As they came down the stairs from their homes, carrying their parents in their arms and their young siblings on their backs, the Jews faced the Germans' screams of "Schnell, schnell!" ("Faster, faster!") en route to the ghettos and death camps. When they lost their loved ones in the gas chambers and crematoria, those who survived carried the memories to the land of Israel.
Even when the survivors formed families of their own, the memories of the dead would haunt them in their sleep.
My mother would cry in her sleep, and I, a young boy, would wake her up. "I dreamed about my sister," she would apologize.
Those lost in the Holocaust were carried by their loved ones through their own deaths, their names engraved on the tombstones on the Mount of Olives, honoring those who were not buried in Israel.
We are the only people whose graves also memorialize the names of the dead not buried in them.
The burden that I carry on their behalf is the decision to dedicate the majority of my time to serve the nation. This sentiment is shared by many whom I call my brothers on the issue. I do not know most of them, but they are driven by the same sense of mission and commitment, in the military, in education and in the settlement enterprise.
We have our disagreements but I never doubt their drive and commitment.
On one, very symbolic issue, I do my best – to persuade them to lay tefillin. Even for a minute. No, I have not become a Chabadnik. I do it in memory of my father.
One day when I was at boarding school, I received a package of cookies from my mother with an emotional letter from my father.
"My dear son," he wrote, his handwriting that of a man who was no stranger to hardship, "your teacher has informed me that you missed one day of laying tefillin!" In Auschwitz, he said, there were no tefillin, but in 1943 a group of Hungarian Jews arrived at the camp, and when he heard that they had a pair of tefillin, he would cross the fence separating them early each morning to put on the tefillin and say the Shema prayer.
"Do not trivialize this, my son. It was very difficult then. It was cold and I would risk missing the distribution of food, and whoever did not receive food, even for one day, was in danger, but this was an issue of 'with all of your might,'" he said, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 which is part of the Shema.
I wanted to hear more about it, and whether it was an electric fence, but my father decreed that "the past is in the past and that's it."
But was it really an issue of pikuach nefesh – a matter of life and death? He answered, "Indeed, once I saw that other Jews caught on and were standing in line, I stopped."
I have been carrying this story with me my entire life.
A Jew in a Nazi forced labor camp finds other like-minded Jews who are willing to stand in a long line, at the crack of dawn, just to lay tefillin.
Since then I have been determined to fly this ancient Jewish flag in my hands and over my head, even if only for one moment, using it and the battle cry "Shema Yisrael," even through all the wars. I do this in memory of those Jews who risked their lives for a moment of raising the Jewish "flag" in Auschwitz, and in memory of Rabbi Moshe Hagerman, whom German troops publicly abused and humiliated as he was wearing a tallit and tefillin.
