It’s Tuesday, April 14, and Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day. For the past two years, the wail of a siren has signaled a frantic scramble for shelter in Israel. This morning, however, the nation froze. In their cars, on bustling street corners, and within the quiet of their homes, Israelis stood in complete silence for two minutes to honor the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Among those standing was Haim Shiloh, a 100-year-old survivor of both the Holocaust and the October 7 attacks. When the sirens blared that morning at his home in Kibbutz Nirim, Shiloh sought refuge in his shelter as rockets devastated the buildings around him. Shiloh survived the onslaught and was evacuated that night. Despite stating in an interview after October 7 that he did not believe he would live to see his home again, he returned to his kibbutz six months ago.
Shiloh’s experience is part of a larger tragic reality: About 2,500 Holocaust survivors were directly exposed to the October 7 attacks, and approximately 2,000 were forced to evacuate. While most survived the initial violence, the toll of displacement was heavy; roughly 86 of those evacuated survivors died in the months that followed.
The most enduring label of the October 7 massacre is “the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.” The reality is that, despite millennia of persecution, the Holocaust is so immense in its scale that it comprises the entire vocabulary through which the Jewish people process catastrophe.
