Never Again?

Exactly seven and a half decades later, here I am walking in the lush gardens of Israel’s presidential residence, where more than 40 world leaders have gathered for a state dinner to renew a solemn pledge: “Never again.”

It’s almost a decade since my grandfather’s passing, but in the conversations I have with the presidents of Romania and Portugal, as well as during King Felipe VI of Spain’s inspiring speech, I feel as though the leaders understand the gravity of those words.

For many years, in his capacity of chief rabbi of Poland, my grandfather ztz”l hosted leaders from across the globe at the site of Nazi death camps in Poland. As a Holocaust survivor who lost his parents and ten siblings, his duty to guarantee the future by commemorating the past accompanied him to his last days. Even after he stepped down from his position, my grandfather never held a meeting or conversation in which he didn’t incorporate the memory of the Holocaust.

I mentioned all this to Klaus Iohannis, the president of Romania, who was among the first dignitaries to appear at the presidential residence. I don’t know the man, and this was our first encounter, but he was clearly moved by the dinner, part of the World Holocaust Forum of 2020. He told me about the personal responsibility to history he felt as the president of a country in which horrific atrocities were perpetrated against the Jewish population — with the full endorsement of the government.