I just heard the siren a few minutes ago and thought of my mother's family who perished in the Holocaust, 108 people that my grandparents wrote on a piece of paper at the kitchen table one day. They were the sole survivors (thread)/

My grandma came from a town called Ruda Babitza (excuse my bad Polish spelling) just outside of Warsaw. She told of a childhood as the middle daughter of seven kids, three older sisters and three younger brothers: picking berries in the forest, learning to sew from her parents/

delivering clothing to people who had ordered them from her tailor father and her seamstress mother. As in many religious families, the kids took on different directions. One sister was engaged to a communist, which my great grandfather, a rabbi with a smicha, hated./

My grandma was active in the Beitar movement. My grandfather hated that less. She was a young Zionist who listened to Jabotinsky and Begin speak, and was trained in a Betar paramilitary training camp. She was apprenticed to a tailor in Warsaw from a young age, and was also/

a Polish patriot. At the local school when she was a child, she would memorize and recite famous Polish poetry. The teacher was proud, the children beat her at recess. (She was unbelievably happy when Pope John Paul was appointed pope)/

Her parents were hardworking and kind, everyone liked them. My great grandfather was very religious and would berate his daughters' boyfriends when they would arrive for Shabbos lunch on bicycles, but he would feed them chulent anyway. All this ended in 1942

My grandmother in apprenticeship in Warsaw, heard that her father had been killed by a drunk Ukrainian soldier while he was on his way back from shul in the Warsaw Ghetto on a Friday night. Against her own safety, she went to the ghetto to find out if it was true. It was.

Soon enough, my grandmother, her mother and siblings were loaded on cattle cars to Treblinka. She was separated from the entire family except her youngest brother Moishele. On the train, her friends from Betar, in neighboring cars called to her, "Let's jump!" but she wouldn't/

leave her little brother, who had typhoid fever and was dying. He was 13, she was 20. He died in her arms. The calls from the friends continued, because they saw that she boarded on the next train car. She came up to the window, and tried to break the bar so that she could escape

She recited "Shma yisrael" and the bar fell off the train. She climbed on top of the train, as did her friends. They jumped. She was shot in the underarm and thigh with "dum-dum" bullets. (She had purple scars for the rest of her life) They killed all the jumpers. They left her/

for dead, bleeding in the snow. After the train had passed, she checked her friends. All dead. She suffered partial amnesia from the fall. She crawled through the snow. The area was in the woods where she would play as a child. A farmer recognized her as the tailor's daughter.

The farmer and his wife, religious Catholics, nursed her to health. She ran from one village to the next in hiding, until she joined local partisan fighters. She was nicknamed the "Rabbit" and used her skills with thread and beading (she was an expert at bead necklaces) to wire/

dynamite and blow up train tracks used by the Nazis. After the war, she met my grandfather, whose family was gunned down in the living room while he was in the cellar getting provisions, and lived under false identity until the end of the war.

The best way of commemorating the Holocaust is living a Jewish life. My children bear the names of some of the relatives who perished. Continuity and never giving up hope are Jewish hallmarks. May we be "iluyei neshama" for them.