These Women are Survivors, These Women are My Sheros

Recently, I was in the foothills of Malibu, overlooking the stunning ocean view..

I thought I was in a safe container until He said....

“Hitler wasn’t bad”...

Huh???**!!

I thought...Did I hear him right??

I looked around at the others

in the room as I gasped for air..

I couldn’t breath..

In that moment...

I felt as if a ton of bricks landed

on my chest...

My heart began to pound rapidly...

My hands began to tremble

as if the onset of an earthquake

was happening inside of me ...

I felt my body temperature rise

as burning flames of red

ignited my curiosity...

I thought..

WTF just happened...

as sweat beads dripped down

both my hairline and spine...

I took another deep breath in ...

and I walked away.

Yet, in the Holocaust, my family could not walk away.

Brutally torn apart and separated from their loved ones,

caged like cattle and imprisoned behind barbed wire

surrounding the concentration camps...

Some gassed to death.

Babies were thrown into the air

and shot like chickens...

I know this because my Grandmother told me.

So ...

In my opinion, Hitler was very bad.

A few days ago, It was Yom Hashoa, in Israel, “Holocaust Remembrance Day.”

I am a 2nd generation Holocaust survivor

as my mother was born towards the end of WWll, on January 20, 1944.

Most of my life, I found it to be inconceivable

how my grandmother could even want to “live on”

after the demise of her entire family during this horrific time in history.

And then about six years ago,

as I studied Kabbalah,

I had an “aha moment”...

My Grandmother had an unshakable inner strength…

They call it “ Chutzpa “ in Yiddish.

I call it gumption...

It’s who she was

and who she will always be,

as her Soul lives on…

I believe that God gives us what we can handle…

And in the big picture,

what matters most, in our evolution ,

is what we do with the challenges presented to us,

no matter how gut wrenching and heart-shattering they may be.

My Grandmother was hidden underground by a kind Polish family toward the end of the WWll, the Holocaust.

She helped care for a family…

two teenage boys, a man

and his terminally ill wife…

The man fell in love with my grandmother,

and she did what she had to do,

in order to survive.

Later in life ,I found out that this kind man

was my biological grandfather,

whom I had never met.

My grandmothers story

can be viewed at the Stephen Spielberg

Shoa Museum in Washington D.C.

As you will se… and to my point,

this unfathomable circumstance, this challenge,

allowed for a blessing to be born…

My beautiful mother…

And even though my grandmother

tried to abort my mother, out of fear

that she too would be taken from her ….

There are no accidents in life …

and my sweet optimistic radiant mama

was meant to be here for a bigger purpose…

From challenges come blessings

From blessings come miracles...

We all deserve to feel loved

safe and that we belong

That’s why I do what I do today...

I understand how scary and confusing separateness is

to the human heart...

As I was bullied as a child,

and it left me with such an open wound.

I feared rejection,

yet I yearned for connection ..

I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself

but the residual pain from being bullied

left me feeling as if it was “them against me.”

I was reliving the fear that both my mother and grandmother felt in the Holocaust.

and this became a painful part of my own story...

I too felt discriminated against

by acts of unkindness, separation and ignorance…

And what I discovered was...

Hurt people, hurt other people.

I also realised then that there is urgency to bring awareness

to the vital link between raising emotionally happy healthy children,

and healing the pain of the past;

our Ancestral Lineage.

We must make a commitment

to do the work ourselves

to release what no longer serves us ...

When we take accountability

for our own lives, we are able

to create a safe environment

for our children to flourish and thrive!

Without a doubt, we all love our children and want the best for them,

But the truth of the matter is, that until we heal our open wounds from childhood,

We will keep repeating the same learned patterns of behavior that are wired in our dna,

and keep us from receiving what it is that we truly desire.

In my next post I'll share how I learned to love all of the parts of me, even the parts I didn't like.

Thank you for reading my story and honouring my SHEROS.