November 8th, 2018 – A very touching Shalom House with 13 Holocaust Survivors from Bat Yam took place in the March of Life Villa in Caesarea.
All of the survivors in this group were in Ghettos when they were children. Some of them lost family members in the Shoa, and when our volunteers shared their family history, every one in the room had tears in their eyes. Men and women were all weeping when they heard about the goal of the March of Life International Movement. They all were clapping and expressing their gratitude to our volunteers for their courage to share their stories.
One particular man approached a volunteer to let her know that his father was in Leningrad, the same city where her grandfather was as a German soldier. The siege of Leningrad lasted nearly 900 days, claiming the lives of 800,000 civilians. Both of them, the Holocaust survivors and a grand-daughter of a perpetrator of the Shoa, wept together when the volunteer asked him for forgiveness for what her grandfather had done.
At the end of the meeting, the group expressed their gratitude for the warm welcome and for showing them that a new generation of Germans is taking a stand for Israel and is willing to share their family stories.
They felt so good that some of them asked if they could spend some holidays in the house. We gladly accepted their request!