Ravean Kretowicz is a student at San Diego State University
currently studying in Israel on Young Judea’s Year Course. His
grandmother, Regina Birenbaum Kretowicz, was imprisoned by the
Nazis in Radom, Poland, and taken to the Warsaw ghetto, where
her parents were killed and her brother and two sisters were
shipped off to Treblinka, never to be seen again. She survived
Auschwitz, though her husband and daughter were killed, a winter
death march to Germany and Bergen-Belsen. When the camp was
liberated, she was the only surviving member of her family, had
no possessions, and had no home to return to. And thus she
embarked on her future. Her grandson wrote this commentary about
the past as part of Holocaust Memorial Day, Yom Hashoah, being
commemorated this week. I never heard many of my grandmother’s
stories of her life during the Holocaust. It pained my father
too much to have to live vicariously through each story as he
passed it down to me. Almost every night when he was a child, he
told me, his mother woul