What We Carry Forward: Remembering My Father and the Holocaust

I could barely hear the phone ring amidst the thundering monsoon rains outside my guesthouse room in southern India. It was my wife, Merav, calling from our home in Israel.

“Ronnie, I’m sorry to tell you that your father hasn’t eaten in four days. In the nursing home they say that this is usually a sign that we are nearing the end.”

This was a moment I had feared for nearly five years, as my dear, beloved father—now over 96—had slowly but steadily declined. We had lived through medical emergencies time and again: ambulances, emergency rooms, long nights of waiting. My father, Mordechai (Max) Dunetz, was a survivor in every possible way. Somehow, he always came through.

I asked Merav if I should come home immediately. She answered quietly, “I don’t know what to tell you. If you don't, keep in mind that you may never see him again.”

It was not easy to decide on the spot. I had devoted many months to preparing a self-designed rite of passage for my 60th birthday: thirty-five days in India volunteering to give workshops, participating in transformational experiences inspired by yoga and Indian teachers, and allowing myself to begin writing my book, The Inner Journey: Finding Meaning in Life After 50.

As I put down the phone, a shiver ran through my body. I realized I was now living a maxim I had quoted to others many times: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

I went to meet Sundar, the tall and thoughtful Indian man with whom I had been corresponding for over six months while planning the workshop series for his community NGO. When he heard what had happened, he placed his hand on my shoulder and said simply, “Go home now. Your father needs you.”

The next day I began the 24-hour journey back to Israel from a small town deep in southern India.

Arriving Home

I was greeted at the airport by my wife, Merav, and our two beloved children, Shani and Gil. We drove straight to the nursing home, only minutes from our home in Kadima–Zoran.

This scene is etched into my memory. On the left side of the room lay my dear mother, Tziona, who had suffered a massive stroke nearly a year earlier, leaving her fully disabled and incapacitated. I wondered whether she sensed the drama unfolding just a few meters away.

Before me lay my father, unconscious and breathing heavily through his open mouth. His body was gaunt in a way I had never known. The only other time an image like this came to mind was from a single photograph after liberation, when he emerged from the forests as the Nazis were retreating.

Mordechai, sister Fanya and cousin Chaim, 1944. The only three who survived.

That photograph showed the only survivors of their families returning to their town of Zhetl (Dyatlovo), in what is today Western Belarus. The three of them- my father, his sister Fanya, and their first cousin, Chaim. Three out of a family of about 30 who were alive in Poland at the start of the war. They were reunited after three years of persecution, trauma, labor camp, partisan warfare, hiding and flight.

As I prepared to leave his bedside, I kissed my father on the forehead and whispered, “Abba, I will be responsible for telling the story of your family. I promise to remember them and never forget.”

We returned home at 10:00 p.m. The next morning, at 6:00 a.m., the phone rang. My father had passed away during the night.

The Story My Father Could—and Could Not—Tell

Research, including my own, suggests that Holocaust survivors tended to relate to their experiences in one of two ways: some spoke incessantly, even obsessively; others avoided the topic entirely. A smaller number lived somewhere in between. My father was among the latter. I always knew the basic facts of his story. His parents, brother, and sister were murdered in Zhetl. He and his sister Fanya survived. These facts were part of our family air.

If asked, my father would answer briefly, sometimes showing us the few photographs he had of his beloved family. But if my brothers or I pressed further, an invisible wall would suddenly rise. It was as if the universe itself was signaling: do not go further—this hurts too much.

Every year at our Passover seder, my father would read a short text linking Passover to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Afterward, we would sing Ani Ma’amin—“I believe.” Without fail, tears welled in my eyes. I would hide them as we opened the door for Elijah.

Only years later did I reflect on how this felt to me as a child. I captured it in the following poem:

Dunetz family, Zhetl, 1934

If I Only Could

Even as a small child, I knew. If only I could, I thought then—I would have. But I couldn’t. That too, I knew.

In the corner of the living room, on the bottom shelf, there was an album where the photos are old, black, and a bit of white.

The album lay between the sacred and the mundane,between silence and speech.

Only in one photo did they all stand together—once, only once. Forever.The Dunetz family. Zhetl, Poland, 1934.

If only I could, I thought as a child, I would save them all. But a little boy cannot save what exists only in a photograph.

If only I could speak to them, I would say:at least one thing I can do—I can keep the photo. Forever.

And when I look at my grandmother,the only one with a smile,I imagine her voice from within the picture:“Thank you.”

If only I could. If only we could.

(November 23, 2024)

The Holocaust was always present in my life, though not always consciously. I attended Jewish schools, learned the history, absorbed the rituals. Yet I cannot fully measure how deeply the experience of being a child of survivors shaped me. It was there—quietly, persistently—without ever being explicitly named. This changed in August of 2000.

August 2000

At age 41, my brothers and I proposed a roots trip to Zhetl with our parents, leaving our young children behind. My father was initially shocked, then gradually became excited.

His excitement ignited something in me—a powerful desire to go deeper. What began as preparation soon took over my life in the best possible way. I met repeatedly with my father, interviewed survivors and partisans, gathered documents and photographs, and immersed myself in the history of a world that had vanished. I was emotionally and totally driven towards something that came from deep within.

Our five-day journey was unforgettable. Three adult children, ages 35–43, leaving their spouses and small children behind, traveling with parents in their seventies, staying in basic accommodations, suspended in time. We walked the streets of my father’s childhood as he pointed to houses, corners, and memories.

Standing mother Basya Golda and father Yoel David. Mordechai (Motl) and Fanya standing near grandmother Rachel Leah, Zhetl, circa 1928.

Nothing could prepare us for the final day: August 6, 2000—fifty-eight years to the day after the second and final massacre of Zhetl’s Jews.

August 6: Witnessing Beyond Words

We arrived at the mass grave in silence. I began to recite Kaddish (Jewish memorial prayer), but midway through my voice broke. My father read a poem he had written in Yiddish shortly after the war, followed by Hebrew and English translations. We tried to use words but we were clearly in a state beyond words.

Time seemed to stop. Tears, silence, and the weight of presence surrounded us. I remember feeling that this moment will never be forgotten. I felt torn between fully inhabiting the moment, watching my father, and making sure someone was filming. Only later did I realize how precious that footage would become.

At the mass grave in Zhetl, August 6, 2000

Sitting together near the grave, we asked my father to tell the story once more. This time, something different happened. His words carried an intensity of emotion I had never seen before. As if in a trance of memory, he recounted the events of August 6, 1942—events that shattered his world and would become a sacred legacy for me to carry forward.

Years later, this footage became a short film of nine minutes and fifty-one seconds—material that has profoundly shaped my life.

I have shared this film in intimate, guided settings for several years. I have never made it publicly available, feeling the need to protect a very private moment. Today, I am choosing to do so. I share it with hesitation and ask that it be received with care. It is my father’s testimony, recorded many years after the Holocaust at the mass grave of his family.

“A Sacred Legacy”

https://youtu.be/VgynvoOry6A

Returning Home: Documenting for the Future

After returning home, life resumed its routines. Yet the responsibility of the material weighed on me. It took nearly seven years before I could work with a professional editor to create a comprehensive 3.5-hour documentation of my father’s life and story.

I felt an immense burden. What I left out would be lost forever. My father, then in his mid-eighties, could no longer carry the project forward. With his blessing, I took it on—alone, intimidated, and deeply responsible

.

Eventually, I understood that to truly pass on the story, a shorter film was essential. The longer documentation gave birth to a 17-minute film, and later to the 9:51 version I share today.

Continuing to Explore

Following my father’s death in 2019, many things changed for me. I found myself charged with new energy to explore more deeply his history and his path in life, reaching out to people who had known him in different countries and across various states in the United States. The more I learned, the more I admired my father’s capacity to renew his passion for life over decades—as a teacher, a principal, a journalist, and a leader in Yiddish cultural life.

I have no doubt that the power of my father’s story living within me was what propelled me, at the age of 61, to undertake a doctoral dissertation on the reflections of the second generation in later life. Even as I interviewed 41 children of survivors from 11 countries, ranging in age from 51 to 78, I knew that I was also interviewing—and exploring—myself. I took up this path with a heart, aware that it was both scholarly and deeply personal.

My curiosity and commitment seemed to know no end. For the final, personal chapter of my dissertation, I did something I had only dreamed of doing: I traveled alone to live in Zhetl. There were no direct flights to Belarus, so I crossed the border from Vilnius by bus. I was the only Western foreigner in sight, with no Russian language to my name.

I lived for a week in a modest home with a warm, non-Jewish elderly couple, sharing with them my father’s story, my research, and—inevitably—my own life journey. Each day I visited the site where my father had grown up and the cemetery where life had been brutally ended. Every morning I walked through the town, trying to imagine what life must have been like during the 450 years of Jewish civilization that were completely destroyed. I felt that "I was history", the first Dunetz family member to sleep and wake up in the town in which my ancestors had lived perhaps for hundreds of years. We had been wiped out but I had returned to write and tell the story.

Fiodor and Tamara, my gracious hosts on my 2023 visit to Dyatlovo (Zhetl)

I also visited the local high school, where I was invited to share my father’s story and the film with a small group of students. On my final evening, I showed my hosts the ten-minute version of my father’s testimony, with Russian subtitles. We wept together as they embraced me, saying, “We have never heard this story in this way.” I was telling the story and I felt that there was someone listening.

At the mass grave in Zhetl, morning prayers, August, 2023

As time went on, it became clear to me that I was not only remembering my father’s story—I was growing with it.

Do I Have Permission?

In my father’s final years, as he steadily declined, I began to ask myself a difficult question: how do I remember for someone who is forgetting?

While I knew my father had given me his blessing in many ways, I was—and still am—uncertain about what that blessing truly entails. The film captures my father in a moment of profound vulnerability, giving heart-wrenching testimony, crying in anguish and guilt. Is this something I am permitted to share openly? As the keeper of the story, do I not also carry a responsibility to protect him in his most exposed moment?

From the very first day I created this short film, I have wrestled with this dilemma. Is it too private? I have tried to control the audience, and I carry some guilt that I may have erred on more than one occasion.

And yet, I am deeply alarmed by the rise of global antisemitism and the proliferation of Holocaust distortion, denial, trivialization and manipulation. We live in a world saturated with unbridled social media “fake news,” where generations are growing up without the knowledge, tools, or depth of understanding needed to grasp what truly happened during the Holocaust.

In such a world, I feel I no longer have the privilege of keeping private what must be seen. The tragically authentic story of my father’s family is one of many, but the video testimony I have been entrusted with is not something I can hold only for myself. It is a treasure that I must share. And so, even though it has taken years, I am now taking the leap of making this film public—hoping with all my heart that it will be met with care, respect, and responsibility.

Living the Legacy

In June 2025, while visiting Poland with my wife, I was invited to give testimony at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, based on my father’s story. I was honored, but I hesitated. I asked Josef, who invited me, “Can I give testimony to something I did not live through? It is my father who needed to give the testimony.”

His response was simple: “We are interested in hearing you. You know the story—and you have your own story.”

As the two-hour interview drew toward its end, Josef asked me why my father’s story was so important to me. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I halted and was once again flooded with tears. I answered haltingly, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

Ronnie Dunetz interview at Polin Museum, 13 June, 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGsUxy3uzBQ&t=6561s

Polin Museum, Warsaw, Poland

And yet, I believe I do know something.

In the final personal chapter of my dissertation, I reflected on the existential search for meaning that emerged repeatedly among the second generation I interviewed. I drew on the words of Dr. Leon Chameides, born in 1935 in Katowice, Poland, who lost nearly his entire family by the age of seven and survived as a hidden child in a monastery. Years later, he became a pioneering pediatric cardiologist in the United States.

Chameides once said: “If you are a survivor, at some point you are going to have to ask yourself, ‘Why did I survive?’ And that places a burden on you—to live not only for yourself, but for those who did not.”

I believe this question does not end with the first generation. It lives on in the second. We, too, are alive only by virtue of that same unanswerable question.

When my father cried out in anguish at the mass grave of his family and community in Zhetl—58 years after they were murdered—“Why was I selected to survive when the others went?” his question became more than his own. It entered my heart and became mine, in a different time, a different place, and a different generation.

Our questions are more powerful, and more truthful, than the answers we may ever find. We are called to live these questions, to embrace them, and to follow them wherever they may lead.

This, then, is the legacy of the second generation: to carry forward the questioning, to search for meaning, to serve as a hinge between past and future—to open doors where possible, and to accept that some doors will remain closed.

We pursue meaning even when it eludes us. We remember as though we ourselves came out of Egypt.

We live the questions from the very core of what it means to remember.

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life, that you and your offspring may live.”(Deuteronomy 30:19)

To remember. To remember—and never forget.