Thank you for attending this important brunch today. By being here you have demonstrated not only a will to remember the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, but also a comprehension of the importance of passing on their legacy and supporting my Generation in this quest, and future generations to come.

My grandmother is a holocaust survivor. She was born in Lithuania, where she lived a happy childhood in a flourishing Jewish community. At the outbreak of the war, she and her parents and 4 siblings were sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp. She was the only family member to survive. Having witnessed the disintegration of Jewish communities and Jewish populations, she eventually attained her goal of becoming a Hebrew teacher dedicated to teaching children about Judaism and the Holocaust.

Having the privilege of learning from her, my first Holocaust lesson at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, rang with familiarity. I was six years old, and I have a very distinct memory of the entire grade being shuffled into the first grade pod, told to sit on the floor, and listen carefully as we were about to hear the story of survival from one of our beloved teachers, Mrs. Lowey. At such a young age, it was impossible to understand what we were being taught. The idea that these episodes of death, murder, starvation, and brutality somehow folded into the framework of being a Jew, and held significance, was beyond my comprehension.

For the next thirteen years, my second family, the Jewish Day School, attempted to teach us the importance of remembering the Holocaust. They taught us the Holocaust through books, films, wartime propaganda, radio broadcasts, primary sources, secondary sources, and firsthand accounts of speakers. Not a teaching method was left unturned. We studied persecution, exile, enslavement, massacre, systematic murder, and medical experimentation. Intertwined with these teachings we studied details about European Jewry, Jewish culture, traditions, identity, and religion, that had once existed with a vibrancy incomparable to our Jewish world today, and then how it all disintegrated so rapidly at the hands of the Nazis.

We visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, conducted Yom Ha'Shoah commemorations, discovered Jewish genealogy and recounted our family histories, read the Diary of Anne Frank, learned Yiddush songs sung during the Holocaust, and even placed a glass box, filled with six million pieces of colorful tissue paper, at the front entrance to the school - a symbol to be noticed every time we walked through those doors. "Never again, Never again, Never again," was impounded into our heads.

No institution could have taught the Holocaust more effectively and more meaningfully than the Jewish Day School. But nothing could have prepared us for the experience of actually being there. Especially, being there with the 50 people with whom we had spent thirteen years, trying to understand this dark hole in our history.

As many of you may know, the second semester of our senior year at the Jewish Day School is spent traveling to Poland, Prague, and then Israel. This trip constitutes the culmination of thirteen years of Jewish study. It is what we work toward and what ultimately fortifies the meaning of our Jewish education. I remember arriving in Poland on a harsh February winter day - colder, wetter, and windier than anything I had ever known. Huddling together for warmth, we began an unforgettably sad journey through our past. I could not stop thinking about survival. Studying the Holocaust through the sources that we had available to us back home, from a warm classroom with warm clothes, without being able to see and feel and experience the pain of the wintery conditions, I could not understand how so many people could physically became so weak and die every day. But once I arrived in Poland and for the first time felt frozen in the bone-chilling cold with icicles forming on my chin and face, I could not understand how so many people survived.

The traintracks. I never forget the sight of the traintracks from the window of the bus. The tracks ran alongside the path we were traveling, slightly covered with snow, but so, so clearly marked as deathtracks in the ground. Everyone knew where they were coming from, and especially where they were going. I remember feeling so sorry for the helpless people on the cattlecars, sincerely believing that they were going to a place where they were going to be safe. They had no idea of the turn their lives were about to take. They had no idea they were traveling to their death. Little did they know at the time, that these tracks were the beginning of the end. Today when I see traintracks, all that comes to mind is those from Poland, and I am reminded of the journey made over the traintracks by Jews from every region of Eastern Europe to the gas chambers.

Perhaps the most memorable moments of this trip were spent in Auschwitz, in a nearly destroyed gas chamber. Enough brick was still in tact such that we were able to light candles, without the wind outside killing the flame. Together, we said Kaddish. We were 17 and 18 years old, and had been saying Kaddish every day for thirteen years. But this Kaddish was something different. This time we were saying Kaddish in Auschwitz, while standing atop mass graves with the bones of Jewish children buried coffin-less in the dirt beneath our feet. After the prayer, we existed the camp by walking along the traintracks under the sign, "Arbeit Macht Frei." The same traintracks that brought millions into this place and to their deaths, we walked out on. Crying, holding hands, and wiping our friends' tears, we left this place for those whose lives were taken before they were able to leave themselves.

I left Poland convinced that I had seen what I needed to see - what I had waited 13 years to see - to understand the Holocaust. I did not want to return, if at all, for a very long time. But then, three years later, as a junior in college doing my study abroad in Prague, I decided to brave returning to Auschwitz. This time I traveled alone, without the strength and support of my 50 friends from JDS, without the companionship of those who understood and shared in the emotions. I was nervous by myself. This time it was a beautiful March spring day and the weather could not have been better. It was sunny and warm, and unlike every picture I had ever seen of Auschwitz, with snow covering the ground and grey, gloomy air, this time blades of grass were glistening in the sun, vines were growing on the brick buildings, and trees were starting to bud with leaves. This I was certainly not prepared for, as I had only known Auschwitz to be a dark place, and had only experienced it with people I had loved.

I ended up joining up with a public group, which I found at the information center. It was lonely being with a public group of strangers, not one of them Jewish, visiting one of the most important places in the world to me. I was disturbed by the fact that for many of them it was nothing more than just another stop on their tour-book guide of Poland. They were laughing, joking, and taking joyous pictures. In order to bring myself back to a place where I was among others who respected the tragedy that had taken place here, and respected the memory of those who had died, at the end of the tour I walked out along the traintracks, through the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign, as I had done with my friends three years before.

This time, though, I was walking in the footsteps of a group of young adults who were playing hopscotch on the wooden planks. I did not resist approaching them, and telling them, nicely, to behave. In fact, I took the opportunity to educate them as to the events which took place on the land upon which they were playing, and the significance of these events in world history. Their changed behavior brought a degree of solace. Maybe they just did not understand where they were in the world. I would like to think that everyone who visits Auschwitz understands Auschwitz, but I realize that this is not the case. Thus set out before me, and everyone else in this room, is a responsibility to educate, inform, and carry on the legacy of our family members - both those who died before we had a chance to meet, and those who survived.

After the Holocaust, many of those who had been imprisoned by the Nazis, starved of their spirit, made to witness brutality against their blood, stripped of human dignity, and forced to withstand the harshest of human conditions, found themselves alone and displaced in an unforgiving world in which they had to find the strength to live again. We, the Generation After, represent their efforts to rebuild what was destroyed.

As time goes on, memories fade and details become lost. Events get buried in the textbooks of history, but I for one, will not allow this to happen to my family, and you should not want it to happen to yours. We are the third generation, the grandchildren, and have accomplished this goal in various personal ways, which we will pass on to our children, the fourth generation. We are the living dead, and the responsibility of remembering the Holocaust falls upon us collectively.

Thank you.