Robert Eli Rubinstein reflects on his mother’s recollections of the Holocaust, the difficulty of speaking of its horrors, and the future of Holocaust memory as the number of living survivors dwindles:

According to Primo Levi, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, survivors fall into two categories: those who talk and those who do not. He was surely describing my parents.

My mother’s memories surged out of her in a mighty torrent, and this had a cathartic and healing effect on her. The passionate eloquence of her words enabled her to impose meaning on what would otherwise have been unbearably meaningless. But she was quite exceptional among survivors in her ability to talk about the past.

Far more characteristic was my father, Bill Rubinstein, who never talked about the past. Not only did he steadfastly refuse to discuss his own wartime experiences: Whenever a conversation drifted toward pre-history—that is, the period before his arrival in Canada— he would try his best to change the subject. If this did not work, he would find a pretext to leave the room. This was my father’s way of coping with his intensely private pain. And really, who could argue when the strategy seemed to work so well for him? This decent and beloved gentleman was able to build a remarkably successful new life in Canada by banishing his demons—at least at the conscious level. When he was adrift in the helplessness of sleep, the nightmares held sway, every night without mercy until the end of his nearly 99 years.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.