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ABE WON'T BE SILENT -
The Five Stages of Grief — Where I Am Right Now
Last week marked the final gathering of a deeply moving Storytellers Workshop at HMLA. For those of you wondering what the hell HMLA is — let me be clear: it’s more like, why the hell does HMLA even have to exist?
You see, for people like me, the HMLA (Holocaust Museum Los Angeles) exists because of the unquantifiable Jew hatred that engulfed the world in the 1930s and 1940s — a time when so many of my people were slaughtered, brutalized, and dehumanized by criminally insane, virulent antisemites. A time so grotesque, it demanded a place like this museum — to document, preserve, and bear witness to the genocide carried out by the Nazis, led by that drug-addicted madman, Adolf Hitler.
What happened in Europe during World War II wasn’t just mass murder — it was a calculated, industrialized effort to wipe us out. Jews — our peoplehood — were reduced to human chattel, if not murdered outright, in the most diabolical plan imaginable to rid the earth of people like my grandparents.
[SIDEBAR]
The legal term genocide refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Genocide is an international crime, as defined by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).
The word itself didn’t even exist until World War II. It was coined in 1942 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), specifically in response to the Holocaust.
[SIDEBAR GALORE]
Just because a bunch of antisemites — and, pathetically, a slew of self-hating, beyond assimilated Jews — are screaming “genocide” about Gaza doesn’t make it true. Genocide has a legal definition.
Riddle me this: how exactly does the Palestinian population grow year after year if it’s being genocided? And how DARE the media call Gaza a concentration camp. That language isn’t just wrong — it’s repulsive. But I digress.
So, when I was told about the program at HMLA — a space where rare breeds like me — children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors — could connect and share our family stories, I knew it was the right place for me. Especially at this moment, as I reflect on the unprecedented number of vile beasts currently dominating our algorithmically challenged social media landscape.
You’d have to be dead not to notice the level of Jew hatred that’s reared its ugly head. Not that it ever truly disappeared. But what we’re seeing now? Wow. It’s next level.
That’s why I sought out a space that felt safe — where I didn’t have to carry the generational trauma of being a descendant of unthinkable horrors alone.
I’ve spent my life trying to imagine what my parents endured — survivors of the most atrocious chapter in human history.
For my Storytellers Workshop, I decided to piece together my father Simon’s extraordinary life story. He never talked about the war — unlike my mom, who, bless her heart, revealed quite a bit about the gory details of her time in the Vilna Ghetto, Dachau, and the dreaded death march. My dad? Tight-lipped. Which only made me wonder how atrocious it must have been to keep it all in.
I only knew a few snippets — that he survived Siberian gulags, and from there, joined the underground to help smuggle Jews out of the Displaced Persons camps. That’s pretty much all I knew till recently, going on this journey to find my dad.
Sadly, my dad died far too young — at just fifty, from a heart attack. We knew his father had also died young, even before World War II. Quite the family trajectory — one nobody would want to inherit. Most notably, me.
As I write this, I’ve outlived that dreaded age by more years than I care to count. Thankfully — knock wood — I’m still here.
Over the six-week workshop, twenty-five of us created and rehearsed our tributes — touching, sometimes poetic remembrances of those no longer with us. What we shared was sacred. Owning our families’ legacies is a beautiful responsibility.
As we honored stories of survival, silence, and resilience, we were also forced to confront a chilling truth: the current wave of antisemitism — often cloaked in new language or masked by so-called movements — is recreating the very conditions that made this work of remembrance necessary in the first place.
This isn’t just history anymore. The cruelty is no longer hidden — it’s deliberate, and it’s rising. And now, it has hit home. Right here in America.
Just days ago, on May 21st, two young Jewish peacekeepers — Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky — were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., after attending a diplomatic reception. Gunned down in cold blood — for being visibly Jewish.
That makes five people murdered in the U.S. simply for being Jewish. I’m reeling. I’m furious. The loss is unimaginable — and yet, somehow, entirely predictable. And to make matters worse, it’s changed nothing. The silence is deafening and the outrage selective.
[BREAKING] As I write this, another attack just happened. A group of Jews gathered peacefully in a park in Boulder were firebombed by a terrorist named Mohamad Soliman — using Molotov cocktails. Children were burned. And yes, he was screaming, “Palestine is free.”
The threat is real. And for many of us, it’s re-traumatizing — tearing open wounds that never fully healed, even as we’ve tried to tend to them these past few weeks at HMLA.
All this truth and misfortune has me thinking a lot about the Five Stages of Grief. Loss has muscle memory — and I’ve suffered enough to know when it’s time to acknowledge the process.
1. DENIAL — How is this our new reality?
2. ANGER — That I can say I’m relieved my Holocaust-survivor parents aren’t alive to see this monstrous vitriol? That’s infuriating.
3. BARGAINING — If only we could be more effective on social media. Control the algorithm. Something. Anything.
4. DEPRESSION — This is where I am now. Sitting in the heaviness of it all. The weight of memory and the violence of now. The silence. The mistrust. The exhaustion.
5. ACCEPTANCE — This too shall pass. It sure better.
Guess I’m skating around #4. I’m not in full-on depression, but an ominous feeling looms in the air — knowing how much people hate Jews, yet little do they know how much more I despise them. There will be no winners in this battle of wits — to wit’s end. Me, with the wits — them, the half-wits.
Let me assure these half-truthers: if my dad could survive his extraordinarily vast and horrendous experiences — and my mom, as well — these friggin’ basket cases will rue the day they chose their evil ways. You’ll see.
(ABE GURKO is the executive producer of a documentary “LOUDER: The Soundtrack of Change,” about the extraordinary Women of Protest Music streaming on MAX. He's an Opinionator who hosts a podcast, "Won't Be Silent," engaging in conversations from the edge of democracy. Abe is a contributor to CityWatchLA.com. [email protected].)
