If I'm not mistaken, today is Yom HaShoah, which is a relatively new Jewish holiday creted to memorialize the Holocaust and it's victims. In response to this, I found several interesting Holocaust survivor stories online, but I want to relate just one here, one that I found especially interesting because it points to the future, and is not just sadness regarding the past.

Anyway, two fatehrs meet at their daughters' school in New York and discover that their fathers came from the same small town in Europe somewhere. With the key word being "small," they realized that their fathers must have been on the same train to the death camps. One father related how his father had always talked about prying a board off the side of the train, helping a younger boy through it, and then jumping out himself. The other father at the school was immediately struck dumb. His father was the little boy that was helped through the hole. Now their granddaughters play together in freedom.

I read another story long ago about a man who got in a taxi in Israel and started talking to the taxi driver about a guy he had just interviewed, and mentioned some pretty specific details of the man's life and Holocaust experience. The taxi driver heard some detail that caused him to go pale. Turns out he knws the other side of the story because a recent passenger had been telling him about his brother that he had not seen since they were shipped off to the death camps, and the details of the two stories matched much too closely to be coincidence. Thanks to this random meeting of a reporter and a taxi driver, two brothers, one living in Israel, the other in the United States, who had not seen each other in 50+ years were reunited.

Maybe I'm just a sap, but that kind of stuff always makes me teary-eyed.