Birkenau, Poland, Jewish women and children on the platform waiting for German orders after getting off the train, 27/05/1944. Image courtesy of the digital photo archives at Yad Vashem.

Yesterday was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. I want to bear witness, but the words don't want to come.

Everyone I know who is descended from Eastern European stock lost family in the Shoah. As a girl I became obsessed with Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, reading and rereading it so many times I practically had it memorized. I would lie in bed at night imagining what I would try to bring with me if we, like the Frank family, were forced to flee in the night.

Many years ago I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. Before we entered, our guide reminded us that while the photographs we were about to see were black-and-white, the reality of the Shoah was in living color. The skies over Auschwitz and Birkenau and Theresienstadt were blue. The emaciated figures in the photos weren't greyscale shadows: they were real people in three dimensions who were herded into cattle cars and into camps ravaged by disease and famine -- if they weren't gassed and burned. The old photos and jerky newsreel footage had been comfortably distancing, but those words from our guide unlocked something in me which made the unspeakable horror newly-real.

I'm not always comfortable with what's done in the name of the six million or with the ways in which their memory is used. But as Emily Hauser notes in her post Holocaust Day 2011, Yom HaShoah isn't the day to make that critique. It's a day to remember, and to mourn.

And now -- the day after that remembrance day -- it's time to once again shoulder the burden of trying to create a better world, a world in which this kind of atrocity is unthinkable...for us; for anyone.