The Media Line: ‘From the Depths of Sorrow to the Heights of Freedom,’ Holocaust Survivor Says as Grandson Serves on Israel’s Northern Border  

‘From the Depths of Sorrow to the Heights of Freedom,’ Holocaust Survivor Says as Grandson Serves on Israel’s Northern Border  

A Holocaust survivor recounts her family’s escape as her grandson, Captain N, an officer in the IDF’s 214th Artillery Brigade, serves on Israel’s northern border. 

By Gabriel Colodro/The Media Line  

Sarah speaks slowly, carefully, as if each memory must first pass through the heart before it becomes a sentence. On the other end of the line, her grandson, Captain N of the 214th Artillery Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), deployed on Israel’s northern border, listens to a story he already knows, though not in the same way.  

The conversation unfolds not as a single shared moment. It moves between generations that did not live through the same events, but are bound by them. For Sarah, the Holocaust is not an abstract chapter of history. It is the reason her life took the path it did. For her grandson, it is the foundation of a responsibility he now carries in uniform.  

At the beginning of the interview, Sarah makes clear that telling the story is not optional. It is a duty. “It’s so very important that people should know,” she said, speaking with The Media Line. “And not make the same mistakes over and over again.”  

She describes herself as “a true Nitzolah,” a survivor, yet her survival did not come from enduring the camps directly. Her story begins before the war fully takes shape, in decisions made without knowing exactly how far things would go.  

Born in Belgium, she was ten when the war began. By then, her father had already been watching what was happening across Europe. He had no formal education, she says, but that did not mean he lacked knowledge. “Whatever he knew, he taught himself.” She often returns to the subject of her father when she speaks. “He was very curious,” she says, trying to describe him. “Very thirsty for learning.” He did not go to school, but that did not stop him. “Whatever he knew, he taught himself,” she repeats.   

He had come from Poland, where, as she puts it, life for Jews was never simple. That was not something he had to learn later. He had seen it early. When he moved west, he began building something for himself, step by step. First in diamonds, learning how to work with them, then trading them. Later, in Belgium, he picked up something completely different. “He also decided to learn chocolate making,” she says, almost as an aside.   

Sarah says it was a pattern rather than a plan. He learned what he needed when he needed it.  

But the part she comes back to is not what he built, but how he read the moment. While others were still unsure, he had already made up his mind that staying was no longer an option.  

He followed what was happening in Germany. He understood what it could mean. At some point, he made the decision, not gradually, she suggests, but clearly. They were not going to stay and see what would happen.  

When he told the family, it did not sound like a departure. Sarah recalls that he simply said they were going to England to visit their daughter. “We’re going to England,” she remembers.  

Only later did it become clear what he had already understood. He was not planning to return. England, in his mind, was not the endpoint either. “When the time comes, we’ll go on to Palestine,” she recalls him saying.  

For her, it felt different. She was a child, and she did not yet understand what was unfolding around her. What she remembers first is not ideology, but atmosphere. She remembers Sussex first through small things. “The smell of kippers … it was a terrible smell,” she says, referring to the smoked fish that was common in Britain at the time. It is not the kind of detail you expect, but it is the one she goes back to. She also recalls seeing elderly people in conditions she had not encountered before. It made an impression on her, even if she could not fully explain it then.  

At the same time, she says, she was taken care of. “They spoiled me,” she says. People gave her small jobs, like polishing shoes, and paid her for it. “This was earned money,” she adds, still sounding slightly proud of it.  

She does not describe the move that followed in a single sentence, but as she speaks, it becomes clear they did not stay there long. The atmosphere changed. Foreigners, including Jews who had fled Europe, were not always seen the same way. “There was a fear that they might be spies,” she says. Her family, like others, had to adjust.  

By the time she speaks about London, it is already in the middle of the war. “I was just ten,” she says, more than once.  

She recalls the night a bomb struck their neighbors’ shelter. There was only a fence between the houses. The neighbors were Jewish, and their children were close to her age. “They didn’t survive it at all,” she says.  

There’s another moment she brings up more than once. It happened after a nearby explosion, when they were told to leave the shelter immediately. “They said, ignore it … just run for your lives,” she recalls. There was concern about another bomb, possibly unexploded, somewhere close by.  

When they got outside, the road was covered in glass. “There were splinters everywhere,” she says. She had no shoes on. At first, she ran. Only later did her father realize what she was stepping on. “He lifted me on his shoulders,” she says.   

What stayed with her is what happened after. When they reached safety, she says, “not a glass splinter stayed on the sole of my foot.” She still sounds surprised by it. None on his shoes either. “We called it miraculous,” she says.  

The war did not end her family’s movement. From London, they relocated to Manchester, believing it would be safer there. They lived among a Jewish community that received them as refugees and treated them, she says, with care and attention. But even there, the sense of uncertainty never disappeared completely.  

Members of her father’s family who remained in Poland did not survive. Her husband, Itzhak, whom she would later meet in Israel, endured the Holocaust in Europe directly. For years, she says, he did not talk about it. “It was too terrible to talk about,” she recalls. When it did come up, it was not in long conversations. “He used to scream in the night,” she says.   

When she describes the life they built later, she does not frame it in those terms. “We managed to keep it a very happy house,” she says. Then she explains what she means by that. “A house where there was a lot of singing and dancing and jokes.” She mentions the jokes again, almost as an afterthought, saying her husband loved telling them, even if, as she puts it, he was “not all that good at it.”   

When the conversation turns to what came later, to life in Israel, she slows down again. It is harder for her to put into words. “I don’t think I can express it,” she says first. Then she tries again. “It’s indescribable, really … that feeling, I find it indescribable,” she says.   

“It’s really like it says in one of the psalms,” she adds. “From the depths of sorrow to the heights of freedom.”   

Although that transformation was not something her grandson witnessed, he inherited it.  

From Israel’s north, where he is currently serving, he says the story never really lands the same way twice. “Listening to this story every time is very emotional,” he says. Even though he grew up with it, he adds, it took him time to understand it fully. “Just around 16, I realized the full story,” he says, referring to both his grandparents.   

By then, he says, his grandfather had already passed away. “Sadly, I couldn’t ask him the questions I have,” he adds.   

When he tries to explain what stayed with him, he does not go first to the events themselves. He goes to something else. “He never let those events define him,” he says of his grandfather.  He describes both grandparents as deeply optimistic, a quality that became part of the family’s identity.  

That inheritance shapes his own sense of duty. “We can’t let those things go back in time and happen to the Jewish community again,” he says. For him, service in the IDF is not only about present threats. It is about preventing the return of a past that, in his family, is still very close.  

He speaks about Israel not only as a state, but as a transformation. A small people, he says, becoming an independent country with a strong army in less than a century. For him, that is “something beautiful.” It is the result of values forged in the hardest periods of Jewish history.  

When asked what being Israeli means, he answers in terms of continuity. To live the Zionist dream. To build a home. To serve the community. To reconnect a people after 2,000 years. His own service, he says, is one way of doing that.  

Sarah listens to that answer and agrees, but her perspective adds another layer. She has lived long enough to know that history does not end. She says openly that she is not the same person she was before October 7. The attack, she says, shook her. It revealed vulnerabilities she had not fully expected.  

And yet, her conclusion is not one of doubt in Israel’s necessity, but the opposite. “Now I feel that I need Israel even more, more than ever,” she says. She speaks of the community, of the protection it provides, of everything the state gives that cannot be taken for granted.  

The distance between them—one speaking from a home built after the war, the other from a military position on an active frontier—does not separate their perspectives, but it connects them.  

Sarah’s life began in a Europe where Jews depended on reading danger correctly and leaving in time. Her grandson’s life unfolds in a state where Jews are responsible for their own defense. The shift between those two realities is not theoretical. This family lives it across generations.  

The conversation never turns into a political statement, but remains grounded in experience. A father who understood history. A child who sensed fear without fully understanding it. A family that moved, survived, and rebuilt. A husband who carried trauma into a life that still made room for joy. And a grandson who now stands, in uniform, on a border his great-grandparents could never have imagined.  

Sarah says more than once that some things cannot be expressed in words. That they are felt “here in the heart.” But across the conversation, something does become clear.  

Survival, in her family, did not end with staying alive. It continued in the decision to build, to raise children, to create a home, and to pass on not only memory, but a sense of responsibility.  

On the northern border, that responsibility now has a different form. It is no longer about escape, but defense. That is the difference she returns to.