Letter: Writer forever linked to Holocaust

Regarding Charles Krauthammer's March 13 column 'The Holocaust and Jewish identity”:

I read and reread and then removed it from the newspaper and put it on my coffee table. It's been sitting on my coffee table for all these weeks and every day I pick it up and reread another paragraph or two to make sure that it still is as disturbing as the first time I read it.

My parents, both of them Polish born, were Holocaust survivors. To exclude the fact that they survived years of being shuffled from concentration camp to concentration camp, to exclude that Nazi's killed 750 of my family members, to exclude that my parents along with my older brother came to this country as displaced people, to exclude all of that from their identity (and mine) as Jews would be like saying something that I can't even imagine saying.

The Holocaust needs to be part of the thinking of every Jew in America, every Jew in the diaspora and every Jew in the land of Zion.

The 'state of Jewish identity in contemporary America” is a subject for debate but I wouldn't say that all 'American Jews make the Holocaust the principal legacy bequeathed to their children” but respectfully the Holocaust should irrevocably link to Jewish identity until there is no more Jewish identity.

In honor of my parents, and the 750 family members that I will never meet, the Holocaust will forever be a part of this Jew's identity.

Lena R. Gebotszrajber Gilbert

Springville