I was named after my grandfather who perished

The first time that my parents, both Holocaust survivors, raised the topic of the Holocaust with me was particularly painful. I remember myself as a child, ever since I went to kindergarten. There was a regular ritual at our house when I didn't eat everything that was put on my plate. My mother would scold me for not having finished everything and she would always add the same sentence: We didn't even have what you left on your plate, so eat up! At the time I didn't really understand who was this "we" she spoke of or where my mother had had problems with food. But I didn't ask, and begrudgingly ate everything off my plate.

The story of the Holocaust literally smacked me in the face one morning as I was preparing for just another normal school day in the third grade. That morning I combed my hair, as I did every day, only that day, for some reason I had decided to comb it in the opposite direction -- from right to left, instead of from left to right. My parents had combed my hair from left to right since the day I was born, in 1952 (I've seen it in pictures).

When I got out of the shower and faced my mother to greet her, moments before I was about the leave for school, I saw that she was more upset than I had ever seen her, which was saying something because I had managed to get her very upset many times before. I didn't understand what had happened. When I asked her: "Mother, what's wrong-" the answer was harsh, painful and above all, humiliating. My mother raised her hand without a word of warning and slapped my across my face -- the first slap I ever got from a parent. The explanation came when my mother half-growled, half-cried in an angry voice and said, "Don't you ever dare comb your hair like that. Only Hitler combed his hair that way."

"Who is Hitler-" I asked naively. My mother repeated my question with pain in her voice making it into both a question and declaration at the same time. "Who is Hitler-!" she said, and from the few words she managed to say to me, I gleaned the clues and facts that ended up shaping my entire personality and determining key events in my life in the decades to come. "Hitler was responsible for the fact that you don't have grandparents or aunts and uncles or a family like the other children." My mother launched these words at me as though from a cannon, sending me off to school full of questions that I didn't get to ask, and to be honest, there was no chance that she would answer. My parents never spoke of the Holocaust, in which the vast majority of their relatives had perished.

The Poles sold my uncle

My father was one of five siblings. I bear his father's, my grandfather's, name Avraham Moshe with pride and awe at once. My mother was one of eight siblings. Only one survived the Holocaust. All the others were murdered.

My parents were born in 1922 in the town of Rozyszcze in Volhynia. Before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact the town was part of Poland, and following the pact it became a part of Ukraine. When the Germans invaded the region, my father was out of town, and he was advised not to come back because the Jews in the city had been rounded up in a ghetto.

My mother was in the ghetto until her 10-year-old brother was shot by the Gestapo. Their Polish neighbors had informed the authorities that he habitually slipped out of the ghetto through a hole in the fence to play with his Polish friends. It was the parents of his close friends who turned him in. They sacrificed a Jewish child, the uncle that I never knew, in exchange for some favor or other from the Nazis.

My father joined the Polish army, and was a horseback soldier. This was the only part of the Holocaust that my father was willing to talk about -- it was only the battles against the German tanks, or, more accurately, the escape deep into the Soviet Union, that he agreed to recount. He never said one word about the massacre the Germans perpetrated in the city in the summer of 1941. His entire family, every last one, was killed in that massacre.

My father's only surviving relatives were two brothers, both Holocaust survivors, who lived thanks to the fact that their father had placed them with a Polish friend who hid them in his home and in a hut in the woods near his house for four years. Their grandmother was my father's grandmother as well. They both immigrated to the U.S. after the war and still live there today. Their family has become very close to my family over the last twenty years, including the generation of their children and grandchildren.

My mother, who was in the ghetto with her family and witnessed her brother's execution, realized that all the Jews in the ghetto were awaiting a similar fate. And indeed, shortly after she managed to flee from the ghetto, the Germans began to exterminate everyone who remained. The town was too small for the Germans to invest the time and effort of transporting its residents to the death camps. They simply led them, by the thousand, to the outskirts of town, forced them to dig ditches and shot them to death at the edge of the ditch. Yes, the Jews, including my mother's and father's families, were forced to dig their own graves, into which they fell with anyone trying to save them.

Thousands of Jews, including the family members I never got to meet, were slaughtered simply for being Jews. They were part of our six million brothers and sisters who died in the Holocaust. Later, when I was appointed to head the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), and subsequently when I served as a minister in Israel's governments, or when I was addressing Jewish audiences around the world, I always made sure to say over and over again: The era of Jews being murdered for being Jews in over!

We hardly heard anything about my mother's time on the run with her friends. She only told us that there were six girls, about twenty years old, who fled together for years, until they finally reached the faraway Uzbekistan. It was only from the testimony that she gave at Yad Vashem years later that we were able to learn a little about those years. She kept in close touch with those girls up until her death in May 2013.

To be honest, my sister and I refrained from asking her about it. I wasn't surprised when I read in her testimony that she had undergone terrible things of which she would never speak to anyone.

"I am never going back to Poland"

May parents' pride and joy was the family they had created. Though they only had two children: My sister Yael (her middle name is Henya after my mother's mother) who was born in Austria in a camp where my parents waited to immigrate to Eretz Israel, and me. I was born in the State of Israel, in the city Ashkelon where my parents lived until their dying day. My father died 22 years ago. They got to see six grandchildren, and my mother got to see eight great-grandchildren as well before she passed away less than a year ago.

It is hard to put into words how desperate they were to build their family anew, or how proud they were when I enlisted in the army, or how worried they were when they realized that I had volunteered to serve in an elite commando unit known as Sayeret Matkal.

In the three weeks of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, during which I was an experienced fighter with my unit, I was not able to tell them that I was okay. My friend and downstairs neighbor Shalom Rosenzpat was also the son of Holocaust survivors, and he had been killed in the Golan Heights at the start of the war. My sister's brother-in-law Avraym Dagan who enlisted in the army as a tank operator at the same time I did was killed on the third day of the war near the Suez Canal. His tank sustained a direct hit. I didn't realize that my parents were at their wits' end when they didn't hear anything from me, or about me.

What a basic lack of understanding on my part, not to make every effort to contact them, despite the hardships. I didn't understand then what it was for a parent to worry about a child. And more than that, I didn't understand how anxious my parents were, having lost their entire family in the Holocaust, over the fate of their son, who was supposed to keep the family name alive.

I didn't understand what they were going through. But years later, when my father was diagnosed with cancer and I accompanied him to his treatments, it was clear to both me and him that the end was near so I asked him to tell me more about his family. He surprised me by demanding that I share with him the things that I had done in the army and in the Israel Security Agency. We made a deal, and he told me about the final days of the war, when he was in the Russian army.

His battalion had returned to Poland and had camped not far from his home town. He was given a pass to go into the town to see who and what was left of his home. My father arrived, together with a friend from the same town, at the end of the street where his family had lived. Polish neighbors who recognized him scurried into the houses. My father was armed, and they had moved into the houses abandoned by Jews who were murdered or had fled, including my father's childhood home. Then, on the street where he had once lived, my father noticed a group of Polish children playing games, wearing clothes that had belonged to his brother.

The friend who accompanied him could see the emotional turmoil on my father's face. He grabbed my father and pulled him out of the city. This was the last time that my father laid eyes on the place where he had been born and raised. He swore that he would never go back there and indeed, he rejected all my pleas to go there together.

"For me, Poland is a black hole and I don't want to go back there," he said, leaving no room for second thoughts on the matter.

Mother, looking down from heaven

His relationship with his relatives in the U.S. was very close, even if they did only see one another once every few years. One year, his relative Anshil "Gun" visited Israel.

It was a Friday. I was on leave from the army and I was on my way to have Shabbat dinner at home. I made my way toward the house in Ashkelon wearing my military uniform, paratrooper's wings affixed to my shirt, red beret and red boots on, and carrying a Kalashnikov gun. Suddenly, I saw from a distance that my father and his relative were standing in the street. When they saw me approach, I could see them hug each other. As I got closer I saw them holding each other and crying.

I was embarrassed. Two men crying in the middle of the street, and my father of all people. When I told my father, perhaps a little sternly, to stop crying, that it was embarrassing me, he looked at me with a love-filled gaze, without an iota of anger, and said "you don't understand what it means to us to see an Israeli soldier, not to mention a paratrooper with a gun."

"And above all," he continued, "to know that it is the son of the Dichter family."

No. I didn't understand. I was a fighter then, taking part in operations that no imagination is developed enough to fathom that they are even possible. I didn't know any other reality. I didn't want to believe that Jews, millions of Jews, were subjected to slaughter and abuse and were so helpless. I myself had never felt helpless in my life.

I admit that at that time I had only understood the meaning of the Holocaust on a national level. I still hadn't fully understood what it meant on a more intimate, familial level. I took me several more years to internalize the meaning of the Holocaust for the family unit. I needed to become a father of three and grandfather of four before I understood the full meaning of the Holocaust.

During the last year I was appointed chairman of the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel. I see Holocaust survivors very closely. I hear their life stories and near-deaths, with as much openness as I possess. I do this job on a volunteer basis, feeling a true sense of duty. As a second generation to survivors I feel pride and satisfaction over the privilege of taking part in this noble mission.

I am convinced that somewhere up there, in heaven, my mother is sitting with her friends and each one tells the others about her children. I am certain that when they ask about me, my mother and father give a quick overview of my positions in the military and the Shin Bet security agency and the government without going into too much detail. But when they talk about their son, now the head of the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel, my mother probably fills with pride and most likely says, in Yiddish, "Nu, finally we have some nachas from the boy."