“I tried to think what’s the best place I can hide.”

“I didn’t think of emotions. I was just focused on surviving.”

“I knew my mom was dead immediately….I lay under her for an hour.”

As we marked Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) yesterday, one might expect these words to be the testimonies of Holocaust survivors — traumas frozen in time for more than 80 years.

In fact, these are the still very raw, very recent recollections of children and teens, as told in a new documentary, The Children of October 7.

Timed for release around Yom HaShoah, the 35-minute film is now streaming on Paramount+ and aired on MTV last night. UJA had the privilege of being part of the official New York premiere on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, we hosted 250 young leaders for an exclusive screening at UJA.

The film is unflinching. Children share their stories with haunted eyes, their words sometimes intercut with chilling GoPro footage filmed by the terrorists — showing, frame by frame, the nightmare the young survivors are recounting.

There’s no politics here. They’re just kids telling the kinds of stories no child should ever have to tell: An older sister murdered before their eyes. A neighbor forced to lure others from safe rooms. A father and beloved pet struck by the same bullet.

Interviewing the children is Montana Tucker — a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and a global influencer and activist who rose to fame on TikTok and other platforms, where she now has 14 million followers.

Montana has been a vocal advocate for the hostages, and her presence in this film massively expands its reach. She offers a powerful bridge to Gen Z — connecting them to history in a way that goes beyond museum walls and classroom lessons.

Why this film and why now?

At a talkback following the premiere, Shari Redstone, non-executive chair of Paramount, explained that she was motivated to fight distortions of history. Producer Eytan Schwartz said he was thinking ahead to when future grandkids might ask him, "What did you do post-October 7 to set the record straight?”

Because the denial started on October 8. And we are now 18 months in, and it has not abated.

Which brings us back to Yom HaShoah.

Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Holocaust denial is also growing. Conspiracy theories proliferate on social media. And the number of firsthand witnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust is dwindling. Just this week, the Claims Conference released a study showing a significant decline in the number of remaining Holocaust survivors. Today, their median age is 87.

For some time now, we’ve been preparing for a world without eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. That’s why we fund programs like Witness Theater and Witness Project, which allow survivors to transmit their memories to teens who will be the ones to share these memories when survivors no longer can. 

As years go by and living memory becomes history, we have another challenge too: History is not static. There is no canon that cannot be rewritten, for better or worse.

How stories are told, how they are felt, can evolve over time, or shift in a moment.

In 2022, most of us would have said the Holocaust was remembered in black and white: a more distant, tragic chapter of Jewish history.

In ways once unimaginable, the book has now reopened, and new pages are being written, in full color.

In 2023, as I walked through the ruins of Be’eri, inhaled the smoke of charred homes, and met survivors, it was an echo of the Shoah. Of pogroms. Of every time and place we’ve been hunted simply for being Jewish. Our children not spared.

And we all know that what children remember shapes who they become. So I worry for the children of October 7 who carry this deep trauma. I worry for all children growing up in a world where truth is pliable, and history too easily erased.

But even now, my worry is tempered by hope.

Hope that the children of October 7, and all our children, will be shaped by the very existence of the State of Israel. Unlike during the Holocaust, we are not without power, without recourse, without a homeland that will take us in.

And though October 7 made clear that even Israel cannot guarantee our people’s safety, the Jewish State transformatively changes the equation. It means, please God, that Jews at risk will always have a place to go. That we will never again face evil without the ability to fight back. Though I hope, too, that the days of fighting will soon be over.

Finally, years from now, when our children are no longer children, I hope they’ll also remember how our community stood with them. How we gave them the tools to carry memory forward — and the strength to build a vibrant, more peaceful future.

Shabbat shalom