"Immigrant children from the USSR do not connect to Holocaust Day." I have often heard this from high school teachers, in response to what they perceived to be, perhaps, as a lack of interest in ceremonies and activities. The feeling that we are less present in the Holocaust story as conveyed in Israeli discourse.

True, most of the Jews of the former USSR were - and are still dating - with the memory of World War II on May 9, known in the USSR as "Victory Day." But the fact that the Soviet regime's ideological reasons emphasized "victory" does not make this day particularly gratifying for them. On this day, Jews from the USSR remember all the horrors of the war, as citizens of the USSR - but also as Jews. 

They remember the 200,000 Jewish soldiers killed in the war, after being sent by Stalin to arrest Hitler in their bodies, sometimes without food and without weapons. The Nazis and Soviet leadership crushed Soviet citizens on both sides of the barricade. At least in my family, on Victory Day, they "celebrate" mainly the fact that they survived. My grandfather called her "cursed war." 

But the Jews died in this war not only as soldiers. They were hunted and murdered by the Nazis in countless unnamed pits and streets of ghettos and towns; 10 percent of all Soviet victims, although their proportion in the general population was less than two percent. About 2 million and 700,000 Jews in the USSR were destroyed. 

This Holocaust was erased from memory by the Soviet authorities, and unfortunately, even in Israeli discourse, it is not present. To date, Holocaust maps seem to be detailed in the central and western parts of Europe, and empty on its eastern side. We, the children, only know her from the stories that went through the family.

My grandfather, Isaac Glazer, spent at the high school graduation party on the evening of June 22, 1941, while Molotov announced on the radio that the war had begun. The next morning he boarded a train to the Siberian officer school. He says the Ukrainians got off the recruits' train, hoping the Germans would release them from the Russians. The Jews stayed on it. Grandfather was injured on the Belarusian front, but the real suffering was that for four years he did not know what had happened to his family. Their shuttle was in the occupied territory, and he was sure all his relatives had perished. At the end of the war he found that most survived, but never recovered from the years of anxiety. 

My grandmother, Sima nee Tabachnik, was a little girl in the war, and had to flee with her mother on the eastbound trains, while bombing hard. Every few hours the bombing started, the train stopped, and they ran into bushes like ducks in range. Another part of her family was burned alive in a Jewish ghetto, whose name I do not know. 

It's all I know about my family's history. The traumas and pain of these people we, their children and grandchildren, feel to this day. To this was added the trauma of life under oppressive totalitarian rule and the anti-Semitism we suffered as Jews. No pain or trauma was really dealt with in the USSR, as everything was silenced, especially our fate as Jews. - May 9, it is important that we take a moment to remember their holocaust.

Vicki Idzinsky is one of the founders of the Generation 1.5 group, which puts the story of young Russian-speaking youngsters in the Israeli public