WE BARELY DESERVE OUR IMMIGRANTS:

Eva Galler was in her mid-teens, the oldest of eight children, when the Nazis rounded up the Jews in her Polish town, Oleszyce, set their synagogues alight, and forced them into a ghetto. When they were ordered to the train station, everyone in the ghetto knew they were being taken to an extermination camp at Belzec. Her father urged his three oldest children to save themselves, pushing them through a narrow window from the moving train.

"But my little brother, the youngest, who was three years old, and he started to cry, 'I want to live, too. I want to live, too,'" Eva told an interviewer. "And these words stayed with me the whole life. No matter how I tried to forget."

German soldiers killed Eva's brother and sister immediately, but somehow their bullets did not find her. She waited until she couldn't hear the train anymore, then walked back to her old village, where terrified neighbors took pity on her. The blond, green-eyed 17-year-old survived the rest of the war by posing as a Catholic girl named Katrina.

She and Henry, who had been sweethearts before the war, found each other again, alike the only survivors in their extended families. They eventually settled in New Orleans, built a beautiful life, and were together for more than 70 years. Some of their many grandchildren were named for the brothers and sisters who perished.

The tallest candle in the menorah, called the shamash, or servant, is the one from which all of the other candles are lit. Survivors like Loren's grandparents devoted their lives to that role, telling their painful stories in service to others, in the hopes of banishing from the world the darkness they'd known, one person at a time. Loren said her grandparents shared their tales of bravery, resilience, and hope with more than 500,000 schoolchildren over the decades.

"The stories they passed down to us were overwhelmingly positive," recalled Loren. "They didn't allow their experiences to crush them, but figured out how to move forward."

We are losing our shamashim. Eva died in 2006, Henry in 2012. The youngest Holocaust survivors are now in their late 70s. Soon there will be no one left who saw what happened with their own eyes, who can say "I was there" to those who would erase history, or hope to repeat it.

It falls to the next generations to keep their light alive now, a mission that feels especially pressing in this moment, when Nazis and other haters seem bolder than they've been in a long time.

On a warm day in 2017, Rafael stood on a highway near the Caribbean Sea. He wore olive fatigues, carried a rifle, and was staring down hundreds of his countrymen -- most of them students and young activists from humble backgrounds like his own. They were protesters, resisting the latest power grab by Venezuela's dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and now they were throwing rocks.

Rafael and his fellow soldiers advanced, shooting tear gas as they marched, Rafael recalled. But instead of retreating, the protesters dug in and tossed back Molotov cocktails, which exploded on the pavement.

Rafael, in the second line, behind other soldiers carrying polycarbonate shields, surveyed the scene and realized they were losing control. The protesters were fanning out, coming around their flanks. Soon the soldiers were surrounded on three sides. They ducked as rocks thudded against the shields. Then Rafael heard the order: Shoot.

With his finger on the trigger of his rifle, and protesters bearing down on him, Rafael froze. He couldn't comply.

He wasn't the only one. "None of us fired," Rafael said. After months of brutal crackdowns against protesters -- heads split open by police batons, eyes shot out with rubber bullets, activists assassinated in the streets -- Rafael and his comrades had realized they were on the wrong side of the struggle. "I saw that what the protesters were fighting for was true," he said.

He now faced an impossible choice: stay and serve a murderous regime or desert and risk prison. He chose to run.

Rafael's decision to desert the military would change the course of his life. It would turn him into an exile in his own country and eventually force him to flee for faraway lands. During that flight, he traversed barren deserts and remote jungles. He climbed mountains, forded rivers, and stepped over the corpses of those who fell along the way. He was robbed and then jailed and then robbed and jailed again. All of this he accepted as the price to pursue a dream.

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