Yellow Light: Doris Zelinsky and the Holocaust Memorial

Under the row labeled “identifying marks,” five faded numbers appeared, not on paper, but etched into the skin. Doris Zelinsky, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, keeps that paper framed in her home, as a mark of survival: threadbare, human, and quiet defiance to a loud triumph. On April 17th, a group of students led by Doris Zelinsky, along with English teacher and Director of Community Service Alissa Davis and Assistant Head of School John Roberts, visited the Holocaust Memorial. “It’s truly impressive,” says Ashley Deng ’27. 

The story begins in Plaszów, a small ghetto on the outskirts of Poland, the same ghetto depicted in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List.” Zelinsky’s mother, as she recalls, was nearly saved: “Her sister ended up getting a place on Schindler’s list, to go work in his factory and be saved. But my mother—she couldn’t get her other sisters on the list, so she didn’t go. She chose to stay with her sisters.” Zelinsky’s mother was then sent to Auschwitz in the winter of 1945. Alongside fifty thousand other women, they marched in one of the harshest winters in Europe. 

Hopkins math teacher Dr. Joshua Zelinsky ’03, Zelinsky’s son, recalls the stories about the Holocaust he grew up hearing: “They had to eat snow to survive.” The truth was that fewer than ten percent survived. Joshua Zelinsky’s grandmother was eventually liberated from a small satellite camp in Neusalz, Poland: “Incredibly, by 1946, she was in Heidelberg and reunited with surviving family.” Within a few years, she and her surviving siblings received visas to come to the United States. 

Upon arrival by boat to the United States, they were given only one Hershey’s Bar and seven single-dollar bills. With no plan, no destination, and nowhere to stay, they wandered uptown from the docks of New York City and spotted a sign that read, “To Let.” Doris Zelinsky continues: “They had learned a little English on the boat, and the letters resembled Polish, so my uncle said, ‘Oh, that must mean there’s a toilet. I need to go to the bathroom.’ They knocked on the door and spoke with a kind Italian man.” With broken English and hand gestures, they managed to communicate. He offered them the apartment for a modest rent. The first home in this new country was secured by kindness and sheer will because we were all on that “same boat at the end of the day,” says Joshua Zelinsky.  

Further, these stories weren’t simply told; they were woven together like an invisible thread, binding the family tightly, stitching memory into identity, and identity into activism. Joshua Zelinsky remarked, “They lived it certainly, but were not defined by this.” There was no silence to break and lock away, Doris continued: “My mother and her siblings lived near each other, and we’d gather for coffee, hear the stories, and see the books filled with photos from before and after the war. It was part of our normal routine.”

Passivity was never meant to be the answer to injustice. As Joshua Zelinsky remarks, “You can’t just stand on the sidelines while something tears at the values we live by. That’s unacceptable,” he said. That belief in remembrance as action is perhaps most powerfully embodied in Yellow Light. “We watched a video about Yellow Light, a national project Mrs. Zelinsky helped create to preserve Holocaust memory,” said Ashley Deng ’27. “It’s especially meaningful — on Holocaust Remembrance Day, landmarks across the country glow yellow.”

In the documentary co-created by Doris Zelinsky, iconic landmarks like the Empire State Building, Niagara Falls, and Yale’s Slifka Center are shown casting a yellow glow in remembrance and solidarity. 

Yellow carries special weight — not just as the color of the Stars of David that Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust. A yellow light is neither stop nor go, but a moment to pause, to pay attention, and to proceed with awareness — because silence, then and now, is never neutral.