For years, organizations around the world have marked June 4 as Holocaust Survivor Day. In Baltimore, Jewish Community Services, an agency of The Associated, held a 2026 commemoration featuring a special luncheon for survivors and their families in the company of those who have experienced similar trauma.

“Survivors play an integral role in our community,” said Joan Grayson Cohen, executive director of Jewish Community Services. “Their strength illustrates the resilience of the human spirit and serves as an inspiration. With rising antisemitism, their powerful stories and lived experiences are even more critical to share so that we ensure the world never forgets nor repeats the atrocities they endured.”

Si Kalderon is one of the survivors who attended. His family escaped from what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina when he was very young, largely thanks to his father’s connections through trading as a merchant. They were welcomed by Italy, where his father had business contacts. Kalderon said that even though the country was also fascist, his experience was that most Italians he remembers weren’t supportive of the aggression of Mussolini or Hitler toward the rest of the region.

They resided in an Allied-captured area for a bit before being selected alongside a small number of other Jews to move to the United States for the duration of the war. After political changes and a short trip across the border to Canada that allowed them to be welcomed back to the U.S. as citizens, Kalderon’s family was here to stay.

They, like many other immigrants, wanted to go to New York.

“All the immigrants would like to go to New York, but they could not support all of them, so we had to find another place,” he said.

Instead, Kalderon’s father chose Baltimore because the ending of the city’s name reminded him of a word in Serbo-Croatian. And just like that, a new legion of Baltimore Jews were born.

Now, Si is happy to participate in events like the one with JCS, because it reminds him of where he came from and surrounds him with some of the few people left who knew exactly what it was like in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

“I don’t really think about it [often], but there aren’t many of us left,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of very nice people that I wouldn’t have otherwise met … we’re a fortunate Jewish community here.”

Holocaust Survivor Day is a bit different than other events like Yom HaShoah. On this day, survivors aren’t going with The Associated to speak at schools or synagogues. They’re just spending time with each other, taking time to reflect as much as they choose. Most of all, they’re celebrating still being here, and surviving one of history’s greatest atrocities.

“Holocaust Survivor Day is a celebration of extraordinary strength,” said Shelley Rood Wernick, associate vice president of Jewish Federations of North America’s Center on Aging, Trauma, and Holocaust Survivor Care. “Survivors rebuilt their lives from unimaginable loss and gifted the world with hope, wisdom and moral clarity. Our task is to honor that legacy by ensuring every survivor feels valued and is cared for, today and every day.”

Kalderon said that the lessons of the Holocaust are ones that extend beyond the need to repair the Jewish population of the world and preserve the culture and history that were devestated by Nazi Germany.

“I think it’s important [to know] the history of the Jewish people. Not because we’re just Jews, but because it puts the whole world in context,” he said.

Nowadays, Kalderon spends his time with friends eating meals and chatting, fishing when he can and enjoying every day that’s in front of him. He’s lived quite the life — Kalderon still receives multiple calls each year on Sept. 11 from people he indirectly spared because his presence at another building that day caused a group of Pentagon employees to be away from the section of the building struck by the plane.

But that’s a story for another time.

Kalderon said regardless of any event in his past, being a Jew is about so much more than what he went through as a child.

“Jewish culture is so rich, and if you understand it, it’ll make your life rich,” he said.

The Claims Conference, who along with the Seed the Dream Foundation are supporters of the event, estimated in January there are about 196,600 Holocaust survivors left. As long as survivors continue to live in the Baltimore area, JCS and The Associated will work to make June 4, and every other day, as comfortable for those survivors as possible.

aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com