Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day - a day dedicated to remembering the six million Jews who died at the hands of Nazis in Germany (as well as in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia). It is well that we remember these events in order to avoid the atrocities recurring in the future, although, sadly, we never seem to learn from our mistakes. However, I was appalled to read that five per cent of UK adults do not believe the Holocaust even took place and one in 12 believes its scale has been exaggerated. Why do they think so many millions of people all around the world would make up these stories?
My own family were victims of the Holocaust. I have mentioned it before. My father came from Germany and was born in 1923. His father was Catholic, his mother a Jewess, albeit one who had never set foot in a synagogue in her life. I guess marrying a Catholic would have been impossible if she were a strict Jew. But she was no more Jewish than I am an African goatherd (and I'm not by the way). By the mid 1930s with Hitler now in power, it became pretty obvious to the family that things were not looking good for Jews. Even if you were non-practicing, they went back six generations to check your Aryan eligibility, so my father and his brother failed miserably on that score, even though they had been raised as Protestants in the Lutheran church. My Dad and uncle had even been confirmed, but it wasn't enough to save them.
In late 1938, my uncle (then aged 17) was arrested at home and taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, presumably because he was not eligible to join the Hitler Youth. My 15-year-old father was thankfully in another town visiting his aunt, otherwise he would have been arrested too. Quite why they didn't take my grandparents at the same time, I do not know, but it was 1938 and things were still not as bad as they later became once the war had started. Also my grandfather had been awarded the Iron Cross in the First World War, so maybe that was enough to spare him at that point.
My uncle witnessed horrible things while in Buchenwald, among them daily hangings which the inmates were forced to watch. I have two photos of him taken just before Buchenwald and just after. He appears much more gaunt in the latter and his eyes look haunted. Thankfully he was only there three months. My grandparents managed with the help of Quakers in England to get both boys over here in March 1939,my grandfather paying the Nazis vast sums to get my uncle out of the camp and promising the family would leave Germany for good. It doesn't bear thinking about what would have happened if they had stayed in Germany. As it was, my grandmother's brothers ended up in concentration camps and we never heard of them again.
From a young child, I saw the tattoos, I heard the stories and I relived their experiences. How anybody could say these things did not happen, when there are so many similar stories from people all over the world that have been told or documented, I cannot fathom. What on earth would be the point in making up such horrid stories on a mass basis?
2 comments:
It is heartbreaking on every level. And here in America our president says there are good people on both sides. There are no good nazis, no good white supremacists. Goodness and racism cannot survive side by side.
I cannot begin to answer your last question ADDY. Sometimes we say "Everybody is entitled to their own opinion" but in my view they are not entitled to say that The Holocaust did not happen. That is an unforgivable insult to the memories of the six million who died because evil had been unleashed in the heart of Europe.
Thank you for providing details of your own family background and how your people were touched by the evil that stalked our continent.
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