My Own Thoughts on the Holocaust
After posting this yesterday, I received an email from my Mom with the following information:
irene is the widow of my first cousin david, oldest son of grandma molly's oldest brother feiwish, who died in concentration camp.
She says she "must have" told me David's story -- he was taken prisoner early in the war as a British soldier, and spent the war in a German POW camp. I have no recollection of any such story, nor do I remember ever hearing her mention an Uncle Feiwish. The only sibling of my grandmother's I know by name is Ernestine, who was my mother's favorite, and in whose memory I have the middle name Tina. She and her mother were taken away by the Nazis after my mother and her brother and parents had gotten out of Italy and gone to New York. They had gone to Italy, in one of the towns in the Alps that went back and forth between Austrian and Italian rule, in 1938, and lived there for over a year. The fact that her father was from there and still had family there (my great-grandmother ran a pensione) was what allowed them to escape; the quota for Italy was not as heavily used as those for other countries.
After my Dad died in 1998, my Mom took my sister and me on a trip to that town in Italy and to Vienna. We happened by chance to run into an old woman who remembered the day the Nazis took the town's Jews away, and told us about it. We also met the older sister of the girl who had been my Mom's best friend in school there. That trip made many things more real for me.
It took me a long time to realize how profound the effects of all this were in my life, and I still find new connections. One of the biggest was when I realized that my mother, who is very social and generally makes friends easily, must have left behind and lost a number of friends when her family fled Vienna.
I also realized a while ago that all the rage that my Dad carried around didn't really have anything to do with us, even though it seemed to when he was angry (or even just irritated) with one of us (which didn't require a lot of provocation at times).
I have sometimes felt as though every member of my generation whose family survived the Nazis represents a dozen or more others whose lines were wiped out before they could be born.
There's so much more to say about all this; I feel like I could write for hours. But I don't have the time today, so I'll end it here.
irene is the widow of my first cousin david, oldest son of grandma molly's oldest brother feiwish, who died in concentration camp.
She says she "must have" told me David's story -- he was taken prisoner early in the war as a British soldier, and spent the war in a German POW camp. I have no recollection of any such story, nor do I remember ever hearing her mention an Uncle Feiwish. The only sibling of my grandmother's I know by name is Ernestine, who was my mother's favorite, and in whose memory I have the middle name Tina. She and her mother were taken away by the Nazis after my mother and her brother and parents had gotten out of Italy and gone to New York. They had gone to Italy, in one of the towns in the Alps that went back and forth between Austrian and Italian rule, in 1938, and lived there for over a year. The fact that her father was from there and still had family there (my great-grandmother ran a pensione) was what allowed them to escape; the quota for Italy was not as heavily used as those for other countries.
After my Dad died in 1998, my Mom took my sister and me on a trip to that town in Italy and to Vienna. We happened by chance to run into an old woman who remembered the day the Nazis took the town's Jews away, and told us about it. We also met the older sister of the girl who had been my Mom's best friend in school there. That trip made many things more real for me.
It took me a long time to realize how profound the effects of all this were in my life, and I still find new connections. One of the biggest was when I realized that my mother, who is very social and generally makes friends easily, must have left behind and lost a number of friends when her family fled Vienna.
I also realized a while ago that all the rage that my Dad carried around didn't really have anything to do with us, even though it seemed to when he was angry (or even just irritated) with one of us (which didn't require a lot of provocation at times).
I have sometimes felt as though every member of my generation whose family survived the Nazis represents a dozen or more others whose lines were wiped out before they could be born.
There's so much more to say about all this; I feel like I could write for hours. But I don't have the time today, so I'll end it here.