For the past year Leslie Wilson and I have been having ‘a big conversation.’ Leslie is half English/ half German. I am Anglo/Jewish. We both believe that dialogue is the way to build bridges across divided communities and to promote healing and reconciliation. We regard our deepening friendship as a contribution towards the defeat of Hitler and Nazism. We therefore decided to do a joint blog for Holocaust Memorial Day 2011.
MIRIAM HALAHMY
Memorial to 7000 Jews of the town of Kerch, Crimea, shot in an anti-tank ditch.
As a Jewish child growing up in England after the Holocaust I saw the faces of my grandparents on the victims in the newsreels. However for my friends the victims looked like foreigners, a people far away about whom they knew almost nothing.
The Nazis organised the rounding up and murder of one and a half million Jewish children and I often thought, That could have been me. My family come from Poland, right in the heart of the killing fields.
But the Nazis threatened all children. Every single German child whether their background was Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Black, gay, gipsy or political was at risk. Kitty Hart who survived Auschwitz and a death march says, “We believe it can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime.” She has given her testimony since 1946 and has even taken neo-Nazis back to Auschwitz.
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By: Rebecca,
on 4/29/2008
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Dachau, Germany
Coordinates: 48 15 N 11 26 E
Population: 40,570 (2007 est.)
The old village and sixteenth-century palace here attest to the fact that Dachau, located just north of Munich on the Amper River in Upper Bavaria, has been inhabited for centuries. In spite of such history however, it will forever be remembered as the site of the first Nazi concentration camp. When it was established in March 1933, the former munitions factory held just under 5,000 prisoners but in a little more than a decade, the population had swelled to more than 14 times that number. American forces liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945. Visitors who enter what remains of the walled camp today will find the foundations of numerous barracks, the crematorium, gas chambers, a museum in the main building, and numerous memorials scattered around the grounds.
Ben Keene is the editor of
Oxford Atlas of the World. Check out some of his
previous places of the week.
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Thank you both for these thoughtful posts. "What if - what if it was me?" I think you're right, we need to consider ourselves and our culture in the light of both sides of that question.
What if I was one of the victims, and nobody helped me?
What if I was too afraid to help, and so ended up complicit - guilty?
... there's a third question too, of course: "What if I was one of the haters? The would-be perpetrators?"
Though I don't believe anybody reading this blog would BE one such, we have certainly all met them. Even when the people in question seem too ignorant or too wildly remote from our ways of thinking to engage with, they do need to be challenged.
I'm not sure about the complicit-guilty if you are too afraid to help. But if you go out of your way to betray, that is the unforgiveable, I think. Anne Frank and her family should have survived. They were betrayed. And what for? An extra sausage?
These are both very interesting posts about a subject that continues to perplex and haunt us. We need to understand what goes wrong with the human mind to have permitted such atrocities on so mass a scale. I think making small steps by recognizing our responsibilities to each other every day in our own communities – not ignoring the bad things we see, however minor – is one way to stay diligent.
From:
To: "miriam"
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2011 1:12 PM
Subject: Re: HMD 2011 from Miriam
> Hi Miriam,
> I've just read your and Leslie's blog, and this comment rightfully belongs there, but the last
> comment I posted ages ago didn't work, so I didn't.
>
> There are two grandmothers in this family. I am one, and Liesl, over a decade older, is the
> other. Liesl is German-Jewish, and a Kindertransport child. She will be speaking on several
> Cornish radio stations today (my daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren live in
> Cornwall). She also visits Cornish schools. Liesl's whole family - mother, father, siblings and
> grandparents, were murdered in the Holocaust.
>
> Although it's not often a topic of conversation, little details sometimes emerge... how, at the
> age of ten, she was a promising young skater, and how, one day, her coach had to tell her
> that he wasn't allowed to teach her any more. And after she'd settled in a school in England
> at the age of fifteen, she kept writing to her mum, and how precious her mum's replies were
> to her, until one day they stopped for ever. Little things - like one of her teachers daring to
> say, one day, that her family was as good as anyone else's (did he learn to keep his mouth
> shut? or did he share the same fate as so many good people). And she's still proud of being
> German, likes using the language, loves the literature...
>
> No, never, never again.
>
> I just needed to say that, and do feel free to use it if you want to.
>
> love, Enid xxx
I'm glad - it makes me cry, actually - that there are people who were born Jewish Germans, unjustly expelled from their homelands and suffering the murder of their loved ones, who can still treasure the culture of Germany - to which, incidentally, her Jews made such an enormous and valuable contribution. Literature, science, music,philosophy, drama - if you go to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, you can see some of that history. Moses Mendelssohn and Mendelssohn the composer, Heinrich Heine, Jakob Wassermann, Elisabeth Bergner, Einstein,, that's just a few, for starters.
Thank you, to both of you, for a very moving post. Like Miriam, I have been brought up with a constant awareness of the terrible things that happened. As a youngster I knew a number of concentration camp survivors and still feel sick with the memory of their accounts.
But how can we grandly say, 'Never Again' when it's still happening to different cultures and different religious groups? It might be called something different, ethnic cleansing, but it's still the murder of human beings.
If only we could care enough about each other for all this killing to stop.
Thank you, Leslie and Mariam for a wonderful, thought-provoking post.
From: Denise De Rome
To: miriam
Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2011 7:18 PM
Subject: Re: SORRY .... HMD 2011 from Miriam
Hi Miriam
Great blog! Yes, amongst many bits, I love the bit when Leslie says ' Fiction can make us feel what it was like to be there, making frightening decisions; to imagine what it’s like to have the Gestapo in your house ...... '
In fact I love it all.
Intended to bring my French grandfather's extraordinary illustrated certificate for some act of bravery in 1917. ... he was later in WW2 resistance, so I've often thought about what it was like to have the Gestapo swarming around. .....
All the best
Denise