The author experienced nightmares when she went through pregnancy, childbirth and having had no reasons to do so, living safe as they were in U.S., except - as she realised - the nightmares and fears had to do with the experiences of her grandparents who had gone through holocaust era in Europe, and she as a child had heard elders talk about their lives albeit not told by them. She wondered if those fears had become part of the DNA, and thus collected the memories of those who she could speak to, added to general known facts.
About Belgium, and everything she writes, it's very informative, of course, but when it comes to the decree of wearing the yellow star on sleeve, there is one bit she doesn't mention that's publicised elsewhere - namely, that the king went out wearing one, thus declaring he was against the antisemitic decree, and Jews of Belgium fared better than, for instance, those of Holland. What she does say is true though:-
"The French Belgians were among the most supportive in Europe when it came to helping the Jewish people during the war. The Flemish Belgians were much less inclined to help the Jews, and in next-door Holland the Dutch tended to support the Nazi anti-Jewish machine. The French in France, ironically, did not support the Jews for the most part; in that country the Germans easily tapped into the society’s anti-Semitic base. Of course, there were outliers in every country, but these were the general trends. It is hard to make sense of these patterns, but the realization that the local peoples’ attitudes could make such a huge difference in the outcome of the Nazis’ plans is chilling, particularly as so few countries came to the Jews’ aid.
Hitler and his henchman Eichmann were adept at assessing and manipulating the locals’ attitude toward their Jewish neighbors. In countries like Poland and the Ukraine, where anti-Semitism was rampant, and violence entrenched, the Nazis handily whipped the masses into an anti-Jewish frenzy within days of taking power. In these occupied countries, where young men felt inadequate under foreign rule, the Jews were an easy target. The Germans didn’t even have to do their own dirty work – locals were happy enough to stage pogroms, rounding up Jews for humiliation and torture. In Lvov, for example, a brutal pogrom took four thousand Jewish lives in the first week of German occupation. Later in the war, in Vichy France, a special French police division, the Milice, was formed in this unoccupied, allegedly “free” zone, specifically to hunt for and arrest Jews.
"In Belgium the Germans implemented their anti-Jewish laws more slowly, but by September 1942 they had begun rounding Jews up for deportation. While initially claiming to be transporting these people to work details, the brutality of the roundups, and the inclusion of the elderly and the infirm, children and babies, made the deportations’ sinister conclusions fairly obvious to anyone with the courage to face the truth.
"In fact, the Belgian Resistance movement had sent a young man, Victor Martin, to Germany, as a spy in February of 1943. He was traveling on an academic pretext, but his true mission was to find out the fate of the thousands of Jews being transported by cattle cars to the east. He returned with the news “people are being burned.” This first-hand information about mass extermination in German death camps confirmed the fears that those who were deported would not be coming back. His sinister report contributed to many Jews’ decision to hide their children in Belgium. Victor Martin was eventually captured by the Nazis, but managed to escape from two different concentration camps, and to lead a normal life after the war."
And this further detail of fact contradicts the supposedly effect of the dramatic show of solidarity by the king:-
"The trucks carrying Jews, and other “unsavory” people arrested by the Gestapo, took the prisoners first to an internment camp. The Germans had built a “transit camp,” a way station, for Belgian deportees in the city of Mechelen (Malines in French), located midway between Antwerp and Brussels, the two cities home to most of the Belgian Jews. From Malines, trains full of prisoners, called transports, each carrying a thousand people, left regularly for the killing camps, most to Auschwitz. A total of twenty-eight such trains, each carrying a thousand people, departed Malines with their human cargo between the summers of 1942 and 1944."
As the rounding up came closer, they tried to save the young:-
"We all knew about the Resistance. There were people, Jews and non-Jews, who were clandestinely fighting the Germans. We heard that there were ways to get help, ways to hide Jewish children.
"Can you comprehend the desperation we were in? Here was our choice: keep our child at home and know that, if we were captured by the Gestapo, as was likely, he would be killed along with us. Maybe we would have to endure seeing him killed before our eyes. Maybe they would torture him and make us watch. Or, we could give him up to strangers, knowing nothing about who would care for him, but hopefully saving his life. If we chose the latter option, it was likely he would grow up without parents, because it didn’t look likely we would make it. The best possible scenario, the one we prayed for, was that the war would end, we would survive, and be reunited with our boy.
"What made this decision even more heartbreaking was Bobby’s young age. He was too little to understand what we were going to do, or why. There was no way to prepare him for what was coming.
"With my brother Nathan, of course, it was easier. At fourteen, he was capable of taking care of himself, of understanding what was going on. He could communicate, he could make decisions. He didn’t even seem like a child, although technically he was one. We knew Nathan could take care of himself.
"But Bobby. Bobby was two. Thinking about giving him up made my entire body shake. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. Desperately I vowed that I would survive. I would not allow my child to grow up an orphan. So maybe Bobby saved my life. Because I was so low, so consumed by blackness, that I would likely have given up if I hadn’t had my child to live for."
About the young woman, a school teacher, who she sent off her two year old son with:-
"As the horrific roundups of Jews escalated in the summer of 1942, Andree met members of the secret Resistance movement. Wanting to do something to help save the children, she decided to join the underground effort despite the risks to her personal safety. And the risks were great. The Nazi regime demanded absolute obedience. Anyone arrested for potential sabotage against the Nazis could expect brutal and sadistic retribution. Yet many intrepid souls risked their lives to do whatever they could to undermine the hated regime.
"One of her recruiters was a woman named Ida Sterno. Sterno was part of the CDJ, a small group within the Belgian Resistance devoted to helping Jews. Sterno realized that, with her affinity for kids and her blonde hair and blue eyes, Andree would be a perfect “escort,” a courier to accompany children to safe houses. She was given the code name, “Claude Fournier,” by which all her contacts in the CDJ, as well as the parents of hidden children, would know her.
"Her job was to transport children from their families’ homes to their hiding places. This was a dangerous job, and an emotionally wrenching one. Andree was given an address and some brief instructions. She arrived at a home and had to take a child, or two, often very young, away from their parents. Always she arrived to a scene of tearful separation. The little children would cling to their mothers. The older ones would often be the ones comforting their parents."
Two year old Bobby was heartbroken at being sent away, and was very sick, while his mother was so heartsick she didnt notice her pregnancy until pointed out by her sister Inge whose escape herself was nothing short of miracle. Irene was born and Bobby brought back, and got better, but of course the children had to be both sent into hiding.
"Irene was loved and well cared-for by the only parents she knew as a baby and toddler. Her world, unlike that of her brother’s, was a secure and happy place. Having been separated from Melly and Genek at only three months of age she had no memory of them, no knowledge of their existence. She was completely content growing up as the little Bouchat girl, the adored adopted baby of a loving Catholic family. These first two years of her life, ironically, would be the happiest of the next two decades."
There are lovely photographs at this point of the various people across generations, and it's quite heartening to see them, especially of the children who did survive.
The author's grandfather Genek Bottner hailed from Lvov in Galicia and had relocated to Belgium alone, having walked all the way with another friend - being Jewish, they would be in danger if found travelling - and now had no news of his family back in Lvov as the war progressed.
"It is ironic that Stalin’s government, virulently anti-Semitic, would inadvertently save over two hundred thousand Polish Jews’ lives. Beginning in 1940, the Soviets deported over a million Poles, including Jews, into remote areas of the Soviet Union as slave laborers. Many of these men worked under grueling physical conditions in Siberia and Eurasia. However, some of these Jews survived the war; they were some of the only Polish Jews who did. The rest, over three million Polish Jews who were not deported by the Soviets, perished in the Holocaust."
The only person from his family who survived was his youngest brother who joined the Russian army, just before Germany invaded for a second time, this time in the process of going against Russia.
"When the Germans took control of Lvov they renamed the city Lemberg. Despite its now-German name, however, the city continued to be a hotbed of opposition, and strife between ethnic groups. The streets erupted in violence between Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Germans. Even the brutal Nazis had a hard time retaining order. The Nazi regime decided to give the people a common enemy.
"The Germans circulated a rumor that the Jews had executed Ukrainian political prisoners. This rumor sparked massive pogroms by Ukrainian nationals living in Lvov, as well as support for the killing of Jews by Einsatzgruppe C.
"The Einsatzgruppen were mobile death squads composed of German Secret Police (S.S. or Gestapo). These battalion-sized squads travelled from city to city right behind the advancing German army. Their express directive was to kill all “undesirables” in the area the army had invaded. The squads were supported by vans carrying food and ammunition, just as any fighting force would be. They were very well organized. There were four main squads, A,B,C, and D, each assigned a specific area of Poland and Ukraine. As they reached a city, the S.S. rounded up the “undesirables” – mostly Jews, some Roma, some political prisoners – and marched them to predesignated killing sites in the nearby forests. The victims were forced to strip, hand over all their valuables, stand at the edge of a mass grave, and wait to be shot. Sometimes the victims were forced to dig their own graves prior to being murdered. At first the Einsatzgruppen targeted mostly Jewish men, but soon included women and children in this ghastly execution scheme. By 1943, the Einsatzgruppe squads would kill over a million people, mostly by shooting, and later in mobile gas vans."
"Within two weeks of the Nazis’ arrival in Lvov, four thousand Jews had been murdered in the streets in massive pogroms. Countless more were shot by the roving death squads. There is no record of exactly how many people were killed, or where, by Einsatzgruppe C, as the squad carried out its demonic deeds in the city.
"The following month another pogrom called the Petilura Days resulted in another two thousand Jewish murders in Lvov in just two days. Women were raped, men were beaten, synagogues were burned, Jewish businesses were destroyed and looted in an orgy of violence."
And killings weren't enough, at that.
"In August 1941 the Nazis demanded that the Jewish population of Lvov pay a ransom of a staggering twenty-million rubles. The understanding was that paying this ransom would protect the Jewish community from harm. The Nazis took many Jews as hostages to ensure that this sum would be raised. Somehow the Jewish community was able to collect enough funds to pay this enormous fine, on time, but once the Nazis had received the ransom they killed the Jewish hostages anyway. In October 1941 Dr. Parnes was also killed because he was not cooperative enough with the “handing over” of Jews for deportation to the Janowska concentration camp. He was quickly replaced by another prominent Jew.
In November 1941 the Germans established a ghetto in Lvov, relocating tens of thousands of Jews into a small area surrounded by barbed-wire fences, where overcrowding, disease, and malnutrition were the rule. Some five thousand sick and elderly Jews were killed during this relocation, by Nazi soldiers and by Ukrainian hooligans who hated the Jews as much as the Nazis did. Many more Jews subsequently died in the ghetto due to the abysmal living conditions. The ghetto was periodically raided by the Nazis, who seized Jews for deportation, or killed them right there in the ghetto. Following the raids, the Jews still living outside the ghetto were then forced to move in. There were periodic attempts by the Lvov Jews over the next years to resist and fight, but, with few exceptions, these efforts were quickly and ruthlessly quashed.
"Next came the mass deportation of Jews to labor camps and to concentration camps. The Belzec camp received over fifty thousand Jews, and Janowska camp was a close second-place recipient.
"The Lvov ghetto lasted about two years. In 1943 the Nazis “liquidated” it, sending any remaining survivors to Auschwitz or other killing camps, or marching them into the forest to be shot.
"Of the original hundred thousand Jewish inhabitants, as well as an additional hundred thousand Jewish refugees who had moved to Lvov prior to the Nazi occupation, only a handful were still alive when the Lvov ghetto was destroyed in late 1943. Even fewer were alive when the Soviet Army liberated the city in 1944.
"Among those who perished were Yehudah and Beila Bottner, and two of their four sons, Joseph and Ephraim, as well as grandparents, scores of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and hundreds of friends.Old people, young ones, children, babies, all were gone. Religious, secular, Hassidic, Zionist, agnostic, atheist – it made no difference. If they were Jewish they were doomed. There are no known records of precisely where and when the Bottner family died. Probably they were either killed in a pogrom, shot in the killing fields around Lvov by the Nazis, or deported to Belzec concentration camp and killed there.
"Yehudah and his two sons did survive long enough to relocate to the Lvov ghetto. Work cards with their names on can be found in the archives in the Holocaust Museum. But Beila (Berta) disappeared – perhaps she died of natural causes, perhaps she was killed in a pogrom or in the relocation process. The very last communication from her was in April 1940 in a telegram. Genek had sent his parents notification of little Bobby’s birth and Berta replied via telegram, sending congratulations. Genek’s one solace was that his parents did know they had a grandson. They would never meet him, but Genek would later say that he hoped it had brought them a little joy."
Genek was caught, but was sent to work as slave labour in a factory, instead of a death camp.
"The Germans used forced labor (slave labor) in every country they occupied. Most of these laborers were transported from their own countries into Germany to work in factories, agriculture, or construction projects. Two hundred thousand people were conscripted from the tiny country of Belgium alone. From larger countries, many more people were seized and sent to work as slaves. Slave labor was a mainstay in the Nazi economy; millions of people were used as slaves by the Nazi regime during the war. Jews and other subhuman undesirables were worked literally to death, but other prisoners served as free labor as well."
One shocking revelation is about a now well known brand:-
"It is not known which factory he was sent to, or the exact date, but he would later tell Bobby of the three months he had spent working as a forced laborer for the Nazis. He was a skilled furrier; most likely the Germans took advantage of this skill and had him working in a garment factory, probably helping to sew uniforms for German soldiers. It is possible he worked at Hugo Boss, a clothing company that made Nazi war uniforms, that would later become a fashion giant. The only reason he was not killed or sent to Malines and then to Auschwitz was that somehow he avoided being recognized as a Jew. He probably passed as a Christian Pole."
Melly was frantic with worry but stuck to the careful precautions they had worked out beforehand, just in case.
"Genek, meanwhile, spent three months as a virtual slave. The workers were given little food and very little rest. Their hours were long, from before dawn until well after dark, seven days a week. They lived in abysmal conditions in cold, damp, rodent-infested cramped rooms. Their Nazi slave masters forced them to stand at attention for hours for roll-call, beat them with riding crops if they didn’t move quickly enough when ordered to do something, and demanded unquestioning obedience. They were given work quotas and were threatened with beatings, or worse, if they didn’t meet them."
He was smart enough and lucky enough to escape. The couple met, went safely to one of their flats, and a while later, desperate to see their son, went to meet him. Heartbreaking description.
This author makes this work an account enough to give a good basic idea of the times. When allies finally arrived in Brussels,
"Desperate Nazis, realizing their time was up, spent their final hours of occupation destroying people and evidence. They executed prisoners even as the British troops made their way into the city. Retreating Nazi soldiers set fire to the Palace of Justice in the center of Brussels, hoping to destroy documents that could be used against them by the Allies. But as the stately building burned, hundreds of Belgians organized themselves into a human chain, rescuing documents by passing them from one person to the next."
Genek went to fetch Bobby, walking seventy miles. On the way back they got a lift on a truck in a U.S. soldiers' convoy. They fed candy to the emaciated child.
"They spoke some language he had never heard before; he couldn’t understand what they said. And one of them had a chocolate-colored face. He had never seen a man that color before. Maybe he had eaten too much chocolate? But they were nice."
Irene brought back home at two was traumatised, and never got reconciled to her mother. Melly returned and married someone, Nathan was involved with Jewish homeland, but Inge was first, going to meet a British soldier from Palestine.
"Jewish entry into Palestine was severely restricted at this time. Even after the destruction of two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population in the Holocaust, Britain, bowing to Arab pressure, was turning away or imprisoning Jews attempting to enter Palestine. When Inge’s ship arrived in Haifa, Inge and the other Jewish Holocaust survivors from Europe were brought to a detention camp in Atlit, just south of the port of Haifa, by the British authorities. Luckily she was only detained there briefly."
Nathan met someone, too, both migrating to Palestine.
"Was the fluke of having been born with blue eyes the reason they were now alive and not dead like so many others? Neither expressed this grim thought. They simply clung to each other, each knowing that they had found the person they would be with for the rest of their lives."
Nathan was amongst the would be migrants sent by British to prison camps in Cyprus, released slowly.
"There were additional roadblocks. In 1947 the refugee ship Exodus was detained by the British as she approached Haifa. A violent skirmish broke out, with many dead and wounded. This time, instead of sending the refugees to Cyprus as usual, the irate British decided to return the Holocaust survivors to Europe. The incident garnered a lot of international press and well-deserved outrage. The Exodus eventually went all the way back to Germany with her load of traumatized people, depositing them back in the country that had vowed to annihilate them from the earth.
"After that event, Golda Meir, then acting head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, came to Cyprus to speak to the Jewish detainees. Her mission was twofold. She asked the prisoners in Cyprus to allow some of the precious entry visas to be used for the people who would otherwise be returned to Europe, such as the Exodus’s passengers. She also begged for babies who were sick with typhus inside the Cyprus camps to be allowed to jump the queue so they could be transported immediately to Palestine, where Jewish hospitals waited to care for them. Essentially she was asking Holocaust survivors from Europe who had already been imprisoned for months in Cyprus to accept a further delay in their release on altruistic grounds. It was a tough sell.
"But the prisoners agreed. They preferred to stay in prison for a few more months than to see Jewish babies die of disease. They had seen enough children die. The next shipment of freed prisoners was called the “baby transport.” It consisted of sick infants and their parents, allowed to jump the queue and get to Palestine right away.
But eventually Nathan’s turn came. On January 25, 1949, he boarded the ship Galilah, leaving Cyprus behind him forever, setting his gaze toward Haifa, Israel. Beside him was the beautiful girl he had met back in Belgium and with whom he had bonded during their years of captivity in Cyprus. Her name was now Shoshana. Nathan had twin goals: to reunite with his family, and to marry Shoshana as soon as possible.
"He managed both. His mother and sisters had managed to get to Israel before him, and all were overjoyed to have their boy Nathan free and finally in Israel. Theirs was a joyous reunion. And only three weeks later, on February 12, 1949, Nathan and Shoshana were married."
Melly preferred a more culturally suitable environment and Bottner family migrated in 1952 to Canada. But her granddaughter, Bobby's daughter the author, experienced trauma and nightmares as a young mother, and wondered if her DNA had received it, through the ancestors' experiences.
"Most people are exposed to a mixture of some good and some bad experiences in their lives. But some people – like the Jews who lived in Europe during World War Two – experienced unprecedented and extreme levels of stress and anxiety. Five years of fear, of hunger, of sensory deprivation, of losing loved ones, of homelessness – five years where each day’s survival was an endeavor, five years when stress hormones were sky-high, as they had to be in order to survive – exacted a serious toll on the people, like my family members, who experienced this trauma. And the cumulative effect of this prolonged trauma no doubt created some very significant genetic modifications.
"Psychologists and sociologists have studied children of survivors, and found that they exhibit certain behaviors, have more anxiety, than their controls. This finding could be the result of living with traumatized parents (environment). But further studies show that most children of survivors actually have altered cortisone levels (stress hormones), regardless of how they were parented. We can now understand these findings not just as a result of these children having grown up with a parent who had experienced trauma, and having “learned” certain behaviors that resulted from this trauma, but at a genetic level. There is still much that science has to figure out. Why do some survivors and their children do well, while others suffer from PTSD or other psychological or physical ill effects?
"There is no easy answer at this point. Studies show that whether one's mother or father underwent trauma, as well as what age they were, affects the progeny's outcomes. And if one looks at grandparents' experiences, it matters whether it is a paternal or maternal grandparent. Strangely, for example, if one's maternal grandmother was severely underfed as a child, one is more likely to develop diabetes but, conversely, if one's paternal grandfather was underfed, the opposite is true. And if one's father was underfed as a child, one is relatively protected from heart disease, but if one's mother was underfed, one is more likely to develop heart disease. The science behind epigenetics and its effect on resilience and health is still in its infancy. But the mere fact that we now understand that life experiences can have an effect on future generations' health is a major step forward in our understanding of how genetics and environment interact in determining our health outcomes.
"So, science seems to support quite strongly the hypothesis that I, a child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, inherited altered genes that affect my cortisone levels, and predispose me to anxiety. Could this predisposition have affected me when my son was born? The time after giving birth is certainly a vulnerable one for most women, so it makes sense that I was affected then. What we don't know is whether there is some kind of collective unconscious memory that is embedded in my DNA, leading me to “remember” the trauma my grandmother Melly was experiencing when her son, my father, was born."
The author discusses the holocaust causes more intelligently than most explanations by those that bought into the nazi propaganda, or the fraudulent propaganda by the church, for centuries, beginning when the church turned to befriend Rome and blamed Jews for an execution that was routine amongst hundreds of such executions of Jews in Judea and Israel - derogatorily misnamed Palestine, an abusive epithet, by the Romans that occupied the land as colonizers.
"Why did the Jews become Hitler’s scapegoat? How did he succeed in recruiting so much help in his effort to annihilate the Jewish people? Why did so much sadism exist, and why was it turned against a minority that tended to keep to itself and rarely bothered anybody?
"There is no ready answer to these philosophical questions, of course. Perhaps, because they were perceived as keeping to themselves rather than integrating into the local population, Jews were an obvious target. Thinking of a group as “other,” as lesser, as nonhuman, is a prerequisite for crimes against humanity. Xenophobia is a prerequisite for genocide of a group perceived as racially “other.” So a group that lives outside the general community in any way is of course at high risk. Hitler decided that “Jewish blood” was antithetical to his vision of Aryan supremacy – and it didn't matter whether a person practiced Judaism or not. His rabid hatred zeroed in on Jews with laser intensity, and he was able – through persuasion and intimidation – to convince millions of followers to go along.
"Jewish people, with their history of valuing education and intelligence more than physical strength, tended to do well economically, at least in Western Europe. Since the Middle Ages, when one of the only professions open to them was banking (money lending), Jews had been associated with money. After World War One, as Germany suffered through a terrible economic depression, the ground was ripe for Hitler to rise, claiming that the Jews were the source of all the Germans’ financial troubles, and that getting rid of them would make all their problems go away.
"This still begs the question of why millions of people believed this twisted tale and cooperated in the atrocities. Psychological studies have shown that “normal” people can turn sadistic when given absolute control over others. In 1971 a landmark study was conducted by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. In this disturbing experiment, a group of college students were split into two groups, and randomly assigned to “be” prisoners or prison guards. The guards were dressed in uniforms and given absolute control over the “prisoners.” Within hours the guards turned cruel and sadistic toward their charges, harassing them, humiliating them, and making them do pointless menial tasks, with punishment if they “misbehaved.” Perhaps more disturbing, the “prisoners” quickly became submissive and docile, exhibiting “learned helplessness,” accepting whatever punishment the guards doled out. This submissiveness in turn seemed to fuel the guards’ sadism. Both groups, the aggressors and the persecuted, quickly adopted the “new normal” behaviors of their peers. The experiment was meant to run for two weeks, but after only six days the psychologists had to terminate the study because one researcher realized it was creating a cruel and abusive situation. Zimbardo later noted that he himself did not think to object to what was going on in the “prison.” He later stated that he found himself thinking as a prison warden rather than as a psychologist. He too had bought into the new normal reality."
And this is far from the only such example, of course. Think invaders and colonial occupiers in India for over a millennium and half, think gender gap, think caste system in Europe with royalty and aristocracy topping the pyramid with education being much less important than property, and of course, slavery in lands as diverse as islamic or U.S.. Why, the discussion above applies even to the recent changes in behaviour of most airport and airline officials who can be as hostile and vicious to anyone they choose to target, as long as the target is safe to aim at.
"Their belongings were confiscated by the Nazis and transported back to Germany as liebesgaben, spoils of war. Not only were Jewish businesses and homes seized, and used by the Germans and their collaborators, but every valuable object – jewelry, art works, furniture, and home goods – was taken too. This fiscal rape was all part of the Nazi final solution.
"Genocide is not new. It had happened time and again prior to World War Two. Nor, sadly, did it end with the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews. The twentieth century would unfortunately see genocide again, in Cambodia, in Rwanda, and in the Balkans. But the obsessive, maniacal effort that the Nazi party put into annihilating the Jews was unprecedented and has not been equaled since. The construction of an entire infrastructure devoted to documenting, finding, concentrating, transporting, and then gassing and burning six million people, more than a quarter of them children, is impossible to fathom."
The author is, obviously, forgetting a few other parallels, or knows little about some, since they used more prevalent methods of extermination rather than the German inventions. Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet, for one, resulting in exodus for survival and genocide of over a million, for example; and China's own millions, since estimated a hundred million, of deaths in what is misnamed cultural revolution, are two more such examples.
But nazis were different from mere racists or slave owners or so forth known through history.
"The Nazis robbed not just the Jews of their humanity; they robbed everyone else of their fundamental decency, in fact of their humanity, as well. Everyone, Jews and non-Jews, was thrust into the impossible choice of either cooperating, or at least passively accepting, the barbarism of the Nazis, or risking their own and their family’s annihilation. This was the reality under this savage regime. The Germans made it clear that not only would resisters be brutally punished, but their families would be too. From a comfortably removed perch seventy years later, it is easy to judge.
"In such circumstances, it is amazing that still there was a small minority of incredibly brave Resistance fighters who risked everything to fight the fascists, and in doing so salvage their own essential humanity."
Indeed. But on the other hand, East Europe was another story.
"After the war, the very few Jews who had managed to survive were of course homeless and penniless as well as psychologically and physically traumatized. Often having nowhere else to go, some tried to return to their home villages or cities. Many times they knew their families had entrusted valuables to non-Jewish friends and neighbors before entering a ghetto or being deported. Some Jews had buried jewelry and family heirlooms in the ground near their homes, attempting to keep it safe for “after the war.” Survivors straggled back, hoping to find some remnant of their family’s belongings and to recapture a bit of their fractured lives.
"These sorry Jewish refugees, having lost all family and friends, and after being subjected to unspeakable horror and brutality in the camps, were – for the most part – met with further hate if they returned home. After years in exile, the return was a cruel and lonely homecoming, devoid of familiar faces, empty of familiar landmarks. There are heartbreaking accounts of Ukrainian and Polish nationals hissing at returning Jews, spitting at them, expressing shock and dismay that they were still alive. Most Jews found their families’ homes and belongings gone – confiscated by their neighbors – never to be returned. Sometimes confrontations broke out, and turned violent. More than one Jew, having somehow survived five years of imprisonment, torture, and unspeakable horror, was killed by villagers upon returning to the place they had once called home.
"In addition to physical harassment – the registering, policing, and rounding up of the Jews – the Nazis used other, psychological weapons, and these were perhaps even more sinister. By robbing people of their basic rights – taking away their livelihood, their community, their religion, their homes, and their families, and later their clothes, even their hair – they stripped the Jewish people of their sense of their own essential humanity, rendering them helpless, hopeless, and vulnerable. Vulnerable, terrified people will do whatever they can to feel safe and to survive, including cooperating with the enemy. The Germans, treating Jews as subhuman, forcing them to hide like animals in dens, tried to demonstrate to the world that Jews were useless vermin, ripe for extermination. For some, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sadly, but predictably, some Jews started seeing the Nazis as masters, and themselves as helpless slaves, dumb animals, meekly submitting to any atrocity.
"People have a strong and primitive survival instinct. Frightened Jews became increasingly desperate to avoid the wrath of the Nazis and, hoping to survive, did whatever they were told – no matter how horrible or degrading. If told to register, they did. If told to wear gold stars on their clothes, they complied. If told to report for work duty, they showed up. If told to be at a train station at a certain time, together with their children, they were there. If told to dig mass graves before they were shot and pushed into them, they did that too. Told to either help out in the crematoria or end up inside them, some Jews cooperated with the enemy, and helped run the killing camps. This didn’t save them, however; most eventually suffered the same fate as those who had gone to the gas chambers before them.
"Even after witnessing the brutality of the regime, desperate Jews still hoped that by cooperating with the Germans they would be saved. In 1943, the Nazis managed to “flush out” many of the remaining hidden Jews by announcing that Belgian Jews should now return to their homes, that they were exempt from further actions. Wanting to believe that the worst was over, many came out of hiding. They were, of course, picked up in the next roundups and deported."
And the treatment meted out to victims of jihadists, for example in Kashmir, isn't very different, except in numbers being smaller - murdered, kidnapped and taken across border, thousands; enforced exodus to life as refugees in their own nation or even state so that U.N. does not count them as such, over half a million. Yezdi are now being recognised as victims of Islamic barbarism that more than matches the nazi, except for technology.
The author brings back the suffering of the two year old Bobby who was her father.
"Decades later, in Romania, psychologists noted that in orphanages in that country there existed an eerie silence: rows of babies lying soundlessly in their cribs. There was no point in making sound if nobody listened, nobody responded. Bobby’s years in the convent were silent ones."
This too is familiar enough to anyone who has suffered being ignored and hence turned silent, including most females across the world who are inculcated with the non complaining persona requirements by every culture, while some demand mere servility and others a smile with makeover. Everything the author describes here about the war refugee children hidden in contents, and other institutionally brought up ones such as those in orphanages, applies to most human females around the globe - including stunted growth.
And finally, the author gives a very good, precise, succinct summing up regarding the opposition faced by Israel:-
"After two thousand years without a homeland, after six years of Nazi atrocities, and despite universal Arab opposition, the Jews finally had a country of their own. In the twenty-first century it has become mainstream to criticize Israel. And, certainly, it is a country with a lot of problems. But Israel is a tiny nation-state, only a few miles wide in some spots, and it is the only place in the world that guarantees that another Holocaust will not happen to the Jewish people. Every Jew in the world is welcome to resettle in Israel. The value of this safety net is, hopefully, evident after reading about the events that took place in Europe in the last century.
"Moreover, I would argue that it is hypocritical of Europeans and Americans to voice outrage about territorial disputes in a tiny country most know very little about. For one thing, European nations themselves have a pretty checkered history. Many colonized the developing world and shamelessly exploited the natural resources in each country, and did so until fairly recently. When it was time to withdraw from its colonies, Europe handily carved up areas, renamed them, and reassigned inhabitants at will. An example of this is the partition of India by the British in 1948, the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the resettlement of millions of people. And let's not forget that the country now called the United States was, in fact, inhabited when the European settlers arrived a few centuries ago. The way the Native Americans were treated by the invaders, the way an entire continent of land was stolen from them, the way they were pushed to the brink of extinction, is a travesty that gets relatively little attention. My point is not to minimize the very real problems that exist in Israel, but to question the self-righteous judgment that often rains down on the state.
"Israel is not perfect. I would argue that no country is. But it is certainly not the world's great villain. It is a small and complicated place wrestling with the uneasy task of juggling the needs of many diverse people with conflicting agendas. But whatever it does, right or wrong, it is a unique haven for a people who desperately need one, and who have no other place that they can ultimately call their own. And for that alone Israel deserves the support of the world."
The epilogue gives details of the various surviving family members and their lives, and their lives as affected by the events during those years. Irene and her being unloved by her parents brings a sharp pain, every time one reads about it. Bobby was able to reconnect with the resistance woman who had helped hide each of them.
"And so the family survived. Through intuition, chutzpah, and a lot of good luck, those who lived through the darkest times of the European Holocaust managed to evade annihilation. Their descendants – including myself – are here due to their courage.
"We owe them all a debt of gratitude. But survival had a price. I believe we inherited their pain and suffering too, and it is embedded in our DNA."
