Does forgetting make us immune?

In these strange times when we are parted from our families by the Pandemic, the family becomes very much front of mind. This, linked with Remembrance day, those whom we have lost, and those ancestors that modeled our families and our lives today. For years now I have attempted to trace my Grandparent's fate as they were part of the Holocaust and even in the age of the internet, information is scarce.

My Mother and her siblings were split up, two young teenage girls were sent to England, the older brother eventually getting to the UK, the youngest son getting to Palestine after a series of ship voyages and being saved by the British Army in Haifa. Our Grandparents were scheduled to be sent to Auschwitz on many occasions, but fate canceled these for a short while. We have tried many times to trace them, I have spoken to so many people in so many countries and heard conflicting stories of their fate. Shot whilst on a train to Switzerland pretending to be guests, sent to various camps, worked in factories producing uniforms for the Nazi forces. Now, older people dying, make information disappear too. There are so many documents that have come up in a brick wall. Yad Vashem and other organizations have come up as blanks. We have letters sent to family in the USA, but they stopped in 1942 and things faded.

The pair owned a very successful Antiques, Furs, and jewelry store in Leipzig, all of which was confiscated and possessed by new German families. When our mother arrived in England both she and her sister were interned on the Isle of Man and then worked in Bournemouth Hotels as a Cook and a Maid…next to no English at all, but saved money to try to get their parents to England. The door was slammed shut by Germany to stop more immigrants?

So, my mother became a proxy 'mother' to her sister and had very little information on her brothers and parents at that time. Eventually, after talking to MPs and officials, our mother managed to get her older brother entry to the UK after he had been fighting with the Free French (although he was interned, being German) and kept in Pentonville Prison for some weeks? he eventually joined the Parachute Regiment and was there at the liberation of the Belsen Concentration camp? One can’t imagine how he felt seeing that horror. My mother then met a Scottish sailor and moved to Fife in Scotland. Imagine a German girl in a tiny Scottish Village and how she was received…not well, My Father was brought up until he joined the Navy before the War in a quite bigoted society (they didn’t even like the English)? We are so blessed by family. We were so blessed by the diversity we lived with as children, my sister and I had a 'weird' upbringing, our mother was so strong and my father was not a happy man, in many ways. Not the best childhood, but we had so much we could learn from both their heritages.

We were brought up in the North East. The food we ate was in a large part ‘German’ and ’Scottish’ and amazed friends who came to eat? The quizzical looks on eating chicken soup with Vermicelli and chicken eggs? Helping our mum boil and press tongue etc. It was educational. Singing Christmas carols in German and learning Scottish nursery rhymes and songs. Diversity?

All are dead now, but the thoughts of the Holocaust and the discussion that this must never happen again is sad. It still happens all over the world (to a lesser extent) ethnicity, race, religion, and all the things we as humans seem to look for differences. ALL lives matter. 

Those who do not have families? Of course, they have, all of us. That means we should see one another as the Human Race, that covers ALL Races, ethnicities and colours and beliefs, and even though we talk of a Holocaust never happening again. It is and we must all be aware and play whatever part we can. Helping a grandchild working on a school history project on WW2 and the amazement they show at our (and the millions of other family histories) is still very relevant and educational. Some people may think we should ignore the past and live for the day?

I watched a YouTube post someone sent me with a young girl being confronted with a telephone from the 1970s and trying to press the numbers on the dialler, saying how big it was to carry around and amazed that it had no wifi? Since the Internet, the young can not understand how we survived, learned, researched, and managed to live. Technology is invisible, we expect it and it’s there, it was not so long ago we have DVD’s, flash drives, all relics already. The cloud and remote storage is a new way. I have given talks about how as a child of the ’50s, how things changed, and how the packaging was paper, milk in bottles, etc. Now we see how plastics and none recyclable items are choking our planet. Why can’t researchers around the world share this research and speed up the process of healing (if we can)? Sometimes looking back is pertinent to our human development. Simply when we touch something hot…we don’t do it again.

The pandemic will end and families will be able to meet, hug, and share the love. We are all family.