The elephant in the living room

I just realized that, like alcoholic families, Holocaust survivors often deny what has happened to them and their loved ones. Or, worse, they don't talk about it at all. I learned that and rarely spoke about my history unless people probed - and then I shook inside until they stopped probing.

My family didn't talk about it - not in my presence anyway.

I think I mentioned that I am going to share my Bat Mitzvah with my cousin, Sigfried. He died in Auschwitz when he was four - I don't know why four is any worse than six - but it horrifies me. I see my kids and grandkids at that age and I know there would have been no mercy.

But ----I went onto the site for Yad Vashem - the Holocaust memorial in Israel and found his name - and that of his Father, my uncle and his Mother, my Aunt Rosie. Complete with dates of birth, location from which they were arrested and the date of their deaths at the camp. And all of this was in my Mother's handwriting in 1973. SHE KNEW all the way back then what had happened but never told me - never talked about it - never brought them up - I am sure to save me pain - and to save herself pain and guilt because I do know she suffered guilt.

Forgive me if I've said all this before - I find it so inexplicable. SHE KNEW.

I've been reading "Into the Arms of Strangers" about the Kindertransport specifically to England. I don't even know if there was one to anywhere else. I was too young, I think, at two to go with them. But in many ways my experience was like theirs. I read their stories and think
how easily things could have gone the other way, and how I'm blessed - there were 1,500,000
CHILDREN under the age of 18 killed by the Nazis. Jewish children. Killed by a people literate, cultivated, educated, composers, poets, writers, artists, scientists - not just by bully boys - killed by their neighbors and friends - people they had grown up with, camped with, gone to school with.

I'll never understand - there is no explanation - nothing. The search for it to make sense is one, I think, better minds than I have attempted. No sense.