Today is Yom HaShoah. April 24th. Holocaust Remembrance Day. I know there is a great concern about the present generation not remembering the unspeakable crimes of the 3d Reich and of their collaborators.
I have written previously how the war affected my family, my relationship with my father, who was permanently scarred by the experience of losing his parents, his sisters and brothers and the story of how he brought his two young sisters, and 21 other survivors from his hometown to America. His mother, sisters and brothers were deported to Auschwitz among the other Hungarian Jews when Adolf Eichman arrived in Budapest in a final paroxysm of Nazi hatred, during the spring of 1944, after the Hungarian Nazi aligned government collapsed. There they faced the line of selection, to the left gas, to the right, work yourself to a starvation induced death. The war was lost, but Hitler figured he could still finish the job of cleansing Europe of Jews (Judenrein). Some 500,000 to 600,000 Hungarian men, women and children were hastily deported to Auschwitz, within approximately three months. The last Jews of Europe that still had not been under the German boot until then. Many of them were gassed upon arrival and immediately thrown into the blazing crematoria. I know that my grandmother and other aunts, uncles and cousins joined them in their ride to death. Some, more able bodied and young were spared to work. Among them, my aunt Sherry.
Near the barracks was a gallows with three prisoners hanging, frozen in death. Elie Wiesel came from the same hometown as my grandparents. Someone asked him where was God? “He is there hanging from the gallows,” he said.
Below is a picture of my Aunt Sherry, a gifted artist in line fourth from the left, in her uniform. Ultimately, my father rescued her and 21 others from the DP camp operated by the British, after the liberation. She was 60 pounds, her brain inflamed. She came to America in 1946, among the first wave of DPs (displaced persons). The photo was taken by the SS and is present in the records of Yad Vashem in Israel, in its Auschwitz album. She has passed on, but was a sensitive, loving mother to the autistic son she had after marrying a man who had also lost his wife and children, and yet had later served in combat in the south Pacific with the US Army. She never lost her Jewish faith, although one could easily question why. She did many oil paintings when she arrived, including a portrait of me and my mother below. I had other lovely aunts who were more fun but none so talented yet tormented or had suffered as much.
My father, having come to America in 1923, went home each year until 1939 but when the war came and he could no longer visit nor introduce his bride (my mother) to his parents or bring insulin to his diabetic father. He tried in vain to get them to America, but after the immigration and nationality act of 1924, it was no longer possible. His father was fortunate, dad said, dying of diabetes, saving him from the indignities of being gassed and burned. Dad said, “if God were so powerful, and he was bloodthirsty so I reject him. And if he was not powerful enough to stop the madness, he does not exist.” Yet Dad still went to synagogue on the holidays and ran his hotel for Jewish, mostly religious guests.
People ask me if I was affected. Well, yes I was. My father ran a hotel in upstate New York from 1951-1971. Many of the people there were survivors, and I grew up among them. Many did not want to talk about their horrifying experiences, many did. I listened to them and absorbed their stories. It was a terrible time to be young and innocent and to learn such things.
