Holocaust

Today

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. As the decades go by this becomes more and more important  as fewer and fewer people are alive to remember it directly, and there are those who say that it never happened.

In My Day

I don't suppose that when my Grandfather Paul Bondy married Eva Freitag in the early part of the 20th century, they had any idea of the shape of their future. I guess there might have been a few family questions asked about his Jewishness and her Christian faith, but I assume they just built the difference into their life. They were both Germans, weren't they?

My Grandfather was a reasonably well-off man - a corn broker, my mother used to tell me. Well-off enough to bring up four children in a handsome house not far from Hamburg.

The children were brought up as Lutherans and celebrated all the traditional Christian Festivals. I think that Paul Bondy absented himself on these occasions and I also think that there was an estrangement which meant that in later years he didn't live with the family.

I don't know what he must have thought when Hitler came to power; certainly Mamma was well aware of the implications, insisting on her right to a private ballot. And she immediately, as a half-Jew, lost her right to a formal education or well-paid jobs.

What I have seen is the paperwork that assigned Paul Bondy to Auschwitz. How he responded to the summons I don't know, but history tells us that most Jews were pretty obedient, not realising or fooling themselves about the implications.  Family opinion is divided about whether he went to the gas chambers or was shot or died on the journey there. I do know that he died as part of the "Final Solution" and that this had a lifelong effect on his family.

I don't think  genocide is a thing of the past; it is going on somewhere in the world as I write. But, remembering our own recent history may help us to be generous to peoples of differing faiths or outlooks on life and to understand that tolerating intolerance debases us all.

We must never forget our common humanity.