Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day)

This evening, because we start our days from sunset, marked the beginning of Yom Hashoah - Holocaust Memorial Day. Everyone lights a memorial candle that lasts for 25 hours. Many people, including us, light in memory of a specific person who perished. DD and I lit our candles in memory of Judit Rajhman and Hanna Schenbron, both aged 6, both murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.

Hanna and Judit would have been 81 now, if they were still alive. Who would their children have been? Where would their grandchildren be living now? How many children would they have had? How many grandchildren? Maybe they would have had careers? Maybe one would have been a doctor and the other a writer? Maybe it would have been the other way round and the other would have been the doctor? It's almost certain that they didn't know each other aged 6 but maybe they would have met later in life and become friends, or colleagues, or even sisters-in-law?

So many questions without answers. So many children who never got to live their full lives (estimated at 1.5 million, most of them Jewish). And their baby brothers and sisters, and their big brothers and sisters and cousins, and young adults, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, classmates, the children next door, the man from the grocery shop who always made jokes, the teacher who gave too much homework, the scary dentist and the kind doctor. And all these people's families and friends until you add up 6 million lives .... stopped. Quashed. Murdered. Gassed.

DD and I watched a film about Anne Frank and I told her how Otto Frank was the only one to survive and how he came back and Miep had saved Anne's diary. Then I told her how he went to live in Switzerland and he married another survivor, Elfriede (Fritzi) Geiringer, who had a daughter called Eva (The author Eva Schloss). Fritzi and her family had lived in the same street as Anne Frank in Amsterdam and Eva and Anne, born only a month apart, had been friends. The Geiringers also went into hiding and were also betrayed. They were sent to Auschwitz. Erich Geiringer and their 19 year old son, Heinz did not survive. After the war Eva went to live in London. In Stanmore in fact, where we also lived. "And Grandma knew her, and her daughter, Sylvia, went to my school. She was in the year above me, Anne Frank's step-niece whom she never met."

DD understood. Real people survived and we know their grandchildren and, now, great-grandchildren. Real people perished and we have to remember them because they didn't get to have children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

Sophie, Wigel, and Fiet Primowees - Righteous Among the Nations

A week ago on Wednesday it was Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel. I didn't write anything this year. We'd just returned from London, I've written about it in past years, I don't know why I didn't mention it last week. However, today, I have the chance to write about a meeting at school with Fiet Primowees whose parents are Righteous Among the Nations.

Last year the Third Grade in my school went to see a play called Hanneke and Fiet, based on the children's book of the same name by Ran Cohen-Harounoff. It's about two little Dutch girls during WW2. Today the real Fiet came to our school. She's 80 and she came to tell the now Fourth Grade her story.

One day in 1942, when she was six years old, Fiet, an only child, came home to find a little girl at home. Her mother, Sophie Primowees, told her that the child, Hanna, was staying for one night on her way to another home. Hanna had been passed from family to family as the danger involved in hiding her was too great for many families to risk. Hanna stayed with the Primowees family for three years.

Fiet didn't know that Hanna was Jewish but she did know that it was a big secret and no one must know that she suddenly had a little sister. She did tell one school friend that she had a new sister but she wasn't a baby, she was already three years old. The friend told her that this was very strange - new little sisters don't come so old. But the friend also understood, somehow, that this was something never to be spoken about. For three years Fiet never had a school friend come over to play. They had no visitors to the house and they could not accept any invitation themselves.

Fiet told us that her family were all blond and Hanna was dark. They looked nothing like each other. There was no way they could have passed Hanna off as her real sister.

Fiet is in the middle with her grandchildren seated on the left.
Right of Fiet is her daughter and next to her, the Dutch translator. 

On one occasion Hanna was very ill. A serious illness that she could have died from. They couldn't take her to the hospital and they had to try to find a doctor they could trust to come to the house. To make matters more complicated, there were Nazi sympathizers living opposite them, who were on the lookout for any strange behaviours.

Once they went to visit Fiet's grandmother. Hanneke could go outside but her grandmother was so afraid that she told them children weren't allowed to speak in the streets in her neighbourhood. One day there was another child in the street with a bicycle. An older woman came over and asked the the child if Hanna could have a ride on his bike. Fiet's grandmother was very scared but the older woman turned out to be Hanna's real grandmother who was in hiding nearby. She had recognized Hanna but Hanna didn't know who she was.

Fiet's father, Wigel (Wim), was arrested and sent to a war camp. Before he left he told her mother to keep both the girls safe and to keep them together. For Fiet, Hanneke was  gift. They loved each other. They were sisters. And then one day, three years later, there came a knock on the door. The war was over. Hanna's parents had come to collect her.

Hanna didn't want to go with them. She didn't remember them at all, even though Sophie Primowees kept telling her that her real parents would come for her after the war. Sophie went with Hanna to stay with her real parents for a few days. Then they both came back. Then they went again. And his went on for a few visits until eventually Hanna had to go to live permanently with her parents.

The two families kept in touch and visited often. When she left school Hanna went to volunteer on a kibbutz in Israel where she met her future husband and stayed, living in Israel and bringing up her own family here.

In 1981, Sophie and Wigel Primowees were honoured by Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem) as Righteous Among the Nations. There was a ceremony and a tree was planted in their names.

On this visit Fiet had brought her daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren to Israel to see the tree. She was going to speak at Yad Vashem. And of course they were visiting her beloved sister, Hanneke.

Our children were allowed to ask questions and among the usual questions (Did you and Hanna ever fight? - No. How did you feel when you suddenly had to share your parents? -  I loved Hanna from the beginning, she was like a gift for me.) there were some quite profound questions too.

How did you have the courage to hide a Jewish child? - We didn't feel like heroes, we don't feel like heroes. It is just a part of our family story. We did what we had to do. We did what was right.

How did you feel when the State of Israel honoured you? - We didn't ask to be thanked but it was a great honour. And it is a wonderful legacy from my parents Sophie and Wigel, to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who never met them.

Yom Hashoah - Holocaust Memorial Day

In my time I have visited Dachau, the concentration camp near Munich, attended courses and seminars at Yad Vashem, I have taken part in 70 Days for 70 Years, I have visited Anne Frank's hiding place in the attic in Amsterdam, I have listened to the testimonies of many survivors, I have read a hundred books about the Shoah. Despite all this background, each year the impact of Yom Hashoah takes me by surprise.

In 2015 I wrote this 100 word challenge. It took a long time for me to understand the implications of being a 2nd Generation Survivor. (It is capitalized because it's a 'thing'). I used to think - you weren't there, for heavens sake, survive already. But then a flatmate explained to me how it is growing up with parents traumatized and damaged, and I remembered certain friends' parents and grandparents from my childhood.

My family, on both sides came to England to escape the pogroms in the 1880s. If they left cousins behind, which they almost certainly did, my parents probably had 3rd or 4th cousins who perished. But we don't know who they are and 3rd or 4th cousins in large families of 5 to 10 children are distant relations.

However, my mother's family did bring over a cousin from Germany with her two daughters. The collective family employed them as maids and found them accommodation. I know this sounds incredible but that's how you got visa's in those days. After the war they lived on reparations, together, the mother and two spinster daughters who never fully recovered and suffered mental health issues until they died.

My mother also remembers sitting on the stairs eavesdropping as her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles discussed what they should do if Hitler conquered Britain. The options were to go into hiding or to commit collective suicide. There were strong arguments for both options.

During the blitz my Grandmother evacuated from Ladbroke Grove in London to Pitlochry in Scotland with my mother and her brother. Afterwards she would say, "I don't know why we went so far, we should've gone to Edgeware." But the underlying and unspoken reason for going so far, where no one knew them, was that if the Nazis took Britain they could disappear as Jews and continue to live as Christians.

So although my own family are not survivors, my facebook page is full of friends giving testimony about how their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts either escaped or were murdered. I lit my memorial candle and read about very young children sent on the kindertransport to England and who never saw their parents again. Other children who were sent into convents or the homes of farmers or maids for the duration. Others hidden in attics.

I read about men and women who lost their whole families - parents, husbands or wives and their children. They came to England, America, Israel, or Australia alone, remarried and some of my friends' parents are their second families. What must it be like to know that your parents had children before you who were murdered in Auschwitz? How could you ever live up to that legacy? How could you ever be good enough to replace those dead first children?

No cousins. No grandparents or uncles or aunts. Only ghosts and the lifelong pain in your parents' hearts.

Just last week I was talking to a friend about her uncle who was taken in by their Christian maid as a baby and lived with them until he was about 7. I asked her if they gave him back readily at the end of the war as some families refused to return the children without a fight. My friend said there was no problem as from the very beginning the 'mother' told him that he has a Mummy and a Daddy and a sister who love him and they will come back to get him after the war. The Mummy never came back from the camps. And I can't write this without crying. Yes there was also much kindness amidst the horror.

Tomorrow at 10 am the siren will sound over the whole of Israel for two minutes of silence. I've shown photos before of how the traffic, even on the busiest highways, stops and the drivers get out to stand by their cars with heads bowed in remembrance and respect. Every school has a ceremony starting with the siren at 10 am, including every schoolchild. Every citizen stops and our collective memory rises in prayer to the heavens. Lest we forget. Never again.