Many Jews born just after World War 2 ended, suffer from a condition called generational trauma, which relates to a deep sense of sadness and grief with accompanying guilt for being alive, when other family members perished. I am a sufferer – both my paternal grandparents, Alma and Raphael Flatauer, perished at Auschwitz. On this anniversary, at this historically pivotal time, I decided to write a letter to my grandmother.
Dear Alma,
I don’t know when the knock at the door came, but I’m sure you were expecting it. Weeks before, when the latest hateful race laws came into being, your windows had been broken by students from the local schools, graffiti sprayed on the outer walls of your house, chants of “Go to Palestine” had been shouted in the street. After that, you must’ve known you were on borrowed time.
It’s difficult to imagine what you must have been thinking
What were your thoughts as the uniformed men hustled you from your comfortable home, where you had lived with your husband as valued and respected members of the Jewish community? Were you grateful that your two boys, Kurt and Hans (my father) had escaped – one to Israel, one to Great Britain? Did you feel relief that Kurt would never again be taken down to the local police station and beaten up by the Gestapo, now that he and his new wife were safe in another country – a country you both had tried to enter, only to be sent back to Nazi Germany by the British authorities as your paperwork “wasn’t correct”.
… and what you must have been feeling
And then came the train journey. I struggle to picture you there. Packed into cattle trucks, stripped of your humanity and dignity, until finally, the train arrived at its destination and the doors were slid back. I imagine men in uniforms shouting at you to get out quickly, snarling dogs straining on leashes, the elderly forced to jump down from the truck, breaking their limbs as they fell. Sticks and batons raining down on terrified, exhausted, bewildered people as the cattle trucks disgorged their human cargo. Did you manage to stay together for those last few minutes? Look into each other’s faces, touch each other before you were parted for ever?
And what of now?
The events of this particular anniversary have been especially triggering for me. I am sure, at some point on your journey, you prayed that G*D would never allow such terrible things to happen ever again to anybody else. Your prayers were echoed by the 50 survivors of Auschwitz who returned to the camp on the 80th anniversary. There they stood, frail but resolute; one wearing the striped cap of the camp inmates, surrounded by European leaders, heads of state, delegates, the global press and media – even the British king – as they spoke their truth, related their experiences of the horrors of deprivation, deportation and dehumanisation. The cameras flashed, the world press recorded their words, and the dignitaries nodded.
But that was then. And today, in another country, the ‘Land of the Free’, whose New York harbour is overlooked by the statue of a woman with a raised torch in her right hand, a statue that symbolises freedom and democracy, laws have just been passed that allow millions of families to be dragged from their homes, their places of work, their schools, and communities, and sent to border detention camps to await expulsion from the land they came to – just to find a better life. In order to emphasise their status, the former prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has been reopened as a forever holding base. Somewhere in the USA, another ‘Anne Frank’ and her Latino family may well be frantically seeking a safe place to hide.
Even in Great Britain, the country that took in (albeit reluctantly) your youngest son, the British government, in a display of performative cruelty, has released a video of so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ being removed from their homes and deported. The same pattern – using desperate human beings to build political popularity in an attempt to counter a racist far right minority opposition. As for Israel, the place to which so many European Jews migrated after the war, when they were refused permission to get their homes, businesses and possessions returned to them – I am at a loss to comprehend what has happened there.
So, what would you wish to say, Alma?
If you could address the world leaders and global media, what would you say to them? Is it enough to ‘mark’ these events? Does building new Holocaust memorials and learning centres compensate for what you and millions of others suffered? How do these things compute when set against the current global resurgence of racial hatred and persecution? Does all we’ve learned from the past boil down to giving ourselves permission to repeat it, albeit in a slightly different format?
Our family house in Osnabruck still stands, still empty. The family who took it over, has always refused to return it to us. But in front of the house, in full view of every passer-by, and in a perpetual memorial, are the two Stolpersteine, marking the fact that a Jewish family: you, Raphael, Kurt and Hans – my family, once lived there.
May your memory be a blessing.
Your loving granddaughter,
Carol
