→ continued from above
One thing I remember hearing (I hope I’m getting this right) is how as a young boy he would go to a Jewish neighbour’s house on the Shabbat to light their candles, and be given a piece of matzo bread, which he considered a treat. In later years, when Jewish families were forced to leave their/his hometown (between 1933-1937) he regularly cycled to the ghetto in the city nearby, sent by his parents with food parcels. Why did it not occur to me to beg him to tell me more?
When Hitler rose to power in January 1933 my dad was seven. What kind of games did he play, and with whom? What did he read? What were children taught at his school? What did the family (incl. maiden-aunts) speak about at the dinner table? What sense did he make of Jewish families disappearing from his small town? Jewish pupils from his class? Playmates from the yard? Why did I not ask him when he was alive? Was it so important to keep history at bay that almost everything, even a child’s life, became subsumed by the silent ‘and’ between ‘before’ and ‘after’, the ‘and’ standing in for the Third Reich and the unspeakable horrors wrought in its name? Fact is: I know and try to unknow. All the time.
