An international conference on whether the Holocaust took place was held some time ago by Machmud Achmadinejad, president of Iran. Holocaust deniers, that is what those people are called, who claim, as the Iranian did, that the deaths of six million Jews and others in the hands of Adolph Hitler and his executioners were sheer fabrication.
I think the best way to counter these denials is to tell the personal story of one family of Hitler’s victims, some of whose members perished and others who survived. Six million is hard to grasp. The story of one family illustrates the fate of them all.
The family is that of my first cousin, Manfred. His mother, my Aunt Lotti, was my father’s sister. Manfred, like myself, was born in Berlin. When he was eight or nine years old, his parents separated and eventually divorced. His father, Georg, moved to The Netherlands with his second wife and her daughter.
On the way, he met in Paris with my father, Martin, his former brother-in-law, who was returning to his family in Berlin from an exploratory trip to what was then Palestine. Georg convinced my father to stay in Paris and send for my mother and me, which my father did. The year was 1933. Hitler had risen to power only a few months earlier. In 1935, after two years in Paris, we moved to Palestine and safety.
Manfred stayed in Berlin with his mother and our grandmother, Leah. But when he was 11 years old, he went to live with his father in The Netherlands, which Georg considered safe, or certainly safer for Jews than Germany. Besides, Manfred wanted to live with his father. Shortly thereafter, my father, having established himself in Palestine, sent for his mother, sister and brother. When Manfred turned 13, his mother traveled from Palestine to attend his Bar Mitzvah.
When World War II broke out in September, 1939, my parents and I and my father’s siblings were living in Tel Aviv, the first Jewish city since the Romans ravaged Judea nearly two thousand years earlier. In May, 1940, the Germans invaded The Netherlands. Georg, Manfred and their fellow Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David to proclaim their identities, their vulnerability, as they walked about the streets of their country.
Freedom in the occupied land under the flag bearing the swastika was not to last. Within a year, Jewish individuals and families were loaded on cattle cars and shipped to concentration camps. Manfred’s family was one of those.
For a while, Manfred, a teenager, and his father, step-mother and step-sister remained in the same camp, but the women were separated from the men. Manfred was often hungry. His biggest treasures were slices of bread, of which he saved one daily from his ration. He kept his treasure of bread in a trunk by his bed. Eventually he became ill and was separated from the others to receive minimal care. Hungry, he asked his best friend, another inmate, to bring him some of his bread. He entrusted the young man with the key to his trunk.
The friend returned a day or two later, empty handed. He confessed, in tears, that overcome by hunger he ate Manfred’s bread.
Eventually Georg would be shipped away. As he stepped into the cattle car, he turned to his son, saying, “See you in Palestine!” He never did. Georg breathed his last in the gas chambers of Bergen Belsen.
World War II in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. Several months later my aunt learned that Manfred, her only child, had survived. So had Georg’s step-daughter, but not his second wife. Mother and son were not reunited until April 23, 1946. Manfred arrived in Palestine by ship, and his mother met him at the port in the city of Haifa. They had been separated for close to 10 years, during many of which Lotti did not know if she would ever see her child again.
In a diary I kept, and which I still have all these years later, I wrote, “Manfred came yesterday. He is a charming fellow and captures your heart from the first moment. I hope we shall be good friends. I shall teach him Hebrew.”
My aunt lived to see her son married and become a father. Today Manfred lives in a suburb of Tel Aviv with his wife, Tirza. They have a daughter and three grandchildren. He still lives with his memories of the Holocaust. He is 83.
