Remembering the Holocaust, Part 1

(Editor's note: People around the world will pause this weekend to remember the Nazi Holocaust, which brought death to millions of people approximately 70 years ago. Although it was long ago and far away, the effects are felt today. Here are two stories, one local from Cathlamet resident Hans York, a retired deputy sheriff, and one from the East Coast by correspondent Christy Green that tell the stories of two families.)

Kari Kandoll, historical society curator, has asked me to write about the Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, sundown April 7 to sundown, April 8, this year.

The Holocaust took the lives of 27,000 German Communists, in 1933; over 70,000 mentally ill and physically disabled Germans starting in 1939; 500 Soviet prisoners of war in August, 1939 (testing Zyklon-B), and approximately 280,000 Romany, or Gypsies. A million Jewish children, 2 million Jewish women and 3 million Jewish men were killed.

The Holocaust had profound effects on my family. My grandfather had come to America, with his parents, from Frayleben, the Ukraine, in 1908, to escape pogroms there. He served in World War I. He was given citizenship with his discharge. My father and his brother fought in WWII, Army.

My mother’s family was from Munich. My grandfather had served in the Bavarian Light Infantry in WWI and was a city councilor. My oldest uncle was a rabbi and had a small synagogue in a Munich suburb. He and his parents were sent to Dachau. We have never been able to find records of their arrival or disposition.

My mother, her younger brother and their older sister left Germany in 1938, sponsored by a Catholic family in Burlington, Vermont. My mother and her brother were WWII Navy, while still German nationals.

My parents met after the war, in Munich, and I was born there. They were both “held over” to help process and interview the “DPs”, or displaced persons, leaving Dachau.

They spoke Yiddish, at that time a common language across borders for European Jews (Askenazim). Iberian Jews (Sephardim), scattered by the Inquisition, spoke Ladino, a Spanish-Portuguese-Hebrew meld.

My mother had episodes of mental illness for the following 25 years that her doctors (VA, mostly) said was likely triggered by that experience.

My children have grown up with no paternal grandparents and huge gaps that I cannot fill in our family history. I saw film of my uncle’s synagogue burning, for the first time, in 2004, at the US Holocaust Museum, in Washington, D.C. My wife and I spent over six hours there, overwhelmed by the information.

This year, I’ll visit Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, at the Israeli Holocaust Memorial.

I talk with other Jews regularly and find very few European Jews whose families weren’t similarly affected. It seems to define us, in a terrible way.