TPM Reader DL shares an echo of the destruction …
Your piece really got to me. Death on the scale of the Holocaust is so overwhelming — so unfathomable that we have trouble processing the reality of it. I am also Jewish and was raised with a kind of cultural paranoia that I’ve always tried to tamp down — basically to maintain my mental health. My father was first generation and his parents survived the pogroms so it was fresh to them. But I was born in America. I wanted to feel safe and belong in this culture and the carrying the Holocaust memory was an anger I fought against.
My family is from the same area as yours and immigrated to the US around the same time, but logically, I knew we must have had extended family that perished under the Nazis. No one shared any names with me, so these ancestors remained an abstraction.
That abstraction finally became reality to me when my father was diagnosed with leukemia in 2005. He needed a bone marrow transplant and a worldwide search was conducted to find a donor as no one of our branch of the family was compatible — and we tested everyone! The search went on for about three years until my father eventually died without ever finding a match. What struck me is how there was no one in the entire world for him. He was a genetic orphan.
Since that time, I’ve often imagined amongst the six million that perished, that at least one of them or their descendants could have been his savior. I finally understood something I had avoided. Those who perished were my people — each a unique individual, but connected by blood, and everything they were and would have contributed to this world, both in deeds and genes is gone forever. A mass extinction. I will never know any of their names, but as it turns out, my father was the last of them.
I still mourn the loss of my father, but now I also think of these lost family members and they have his face.
