Read Related Article #2: Pre-Holocaust Jewish life
Read Related Article #3: Centuries of anti-Semitism
Read Related Article #4: The master race
Read Related Article #5: KRISTALLNACHT: The night everything went to pieces
When you stare into their eyes, you often see a flicker of a memory, a tendril of anguish that has held on tight, twisting and turning along with the changes of time. Their hair has grayed, skin has become delicate, bodies more fragile. It’s hard to imagine them kicking out the windows of cattle cars; sweeping up their lives and fleeing in the middle of the night; watching a human life vanish in an instant; saying farewell to childhood when they were still children. It’s hard to imagine how they survived.
“In a civilized world and a civilized country like Germany, you would never think it could happen,” one of them said.
“But it did happen.”
It happened to the Jews and the gypsies, the handicapped and the homosexuals, the communists, Catholics and blacks. It happened across Europe and affected the world.
The Holocaust was the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question” - a calculated attempt, machine-like in its method and its madness, to eradicate a race. Eleven million people, six million of whom were Jews, lost their lives. But many survived to tell their stories.
Transformed by age, appearance, geography and experience, many Holocaust survivors are still here, still remembering, still living the pain of those years. All were forever altered; many are unable to speak about it, but some must shout the truth.
Today, all survivors are senior citizens; the oldest were in their twenties during World War II. Tomorrow, many of them will no longer be around.
In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah, which fell on May 1 this year, The Queens Courier will pay tribute to the legacy of the Holocaust with a weekly series of articles and videos.
Over the coming weeks, we will transport you, our readers, back in time and across oceans, onto the streets ablaze with Nazi furor, into the ghettos of the oppressed and inside the death camps of the persecuted, enslaved and tortured. We will escort you across dangerous borders and into the hideouts that saved lives. We will introduce you to survivors and historians, scientists and psychologists.
We will dissect Nazi Germany and recreate Nuremberg; investigate the trajectory of the afflicted and elucidate the death and destruction, hope and endurance embodied by those who lived and breathed the Holocaust.
Many of the affected are right here in Queens, living quietly among us, passing us on the sidewalk, while they are memorialized in museums, listed among the lucky. Some have attempted to shed their painful past, choosing to let history have its Holocaust. Others, who you will meet over the coming weeks, are lighting candles of remembrance, lecturing to our schoolchildren, tending that terrible flame of history so it will never again turn into a raging inferno.
From pre-war life across Europe to the rising tide of Hitler and all he hoped to erase; from the factories of death to the displaced persons camps; the frantic search for family to new lives in new places; from back then to right now, we strive, with this series, to teach, to inspire, to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust through those that survived it and those who lost their voices because of it.
