My life as a jew
Mum’s family were classed by the Nazis as Jewish. They were not religious or observant in any way, and, as my aunt described it, “didn’t know one end of a synagogue from another”.
But because at that time in Germany and Austria, at any rate, there were no civil services or registers, my grandparents were married in a synagogue and their children’s births recorded in a synagogue, the birth certificates with large Js stamped on them to signal their Jewishness.
Dad was not Jewish, from an atheist German family with Calvinist roots.
Our home life involved no religious rituals or practices of any kind. I’ve never entered a synagogue, still have little idea what or when Hanukah is and only know what a Bar mitzvah is from watching Dustin Hoffman movies. But I found out I was Jewish when, at the age of six, I discovered a book of photographs of Nazi atrocities perpetrated on Jewish civilians including toddlers and young children.
Since that age I’ve known that I am categorised by some people by my race (certainly not my religion), and that had I been alive and my parents still living in Germany or Austria when Hitler took power, I could have been one of those children.
One of those toddlers bloodied and bruised, with a rifle poked in his face and a group of German civilians standing around looking on, seemingly unperturbed.
One of those little girls with braids and freckles, tied onto a bed in an operating theatre and smiling for the good doctor before he began his experimental surgery, without anaesthetic.
One of those naked little girls forced to smile while a group of uniformed men took snapshots of my cowering body.
Lucky me, my parents got away. But many jews were not so lucky. My granddad worked in Berlin for AEG as a chief engineer. When he was forced to leave because of laws forbidding employing Jewish workers – “Kauft nicht beim Juden” – he managed to secure a job with Vickers in Sheffield. My grandparents knew what Hitler was planning, they’d read Mein Kampf, and they believed its promise to exterminate the Jews. Because of his job offer in England my grandfather was able to move the immediate family to safety in 1937, and afterwards he “guaranteed” dozens of family members to come to England (a guarantor was the only way Jews could get asylum), where they all lived together, in rather cramped conditions, in the same house with my granddad, my nana, my mother and her two siblings.
Mum was about eleven years old when they moved to England. Her older brother was thirteen and her sister sixteen. All three of them had been taken out of school for years when the bullying and ridicule started, the Jewish children being made to stand up in front of class while teachers held up diagrams and pictures demonstrating the “racial deformity” of their facial features, the grades being marked down so that my uncle, who had always been a brilliant student, went to bottom of the class.
Lucky them. They got out before it got any worse. But sadly mum’s eighty four year old grandmother and mum’s elderly aunt did not escape. They held on too long, waiting for other family, and missed the last train before all travel out of the country was outlawed for Jews. They were taken from their beds, loaded onto cattle trucks and transported to Auschwitz where they were starved, worked to death or gassed – we don’t know exactly how it ended.
My auntie Eva wrote about the time before they escaped, about the two old “spinsters” who ran a shabby shop round the corner from the school selling exercise books and rulers. They were starving, because no one would shop there any more because Juden, and so they hung themselves. That kind of story was pretty much every day at the time, but of course, it got much worse.
We were a large extended family, with lots of cousins and nephews and nieces. Of course many were murdered. My grandparents, aunts and uncles talked of one cousin who escaped over the mountains from Austria to Switzerland. Like everyone else in the family he was a Jew by civil designation only, not by religion. He made it by the skin of his teeth, scavenging for food and water, hiding in terror when anyone approached. The story goes that he swore to himself, if he made it and got out alive, he would become observant and move to Israel. That’s exactly what he did, apparently, though no one ever seems to have ever heard from him since.
Our family was always desperate over Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. How could survivors of the Holocaust not learn from that experience? How could they behave with anything less than humanity to the Palestinian population? How could Jewish survivors of a murderous ethnic cleansing go on to subjugate another ethnic group, after everything they themselves had been through? One of my cousins on mum’s side lived on a kibbutz for a year. The rest of us never visited Israel or had much to do with it really. To be honest the less I had to think about the history the better, I just wanted to move on, put it behind me.
I grew up aware of all this though, you couldn’t avoid it, and gained a solid grounding in ethics and morality both from the Jewish side of my family and from dad, whose own non-Jewish father was murdered in a concentration camp for openly standing up to the Nazis – dad and his brother were only little boys when this happened. Apparently the family were invited to come and say goodbye to their father before he was killed, but he refused to see them, because he didn’t want them to see the state he was in, beaten and starved, and knowing he would never see them again.
Dad described many things that happened in Berlin before they got his father. When the teacher at dad’s school bullied his best friend, a Jewish boy, his father my grandfather went to the school and threatened to punch the teacher’s lights out if he ever did it again. The Jewish boy got out to England. He and dad remained close friends for the rest of their lives.
Dad described how local Jewish businesses started being targeted, with swastikas and stars of David painted on their windows so that people would no longer go to their shops or buy their goods. Dad’s father took him and his brother to the Jewish ice cream shop and bought them all an ice cream, very publicly, and made a show of eating the ice creams with his children in front of the shop window.
He described their pet parrot, who used to “laugh” hysterically whenever Hitler’s speeches were played on the public tannoy radio system, so that the family had to shut the windows to stop the neighbours from hearing him.
He described terrible things he had witnessed, and there were many more things he did not describe. He had a library of books about the Holocaust, with horrifying titles and gruesome covers.
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I own that library now.
Dad never got over the trauma, and as he got older it was mostly all he ever talked about.
My mother never spoke about the Holocaust to me. She never said a word. She tried to take her own life in 2009, but the meals on wheels lady found her. She never recovered her mental health, and died of Covid in 2021.
So we grew up, in my family, with a really acute awareness of the family’s own experience of that time of horror, and of course it was so recent that when my older sister was born in 1956, only 9 years had elapsed since the liberation of Auschwitz. My sister had lifetime mental health problems, was anorexic and a self cutter. She killed himself, after many prior unsuccessful attempts, at the age of forty five.
Myself, I was bullied at school. The first time I ever learnt that I was something called “Jewish” was when I was taunted as such at infant school, by a boy who’d heard my parents German/Austrian accents at the school gates. I was bullied at secondary school for being different – tall, early developer, a brainy clown who loved to show off. They knocked that out of me and, after two years of it, I’d stopped attending school except to sign the register. I tried to change schools but the headmistress wouldn’t allow it until, eventually, I was hung from a tree by a crowd of my peers, saved by a teacher.
They let me leave after that.
It took my many years to get back onto any sort of track. I left school at fifteen, moved into a squat, slept around a lot and started shooting up heroin.
Ten years later, after being arrested and narrowly escaping a lengthy prison sentence, I got clean, with the help of a supportive female GP and a life changing rehabilitation programme. Thanks to my dad and step-mum my daughter wasn’t put into care, and when I got out of rehab two years later, she came back to live with me.
I went on to sort myself out, got a first class degree and a job teaching, and have been more or less steady since then, and never touched heroin again. But the shadow of our history has always hung over me.
I think it’s just like that for Jews. I think we all know, at some level or other, that we were so loathed and so despised, by so many, that no matter what was done to us – to our babies, our children, our mothers, our grandparents – no one cared. In fact, many applauded it and many joined in with enthusiasm.
That’s my story. Make of it what you will.
I am telling you this because – when it comes to the agonised wail of misery and outrage with which Jews across the world have responded to the Hamas atrocities on #BlackSaturday – there seems to be an empty space where understanding ought to be.
I simply cannot grasp the lack of empathy that allowed people in the west to go out on a March to “free Palestine”, the day after the atrocities, without a single speech, banner or placard condemning the atrocities or expressing solidarity/sympathy for the victims.
I can’t get how people can deface and tear down posters of kidnapped infants, many of whom watched their parents die under torture, and claim it as an act of “resistance”.
I can’t accept that Israel has no right to defend itself against this outrage, or that it’s retaliation is more to be condemned than the atrocities themselves.
No. Gunfire and bombs and artillery are not the same as cutting off children’s feet and fingers in front of their parents or burning them alive tied to their mothers.
No. Blockading food, water and medicine – abominable as these are – are not the same as cutting open a pregnant woman’s belly, ripping out her child and beheading it.
For Jews, no, these atrocities, these tortures, did not occur in a vacuum. They occurred within a larger frame of reference – the Holocaust – an event that has been seared into the psyches of every Jewish person alive today.
Maybe if your own family history was one in which your entire race had almost been annihilated into extinction through torture, through cruel and unusual punishment, maybe you’d understand why we’ve reacted as we have to your indifference, your whataboutery, your victim-blaming (yes, that’s what it is).
And no, this is not “weaponising” the Holocaust. It is seeing the Hamas atrocities in blood soaked, shrieking, agonised context. A context, apparently, that is only perceptible to Jews.
