Holocaust Remembrance. Photo: Ted Eytan/Flickr CC.
This article is the first in a two-part series.
My mother didn’t die when so many others did – and that means she lived to give birth to me.
I write about this now, because it has everything to do with today, even though the cataclysm in which so many perished happened more than 75 years ago. I owe my life, in part, to people who were willing to risk theirs, whose names I will never know.
The story is etched in my bones. I remember its telling and retelling as far back as my early childhood memories. The details are blurred with the passing of time. No one who lived it is still alive. I would not know how to verify the specific facts. So I write this story to the best of my memory, knowing its truth in the deepest and widest sense.
My mother’s family were Dutch Jews with a several century history of calling Holland their home. They were Sephardic Jews, descendants of those who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the 1500s. They came from a people who had a well-refined intuition about when it was time to flee and had found the ways to do so.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert.
More Jews from Holland died in the Holocaust than from any other Western European country. An often used estimate is 75%. Other estimates range as high as 90%.
How did this part of my family manage to survive? And what might be the implications for our times of climate crisis, when we are already living in what is called “The Sixth Extinction” (with dozens of species going extinct every day), when the future of life as we know it may hang in the balance?
