It felt right to have remembered them again today. I am deeply sorry about the outcome of the US election. We were following the run-up to it very closely here, in Berlin, and like you were hoping for the best. Sometimes it is just not enough to hope.
This is very immediate in its impact. You tell the story with a powerful mix of the succinct and the unbearable. Of course, the events do that themselves, but you honour them in your re-telling.
The individual stories, and we know that there are six million of them, never cease to fell me emotionally. Hugo Gryn, a thoughtful and insightful rabbi, when passing on the story of his own family was always keen to make the point that these were good people. Good people living their lives as honestly and as creatively as they could. When we remember people who are died Jews say zikhronah l’vracha after saying the name of the dead. It really means ‘may their name be for a blessing’ which I always find a very poignant and beautiful construction in its rather idiosyncratic use of language: it is as if saying the name keeps the memory of the person alive and in so doing brings some form of blessing somehow into the world. I’m not a schmaltzy guy, trust me, but I do think that it is worth thinking about the language and the emotion behind it. In your re-telling the story of Joachim, Meta, and Michael and the choice they were forced to make, I think you have done just that: honoured their memory and kept them, somehow, alive in the lives of those of us who have read the piece. And, in Jewish terms, man, that’s called a mitzvah. And that’s a very good thing to do.
I once spent many years looking for a man who built one of my beloved Berlin places. It took me a decade to trace him but once I did, a cemetery employee unwittingly sent me to a wrong section of the Jewish Cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee. Crushed and disappointed I thought I should go back and leave. But on my way through the vast grounds of the cemetery, I remembered that on way towards the section the man marked on the small map, I took a wrong turn and almost ended up somewhere completely different. I thought I had had nothing to lose and went back to that lane and continued as I would’ve walked otherwise. And there he was. Buried together with his wife. And the words on his tombstones are: “Tot ist nur, wer vergessen wird”. “You only die, when you have been forgotten.”
It’s a kind of universal emotion, I think, in response to mortality. It is, for me, an intrinsically Jewish one, while I know other cultures and religions have a similar lens which can be both intellectual and spiritual at the same time. It’s that time of year for me as my mother’s Yahrzeit approaches…these autumn days and softening goldening lights always presage its arrival and its marking in exactly the same spirit as the words you found after your search.
It is small stories like this that must continue to be told to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust is never forgotten or erased. May their precious souls rest in peace.
On an already emotional day, this story is touching me deeply. Thank you!
It felt right to have remembered them again today. I am deeply sorry about the outcome of the US election. We were following the run-up to it very closely here, in Berlin, and like you were hoping for the best. Sometimes it is just not enough to hope.
This is very immediate in its impact. You tell the story with a powerful mix of the succinct and the unbearable. Of course, the events do that themselves, but you honour them in your re-telling.
The individual stories, and we know that there are six million of them, never cease to fell me emotionally. Hugo Gryn, a thoughtful and insightful rabbi, when passing on the story of his own family was always keen to make the point that these were good people. Good people living their lives as honestly and as creatively as they could. When we remember people who are died Jews say zikhronah l’vracha after saying the name of the dead. It really means ‘may their name be for a blessing’ which I always find a very poignant and beautiful construction in its rather idiosyncratic use of language: it is as if saying the name keeps the memory of the person alive and in so doing brings some form of blessing somehow into the world. I’m not a schmaltzy guy, trust me, but I do think that it is worth thinking about the language and the emotion behind it. In your re-telling the story of Joachim, Meta, and Michael and the choice they were forced to make, I think you have done just that: honoured their memory and kept them, somehow, alive in the lives of those of us who have read the piece. And, in Jewish terms, man, that’s called a mitzvah. And that’s a very good thing to do.
I once spent many years looking for a man who built one of my beloved Berlin places. It took me a decade to trace him but once I did, a cemetery employee unwittingly sent me to a wrong section of the Jewish Cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee. Crushed and disappointed I thought I should go back and leave. But on my way through the vast grounds of the cemetery, I remembered that on way towards the section the man marked on the small map, I took a wrong turn and almost ended up somewhere completely different. I thought I had had nothing to lose and went back to that lane and continued as I would’ve walked otherwise. And there he was. Buried together with his wife. And the words on his tombstones are: “Tot ist nur, wer vergessen wird”. “You only die, when you have been forgotten.”
It’s a kind of universal emotion, I think, in response to mortality. It is, for me, an intrinsically Jewish one, while I know other cultures and religions have a similar lens which can be both intellectual and spiritual at the same time. It’s that time of year for me as my mother’s Yahrzeit approaches…these autumn days and softening goldening lights always presage its arrival and its marking in exactly the same spirit as the words you found after your search.
Such an appallingly sad story. Thank you for sharing.
It comes back to me every year come November. And it never gets any easier to think about those three. Neither should it...
It is small stories like this that must continue to be told to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust is never forgotten or erased. May their precious souls rest in peace.