remembrance
Apr. 11th, 2010 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dichroicoday is Yom HaShoah, the Day of Holocaust Remembrance. I ran into some statistics the other day that put quite a perspective on what happened.
My mother's parents' families both came from the area around Kiev, in the Ukraine. Her mother's mother's father and his family came over in the 1880s; my great-grandmother was born in the US. My grandfather's parents couldn't afford to come straight here; they stopped in London to earn money for a couple of years. He was born there in 1909; they came to the US in 1912.
60% of Ukrainian Jews, an estimated 900,000 people were killed in the Holocaust.
My father's mother also immigrated as a toddler, with her parents. (If I'm seeing the right person's record at the Ellis Island website, she came in 1913, age 11.) They came from what was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire then, later Poland.
90% of Polish Jews were killed - three million people.
I don't know where my father's father came from; Dad's parents were divorced and I don't even know if he ever saw his father again. But I carry his family name. In Prague, one of the synagogues in the old Jewish quarter has names painted on the wall of every known person sent from Prague to Terezin. My surname is on those walls, over and over again.
I'm typing this right now from the Netherlands, where 75% of the Jews were killed - about 105,000 people. (Some of the other 25% were children who were saved by placing them with Christian families. After the war there was the added and unsolvable tragedy of parents who wanted to be reunited with their children finding that the children had formed new bonds with their foster parents. There was no solution that didn't involve breaking up someone's family. Still beats having your children murdered.)
I cannot look at those numbers and think myself anything but damned lucky to be here.
I don't suppose my great-grandparents saw it as an easy escape. I'm sure they left to escape poverty, pogroms, the draft of the Tsar's army, and the threat of starvation. But they guessed right when they looked around and thought "Things aren't going to get any better if we stay here." I've changed countries three times now; it wasn't easy and that's with money, with a lot of help from my company and my family, and with a warm welcome from the countries I moved to. It gives me some insight into how hard the move must have been for them, with none of those things. When they suffered to get a better life for their children and their children's children, it worked. My family's never been rich or had things soft, but it's gotten easier and better every generation.
It's not only Jews, of course; anywhere from 5 to 11 million other people died, depending how you count it - for speaking out, for defending their homeland, for being Rom or gay or Jehovah's Witnesses. If my luck in getting to be born means anything, it means I have a responsibility to remember them as well - and those who have died in the genocides since. Because I remember them, I can't honestly say "Never again," but I can at least say "We will not forget." Not while I can speak and write.
(Numbers are from Wikipedia. They may not be completely accurate, but I think they are as close as anyone's figures - no one knows exactly how many people died in the Holocaust. Anyway, the count is sort of arbitrary - do you could only those murdered directly in the camps? How do you know how many died on the trains there? What about those who starved or died of exposure while hiding or fleeing? But these at least give some idea.)
My mother's parents' families both came from the area around Kiev, in the Ukraine. Her mother's mother's father and his family came over in the 1880s; my great-grandmother was born in the US. My grandfather's parents couldn't afford to come straight here; they stopped in London to earn money for a couple of years. He was born there in 1909; they came to the US in 1912.
60% of Ukrainian Jews, an estimated 900,000 people were killed in the Holocaust.
My father's mother also immigrated as a toddler, with her parents. (If I'm seeing the right person's record at the Ellis Island website, she came in 1913, age 11.) They came from what was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire then, later Poland.
90% of Polish Jews were killed - three million people.
I don't know where my father's father came from; Dad's parents were divorced and I don't even know if he ever saw his father again. But I carry his family name. In Prague, one of the synagogues in the old Jewish quarter has names painted on the wall of every known person sent from Prague to Terezin. My surname is on those walls, over and over again.
I'm typing this right now from the Netherlands, where 75% of the Jews were killed - about 105,000 people. (Some of the other 25% were children who were saved by placing them with Christian families. After the war there was the added and unsolvable tragedy of parents who wanted to be reunited with their children finding that the children had formed new bonds with their foster parents. There was no solution that didn't involve breaking up someone's family. Still beats having your children murdered.)
I cannot look at those numbers and think myself anything but damned lucky to be here.
I don't suppose my great-grandparents saw it as an easy escape. I'm sure they left to escape poverty, pogroms, the draft of the Tsar's army, and the threat of starvation. But they guessed right when they looked around and thought "Things aren't going to get any better if we stay here." I've changed countries three times now; it wasn't easy and that's with money, with a lot of help from my company and my family, and with a warm welcome from the countries I moved to. It gives me some insight into how hard the move must have been for them, with none of those things. When they suffered to get a better life for their children and their children's children, it worked. My family's never been rich or had things soft, but it's gotten easier and better every generation.
It's not only Jews, of course; anywhere from 5 to 11 million other people died, depending how you count it - for speaking out, for defending their homeland, for being Rom or gay or Jehovah's Witnesses. If my luck in getting to be born means anything, it means I have a responsibility to remember them as well - and those who have died in the genocides since. Because I remember them, I can't honestly say "Never again," but I can at least say "We will not forget." Not while I can speak and write.
(Numbers are from Wikipedia. They may not be completely accurate, but I think they are as close as anyone's figures - no one knows exactly how many people died in the Holocaust. Anyway, the count is sort of arbitrary - do you could only those murdered directly in the camps? How do you know how many died on the trains there? What about those who starved or died of exposure while hiding or fleeing? But these at least give some idea.)
