I´m One Day Late

And 70 years.
Pic: My parents on their silver wedding.
Maybe it´s just over here – and rightfully, too. We get … well, there is actually no other word than “bombarded” with memoirs of people who survived Auschwitz and were freed 70 years ago.

I am half German.
My German father´s father was a watch-maker and was allowed to work at home during the war.
My father, certainly, was a kid, born 1938.

My Mum spent her first two years in Prussia, near Königsberg. (I have a point here later)
Her father was in war captivity while my Grandma had to decide: Do we stick together as a family of eight or do I send the oldest ones on the Gustloff into freedom and wait with the rest for the next chance?
She decided the first, luckily – the Gustloff was bombed by the Russians – knowing there are civilians on it! – and sank.
I found this out by chance – my Mum´s family never spoke of that time.

My Dad told me often he was in the cellar at home or in the bunker at school, fearing and hearing the bombs attacking – none ever found our house.
He did not learn much at school in those years.
When the war was over one day a colored US-Army-soldier knocked on the door to ask for the way – my Dad´s Mum panicked just due to the color of his skin, ran into the cellar and gave him butter.
Well, she did not speak English.

After the war they had many refugees in the house. It was hard times, but they managed well, actually.
Seesen is a small place after all. Braunschweig was hit much harder, btw. The whole inner city was bombed and burnt to the grounds.

Auschwitz, Holocaust.
I see the pictures. I read the memories of the survivors, I feel like I have to puke, I fail to understand how people can be so darn cruel.
I plain fail to understand how a small man from Austria with brown hair can talk of “Arian race” and people believe his sick ideas.
How people can… And yes, I know. It was this very city that gave him German citizenship and only because of this he was able to get that “big”.

But really.
Is it right us school-kids had to go to a central place in town and say:
“I am sorry for what I did to the Jewish people”?

What did I do, my father or his father?

When I was in France back then, looking for a place to leave my car when going to England with push-bikes I found a farmer´s family and was invited to dinner.
And there he was. The oldest of the four generations. And I thought, oh, bingo. Now he will go at me for WW II.

He asked how the journey from Germany was so far and what I plan to do. How it is like in Germany these days. I was surprised.
And yelled. Cause he was near-deaf and sitting at the other side in the huge farmer´s kitchen-table.
I´ll never forget that. We must have made some couple!
Not everybody sees Nazis in Germans.

Yet I fail to understand how some Auschwitz survivors can forgive. Not Germans, but the Nazi Germans!
Magda Hollander Lafon is one of them, she was 17 when she was deported there, she lives in France now.
She says some of her Grandkids learn German and she thinks it´s great.
Sometimes people ask her what she would do if she met an “old-Nazi”. She says she doesn´t know, but she hopes she can be respectful.

Others, one a survivor as a twin, having been tortured by Dr. Mengele, says she forgives him. That this is being strong, this way she is no longer a victim, but a forgiver.

I cannot make my mind up here.

Many reduce us to Holocaust, Auschwitz, H.
Yes. It was wrong. Yes it should never be forgotten. Or repeated.

But actually it still does happen, right now, Palestinians against Jews, IS...

It seems mankind has learned nothing from Holocaust, especially not IS.

But really. Some do forgive? Some can forgive?

Did you learn much about Holocaust and H-Germany were you grew up at school?
I´d be interested in what and how…