Holocaust Remembrance Day - Two books

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Two Books to Recommend

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History by Katrin Himmler

 

            Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. There are things we hold in our memories because we desire to remember and other things we simply know we must not forget. Some might imagine that the Holocaust happened long ago, and so we should move on. But the Holocaust isn’t simply a one of a kind event. We know better don’t we? We know or should know of Rwanda, Cambodia’s killing fields, Stalin’s extermination of millions in Ukraine, Leopold’s slaughter of up to half the population the Congo Free State, America’s ghettoization of the Native American, and the Ottoman Empire’s treatment of Armenians. We are today confronted with actions of genocide taking place in the Middle East. The Holocaust is unfortunately not a one of a kind event unlike anything in human history. It is the highlighted symbol of failed collectivized human conscience being able to justify scapegoating and mass murders. It can be easily argued that every war reminds us how quickly we can be lead to believe that killing others is a problem solver.

            After last year’s election I decided I should read up on the Holocaust. It wasn’t that I believed Donald Trump was the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler or Pol Pot. I was concerned at his ease in scapegoating groups, and the inclusion of certain persons from the alt-right on his roundtable of advisors. I wanted to take a closer look at the holocaust not because I thought one was imminent but because it mostly easily occurs where people grow complacent in imagining such a thing could never happen here.

            These two books I am recommending for reading are like mirror presentations of the holocaust. Both books are written by authors who are descendants of persons connected to the holocaust. Both books are written because of the authors’ connections to a grandfather’s brother. In Daniel Mendelsohn’s family history not many details of the death of Mendelsohn’s grandfather’s Uncle Schmiel was known. It was only known that he, his wife, and their four beautiful daughters were killed by the Nazis. That was a sentence Daniel Mendelsohn heard without a lot of elaboration several times growing up. Daniel Mendelsohn’s book The Lost is his story of seeking to know more about that family lost in the holocaust. It was a story about six of the six million whose lives and life stories were cut off in the darkness of the holocaust.

            Katrin Himmler wrote her book with a focus on the infamous Heinrich Himmler and his brothers, one of which was his youngest brother Ernst, who was Katrin Himmler’s grandfather. She wrote as one whose ancestry had left her a painful legacy. Both authors wrote from different aspects of persons haunted by family history. Katrin Himmler begins the telling of her family history with something that happened in a German school room where she grew up, when she was 15 years old. At age 15, as the names of the role were read off and her name “Himmler” was announced, another student asked if she was related to that Himmler. She answered quietly in the affirmative. The classroom became uncomfortably completely silent. The teacher not knowing how to bring good out of the situation, perhaps herself overpowered by the moment, moved to change the subject. Later Katrin Himmler, a German who often thought about how terrible it must have been to have been a Jewish person during the holocaust met a Jewish man whose ancestor had been saved by being given an Aryan identification and hidden out from the Nazis. The Jewish man had wondered what it was like to be part of the Nazi establishment. He had enjoyed making model Messerschmitt planes, and carefully painting Swastikas on them. They understood each other in ways that few people understood them. They are now married. Katrin Himmler had spent some years trying to piece together her family’s past from family archives of letters, from conversations, and from historical details. When her son was born Katrin Himmler pondered how a day would come when her son would ask questions about why one side of his family had tried to kill and destroy the other side of her family. Her research was all the more important so she became determined to see her work brought to completion in publication.

            Katrin Himmler’s research had disturbed the myths of only limited family participation in Hitler’s National Socialist Party. It was a story of how three brothers, the sons of a respected school headmaster and a practical Roman Catholic mother, let their cultivated German nationalism be channeled into participation in Germany’s Nazi regime.

            Taken together the two books helped give me a feel of those times from both sides of the Holocaust; the oppressor and the oppressed, the innocent and the evil. The Lost by Mendelsohn is a beautiful work, including the story of his search which took place on several continents, to the discovery of more of the story of the lost family’s lives and their sad deaths; and also an interesting presentation of rabbinic contemplations from some of the seemingly parallel stories of the Book of Genesis. These features of Mendelsohn’s book are all intertwined into one of the most beautiful, moving, and powerful books I have ever read.

            Katrin Himmler’s book, because of the subject matter, can never be beautiful. It is a sobering story. We are reminded that evil is often connected to persons whose lives can be in many ways ordinary and normal. We watch the sons of a school headmaster and a practicing Catholic mother with helpful connections to the Bavarian royal family become men of their own families enjoying connections to the ruling Nazi Party that began to dominate Germany in 1932. Something happened to turn the children from every day children into willing servants of one of humanity’s most evil regimes. Between the two books we remember two lost families. One is a family lost to the Holocaust that we wish might have lived out their lives and be remembered by descendants from their elderly years. The other lost family we simply need to remember because we dare not forget them. Together the two books didn’t help me to understand the Holocaust. They only helped me feel it a little more than I once did. So now, removed from its context, I can feel part of the story because of what Daniel Mendelsohn and Katrin Himmler have labored to make certain their family stories could be told.