Being Refugees
Telling my story, verbally or in writing, is part of my attempt to describe the impact the Holocaust had on my parents and on me.
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A Memory Long Forgotten
It has been many years since World War II, and I continue to bear witness to what I remember.
Disquieting Pictures
A small black-and-white photograph has suddenly taken on a heartbreaking new significance.
Longings
I am standing now at the railroad station of the small village where I reside with a Polish family.
Waiting
On the outskirts of a small village near Vichy, France, Looms the antediluvian castle the Château des Morelles Housing not grand dukes and duchesses But children from Germany, France, and Italy—waiting Lost from their individual families Scattered by the Third Reich. They eat their meager food Pretending it is the feast of royalty.
Dini
Dini Polak is a lively Dutch woman in her mid-80s who has a debilitating muscle and balance disorder that has kept her in a wheelchair and homebound for ten years, but whose social media presence alone testifies to her avid interest in world affairs, politics, and literature.
Ellen
In the spring of 1945, the US Army was closing in on Cologne. I was an intelligence agent, a member of Interrogator Prisoner of War Team no.66, a part of an intelligence unit called T-Force, 12th Army Group, with a mission to follow the infantry into large cities as they were liberated.
A Furtive Thing
When you are five and a half years old, at what point do you start crying because you haven’t seen your mother?
Friedel
The red clay mixed with brown earth makes a somber noise as it is shoveled onto the plain pine casket. It contains the body of my second cousin Friedel.
Reinkensstraat 67
Reinkenstraat 67 is the address in Den Haag of an ordinary two-story home next to a fish market. It is an ordinary house on an ordinary street lined with ordinary small businesses and cafés. The address is less than a mile from the house where I was born and that my family called home until October 1942 when our family was torn apart, and we were forced to go into hiding. Reinkenstraat 67 is an address that Hannah Arendt might have called “banal,” an ordinary address where evil and mass murder assumed a personal dimension. A house I needed to see with my own two eyes, not to achieve closure, but to feel and bear witness to the depths to which the human soul can descend.