Many people nowadays, including Slovakian relatives and a close American friend, are discovering that they are Jewish.
Sarah’s Key, a movie that traces the life of a girl who survived the Holocaust in France, explores this theme too. It was so graphic that I wondered if I, who have done extensive Holocaust research connected with my book, Between Galicia and Hungary: The Jews of Stropkov, will ever see any more Holocaust films.
If I have learned anything, it’s this:
The more you learn about the Holocaust the worse it is.
What you thought was unimaginably bad is only a preliminary for what comes next.
Six million Jews? Six million individual Holocausts. Plus the Holocausts of those who survived– like (fictional) Sarah.
Unlike Jews in the US, the Holocaust touches those of us in Israel personally — everyday. We have annual Holocaust Day when schools “adopt” certain destroyed communities, many of us send our teenagers to explore Majdanek and Auschwitz…
My great-grandfather, Yossl Amsel from Stropkov, is often on my mind. When my son became a soldier, I thought, had he known, how amazed and proud he would have been. What would have tickled him more– a great-great grandson in the Israeli army or the State of Israel itself?
Yossl was a farmer. Now that this great-great grandson is an agronomist, I think he would have been beside himself with nachas.
I don’t need to see any more Holocaust movies. Enough.
Melody Amsel-Arieli 