What's the difference between atrocities committed in war and outright genocide?
by Joshua Rozenberg / May 19, 2016 / Leave a commentPublished in June 2016 issue of Prospect Magazine
Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, 20th November 1945
I always wanted to know exactly how my father had managed to escape from Nazi-occupied Poland and survive the Holocaust that killed almost his entire family.
Like so many other refugees trying to build a new life in a foreign land, he didn’t want to talk about the past he’d lost for ever. When my father reached his early seventies, though, he seemed more willing to open up. Thinking he’d find it easier to talk to a stranger, I arranged for a fellow journalist to interview him. There seemed no particular hurry. And then my father suddenly died. Even though I used to carry a BBC tape recorder on my shoulder for a living, I found I didn’t even have a recording of his voice—let alone an account of his life.
When my son was two, his grandfather died. So, after university, he set off for Poland to find out about the grandfather he never knew. To my amazement, he was able to trace the Rozenbergs of Izbica as far back as the 18th century. He also discovered that my father had been deported to the Soviet Union before enlisting in the Polish forces under British command in Iran. That was followed by the British Army, naturalisation and a return to his pre-war occupation as a tailor.
Researching and publishing our family histories allows European Jews to demonstrate—in a way that readers can readily comprehend—the ultimate failure of Adolf Hitler’s attempt to wipe us all out. It is a well-trodden path. In his new memoir My Dear Ones: One Family and the Final Solution (William Collins), Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg consults the German Holocaust researcher Götz Aly. …
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Alyson K