G lobal Growing Up in Anne Frank’s Shadow, My Kids Have
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JEWISH LIGHT
Known About the Holocaust Since Before They Could Speak By Cnaan Liphshiz
The son of JTA's Europe correspondent, pictured here when he was nearing his second birthday, examines a memorial cobblestone for murdered Dutch Jews in Heerlen, the Netherlands, July 29, 2017. (Cnaan Liphshiz)
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — On a country road steeped in spring blossom, the 5-year-old in the backseat asked a question that sent shivers down our spines. “Did the farmer plant those trees around his house because his family’s Jewish?” he asked us, his parents, pointing at a farmhouse we passed along the way. I knew immediately what he meant. “What do you mean?” I asked anyway. “So, people wouldn’t be able to see them from the road,” he replied. It was startling evidence of how his mother and I — and perhaps life itself as a Dutch-Jewish boy — have allowed Holocaust traumas to mark his young mind and that of his younger sister. For me, the revelation invoked a pang of guilt. But that feeling subsided into resignation of the reality of raising children in cities haunted by the ghosts of their murdered ancestors. For Europe’s Jews, that’s just our lot in life. I told my son reassuringly that the farmer’s family probably wasn’t Jewish and that they wouldn’t need to hide even if they were. But in my mind I was revisiting — one guilty flashback by another — all the times that I had exposed the kids to the Holocaust. There was that rainy afternoon when I took them to the Holocaust museum in Mechelen, Belgium. We had some time to spare, I wanted to see the place and the two bottom floors were supposed to be ageappropriate. They deal only with the background to the genocide, which is explored in escalating order in the five-story building. But the lobby had a temporary THE
JEWISH LIGHT
exhibition of drawings by an Aus- raised here to be invested in their chwitz prisoner showing a Nazi identity. flailing an inmate’s bare buttocks. Questions followed. Answers flowed, including about how the Germans tried to kill Granny Hella at Auschwitz because she was Jewish. Before I knew it I mentioned gas chambers. Then I changed the subject and we walked in the rain to Frost covers the Merwede Square in the nearest ice cream shop.
The author’s son visits the Kazerne Dossin Holocaust museum near Antwerp, Belgium, March 12, 2020. (Cnaan Liphshiz)
I’ve been obsessed with the Holocaust since a young age. I must have been 3 when Hella told me, sobbing intermittently, about how she had survived Auschwitz, the death marches and the carpet bombing of Dresden. My job as JTA Europe correspondent isn’t helping me put distance from the genocide. Clearly I’m partly responsible for introducing my very young children to horrific facts. Some parents make the argument for starting early with age-appropriate Holocaust instruction. I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing, especially considering the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism today in Europe and the Netherlands. In last month’s general elections here, the right-wing and COVIDskeptic Forum for Democracy party quadrupled its number of seats in parliament — it has eight now — despite a massive scandal over antiSemitism in its ranks in November. On the left, Green Left, the only party in the Dutch parliament that supports a boycott of Israel — and no other country — entered as a lawmaker Kauthar Bouchallikht, an activist who in 2014 posed for pictures in front of a sign reading “stop doing what Hitler did to you” at a pro-Palestinian demonstration. She has apologized for her actions. But even if I’m overreacting, the H-word seems unavoidable for a Jewish-Dutch child who is being
playground just under that flat featuring a prominent statue of the teenage diarist that always has fresh wreaths at its feet, placed there by tourists. Their mother attended Frank’s former elementary school, which is now named for her. It sits about 500 yards from the playground. The entrance to our children’s Jewish kindergarten has a life-size Amsterdam, where a statue of Anne poster of Anne Frank. And there’s a Frank stands opposite her last home in building-size portrait of her towerwhich she and her family lived as free people. (Wikimedia Commons/Franklin ing over the passenger terminal of Heijnen) the ferry that we take several times For such Jews, the Holocaust a week to reach the city center. seems everywhere in the NetherOn the streets of many Dutch citlands, where the Nazis and collabo- ies, especially their native Amsterrators murdered at least 75% of the dam, shiny brass memorial cobblelocal Jewish population — the stones decorate the doorsteps of highest death rate in occupied West- pretty much each building from ern Europe. which Jews were deported. They My father-in-law lives down the are magnets for inquisitive young road from Anne Frank’s old apart- children, especially my 4-year-old ment, before she went into hiding. On visits, the kids go with their See ANNE FRANK 14 saba, Hebrew for grandfather, to a on Page
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