Wow. What an amazingly great article!

The Holocaust era became an obsession for me when I was about 15 years old when I read one survivor story after another so that my bookshelf was lined with gruesome autobiographies. And in my 50s I wrote a best selling book on the life of a survivor of Mauthausen. The wife of the survivor was a woman who was sent from Germany to England on the Kindertransport. Though she survived the war, she and her sister were treated like servants, free help, by the family that took them in. This only added to their trauma.

You are right that few survivors really talked much about their ordeal, but this is common with trauma. So much can be said about the Holocaust period, and millions of words have been written over the past 70 years or so. Until Trump became president I found it difficult to understand how a modern, progressive nation could quickly embrace a fascist leader and turn the truth into the lie. But it can happen faster than anyone realizes

Thanks for sharing your story, and here is a quote from one of the first Holocaust survivors whose books I read:

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.”

― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz