Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I'm half-Jewish, and strangely, my Holocaust connection comes from my Dutch Goyim family, not my New York Jewish family. I mean, probably my Nana and Zaide lost relatives, but I don't know who. I've never tried to find out.
I'd like to share the story my mom posted yesterday, in her words, and I'm including a photograph that I dug out of a box of random photos my great-aunts ("the Tantes" as they were known) had sent mom three decades ago.
Today I have a short but intense story, regarding my aunt in the Netherlands. She was a teacher in Amsterdam who had been assigned to a Jewish school in the Ghetto round 1942*. She worked with the Rabbi to ensure her curriculum was sensitive to Jewish culture (unusual at that time). She loved the children she described as alert and very bright. After many months, she arrived at school at the usual time in the morning, to an empty school yard and a locked school. It was eerily silent. She located the caretaker who informed my aunt that the children were gone. The Nazis rounded them up overnight and put them onto a train. My aunt stood stalk still processing this information. Then, her tears began to flow and continued to flow for the rest of her life. Then and there she decided to join the Dutch Resistance. In her eighties, near the end of life and suffering from dementia, she still remembered those absent children. Her tears would roll silently down her cheeks and she’d keep saying: “I should have done more”. Her name was Ina Hogenkamp and she went on to do much more.
These are her Jewish children, when they were still alive with bright futures ahead of them.
*It was 1941.
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