identity

When I was a young child we would go to visit my mother's aunts, uncles and cousins in Perth Amboy, a New Jersey town that was, at that time, home to a very large population of Hungarian Jews, refugees from the Nazis. I knew little about the Nazis or WWII, but I remember wondering why all my aunts and uncles had those tattoos on their forearms? I remember how much they loved dancing, laughing, and celebrating life. When I was a little older my mother told me the real stories: how my cousin N saw his mother and his brother and sister killed before his eyes as they lined up to be imprisoned; how my grandfather's entire family--parents, brother and five sisters--were imprisoned and only one sister survived. My grandfather and one of his sisters already were in the US before the war. How my grandfather owned a large farm and his business employed so many in the town where they lived in Hungary, and how his family was beloved in that town (my cousins, visiting that town a few years ago, were told stories by two very old ladies; they told my cousins about my great-grandparents). But the family home had been turned into a factory. I have a picture of my great-grandparents and great aunts and uncles. They look so dapper, the men with their walking sticks and suits, the women elegantly dressed.

I grew up with the weight of this tragedy hanging in the air, rarely spoken of but always present. Their is a sadness in many of my cousins, who are first-generation Americans, children of holocaust survivors. There are horror stories which no one wants to recall. My family lived in a different kind of place; there were almost no Jews and no one's aunts and uncles had tattoos, numbers inked on their forearms. So I was different from my extended family, and different from the people at home.

My feeling about Israel is so complex. Why shouldn't the Jews have a place to be safe, after the majority of them were exterminated while so many did nothing? Why shouldn't they fight for their lives now? The world must never forget, even if those idiots who claim that the Holocaust is fiction, that six million Jews were not killed? Did they just disappear?