History

[liv]

I don't normally care whether people read my links or not, but I would very much like it if as wide an audience as possible saw sovay's post I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry, about visiting an exhibition of photos from the Lodz ghetto. The subject matter is the Holocaust / Shoah.

I don't know my family history as well as Sovay does. All my great-grandparents were in England by 1900, so none of my close relatives were directly involved. I'm in a similar position that I'm pretty sure there are third etc cousins of mine who should exist but don't. The people who should have been their ancestors might be in the photos; there probably were people related to me among those murdered in Poland, no idea if they were in Lodz specifically.

Whichever Nazi it was that claimed 'a million deaths is a statistic', the scale matters in a different way. That is, one person murdered because of who they are is already too many, but once you get into the millions, everybody is affected. Every Jewish person with any European connections at all might, it's probably best to assume they do, have missing relatives. Every part of history since 1930 is marked by that mass murder.

Anyway. I have more to say but I'm not sure I want to say it on a public post, and you're better reading the linked post anyway.

Comments

[davidgillon]

I read it when Sovay posted it. The images are powerful in their own right, but when you start thinking of it in terms of people you know, who should have cousins, but don't, that brings it very close to home.

[ambyr]

I almost saw that exhibit when it was at the Art Gallery of Toronto, but I ran out of time on that trip. I ducked into the gift shop just long enough to buy the catalog instead. The photographs are intense.

[smhwpf]

Thanks for sharing. Now I know what I'm doing this weekend.

[mrissa]

Thank you for saying so, I promise I will go read it right now.

[batdina]

I read it the other day when she posted it. was at my father's earlier this week, and we got to talking about the exhibit (he was unaware it was out there) and eventually got to our family, and its lack of cousins ...

what's interesting for us, is that we supposed how our family (there were 10 siblings on one side and 7 on the other in my father's family) had been murdered, but a couple of years ago at Yad VaShem, we actually got confirmation of how they died. It was like a punch in the gut. (We were correct in our suppositions.)

anyway, I plan to spend time at that photo archive because maybe, just maybe, there are pictures there of people who either were family, or were adjacent to them.

good shabbes Liv, and thanks for this post and reminder.

[emperor]

I read that post; thank you for drawing it to my attention.

[lilacsigil]

Just to let you know I read and absorbed it. No-one in my extended family, at least since the Irish Potato Famine, has been subject to anything even marginally similar, so I know I can't feel it the same way, but I can at least learn and stay alert.