Holocaust remembrance

On Sunday January 26, 2025,, I thought about writing a post for Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2025. It’s hard not to think about that day in history as it approaches. How can we properly empathize with or memorialize those liberated by the Soviet Army on January 27, 1945, those who had been certain only hours before that they would die in that camp?

After all on December 2, 1943, Jenny Grimminger nee Stern had died in Auschwitz. She had not known the precious taste of liberation. Her husband Eugen tried to suicide when news of her murder reached him in the penitentiary where he was serving his sentence for funding White Rose work. In the moment when someone said, Did you hear about Jenny?, he questioned the basis of his resistance.

Because as long as he was not on Gestapo radar, Jenny had been protected as Jewish wife of an Aryan man. The moment he was in Gestapo custody, her protective shield vanished.

Three months later, Traute Lafrenz would be freed from the concentration camp in Bayreuth, two days before her trial and execution were scheduled.

Yet even with these direct connections between White Rose individuals and the Allied liberation of those imprisoned in concentration and extermination camps, the words would not come. Nothing seemed appropriate.

The longer I thought about my hesitancy, the more I realized that writing about Holocaust Remembrance Day is beyond my capacity for meaningful words. Especially writing about the emancipation of those awaiting death in Auschwitz.

As memorable, as grand, as astoundingly extraordinary as that day would have been to the prisoners as they first espied Russian soldiers throwing open the gates, it began a painful process that we tend to forget. To overlook. To fail to acknowledge as real.

Those prisoners – Jewish, gay, Russian, Polish, Jehovah’s Witness, Sinti and Roma, Socialist, Communist – faced a long road. If they were lucky enough to return to their hometowns in Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, the prisoners sometimes found that their erstwhile neighbors were not happy to see them. Frequently one of those former neighbors occupied their homes and they were forced to fight to reclaim their rightful property.

Many were herded into DP-Lager, displaced persons camps, more often than not barracks that had housed forced laborers. Worse yet, many prisoners were required to remain in the same concentration camps from which they had been “liberated,” complete with watchtowers and barbed wire, because there was no place for them to go. Dr. Earl Harrison of Penn Law School reported on this in a September 1945 letter to President Truman.

In our modern era, we recognize and openly discuss Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We correctly apply it to abusive marriages, to toxic work environments, to returning home after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. We have developed and continue to develop tools to deal with PTSD. Jack Hopkins writes about PTSD and reclaiming our lives. I’ve learned a great deal from him regarding putting an abusive and toxic work environment behind me.

But the PTSD we discuss in our modern era bears little resemblance to the PTSD that those released from extermination and concentration camps knew. In 1945, those Jewish, gay, Russian, Polish, Jehovah’s Witness, Sinti and Roma, Socialist, and Communist ex-prisoners were essentially told to suck it up, to get on with life. They did not – could not – talk out loud about the beatings, about seeing babies murdered by being dashed against brick walls, about starvation, about being publicly humiliated and whipped, about sleeping in flea- and bedbug-infested bunk beds. About being the sole survivor from their extended family. About losing every stick of furniture, photo albums, household goods, clothing, homes, automobiles, businesses, business records, sold pennies on the Reichsmark to an Aryan neighbor. About Kristallnacht. About being rounded up and marched through city streets in shame to board a cattle car headed East. About surviving a mass shooting in Riga as everyone you loved fell into the pit of stinking death, only to be discovered and shipped to Auschwitz.

After 1945, we collectively failed those who were liberated by Allied troops. (And yes, we failed the Allied troops who participated in that liberation and had to live with those scenes in their brains for the rest of their lives.)

It is one thing to commemorate January 27 as day of liberation from Auschwitz, or 27th day of Nisan (Wednesday, April 23, 2025 this year) as Yom Ha-Shoah, or 14th day of Nisan (this year April 9) as date of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943).

It is quite another to do the hard work of standing with the survivors and the families of survivors. Among the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors I know, few care much about the material possessions their families lost. They care a great deal about the recurring nightmares their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents suffer. They care about the harmful coping mechanisms that generation developed, just to survive. They care about the inability of the survivors to trust, to form close bonds, to enjoy good times fully.

The damage done to survivors lives on in their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Researchers – primarily in Israel and the USA, with organizations as diverse as NIH, US Department of Veterans Affairs, and the American Psychological Association – are finally digging in to psychological effects of growing up as descendant of a Holocaust survivor. Art Spiegelman delved into his own troubled relationship with his survivor parents in his much-admired book Maus.

A group called Kriegs Enkel Stuttgart has recognized the parallels between the lives of descendants of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators. Initially this seemed illogical to me. Reading their posts, I appreciate the healing I see as these two groups of descendants join forces to recover from different-but-same trauma.

Instead of empathizing with or memorializing those who were freed on January 27, 1945, our “remembrance” should consider the whole person. Our remembering should not and must not stop with memory. Rather, we should focus on the ongoing needs of survivors and their successors, those who inherited a legacy of pain and injury.

The healing mechanisms for PTSD must be broadened and better understood for the few remaining survivors and their descendants. Until that happens, Holocaust Remembrance Day and other anniversaries on our calendars are nothing more than photo ops.

Make it real. Make it lasting.

Be more than a “guardian of memory.”

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Image credits: Top photo--Olga Vsevolodovna Ignatovitsj, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Auschwitz was liberated by the 100th Lviv Infantry Division, 60th Army, I Ukrainian Front, under the command of Major-General Fyodor Krasavin. Bottom photo: Dachau. Photo © 2023 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to use.

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