Fighting Back Against Hitler

Older Sister, Little Sister, and I are all attending an institute class dedicated to family history.

At the first class, Little Sister and I perused our family tree on familysearch.org.

"Did you find any royalty?" this other girl asked us. It's not uncommon for a well-researched line to turn up some cool stuff. In the past, we've learned, among other things, that we're not-so-distant cousins of FDR and that we're direct descendants of Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of history's most powerful and fascinating women.

"Not today," Little Sister said. "But maybe we'll find some Jewish royalty or something."

"Esther," I suggested.

"Yeah, it will just say 'Esther,'" Little Sister said. "And then we'll be like, 'Oh my gosh! Esther, queen of Persia!'"

Joking aside, we really have no idea what we might find on the Jewish eighth of our family tree. That line is not well-recorded. But I don't think this is because my relatives didn't keep track of their ancestors. If you get anything out of the Bible, it's that the Jews love them some lineages. No, I think that Hitler is the person that we can thank for the lack of documentation. Except I don't want to thank him; I want to slap him in the face. With a glove. Because that seems particularly humiliating.

My grandmother is the link between me and her grandparents. My mom never met them. But I feel like I know them because I've heard stories about them from my grandma.

I can't say the same of the Jewish great-something-great-aunts and great-something-great-uncles and cousins who died in the Holocaust. I hardly know anything about them. I don't know of anybody living who knew them or even anybody who knew anybody who knew them. With these relatives' murders, any information they could have shared about their ancestors is gone. A whole link in my family line has vanished.

This bothers me particularly in that Hitler tried to destroy the Jews. He lost the war, but if by killing a whole generation he wiped our ancestors from living memory, then in a sense he succeeded. Oblivion differs from destruction only for the victim. For everybody else, well, all they know is that there's no trace of the victim. Or, rather, they don't know that there's no trace of the victim, because for them it's like that person never existed.

All I know is that I would like a breakthrough so that I can learn more about the men and women that I came from. I pray that something useful will turn up.