It took until 1990 for my grandmother — who upon her liberation, weighed just 20kg — to even begin speaking about her experiences. She, like the rest of her family (only one of whom still survives now) would carry the trauma with them for the rest of their lives.
(…)
However much she somehow rebuilt her life through the most astounding courage and strength — which included
helping smuggle her mother and sisters over the Hungarian-Austrian border in 1956, from where they travelled to safety in the UK — she lived in perpetual fear of it happening again.
At the very core of our being, I think all Jews live with that fear. It’s no good telling us that something cannot happen when we all know that it has, many times over; when our family histories are dominated not just by the Holocaust, but an endless history of pogroms and persecution, hatred and horror. The number one cause of that history? Our lack of a homeland. This enabled scores of tyrants, charlatans and opportunists to keep the Jews out of mainstream society, then turn on us whenever anything went wrong, accusing us of ‘polluting’ the national bloodstream. And it also meant that as the situation across Europe deteriorated dramatically during the 1930s, there was next to no help from its governments; growing hostility from its peoples; and for so many, nowhere to turn.
That was the backdrop behind Israel coming into being. As my grandmother often said to me: “Shaun, we Jews had always been weak. The lesson of the Holocaust was that we had to be strong”. Europe had completely betrayed the Jewish people. Only one place offered salvation.
