11/24: Rememberance

During the student leadership conference, I made friends with Priti, a teacher from Central India. I have read a lot of Indian literature (which is fantastic, by the way. They have some incredible writers, and they write in English, so no need for translation), and Priti recommended The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth. At the book store, I picked up another book by Seth titled Two Lives. I had no idea when I purchased the book that it was a biography about his uncle, who married a German woman and lived in England. Later into the book did it become clear that Seth's German aunt was Jewish, and that the book would tell in detail, complete with copies of letters, telegrams and postcards, the plight of her family, who did not manage to escape.

So here I sit in India, ten thousand miles from home, crying about events which occurred more than 60 years ago to people I did not know. In some ways, telling the story of one family is so much more heart-wrenching than the abstract concept of six million dead.

I do not know the stories of my grandfathers, from Russia on my mother's side, and Romania on my father's. I know little of my grandmothers' stories, though I think I heard that my mother's mother from Poland came from a family of eleven, and only one sister survived. My grandmother on my father's side came from Czechoslovakia from a family of eight, with only one sister surviving as well. I can't even imagine how many cousins were lost. I don't know the details of how my family perished in Eastern Europe - starvation, dysentery, concentration camps. I think this may be the first time in my life that I actually thought about all my relatives who died during the holocaust as "my family," for my life has been so far removed from that reality. How small the world is that an Indian author in the 21st century could remind me of my lost roots, but also remind me proudly of my beautiful heritage.