Photoessay #2816 - Circle

I can feel a circle coming on here.  And it's good.

I was very impressed with the young professor who talked at the jewdub.org talks.  So so young.  His talk was about his search for his relatives killed by the Nazis when they were deported from their home in Salonika.

He teaches a class about "The Holocaust" this spring.  A class with sections.  I'm trying to get myself in though I won't know until the quarter starts.

At first I thought, do I really want to submit myself to ten weeks of testimony about how the Jews (my co-religionists) were persecuted and murdered?  Do I have time (and the stomach) for this?

I mentioned the book "The Lost: search for six in six million."  by Daniel Mendelsohn.  I had checked it out from the UW library for some forgotten reason.  I started reading it; excellent.  The picture is of the author's mother's cousin Ruchele Jager, killed at age 16 in the first Aktion in her small Polish town in 1941.

She's the same age as my mother, who was safe, celebrating the century mark of her congregation Mishkan Israel in Connecticut.

Reading the witness accounts I wonder, how did the Nazis find so many people who were willing to participate in such horrid sadistic acts. 

The professor suggested a book "We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust 1945-1962."  I can tell that I will get a lot out of this book.  I used another book "The Second Migration" by this same author Hasia Diner in my Maier Zunder paper.  This is an example of things that I will remember from my own past as I go along.  I was ten years old in 1962.

That's part of the memoir and genealogy piece, the more you think, write and talk about things, the more you remember.  I think I will get a bountiful harvest of my own remembrances from her work.