“Never Again”
Like many American Jews, I grew up in the shadow of a Holocaust tragedy.
In the fall of 1920, my maternal grandfather lit out for America, leaving behind the Galician shtetl that had been his family’s home for generations. My grandfather’s oldest brother, Shmiel Jäger, had made the same journey in 1913. But unlike the rest of his siblings, Uncle Shmiel did not fall under the spell of America and sailed back to Bolechow after a year. It was a decision whose disastrous consequences he couldn’t possibly have imagined.
At the beginning of World War II, there were about 3,000 Jews living in Bolechow. Only 48 of them survived the Holocaust, and my great-uncle’s family was not among them, a story told in painstaking detail in my brother Daniel’s book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Their loss has always haunted me, so much so that we gave our son a Hebrew name in memory of Shmiel’s 12-year-old daughter Bronia.
Over the last three years, I’ve become consumed with doing genealogical research. And it’s only now that I have begun to understand the full extent of the Holocaust’s toll, to see the devastating swath it cut through my family. Whereas I once gestured abstractly to the “relatives” I knew I must have lost, I can now can attach names, faces and stories to those branches on our tree that all end somewhere around 1942. Names like that of my mother’s second cousin Isaac Moses Hallemann, who ran a Jewish orphanage in Fürth, Germany, and steadfastly refused to abandon the children in his care as the Nazi persecution intensified. Isaac, his wife Clara, and two of their four children perished.
When you lose family members in this way, with no death certificates, funerals, or grave markers, it can feel as if they have simply been wiped off the face of the earth, as if they never existed. But their ignominious deaths — the monstrous disregard for their very humanity— must not eclipse the simple significance of their lives.
These were just ordinary people — housewives and businessmen and teachers and schoolchildren — going about their day to day existence. They weren’t soldiers or political activists or extremists. And they endured unthinkable suffering and met barbaric deaths solely because a pernicious bigotry was allowed to spread unchecked across Europe like a cancer.
These people left gaping holes in the universe where each of them — and their descendants — should rightly be. So today I remember not only my eight-and-a-half year old third cousin Beate Hallemann, who was murdered at Belzec, but I honor the stunted branches of our family tree she left in her wake: the untold generations of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren she will never have. I look at the miraculous face of my own eight-and-a-half year old son with renewed gratitude.
On this Yom HaShoah, I pause to honor the lives of the people below, to assert to the universe that they have not been forgotten. With violent bigotry being championed rather than condemned by a frighteningly large segment of the American electorate, it is especially important that today and every day, we say over and over and over: “Never again.”
In Memoriam
Shmiel Jäger 1895–1943
Ester Schneelicht Jäger 1896–1942
Lorka Jäger 1920–1943
Frydka Jäger 1922–1943
Ruchele Jäger 1925–1941
Bronia Jäger 1929–1942
Shewa Jäger Hallemann 1871–1943
Nuchim Hallemann 1870–1942
Ernst Hallemann ?-1942
Isaac Moses Hallemann 1896–1942
Clara Mandelbaum Hallemann 1896–1942
Eva Hallemann 1927–1942
Beata Rachel Hallemann 1933–1942
Lotte Hallemann Dodeles 1900–1942
Isaac Dodeles 1900–1943
Bessie Dodeles 1930–1943
Manfred Dodeles 1933–1944
Ruth Hallemann 1905–1942
Kate Hallemann 1907–1943
Ralph Krausz 1934–1943
Dvora Jäger Kosiner 1880–1943
Jacob Kosiner 1880–1943
Ferdinand Jäger 1882–1944
Mary Kallman Jäger 1887–1944
Hans Jäger ?-1944
Gunther Heidemann 1913–1944
Berta Nussenblatt Eisenberg 1884–1943
Paula Eisenberg 1909–1942
Leah Eisenberg 1940–1942
Hersch Nussenblatt 1895–1942
Lena Nussenblatt Knoll 1893–1942
Max Chaim Knoll ?-1942
Sally Nussenblatt Scheiner 1886–1942
Bluma Mendelsohn Silberman 1889–1942
Moses Silberman 1893–1942
Hana Mendelsohn Cantor 1879–1941
Kopel Cantor 1880–1941?
Chava Mendelsohn and her husband Jacob (Last name unknown;) Her children, Salcia and Max
Frieda Mendelsohn Poppelaner 1887–1941
Leiser Poppelaner 1883–1941
Nechama Poppelaner 1922–1941
Sarah Poppelaner 1927–1941
Aaron Mendelsohn 1866–1942
Hena Taube Schklyarsky Mendelsohn 1872–1942
Lieb Hirsch Mendelsohn 1898–1945
Scheine Rivka Mendelsohn Westerman 1872–1942?
Schaje Westerman ?-1942
Judith Westerman Wasserman 1909–1942
Risa Lea Mendelsohn Scherr 1875–1942
