Remember them, please
#86
Dear Friends of Democracy,
I want to dedicate today's post to these two wonderful women.
They were from my little hometown of Tauberbischofsheim, Germany: Flora Simons on the right, her daughter, Hannelore, next to her, so close, their heads touch.
The two dearly loved each other.
This was the life of the girl Hannelore, who was born in 1925, before the Nazis took over in 1933:
"... Mom took me into the forests and villages, and we went to the inns there. We sat in the gardens in the shade of the chestnut trees, which had blossoms like candles, and when they were ripe, we collected the chestnuts and made necklaces out of them. We ate country bread with butter and cheese, and I got lemonade. I was happy. Then suddenly everything changed. There were elections in February 1933. ..."
Seven horrible years later, the two, along with Hannelore's grandmother, were among the last 22 Jewish people to be deported from Tauberbischofsheim. That was on 22 October 1940.
The horror was followed by even greater horror.
Hannelore's grandmother died in a prison camp in France; her mother was killed in Auschwitz.
Hannelore survived the Holocaust through luck and courageous people in France as one of three of the 22 deportees. She later moved to Israel and eventually wrote down her memories.
The memories were intended for her children and grandchildren only. But when two Tauberbischofsheim schoolgirls followed Hannelore's footsteps and met her in Israel under her new name, Chana Sass, in 2011, she shared her memories with the two young women.
Back in Tauberbischofsheim, the text was translated from Hebrew into German and has since been offered at the local history museum in my hometown under the title "From Tauberbischofsheim to Jerusalem" (where the quote above is from).
This weekend, I bought a copy and read the 50-page memory of that woman who died in 2021 as the last surviving Jew of Tauberbischofsheim.
The story is so heartbreaking I wished the story were fiction. It is not. And nothing can be changed about this horrible past, except, it is up to us whether this story will ever be forgotten.
Preserving the memory of these two women is a small and late victory over the Nazi regime, which also wanted to erase all memories of Jewish life.
They almost succeded. Because in the "Jew-free" Tauberbischofsheim of my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, almost no one talked about the fact that many Jews had once lived in this city and that it was the people of my hometown who drove them out and killed them.
It tortures me to believe that Hannelore’s story and that of millions of other Jews really happened. I better do believe. It is how we prevent history from repeating itself.
See you in Europe,
Johannes