Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 16:11:09 -0500 From: Emil or Nedra

Karl, thank you for mentioning the Holocaust discussion and for attaching your thoughtful piece re Auschwitz. You ask why this was not spoken of in the immediate years after WWII. When I am being generous, I attribute it to some form of collective guilt, I don?t know. But for many of the survivors, it was a topic that they too did not want to talk about ? especially to their children. My parents, who were survivors of the Holocaust but lost most of their families in Poland, stayed silent about what had happened to them for most of their lives afterwards. They wanted to spare their children the agony of knowing. But we knew. We heard the whispers between them and the sobbing as they wakened from nightmares. I avoided asking them about it because I wanted to spare them the agony of remembering. So it remained unspoken.

I was surprised to hear last night that, like myself, quite a few of our classmates were born in the DP camps. It is something we didn?t speak about even among ourselves. Here is a link to an artifact I contributed to the Holocaust Education Pop-up Museum a couple years ago in Ottawa. ? Emil

landing papers