The future is scary, but the pain of the past is worse

As the corona crisis began to unfold, my cousin and I started leaving each other voice notes on WhatsApp: an audio log of how we were feeling and what we were doing. I had just arrived in a rapidly shuttering Melbourne and she was acclimatising to a newly stunned London. We felt stuck in a brace of never-ending negativity and fear.

So we began to think about our family history. Our grandparents, German Jews, found themselves in the wrongest possible place at the wrongest possible time: Germany in the Thirties. They had good lives, houses and towns they loved, colleagues and businesses they were committed to. Then they had to up sticks on pain of arrest and murder, with the forcible theft of their property to come. My greatgrandmother, accustomed to sharing a villa with the Duke of Bavaria and holding evening salons, found herself learning English at 40 and sewing little felt horses in Newcastle to survive. Those who got out built good lives in places they’d never imagined setting foot.

This adaptability is something Jews have had to learn over the millennia of our persecution. History has shown us that crisis and catastrophe is always round the corner and we want to be ready, which means nimble. My parents inherited the Holocaust generation’s sense of imminent disaster, and responded by not getting too attached to material possessions, and crucially of always preparing for the worst.

Coronavirus is scary and deadly, but it isn’t close to the murder and mayhem our ancestors had to manoeuvre. My cousin and I decided we wanted to approach the current crisis in a manner befitting our Jewish heritage: with preparedness, flexibility, a philosophical outlook and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to help each other out.