For some, the hate from Charlottesville strikes haunting chord
Like many Americans, I watched in shock the scenes in Charlottesville of young white men, looking grim and determined, chanting “Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” as they carried flags emblazoned with swastikas.
I had never seen such a naked and public display of anti-Semitism. But my shock was combined with another more unusual reaction.
“It’s good that George is not here to see this,” I thought to myself. My own shock would have seemed mild compared to what George would have felt.
George Klin was my longtime companion who died seven months ago. Unlike my privileged life as an American Jew who never personally experienced anti-Semitism, George’s life was starkly different.
In his native Brussels, he was a hidden child during the Holocaust. These were children living in Nazi-occupied countries who were spared the death camps because brave Christians hid them.
George’s happy childhood was suddenly interrupted when the Nazis occupied Belgium. From then on, Jews lived in constant fear. He was just 11 when he heard a fateful knock on the door of the family apartment in Brussels one day. Along with the urgent knock came voices shouting, “Polizei! Polizei!”
It signified a dreaded Nazi roundup. Although terrified, young George still had the presence of mind to use the chain lock on the door. He huddled in fear with his mother and sister as the police knocked repeatedly – but then moved on to knock on other doors.
All was silence after about an hour. Later, when George ventured outdoors, the street was completely empty. His neighbors had been rounded up and would be sent to the death camps.
After that, It was too dangerous to stay in his neighborhood. A Christian neighbor knew about a courageous Catholic woman who ran a boarding school in a town near Brussels. At risk of her life, she hid Jewish children who then pretended to be Catholic. She agreed to take in George and his younger sister Louise.
Along with other hidden children, they were now safe, but still lived in fear of discovery.
Once a month, George and Louise looked forward to their mother’s visits. She brought cookies, other treats – and love.
Then, one day, the visits ended and never resumed. Sister and brother knew that something terrible had happened.
But their father was safe in Brooklyn, where he had come to visit a cousin right before the war started. When war broke out, the cousin urged him not to return. So at war’s end, brother and sister boarded a boat and were reunited with their father in Brooklyn.
Life resumed some normalcy. George was an honor student in high school, earned a college degree and then a PhD. With a talent for language, he became a professor of Romance Languages. He married and raised two children (the marriage later ended in divorce).
But the shadow of the Holocaust was always with him. At age 65, he finally learned the actual fate of his mother. The Nazis had left Belgium in haste, with no time to take their records. Years later, when I visited a Holocaust museum outside of Brussels, the curator showed me a computer with the Nazis’ meticulous documentation of Belgium’s Holocaust victims.
He typed in the name of George’s mother, and soon the facts appeared on the computer screen. First, the mundane details: her name, address, occupation. Then came the dark facts – the date she was deported to Auschwitz – even the train number, and the date she was gassed.
George tried to take the news stoically. He had always known something terrible had happened; now he knew the specifics. It haunted him with new intensity.
Unlike his mother, who died in her early 30s, George lived to age 85- and during that long life, he never really recovered from the childhood trauma. He occasionally had nightmares about the past, and he felt lifelong and intense hatred for the Nazis.
“They killed my mother!” he would shout tearfully in moments of anger and grief.
He would surely have suffered more nightmares if he saw the young neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, marching in lockstep and shouting, “Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”
I wonder if these young men ever think about how their actions probably affected Holocaust survivors here. I wonder if, as future fathers, they will ever understand the lifelong trauma of children victimized by the Nazis whom they want to glorify.
George was one of those children. While I grieve for him, I am relieved that at the very end of his life, he was spared one more stab to a wound that never healed.