"God must have been on leave during the Holocaust." - Simon Wiesenthal

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An unfortunate truth of telling the story of my family is that the Holocaust wasn't just an abstract concept. It's real. It's horrible. And for all that my friends tease me at times for my ample lexicon and consummate use of $5 words (I am quite the sesquipedalian), I cannot find one that comes close to describing the sheer horror I feel when I think of the barbaric atrocities that went on during those few short years.

Before I continue on with my research, I feel inclined to share the following images. I'll be kind and post small images so if you really want you can scroll down past them, but I encourage you to stop for a second and look and breathe and understand what I am feeling while I write this. I quite literally feel sick having seen some of the images I have looked at today, but with that creeping nausea has come a resolve to tell the stories of my family, to honor their experience and to show them as actual individual people with lives and names and personalities and pasts and futures, not just as statistics.

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Pardon me a moment. I need to step back from that for  a little while.

Here we go. Kittens. Kittens make everything a little bit better.

Anyway.

I spent a good part of yesterday going through records and dates I already have in my disposal (collected from my dad, myAunt Helen, my distant cousin Shlomo, my even further distant cousin Howard, and other family members) and matching them up to records I could find on Yad Vashem. I don't have enough information on my grandfather's side to find records (what with changing spellings and a lack of birthdates), but on my grandmother's side I found this:

My great-grandmother's tree.

My great-grandfather's tree.

Already, so, so very many people. Even since last night when I made this graphic a cursory glance over some old notes gave me more people to add, and there's circumstantial evidence I need to follow up on that there are even more for whom I haven't found information yet.

Three of the people on this list were age 20 and under. There were families transported together on the same train, clinging together desperately for as long as they could. At the risk of sounding maudlin, I will admit to spending most of last night imagining what that would have been like, parents and children and brothers and sisters and adults and children, crammed together, not knowing their fates (or worse, going in the full knowledge of what was about to happen).

I think this is where I should stop, because there's only so much I can say before I start repeating myself about how completely awful the Holocaust was. If you're reading this, you probably know this already, anyway. I don't mean in any way to imply that this will be the tone of my blog - sad stories of murder and inhumanity. Quite the opposite, really. I need you, dear reader, to get an idea for exactly how terrible the circumstances of my family were so that you can understand how amazing their ability to persevere truly is.

“… in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
- Anne Frank