Born in 1946, the trauma of Hitler’s genocide was implanted in my marrow, long before I had cognition to understand it.
I grew up in safety and privilege. I lived in a Jewish neighborhood. The quota systems from before the war had largely gone away. The best public schools were free to go to. There would be no bar from society to keep me from going to college, to medical school. All Americans were eating bagels. We were accepted.
But I never felt entirely safe, knowing that Jewish German citizens who were loyal to their country, who had even won medals of valor fighting for Germany in World War I, were not safe, that their government and neighbors turned on them, pronounced them as “the other,” the “enemy,” and sent them to their deaths in concentration camps.