Perspective

Today at work a holocaust survivor named Rudi Oppenheimer came in to give a talk about his experiences during World War II. He went from Germany to London and then to Holland, where he and his family were taken to the transit camp Westerbork and then to the concentration camp Bergen Belsen. I have blogged before about how I can’t watch depictions of the Holocaust. But having Mr Oppenheimer standing in front of me telling us about his first hand experiences was something else. He was only 14 and he had to hear the news that his grandparents had been gassed on arrival to the camp. He had to see his parents die of Typhus. He had to live in fear of the SS knocking on his door before they were taken to Westerbork, knowing that it was coming any day now. All the things that I have read about so many times in so many books was there in front of me. It was unbelievable. I read Anne Frank’s diary when I was very young, about 10, and I know it extremely well. Mr Oppenheimer lived down the street from her, and he mentioned the names of people that I know were friends of Anne. He said he used to play in the same park as her, and that he was at Bergen Belsen the same time that Anne and her sister Margot died there of Typhus. He was telling us about the mounds you can see there today, and about the thousands and thousands of bodies buried under each one. He then said that underneath them somewhere are his mum and dad.

What got me the most was firstly that he has very little, if not no resentment towards Germany. He had to flee his home in Berlin when he was a small boy to escape the Nazi regime. Yet he says with perfect composure that most of the people living there now were born post-war so they cannot be held accountable. Obviously I agree with him, but I know from my own grandparents how difficult it is to regain this frame of mind after the war. So the fact that someone impacted so directly from it can say this is incredible. The other thing that touched me the most was his humour. After everything he went through, losing his parents, grandparents, friends, dignity…he still injected humour into his words. How a person can come out of that and still have the essence of themselves is amazing.

It was an extremely harrowing 90 minutes, but I will never forget them. It gave me a lot of perspective in my life, and I think anyone lucky enough to live a privileged life needs perspective sometimes. Mr Oppenheimer said that the worst thing about the holocaust is that humans have not learnt from their mistakes. He definitely made us all think a lot about this, and the importance of keeping in our minds what people go through every single day. He said that the main thing we can learn from this is the importance of protest, and that even if our protests make no difference we should still utilise our freedom to protest to make stands about what we know is right and wrong.

I’m very glad I got to attend this talk and as an Ashkenazi Jew I took a lot from it in a personal way. I cannot believe how truly unlikely my existence is when I think about my heritage and my religion. I need to remember how lucky I am to be alive every day.