Crying for people you do not know

Well, this is all my grandmother had left of her uncles and aunt and her own grandparents.....

This photo was taken around 1900.   Hard to tell what was going on there.   So if they had converted, I checked into it, you were Jewish to the Nazi's unless the conversion occurred before 1875ish.   I think of that little girl, Elizabeth Klein in the middle and know what part of Hungary they were from and know that most of them got taken directly from their village to Auschwitz.  

I lay down next to my persian cat now at night and think, she never would be laying in a comfortable bed in a warm room with her cat.  She would have been early middle age and if they let her live it would have been in a labor camp.

I know the names of these people, because I asked my grandmother when I was maybe 12 years old.  I had labeled every picture and placed them in an album.  When I asked her who they were she said they were my great-grandfather's family that never came to America.  Later when my grandmother got sick while I was about 17 or 18 with Alzheimer's disease (though they called it senile back then), we found the 1940 something paper about the Nuremberg trials she had saved and the names of a few Nazi war criminals circled.  My mother (her daughter-in-law) said she didn't understand why she saved it.  Someone got rid of it quick. 

My grandmother was not one to save papers, she only saved one other paper it was about my eldest uncle who was mentioned in Stars and Stripes during WWII.  I still have that paper.  My family was one that liked to tidy up bad information anyway.   There were other skeleton's in the closet that we all just went around pretending didn't happen.

Well, Elizabeth this one is for you as well as for me.  I will work hard to make sure I get to that mikvah.  I can only hope that something else happened to you and the rest of your family and not Auschwitz.  I don't know if I will ever know the truth, although I think I do.  I so wish there was someone to ask like my father, but he is no longer with us, so I can't.

I can only surmise someone thinking we "Why do we need to know this information?"  No one knows for sure what happened to them.  We are Christians now-especially my one uncle, so therefore we need to leave these people in the past.

I can't save them, but I can contribute something to our lost past, that is probably all I can do.

Kathy

10th of Tevet, 5770 / י׳ בטבת תש״ע