My calendar tells me today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, which occurs on the anniversary of the start of the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. I grew up in an extremely conservative country (South Africa) where antisemitism was rife amidst all the other prejudices found under apartheid, and where so many people were somehow able to happily live with the contradiction of being holocaust deniers while also regularly wishing aloud that Hitler had done a better job... and regularly reminded me of both views.Most of my mother's family did not survive WWII. After many years of searching, my grandfather found only one distant cousin after the war, and he was the only relative they had found too. The rest of their large Europe-wide family were all murdered.
My calendar reminder has got me thinking of all of them and their descendants... never to be born.