When I was growing up. my family didn’t much talk about the Holocaust and I have since learned that, at the time, almost nobody did. Out of shame, I think. On the Jewish side, shame that they let the catastrophe – Shoah – happen to them (although, of course, they really didn’t). On the German’s side, shame that they had let themselves become such monsters (although, of course, not all of them were). On everybody’s else’s side, shame that they were passive bystanders (although, of course, in the end, they weren’t). However for much of Michele’s long lost, just found, family – collectively known as The Cousins – the Shoah was the center of their lives.
When I wrote this, in 2013 after a Cousin’s Reunion at Tahoe, “the Shoah was the center of their lives” was more theoretical than felt. But, now, in Germany, in the company of people whose grandparents were deported and murdered solely because they were Jewish, it is shattering to walk into a recently excavated Jewish Temple, and read the dispassionate, explanatory, signs of the constant Jewish persecution – 3 May 1096, Pogrom by Crusaders; February 1195, Pogrom against Jews for unsolved murder of Christian girl; from roughly 1250, increasing financial burdens; 15th Century, decline of the Community as a consequence of repeated expulsions…starting in 1933, the National Socialists, using force and terror, began to exclude the Jews from public life; the synagogue the community had built in 1837 was destroyed in the Pogrom of 1938; And finally, in a combined action of the heads of the NSDAP administration districts of Baden and Saar-Palatinate, the history of the Jewish Community came to an end on October 22/23, 1940 with the deportation of 51 Jewish men, women, and children. Only 15 of the deportees survived the Nazi terror.
Last night, after our day trip to Speyer to see a truly magnificent Romanesque Cathedral and the aforementioned synagogue, we had dinner in the backyard of the home of Michele’s German Cousins. It was a lovely, warm, night, with children running around, laughing, giggling, while the adults drank wine and French whiskey, talking about the day and the past. Walking to the Cousin’s, just around the corner from their home, I saw my first Stolperstein or “stumbling stone which – which according to Wikipedia, aims to commemorate individuals at exactly the last place of residency—or, sometimes, work—which was freely chosen by the person before he or she fell victim to Nazi terror – and the Holocaust seemed tangible, more relatable, more real, rather than dim history. 
