Today I am bitter. I am bitter because today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. I am bitter because on this Day, my remembrance and showing the personal face of the lasting effects of the Shoah has been ignored in favor of platitudes from “Blue Checks” as if their comments were all there is.
My grandparents were amongst the first of the 250,000 souls murdered at Sobibor. In 1942.
Machiel Willem Nathans
Lawyer.
WWI Resistance- helped Allies escape Europe
One of the first 10 arrested when the Germans occupied The Hague.
Rosa Erna Weijl Nathans and my father, Marcel Willem Nathans.
I am bitter. I never had the opportunity to love them. Nor the rest of the immediate family who perished wholesale in the camps of Poland in1942. Cousins I would never meet. Save for one who survived Auschwitz. I trace my family tree, and while I know the name of my 8th great grandfather on my father’s side, only 2nd — 4th cousins and cousins so distant, I could marry them without repercussions remain. One direct relation won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry & Physics in then1970’s, but my dad wasn’t sure if we were really related even though the surname was the same. Surviving will do that.
My father remained in contact with one of the women who worked for his father. She was the only link for him to his father.
Sobibor… Sobibor. Where the Jews who had nothing to lose rebelled against their captors in 1943 and even though the rebellion failed on one level. on another, it succeeded. The camp was closed, the gas chambers, and every single building was destroyed leaving not a trace of its existence.
Sobibor. 1942
Sobibor. 1943
Sobibor
my father is one of the Oral Histories at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
USC Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Marcel Nathans catalogue info:
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/vha30830