Giving Thanks

This past holiday weekend involved proclamations of thanks and the creation of family memories. I am lucky enough to come from two very different families with unique histories and cultures. Sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, surrounded by paternal and maternal bloodlines, I was reminded of the ancestral influences that sparked my interest in studying the Holocaust and, eventually, creating my own co-op.

My mom, born on an Air Force base in Germany, grew up in a rather conservative Catholic family with five older siblings and a Colonel patriarch. My grandfather fought in World War II on the American side, despite having German roots. 

My dad, born in New Jersey, grew up in a Jewish household with one younger sister. My grandmother divorced my biological grandfather, won enough money on Jeopardy (yes, the game show) to move my father and aunt, and begin raising them as a single mother. Yeah, my grandmother was pretty cool. Her parents, my great-grandparents, immigrated to the United States prior to World War I, sensing that Poland would no longer be a safe place for Jewish people. Despite foreseeing the dangers of being a Jew in small-town Poland, my great-grandparents were the only ones from their family able to escape. The rest of my great-uncles and great-aunts presumably suffered the same fate as millions of other Polish Jews during the time.

My step-grandfather (on my father's side), whom I knew only as my grandfather despite having no biological relationship to me, also belonged to the armed forces and fought in the American army during World War II. As previously mentioned, this position deployed him to France, where he helped to liberate a concentration camp and re-connect a French Jew with his father.

My Polish-German, Catholic-Jewish ancestry had a variety of experiences during World War II and the Holocaust. That multi-dimensional background is what initially sparked my interest in the Holocaust. I interviewed my paternal grandmother for an 8th grade project about the subject. Her experiences as a woman on the home front, made me interested to learn more about my other grandparents' experiences during this time period. The topic continued to follow me as I began my studies in Sociology and chose to participate in a Dialogue of Civilization that followed the Hitler's rise to power. 

As one of the youngest workers by far at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, I fear that the endangerment of older generations will diminish interest in Holocaust and Genocide studies. Crime and violence gathers much more interest when a party is personally affected, hence why the majority of the employees at the Auschwitz Museum and USHMM are from one of the Nazi-targeted groups. I have my own ancestral biases that brought me to the topic, so I am unsure if I would have participated in the study abroad and subsequent co-op had I not had these influences. Older generations have a large influence on developing genocide prevention interest among the younger generations. The passing of elders, therefore, contributes to a diminishing interest in the topic. 

My Thanksgiving weekend involved the convergence of two sets of families, each with a distinctive 20th century history. I cannot help but be thankful for these family members. For the purposes of this blog, however, I want to highlight the particular gratefulness I hold towards my family's holocaustic histories. It also reminds me that others do not have similar histories and were not able to learn about World War II and the Holocaust from a primary source. It reminds me that there is diminishing interest in atrocity prevention and genocidal studies as the gap between the present and the past grows wider. In a contemporary world in which hate monopolizes communications between individuals, institutions and societies, my Thanksgiving dinner provided humbled delicacies with a slightly bittersweet aftertaste.