‘Tell Them I Was Not Afraid’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/opinion/germany-fascism-jews-family.html

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HAMBURG, Germany — For years Raya Mazin’s slim memoir sat on my shelf unread, the sort of book familial duty prevents you from throwing out and emotional dread keeps you from reading. Raya’s life had been an eventful one. It began in 1919 in the Latvian port of Liepaja, also known as Libau, and ended in Israel nearly 96 years later. In between came the Holocaust.

On Tuesday, I finally took the book down and read it in one sitting. I had a reason. Alexander Gauland, a member of the Bundestag and co-leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), this country’s third-largest political party, had said in a weekend speech that “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”

I needed to learn anew just what that “speck” had meant for my extended family.

Rachel Westerman — that was Raya’s birth name — was my maternal grandmother’s first cousin; their mothers, born Baskind, were sisters. Her memoir recalls a happy Jewish childhood during Latvia’s independence between the wars. When the Soviets took over in 1940 she was living in Riga, the capital, studying and acting and being wooed by a journalist and playwright named Grisha, her future husband.

The Russian occupation brought midnight arrests and deportations. The Nazis, who invaded the following June, brought mass slaughter and enslavement.

Raya’s father, Shmuel, was arrested along with the other Jewish men on his street in Liepaja on July 14. He “kissed my mother and took his walking stick with him to the jail,” Raya wrote. “Later the men were taken to the lighthouse and shot.”

Raya’s older brother, Abrasha, was arrested on Oct. 1 and murdered about a week later, most likely by Germany’s Latvian henchmen. “Bye, my girl, I hope we meet again,” were his last words to Raya. His wife, Zina, was murdered as well.

Grisha’s entire family — his green-eyed mother, Bella, his older sister, her three children — were murdered in Riga “in the first days of the German occupation.”

Raya’s mother, Haya, and two of her sisters, Becka and Ethel, survived a little longer. On Monday, Dec. 15, 1941, they and thousands of other Jews were taken to the women’s prison in Liepaja. From there, in the freezing cold, they were marched to a nearby beach called Skede, forced to strip to their underclothes, taken to the edge of a trench, made to strip naked, and shot in groups of 10. After three straight days of methodical slaughter, 2,749 Jews — mostly women and children — had perished.

The victims were photographed in their final moments. Gauland may want to celebrate “1,000 years of successful German history,” but all the glories of Goethe or Beethoven crumble to nothingness next to what happened on that beach.

What about Raya? She and Grisha had barely escaped Riga under heavy German fire. They wound up in Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan, where he enlisted in the Red Army and was badly wounded in action. In 1945 they were reunited in Riga, and Raya set about discovering what had happened to her family.

One of the handful of Jewish survivors of Liepaja (out of an original population of 6,500) had known Raya’s mother and had tried to help her. “I brought your mother a work certificate attesting that she was working and did not need to go with the rest,” the survivor told Raya.

“I begged her to take the paper, but she told me: ‘I will not take it. My husband is already gone. My sister, Becka, is terrified, and we will go together. Just know that I am not afraid.’ ”

She added this:

“If you meet any of my children, tell them I was not afraid. Tell them to continue living knowing that I was not afraid.”

In 1972, Raya emigrated to Israel, which is where I came to know her. She had taken her mother’s words to heart and had the steady gaze of a woman who feared nothing because she had seen the worst.

The Alexander Gaulands of the world would not have surprised Raya. Every generation has its demagogues to target minorities, extol a mythical past, and minimize or disavow historical crimes. It paves the way for the crimes of the future.

We are witnessing the return of those demagogues today — in the Philippines, Italy, Hungary, Poland, France and the United States. Germany, too. I have come to love this country that has been my home for much of the past year, and I have no patience for the idea that guilt carries over from one generation to the next.

But memory, vigilance, and a sense of responsibility must. For Germans, that requires wiping clean from their Parliament that disgusting speck of avian foulness known as Alternative für Deutschland the next time they go to the polls.