The way to protect oneself against nefarious forces, such as the Inquisition or Nazism, would logically be through family defense and hiding any wrongdoing from the public.
However, the Nazis changed everything.
First, we learned that family ties could be rather dangerous. People, like my grandfather, who survived by sheer luck, did so by breaking away from their families. From the accounts of survivors, a lesson was drawn: the few who survived were those who hid in sewers, forests, peasants’ houses, battlefronts, those who, on every occasion, had to abandon grandparents, parents, and young children.
Even worse was in the camps. To be sent to a labor camp instead of an extermination camp, someone from your family took your place. The survivors were telling the story because the rest of their family went towards death. Those who couldn’t leave a mother, or a younger sister alone ended up in a cloud of gas. The surviving family inherited a wound of betrayals and cuts and would unconsciously pass it on to the new generations.
I know there will be thousands of exceptions, hopefully the majority, but in the unconscious of the generation that survived, guilt remained. Also, the perception that having a family could be dangerous.
The poor Jewish mothers had to kill the children born in the camps. In the movie “Sophie’s Choice,” there 200
was only one chance: to save the child who could work and send the youngest girl to death.
Only in this way have I been able to explain the toxicity of my family. The Holocaust turned mine into a battlefield where the betrayals of the ancestors were inherited by their descendants.
I stayed to take care of my mother who survived for four and a half years. The cancer came back. I had to receive the exam that showed a spot on her lungs, and they told me she had one year left to live.
During this year, my brother didn’t call or come a single day (he did on the day we buried her to see how much he would get) and my sister only made excuses (her lover wouldn’t let her come), so I had to take care of her alone with my partner (that’s why we’ve been together for 38 years; I could never leave the person who helped me take care of my mother).
The day of my mother’s death came and instead of coming to the hospital, she went with Elizabeth or Beto, the new lover. How can you go to a motel when your mother is dying?
Beto’s didn’t have any trauma from the Holocaust and her family didn’t make decisions that saved some and liquidated others. So, Beto would support her descendants in good times and bad, with legitimate and illegitimate and corrupt decisions. Beto defends her family to the death. Derek destroys her own.