This year I’ve been tweeting extracts from my Oma’s 1943 diary (follow me @MyMischlingFam). The diary is an interesting mix of harrowing wartime experiences and mundane teenage angst. I think that interacting with it on a near-daily basis has really brought me closer to my Oma, what she was like as a 16 year-old, and … More Rosenstraβe
I spent a while thinking about what blog I would write for Holocaust Memorial Day. The theme this year is ‘Be the Light in the Darkness’. The blog I posted in February last year, about the different ways people helped my Oma’s family, would have been perfect for it. When I looked down my list … More Tante Liesel
I’ve been planning today’s blog for a long time. I want to tell the story of ‘Aunty’ Jeanne, a woman whose World War 2 experience has always fascinated me, but it feels like there’s so much I don’t know. Jeanne and her husband didn’t have children – like many other Jewish couples in central Europe … More Jeanne & Ernst Part 1: Staatenlos
Doing this research is hard. Reading my Oma’s diaries and memoirs can be pretty depressing, and the more I learn about the whole period, the bleaker it seems. My family – although temporarily exempted from the mass deportations of Jews – lived under harsh restrictions, with increasingly meagre food rations and in constant fear for … More Small acts of kindness
January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK – in 2020 it marks 75 years to the day since Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi’s largest concentration camp, was liberated. The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is ♯StandTogether and the organisers are encouraging people to take part online, by sharing information about someone who died … More Onkel Fritz
My Oma (my mum’s mum) kept diaries for most of her life and we recently found a whole box of them in our attic. Her diaries are the type I’ve always wanted to be able to keep up – notes of what she did each day, with a couple of lines about more personal things. … More Oma and the Rosenstrasse Protests
