Thread by @AmySpiro

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Today I want to tell you a story you probably haven't heard before. It's a personal story, but it also reveals some aspects of Holocaust history that you may have never known. 

Thanks for listening.

My great grandfather, Paul Holzer, was born in Germany in the late 19th century.

He served in the German Army during World War I, received his doctorate and his rabbinic ordination in the 1920s, and served as a congregational rabbi in Hamburg.

On the day Kristallnacht began in 1938, he was warned not to go to the synagogue where he served as rabbi.

He ignored the warning and went anyway.

He was arrested by the Nazis that day and was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany.

While he was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen, his wife, Gretel, made the decision to send their three daughters - including my 13-year-old grandmother - on a Kindertransport to England.

She didn't know the fate of her or her husband. But she wanted her children out of Germany.

In January 1939, he was released from Sachsenhausen, on condition he leave Germany within 10 days.

According to the biography of my great aunt, he spoke of his experience in the camp on the night of his release, and he "never, ever talked about that part of his life again."

Paul and his wife Gretel fled to England after his release and were briefly reunited with their three children. Later that year, their daughters were evacuated from London when Britain joined World War II.

But his freedom in the relative safety of England was short lived.

In early 1940, Britain began to round up "enemy aliens" - aka German citizens - and sent them to be imprisoned at various internment camps.

My great grandfather, along with many other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, was sent to the Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man.

Just over a year after he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Paul Holzer was once again imprisoned, this time by the British, who viewed him as an enemy for being German.

Thousands of Jewish German refugees, many of them camp survivors, were held there.

Even during his time in the internment camp, Rabbi Dr. Paul Holzer continued to serve as a religious leader.

When a Torah scroll arrived in the camp, he urged all the Jewish inmates - no matter their religious observance - to join in a celebratory service.

Ahead of the High Holidays in 1940, he wrote a greeting in the Hutchinson interment camp newspaper.

He noted the suffering and sadness over being imprisoned and separated from family.

But he urged that religion could provide strength, stability and hope for the inmates.

During his time in the Hutchinson internment camp, he met two men who would eventually become his sons in law - including my grandfather.

In 1941, he was released from the camp and returned to life in England, where he served again as a communal rabbi.

After the war, Paul Holzer was one of a few rabbis who returned to Germany to tend to the small Jewish community remaining there.

He went back to the country that put him in a concentration camp, that murdered his two brothers - one in Thereisenstadt, another in Auschwitz.

He eventually was appointed chief rabbi of North-Rhine-Westphalia.

He tended to the tiny Jewish communities remaining in dozens of cities there.

He oversaw the rededication of synagogues and the somber commemorations of the all-too-fresh Holocaust. 

jta.org/1954/04/12/arc…

He later retired to London and died there in 1975 at age 83.

Though I never had the privilege of meeting him, it is clear he lived a life of service, of faith and of unwavering dedication to the Jewish people.

The story of Rabbi Dr. Paul Holzer is just one of millions of tales of lives indelibly touched by the Holocaust.

Every single branch of my family was affected.

Every rendering of my family tree has branches that came to an abrupt end in Europe in the 1940s.

My existence today is a miracle.

The existence of every Jew of European descent alive today is a miracle, born of hundreds of other miracles, large and small.

Two-thirds of Jews living in Europe were murdered in the Holocaust. 91% of Jews in Poland were completely wiped out.

Those who survived, in whatever way imaginable, are miracles.

Thank you for reading this story. This tale of one man, one family, one story amid millions.

Please never forget.

Here's the thread unrolled for easier reading... threadreaderapp.com/thread/1221845…