Thread by @sarasheridan

So: a short thread about the ongoing effect of the Holocaust (also called the Shoah) cos it's #HolocaustMemorialDay #LightTheDarkness #NeverAgain I grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Edinburgh in the 70s. Nobody mentioned the Shoah. People didn't want to upset or scare kids./1

At the age when most kids learned Santa wasn't real, 1 of my Jewish pals found a video of a BBC doc about the death camps. They shared it. We were terrified. We came from families that had left places (Russia in the 1880s/1910s), Hungary, Germany None of us had realised why /2

My family regularly had summer parties. Big buffet. Music in the garden. Maybe 100 folk. We had a big house. It was at one of these parties I made the connection that some of my parents' friends (ie some of my friends' parents) had survived what had happened. /3

That was cos they had a tattoo on their arm. I began to piece together - some of the women who had accents: had they been effected? Had they? Why hadn't anybody said anything? I tried to ask my mother. The Mammy did not want to talk about this. I asked her friend, Sheva. /4

'We had a big house in Budapest' she said. 'We were rich. Now our children are our riches. We got to have you.' I had no idea what she meant. All the kids were confused. Could the survivors on the b&w newsreel be some of our grannies? Even some parents? Why hadn't they told us?/5

It felt like they'd lied. Mostly I think they didn't have the words. Anyway, an adult explained to one kid, that kid explained to others. But it left me terrified. I had nightmares about being pursued by wolves.About being a nurse and not being able to help wounded soldiers /6

And a deep mistrust of politics as I grew up. If this had happened once, why not again? I cannot lie, the veering to the right of late has been scary for my generation of Jews. This is what we were scared of as kids *and nobody talking about it* Familiar? A wee bit. /7

I know this is difficult to read. It's difficult to write. But I want to say the Shoah scarred more than 1 generation & will take more generations to get over. Everyone lost people. Here's a story from Hugo, who was a wee boy at those parties:

https://twitter.com/hugorifkind/status/1089493440117784578

And lastly just in memoriam. My mother's cousin (who was brought up in the same house as she was and is basically as close as an aunt) married a guy with a limp. Turned out he had been in one of the camps. He was a brilliant chess player & they emigrated to the US where he ...

was a pioneer in Silicon Valley in the early computer industry. He died quite young - he had lots of medical issues resulting from (I think) being experimented on. He was a lovely, smiley, kind man. I wish we'd had him for longer. /ends