Now Is the Time to Tell Them

“I think now is the right time to tell my children about the Holocaust.”

These words rang in my ears as I listened to the father of one child interviewed in front of the Jewish Community Center in the beautiful Granada Hills. He was lucky that his 10-year-old daughter was not hurt, but what trauma did she have to go through? How will Dad explain to her that there are bad guys in this world who hate Jews and want to kill little children?

By the age of 4 or 5, I had already been told what the Holocaust was all about. My father used to translate the Haggadah on Passover from Hebrew into German. While I sat on his lap, I noticed the greenish-blue numbers, partially covered by the hair on his forearm. He talked about bad guys, Nazis and SS men who came to his hometown and took away his family. These tales of horror from my father were blurry in my vision, like the blue number on my father’s arm, but became more defined and clear in the years as I grew up in Vienna, Austria.

I heard stories of my grandmother, who did not know that holding a child in your arms during the sorting process meant certain death; she held one of her grandchildren. My Uncle Chaim could not cope with the fact that his beloved wife and three children were dead. He gave up living, shrunk to a skeleton until he collapsed on the dirt floor and was carried away by the Sonderkommando (special force to dispose of the dead bodies).

The words “gas chamber” became part of my vocabulary at a very early age, because that was the way bad guys got rid of what they considered the vermin of the Aryan race. Cattle cars: Children today associate them with animals transported from one place to the next. I always associated cattle cars with my grandmother being in charge of the waste pail, because she sat closest to the tiny opening on the way to Auschwitz. Next to her my little cousins sat on the woodplank floor and sang of how they believed in God, Ani Maamin, Ani Maamin.

Perhaps you as parents are wondering when is the right time to tell your children. Some of you are hesitant to tell them at all for understandable reasons. Many survivors do not want to relive the horror; some needed to protect their children, and others had only one desire: to raise them in a happy and beautiful world, in America, the land of the free where no one hunted down Jews and murdered them.

And now there is Aug. 10, 1999, in our own San Fernando Valley. This date will be worth remembering. On that day, the bad guy came back and shot at our babies--innocent babies--whose grandparents or great-grandparents probably witnessed similar incidents back in Europe.

When is the right time to tell your children about the Holocaust? It is now. Now is the right time to tell them the tales that I already knew at their age because of the greenish-blue numbers on my father’s forearm.