Day 11
Jewish Life in Europe after the Holocaust
Dedicated in loving memory of the family members of Edith & Benny Schmidt-Bodner who were murdered in the Shoah. May they never be forgotten.
Recently, over glasses of white wine in a trendy Budapest bistro, a friend of mine, whom I will call Rozsa, told me a story from her childhood that I had never heard before. In the early 1960s, when she was five or six years old, she visited her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, in the small Hungarian town where he lived. He took her to the Jewish cemetery and stood with her in front of the entrance. “See those beautiful letters?” he asked, pointing to the Hebrew.
“At one point I could read them. But then I decided not to. Now can’t, and I regret it.”
The anecdote typifies the experience of many Jews during the post-Holocaust Communist era, when established Jewish communities were organisationally weak, and study or even discussion of Jewish topics was discouraged, if not outright taboo.
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Ruth Ellen Gruber
Ruth Ellen Gruber is an American author and journalist who has chronicled Jewish developments in Europe for more than 25 years. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Poland’s Knight’s
Cross of the Order of Merit, and other awards. She coordinates the web site www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu.
Click here for today’s parallel essay by Anne Applebaum.
