When I was growing up, I thought of my parents as the lucky ones. So many had perished during the Holocaust that I did not associate that term with them. After all, they had never been carted off to a labor camp or death camp. They were hunted, but they were not caught. Did that count? Clearly, the upending of their lives was traumatic but not equivalent to the tragedy of whole families and whole communities – be they Jews, Romi and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, LGBTQ, disabled, political enemies like German Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats, or members of the Resistance – exterminated systematically. That’s a long list of “others,” isn’t it? When one group is persecuted in a Fascist regime, they are usually not alone for long.
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