In 1951 the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) set the date of a week after the seventh day of Passover as Yom Hashoah Ve-Hagevurah (Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and teh Heroism).  The date marks the anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.  Today in celebration of that day, my husband and I went to Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and listened to two people deeply affected by the Holocaust tell their stories.

Marga Dieter told her story of being a young child in Germany during World War II.  She was born in 1939 and as a young child spent time hiding in bomb shelters as her country was bombed.  At one point in her life, her mother was taken away by the SS because one of her brothers had reported something her mother said or did.  Her father served in the German Navy.

Zella Brown is the daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors.  She spoke of growing up hearing her father talk about being in thirteen concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and seeing his pictures of what had happened in the camps.  Her father was one of the few concentration camp survivors who told his story to everyone who would listen.

The two women were part of a seminar at Harvard University in 1992 when Jews and Germans shared their stories.  Marga spoke of being ashamed as she heard the stories from the Jews and not really knowing how to share her story. 

Obviously the two stories are very different, but each has a valid story to tell.  One of the things said early in the presentation was that nothing we do can bring back the people who were killed or change history.

It was encouraging to see the friendship and respect between these two women, but I do have a few observations which probably do not go along with the spirit of the event.  There is no moral equivalency here.  I had the impression that Marga’s family did not support Hitler, and she explained some of the events that allowed him to rise to power.  But the fact remains that he rose to power and no one inside Germany successfully stopped him from building the concentration camps and killing innocent people.  The part of the presentation I disagreed with was the idea that war is not the way to solve anything.  My question at that point becomes, “How do you suggest we should have dealt with Hitler?”  I am not sure anything other than war would have worked.

War is a terrible thing, and what happened in Germany during World War II was a terrible thing–both for the Jews and many innocent German people.  We cannot change that, and I applaud these two women for speaking out so people can hear the pain caused by war.  Unfortunately, we live in a less than perfect world, and every now and then you have to fight to stop evil.  If the German people had successfully killed Hitler after it became obvious what he was doing, World War II might have been avoided.  Other than that, I think that World War II was inevitable after Kristallnacht in November of 1938.