One man whose family were on Schindler’s list chatted with the son of an SS officer

A survey on Holocaust awareness in Ireland shows that 9% of adults between 18 and 29 believe the calamity to be a myth. Photograph: Michael Dalder/Reuters

Repair and restoration can only be achieved with meaning by embracing the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators.

A survey on Holocaust awareness in Ireland shows that 9% of adults between 18 and 29 believe the calamity to be a myth. Photograph: Michael Dalder/Reuters

Holocaust Remembrance Day holds special significance for me this year, the first to take place beyond the lifetime of my mother Monika Sears, who died last month. With my direct link to the Holocaust no longer within living memory, the responsibility to remember has definitively passed through a one-way door.

Remembering seems even more urgent now as a new survey on Holocaust awareness in Ireland, commissioned by the US-based Claims Conference, shows that 9 per cent of adults between 18 and 29 believe the Holocaust to be a myth, while 19 per cent believe it was exaggerated. However, 92 per cent of adults would like more Holocaust education in school. We must feed this appetite for knowledge. Learning about the Holocaust will make society more reflective and more compassionate. So too will dialogue.

And so will friendship, like the ones I have forged with the children and grandchildren of Nazis, and the long, intimate relationship between Germans and Jews.

The Jews of Germany were the most integrated of all European Jewry. Eleven thousand German Jews were killed in the first World War, fighting for the Kaiser. Lieut Hugo Gutmann, a Jew, recommended a certain Adolf Hitler for the Iron Cross in 1918. Ashkenazi, the term used to categorise most central and eastern European Jews means German in Hebrew. So German did the pre-war German Jews feel that it is more accurate to describe them as Jewish Germans.

Yiddish, my Polish grandfather’s mother tongue, is 800 years old. Written in Hebrew, it sounds much like German. My maternal grandmother was also Polish but she did not speak Yiddish. She spoke fluent and accentless German, which helped to conceal her Jewish identity during the Nazi occupation.

I learned German at school in the 1980s. My teacher wrote in one report that my accent was perfect (practised by mimicking Nazi war villains in the movies) but doubted that my grasp of the language would ever catch up; I fear he was right. Humour was the only therapy in a childhood where the trauma of the Holocaust surrounded us in silence. Germans and Jews.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that to understand life, one must look backwards, but to live life, one must look forward. A 19th-century man of deep faith, he hadn’t bargained for the Holocaust, which, along with much humanity, chewed up philosophy, religion and, in the words of Auschwitz survivor Rabbi Hugo Gryn, took each one of the Ten Commandments and turned it on its head.

The opposite of Kierkegaard’s maxim sometimes rings more true. It is not a case of wishing to live in the past but rather to repair and honour a past damaged by violent rage so intense that we are still measuring the fallout, 80 years later. And for me, the work of repair and restoration can only be achieved by embracing the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators. Together, we can breathe air into the lungs of the dead, reviving a little of those lives that were confiscated and dishonoured. We can remake, intergenerationally, the friendships and allegiances that were severed and outlawed and rediscover the lost love – love that itself was thrown into the inferno. Jews and Germans.

Last August, I sat in the old Jewish cemetery in Lodz, Poland, my mother’s birthplace. Forming part of the ghetto, it was, remarkably, neither vandalised nor looted. A friend from Germany and I were there to participate in The Encounter, a dialogue group set up in 1992 for the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators, including those who have both a Jewish and a Nazi side in their families. This is not uncommon in Germany, where Jewish assimilation ran so deeply. Fifteen of us in a circle, for eight hours a day for four days, with no agenda, no facilitator. Just trust and time. Germans, mostly, and Jews.

In the cemetery were remains of Jews who had died better deaths, buried here before the Holocaust denied their descendants the niceties of funerals. Somewhere here were my relatives, but I could not find them in the inscriptions worn on half-collapsed headstones. My friend pointed to the giant mausoleums of the wealthy Poznanski and Szilberstein families amid a sea of ordinary tombstones. “You see,” he said with a knowing wink, “not all Jews were rich”. Germans and Jews.

The Encounter took place in a facility of the University of Lodz, deep in Lagiewniki Woods where my grandfather, Pawel Rozenfeld, had been shot in November 1939. He was out there, somewhere among the silver birches. One evening, a group of us walked along the road to a bar. Ahead of me was a man, both of whose parents and three grandparents were on Schindler’s list, laughing and joking with the son of a notorious SS officer. And I was left thinking about Germans and Jews and how bonds made in the Encounter pull on us with tidal intent, constant and irrepressible.

At the end of October, I visited Dachau, where many Jews were interned during Kristallnacht in 1938. Established in 1933, Dachau became the training college for the “Final Solution”, where the techniques for mass murder were developed and trialled. It was from there that many commandants of the death camps graduated. I promised my friend who joined me at the cemetery that I would accompany him to Dachau.

His father had been incarcerated and tortured there in 1937 for speaking out against the regime, having been found guilty of high treason, before being conscripted to the Wehrmacht. His son perceives his father as both victim and perpetrator. Dachau is the heart of darkness for both father and son. It is here that the son sees his father at his most vulnerable. At 80 years of age, with roles reversed, he offers his father salvation.

He has visited Dachau frequently. With no small reference to Viktor Frankl’s paradoxical intention, where fear is demystified through direct confrontation, Dachau has become a place of tranquillity, a place where violence can no longer happen because we, the heirs of violence, decree that it cannot.

The descendants of Nazis cannot honour their Nazi ancestors, but by honouring Jewish victims, a mysterious and magical act of restorative love is unlocked.

We are not Germans and Jews, not even fathers and sons – just human beings. We spent a day together that neither of us will ever forget; his very first visit to Dachau with a Jewish friend. A German and a Jew.

Oliver Sears is the son of a Holocaust survivor and founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland.

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