Lest we forget...

Yesterday we went for a family gathering in a park in Ra'anana. Yoram's mother came with us, but except her and us there were mostly people from Yoram's fathers side, of which most of them I had still not yet met. Yoram's father fled Europe during the Holocaust with his wife and first son. They later got more kids in Israel. After his first wife had diseased, he met Yoram's mother, who was 25 years younger than him, they got married and conceived Yoram and his younger sister. Yoram's father died over 20 years ago. Thus, there are two batches of kids, separated by over 20 years, which means that among other things Yoram has an uncle in his own age, with whom he grew up as brothers.

Yoram's brother was born in 1942 in Europe. When he was a blond toddler, his bright hair colour once saved his whole (and future) family from being captured by the Nazis. The father had figured out that they had to leave their homes, and as they were on the road, they were stopped by German soldiers at some point. The soldiers tried to figure out whether their capture were Jews, but when they saw the totally blond boy they looked at each other and said that "A boy that blond can never be a Jew", and they let them go. What this says about Nazi intelligence I leave free for interpretation...

Not until now, when I live among Jews, I am starting to sense the depth of what centuries of pogroms do to the mentality of a people and I can understand the general "paranoia" among Jews, which ignorant people choose to call it. Not that I don't think that they should work on exercising their imagination more than their memories - everybody should - but knowing history in close-up by meeting Holocaust survivors in person, and at the same time reading stories about opinions like these and these, then I cannot avoid acknowledging that the anti-Semitism is actually out there, and it is very real, and once more increasing. In addition, the ones who claim that everything started with Israel's national policies can be catalogued to the same intelligence level like the Nazis who let Yoram's brother go due to his hair colour.