Unfortunately, this is not going to be something that can be easily assimilated. Whether I proved bite-sized factoids or not, the Shoah (which is the word Jewish people use for the Holocaust) you will find is like an onion. The more you learn, the more unwinds. And there is always a bit of an emotional toll on a person when they get to that point in adulthood that they can fully digest the history of it.
I can send you this link to the
United States Holocaust Museum. It is a start, and it is created in such a way as you can take in as much as you need and go back later. This is one of those subjects you might find yourself revisiting over time, so it might be best to have a ready resource.
As a Catholic of Jewish origins I was not left untouched by the Shoah despite the fact that I was born 20 years after the camps were liberated and that my family lived in the United States.
I am the child of “Conversos” mostly, of Sephardic origin. My family was expelled from Spain at the proclamation of the Alhambra Decree of 1492. The Inquisition continued to chase down my ancestors down through the generations into Dutch Africa, across the Atlantic, in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and finally upon our settling what is now known as Monterrey, Mexico. You would think that the Shoah would have nothing to do with me, but you would be mistaken.
All four lines of my family were related to the millions of Sephardic Jews who lived throughout Europe. With the rise of the Nazis these communities were emptied, and none of the European Sephardic communities survived. At the beginning of the 20th century the most widely spoke dialect among the Jews was Judean-Spanish, a language often referred to as Ladino.
About 20 years ago I learned about how much of my family tree was lost in the Holocaust. The numbers are more than 2 million. Less than 1% of them survived. I grew up speaking Ladino, but with the Shoah and the destruction of the Jewish Sephardi communities in across Europe my native language went from most widely spoken among Jews to practically extinct. By the time I was born it was estimated that less than 100,000 Ladino speakers were alive. I didn’t even know I spoke Ladino until 20 years ago. I thought I grew up speaking Spanish very badly. The world had forgotten Ladino, and it would take running into a specialized linguist to uncover this fact about me and my family.
By the time my Jewish ancestry had been fully drawn up in the year 2000 (as part of a Law of Return that was starting to take shape in Spain for Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had been displaced by the Spanish Inquisition), I was given both a marvelous picture of an overwhelming family that lived on the other side of the globe and a horrific tale of how they all disappeared in less than a decade. I had a rich history and great family lineage, but it had dark gaping holes of death in it. In dealing with Spain the Church stepped in to show me the records of the Inquisition where I lost many, many members of my family, and then again history gave me records of the names of uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers, and sisters from the 1930s and 1940s who I would never meet. I even had photographs of some of these most recent family members, and the resemblance was both striking and due to the circumstances of their passing, at the same time quite haunting.
I can’t offer you a perspective of those who went through it or who are children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. And what I do have to offer is more of an empty space that I have recently been made painfully aware of than anything else.
And I can’t say it’s a “Christian perspective” as you put it, in the sense that most Christians are Gentile. What I do have is only very Jewish. There’s no Christian perspective to it. If anything binds me to my ancestors, it is the suffering we have in common. Except for a handful of apologies, some very moving like those from popes, some from far away like those I received recently at the 70 year anniversary of the end of that era, my fellow Christians can’t help but be greatly separated from me on this because the Shoah is something that happened to a people. Except for a handful of Christians who sadly suffered at the hands of the same enemy, the Shoah is uniquely tied in with the facet of me that is Jewish because it was devised as a monstrous “solution” meant for the annihilation of my race.
This is not easy to put into words, and I am sure I’ve offended somebody who has read something here that they believed I have no right to express or that I am wrong about. My apologies, but learning these things has been very, very recent and the spot it made in my life is still raw. I cannot wrap my mind around it, have yet to process it all, and I am sure I can’t say much about it correctly.
