Yom Kippur's Meaning to the Son of a Schindler Jew

Featured in The Times of Israel blog

On Yom Kippur day, October 1993, my rabbi’s sermon in synagogue was the story of the upcoming release next month of the movie “Schindler’s List.”  It had been five years after my mother passed away.  At the end of the Rabbi’s speech that day, my father who was sitting next to me in synagogue leaned over and told me something that she never did.  It was six words that I would never forget – “Your mother was on that list.”

In synagogue that day, 40% of the congregation were Holocaust survivors. Some I knew personally having lived in the neighborhood where the synagogue was located growing up.   I can’t even imagine what they might have been feeling, hearing in their schul the first major story of the Holocaust that Steven Spielberg had turned into a movie. Most importantly, it was a story of a Nazi German saving Jewish lives. A person who turned righteous when so few did, in history’s darkest period. If some of those survivors might have been like my mother, who were traumatized and hated all Germans, could hearing this story have changed anything for them? I have to believe it might have reconciled at least some of what they felt. How could it not?

My mother had mentioned to me several times what she knew of her parents and six brothers and sisters that were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. I also listened to the atrocities she lived through in the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland led by Amon Goth.  He was the camp’s SS Commander – “The Butcher of Plaszow.”  But she never told me that Oskar Schindler had saved her life from the fate of 6 million other Jews in the Holocaust.

Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year in the Jewish religion, and I have always felt is the commitment to a reconciliation of the heart, the repentance and forgiveness foe our sins.  After a lifetime of hatred for my stepmother and every other German, I learned on Yom Kippur day that my mother and over 1200 Jewish lives were saved by a Nazi German. How much more could that have meant for me.  It led me to finally realize that every bit of my mother’s vengeance for my stepmother and all other Germans she’d inflicted upon us, that penetrated too far inside me and destroyed my brother was never deserved.

One of Steven Spielberg’s intentions for the girl in the red coat in “Schindler’s List was to represent how the Holocaust was visible to the world – “as obvious as a girl in a red coat, but too many ignored.  I’ve felt the memoir I’ve written “In the Midst of Darkness” being what I know of my mother’s teenage life as a Schindler survivor, which confronts Intergenerational (“Second Generation”) Trauma due to the holocaust, manifested in hatred as a form of racism is what my brother couldn’t see and probably even ignored due to how we grew up.

What I learned on Yom Kippur about my mother opened myself to really see the meaning I feel of the holiest day of the year in the Jewish faith.  It let me find lasting reconciliation I needed for my lifetime of hatred of my stepmother and every other German that I couldn’t have done before.  The learning by my past that I’m always especially reminded of on Yom Kippur day – resting in never losing hope that even In the Midst of Darkness, “we can still overcome what pulls us apart.” It’s what Oskar Schindler did for my mother and so many other Jewish lives he saved that no one else would.  How more important can that be for our world today being what I hope is often seen in the story I’ve told – living in an era that has never been more divided than since the Holocaust.

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