I did not write this story to say that Germans are bad and Jews are good. The line between good and evil runs through all hearts. It is, sadly, as easy to become an executioner as a victim. This is the most sobering lesson of war. And it is something the greatest writers on the Holocaust, such as Primo Levi, understood. There were, after all, Judische Ghetto-Polizei, Jewish Kapos, Judenrate, Sonderkommandos and Blockalteste whose contributions to the organization of the ghettos and the death camps kept the crematoriums functioning. The prisoners who lowered themselves to the moral squalor of the SS were soon lost.
I did not write this piece to say that virtue or goodness triumphed after the Holocaust. The Nazi extermination of 12 million people, including 6 million Jews, was a colossal, tragic and absurd waste of human life. I wrote this piece to say that the fierce and protective love of a mother and a father is stronger than hate. It can overcome evil. After the war Lola met a young German man in Spain. "He could have been a soldier," she said. He asked Lola about her wartime experience. She told him. She kissed him on the cheek in saying goodbye.
Where time and light bend and twist in space, perhaps defying the known laws of physics, a mother and a father, fighting to protect their daughter and son from death, still exist in faint particles of light, making visible an iron bond of fidelity. They gave up life to save it. Scarred emotionally and physically -- she rolled up her sleeve as we talked to show me her tattooed concentration camp number, A-14989 -- Lola would nevertheless marry a survivor to raise, love and nurture four children of her own. Emil Rewitz and Helena Rewitz, at least in this small house in Brooklyn, won the war.
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