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DEDICATION

I’M AN ONLY CHILD.

It was customary for young Jewish German adults during the Holocaust to have only one child—often none at all. “Why bring more Jewish children into a world like this?” my mother often asked. Why, indeed.

Papa had an older sister, Tante Beda, who married Ernst Lustig. No children. Papa’s younger brother, roly-poly Onkel Max, my favorite relative, married Jenny late in life. No children. They all died of natural causes in the United States.

Mutti (German for mommy) was the oldest of three girls. The second, Karola, married Jakob Stern. No children. She died in the Riga (Latvia) ghetto on January 6, 1945. Perhaps Onkel Jakob did, too.

The youngest sister, Käthe—Mutti called her the baby—moved to Amsterdam and married a Dutch man, Isaak Wurms. Their only child, my only first cousin, Aaltje, was born in Holland on August 21, 1939, when Holland still seemed like a safe country for Jews.

At the end of October 1939, shortly after Aaltje’s birth, Mutti, Papa and I, a six-year old “adventurer,” escaped from Germany. We stayed with Tante Käthe and Onkel Isaak where I met Aaltje for the first and only time. I held the baby with great love. Everyone reminded me often that this was my only cousin. I couldn’t really play with this babe of two months. How does one “play” with a newborn? At best, one shakes a rattle in hopes of eliciting a gurgle. Did I sit on the carpet with her nestled in my arms? Did I sing to her? Surely, it was the clichéd love at first sight.

The Nazis invaded Holland on May 10, 1940. We don’t know the details of the family’s suffering. Years later, however, while studying records at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, I learned that on April 30, 1943, Onkel Isaak died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He outlived cousin Aaltje by a few months. On February 19, 1943, Aaltje, with her 29-year old mother, was killed in an Auschwitz gas chamber. The Nazi executioners scrupulously documented their evil in a clear script. Aaltje’s age at the time of her murder: 3½.

Cousin Aaltje Wurms

What can I tell about Aaltje Wurms? All I remember is that she was small, an infant, when I saw her last. I can only imagine her life story; what might have been. Might she have become a Pulitzer Prize recipient? A Nobel laureate scientist? Or, might she have become a housewife caring for her own children and grandchildren? She might have grown old, just as I did. She might have grown old with me, my only cousin—just six years my junior.

Parents gone. Uncles and aunts gone. Cousin Aaltje gone. I am an only child. All I have left is the photograph of a child who did not survive the Holocaust.

This book is dedicated to my cousin Aaltje and all the children butchered in genocides.