Debby
Fort Collins, CO
Category: Holocaust

The first time I remember hearing anything about WWII was when I was five years old and was grasping the concept of relatives and extended families. I'd just learned that even grandparents had parents. "Where are my great-grandparents?" I asked my mother.

"Hitler got them," she said simply.

That's how I first learned who Hitler was, along with the word "genocide" and the concept of "evil." My mother's simplicity was so final it frightened me.

My mother was also five years old in her clearest memory of WWII. When the news of Hitler's death came in over the radio she was bouncing a ball outside her apartment building in the New Jersey town where her Jewish immigrant parents had sought refuge two decades earlier from the pograms in Poland. "Hooray!" she squealed, "Hitler's dead!" She threw the ball up in the air.

In her memory, her father catches the ball and stands above her, short but imposing, with a solemn look that puzzles her. "Aren't you happy?"

"We must never celebrate the death of another human being," he explains. "We can be glad that suffering may lessen, but we must never be happy because a person dies."

"Not even Hitler?" By then, when contact with the Polish Bermans had been cut off for years, the American Bermans assumed the worst.

"Not even Hitler."

My mother passed on this story to me—and repeated it often in my childhood—as an illustration of what kind of man her father was, and more importantly of what it meant to live by your Jewish values. If the phrase "Hitler got them" summarizes the effect of the war on my extended Jewish family, the phrase "Not even Hitler" encapsulates the legacy of Jewish humanism that we were supposed to carry on in the U.S.