My Father's Book A Legacy of Courage, Resilience, and Hope

When my father retired, he wrote his memoir describing his and my mother's experience prior to, during, and after the period in history referred to as the Holocaust. It includes his and my mother's escape from a concentration camp in Estonia in September of 1944. My mother was the only woman to escape with a group of approximately 20 men...and she was pregnant with me at the time. The word Genocide derives from the Greek: gen meaning people, and cide meaning murder. It is the intentional murder of a part of or of an entire group of people. There have been numerous genocides throughout history: Cambodian, Ruwanga, indigenous peoples in the Americas, Armenian, and others. The Holocaust, the Shoah, which means the destruction in Hebrew, was the intentional annihilation of 11 million people: 6 million Jews, and 5 million made up of Romani (gypsies), homosexuals, mentally and physically disabled adults and children, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political dissidents. Anyone identified as non-Aryan by the German government, led by Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party, between the years of 1939 and 1945, could be targeted for extermination. This genocide was state sponsored and industrialized. It did not begin with bombs and bullets; it began with words, with lies, with propaganda……and with silence.