We Are All Children Here

In her letter Lisa Doser [Correspondence, January 2018] empathized with Paul Mandelbaum’s regret at not having been with his mother the moment she died [“We Are All Children Here,” October 2017]. I feel I must reach out to them both. I once dated a man who took care of his dying grandfather. This boyfriend beat himself up over the fact that his grandfather died while he (my boyfriend) was out drinking with friends. He talked of it often in a drunken stupor, saying, “If only I’d been there, he wouldn’t have died.” But those who love us often linger because we are with them; they don’t want to disappoint us by leaving. Neither Doser nor Mandelbaum need to be forgiven. Their loved ones simply waited until they left the room to leave this world.

I was at the gathering for Child Survivors of the Holocaust that Paul Mandelbaum describes in “We Are All Children Here” [October 2017]. He and I seem to have attended some of the same sessions and even danced past one another and sang together. Being there was part of a commitment I have made since my father passed away five years ago: to identify myself more openly as the child of a survivor.

Due to my grandparents’ foresight and a measure of luck, my father escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager and lived through the war in London, rather than dying in Auschwitz or Treblinka. I lost dozens of relatives in the Holocaust, especially on my mother’s side in Ukraine. What rang true for me in Mandelbaum’s essay was the survivors’ sense of that time as being not so distant: a mirror of the current stirrings of racism and ethnophobia in the U.S. and Europe.