I grew up in a house where nothing German was allowed. No Siemens dishwasher or Krups coffee machine in the kitchen, no Volkswagen, Audi or Mercedes in the driveway. The edict came from my mother. She was not a Holocaust survivor, though she had felt the breath of the Shoah on her neck. She was just eight years old on 27 March 1945, when her own mother was killed by the last German V-2 rocket of the war to fall on London, a bomb that flattened a corner of the East End, killing 134 people, almost all of them Jews. One way or another, the blast radius of that explosion would encompass the rest of my mother’s life and much of mine.
Of course, she knew that the bomb that fell on Hughes Mansions had not picked out that particular building deliberately. But given that the Nazis were bent on eliminating the Jews of Europe, she also knew how delighted they would have been by the target that fate, or luck, had chosen for that last V-2, how pleased that at 21 minutes past seven on that March morning it had added 120 more to the tally of dead Jews that would, in the end, number 6 million. And so came the rule. No trace of Germany would be allowed to touch our family: no visits, no holidays, no contact. The Germans were a guilty nation, every last one of them implicated in the wickedest crime of the 20th century.
There were other Jews I knew whose parents followed the same prohibition, but few were as strict on the matter as my mother. And yet, though her practice was unusual, her underlying thinking was not. Far beyond the Jewish community, many shared, and perhaps still share, the assumption that I was raised on: that, with just a handful of exceptions, Adolf Hitler found a universally willing accomplice in the German nation. » | Jonathan Friedland | Saturday, September 6, 2025
