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This Is How I’m Teaching My Kids About The Anti-Semitism They’ll Face
How do you tell your children that if they’d been born just six decades earlier they probably would have been murdered? Or, if they were lucky, have to be hidden by strangers and live in fear of discovery, far from the protection of their parents?
My children grew up in Amsterdam. For four years we lived in the street where the Gestapo had been located in the city. Our street was also where the ‘Central Office for Jewish Emigration’ and the Department IV 4B were based – where bureaucrats organised the mass deportations of the city’s Jews. According to the US Holocaust Memorial museum, there were 79,000 Jews living in Amsterdam before the war. Eighty percent of Dutch Jewry perished.
Amsterdam was a fun place to bring up my children. They paddled and swam in pools, swung on zip wires, played in playgrounds and sandpits, on slides and climbing frames. We drank hot chocolate and ate poffertjes – little pancakes dusted with icing sugar. We went to the big art museums, and to the zoo.
Sometimes I would think about Jewish children exactly like mine, who lived in homes just like ours, whose lives closed down in the 1940s. First banned from schools and playgrounds, then, if they couldn’t escape, desperately trying to hide. In our home’s big basement, I would imagine putting up a false wall, trying to keep children quiet, hiding, terrified for years. Who would feed us? How would we survive?
Growing up Jewish in leafy Hertfordshire, I didn’t suffer from overt anti-Semitism. No one shouted “Christ killer” at me in the street, unlike my husband on the way to school in a working class area of Manchester, and no one ever threw pennies at me, like his fellow students did in Oxford University bars.
