The Guardian – Michael Rosen
“As a very young child, the only inkling I had of the Holocaust was that every now and then my father would say that he’d had two uncles in France who were “there before the war and weren’t there afterwards”. I’d wonder, how could they have just disappeared? How could there only be a nothing? At weddings and wider family gatherings, we would meet his cousin Michael and later we would be told that Michael had been “put on a train in Poland” by his parents, been sent to a prison camp in the Soviet Union, fought with Polish forces in General Anders’ army, and had somehow arrived on our aunt’s doorstep in east London, but had never seen his parents again. Living in the London suburbs of the 1950s, I couldn’t figure out how any of this could have happened. How could you lose your parents?” (more)