"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."
"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."
The narrator grew up under a strict prohibition against anything German—no appliances, cars, visits, or holidays—imposed by the mother. The mother's rule stemmed from a childhood trauma: at age eight she lost her own mother on 27 March 1945 when the last German V-2 rocket to fall on London flattened part of the East End, killing 134 people, almost all Jews. The mother connected that bombing to the Nazis' genocidal project and treated the German nation as collectively guilty. The narrator notes that many others, both within and beyond the Jewish community, held or hold the same assumption of near-universal German complicity.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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