If Only My Father Could Choose to Deny the Holocaust

New York Times

3 days ago

At 96, my father is one of the last living Holocaust survivors. He also has Alzheimer's. The disease has not brought him the forgetting that would be a gift to him.
Alzheimer's progresses in a pattern that erodes the mind in reverse, stripping away recent memories first, then advancing into the regions that regulate emotion and suppress fear. Early memories, especially those charged with deep emotion, tend to last the longest.
So now, with his brain's defenses weakened, the horrors he experienced as a child in a Jewish ghetto in Poland surge through him unfiltered. They come without warning, intruding even in moments of joy, as if he's reliving them.
The growth of Holocaust denial and antisemitism presents a brutal irony. The people tormented by their memories can't forget, and too many of those who should remember choose not to do so.
My father is not alone in his suffering. A large study by researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel found that Holocaust survivors were about 21 percent more likely to develop dementia, probably owing to the lasting neurological and physiological effects of extreme trauma and deprivation.
My father was 11 when the Nazis invaded Poland, and he had to start wearing a yellow star of David on the front and back of his clothing so that it could be seen from both directions. He and about 200,000 Jews in Lodz were eventually sealed off behind walls and barbed wire. In the ghetto my father and his family faced starvation and disease, and were forced into labor. My father worked in a shoe factory that supplied the German military. Dozens of his family members were tortured and killed.
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