AMSTERDAM (JTA) — On a country road steeped in spring blossom, the 5-year-old in the backseat asked a question that sent shivers down our spines.
“Did the farmer plant those trees around his house because his family’s Jewish?” he asked us, his parents, pointing at a farmhouse we passed along the way.
I knew immediately what he meant.
“What do you mean?” I asked anyway.
“So people wouldn’t be able to see them from the road,” he replied.
It was startling evidence of how his mother and I — and perhaps life itself as a Dutch-Jewish boy — have allowed Holocaust traumas to mark his young mind and that of his younger sister.
The post Growing up in Anne Frank’s shadow, my kids have known about the Holocaust since before they could speak first appeared on World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust & Descendants.