How I got to give a Shoah lecture on January 27

One cost that I did not take into full calculation when I agreed to do this whole cancer thing (I lie – I never agreed!) was time.

Apart from caring for my family, trying to stay reasonably fit and occasionally sociable, and participating in Jewish life, I have a full-time job. In fact, I would say I have a very full-time job. Although my kids insist on calling me a “teacher” (“Mama, you’re a teacher, you should know what our curriculum is for GCSE computing” or whatever), an academic job is much blobbier. Apart from teaching, there’s research and administration. And let me tell you: you can never publish enough, and the admin duties are here, there, and everywhere, a bit like Hashem in the Uncle Moishe song.

Do I have time to go to an oncologist appointment now and again? Sure. A breast surgeon appointment? OK. How about a scan to check for cancer recurrence? Sounds important. A scan to check on bone density? Vaccinations because I’m higher risk? A visit to the nurse every four weeks to get an injection? A weekly trip to the hospital for physiotherapy?

Even though the physiotherapy helps with the cording that runs down the length of my right arm, a result of my lymphectomy, I can barely fit it into my schedule. Things fall by the wayside.

This year marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I would have liked to have done something grand for Holocaust Memorial Day, maybe give a meaningful lecture to a large crowd, perhaps weaving in the story of my husband’s grandmother’s survival in Auschwitz. But instead I found myself lying on a hospital bed, talking to my physiotherapist.

At first, we were talking about television, that perennial subject of low-stakes small talk between near-strangers. I mentioned I was watching the second series of Squid Game, mostly because my kids had encouraged me to do so. One of us spouted the tired lament about young people being desensitised to violence through TV and video games, but then I sighed, actually thinking about it. “Today is Holocaust Memorial Day,” I said, “And I’m fairly certain the Squid Game violence is no more or less real to them than the Holocaust, which their great-grandparents endured.”

My physiotherapist stopped kneading my arm. “What do you mean?”

I explained at some length: my grandparents in eastern Poland (the ghetto liquidated, Holocaust by bullets, my grandmother the sole survivor of her family), my husband’s grandparents in Hungary and Romania (Auschwitz and other concentration camps, a murdered first wife and child of his grandfather). I talked about all the loss – the siblings, parents, nieces, nephews, cousins, friends. The houses and home towns. The sense of security.

I told her, too, about the aftermath, about how my mother was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, about how my grandfather was diagnosed with brain cancer there, about my grandmother, a refugee in Canada who knew no English, who had to raise her daughter on her own.

My physiotherapist was… dumbfounded.

But she was also very interested. She asked a lot of questions

My physiotherapist was… dumbfounded.

But she was also very interested. She asked a lot of questions. “How did your grandmother escape the ghetto?” I told her my grandmother’s niece, a blonde, pretended to be a Christian girl, and my grandmother her nanny. “How did she survive in the forest?” I explained that she haunted farms, ate the slop left out for the animals. “Why would your grandparents go to Germany after the war if they were Polish?” I didn’t quite know why it was Germany, but I said that must have been what they were told to do; they had nowhere else to go.

I did my best to answer all her questions, which were thoughtful and engaged. “What did your grandmother name your mother?” “Rochel,” I said, “like the niece who saved her life. But when my mom went to school in Canada, she changed it to Rochelle.” “Those are both pretty names,” she said, smiling.

We talked and talked as she softened the stubborn post-surgery cords that creep along the inside of my upper arm, down my forearm, and into my wrists. We talked until I could move with a little more ease.

And then she thanked me. She said she knew about the Holocaust, of course, who didn’t? But she had never met anyone who had a personal connection to it. She said it felt so different to her now. She said she wanted to learn more.

As I cycled home, hurrying to do the work I was (as ever) behind on, I felt better – and not only in my arm. I realised that although I didn’t give a lecture or contribute widely to the commemoration that day, I did, at least, change the way one person thought, and that was meaningful too.