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How It Happened
Anna Wrobel
October 14, 2014
A German Scholar Ponders Holocaust Pre-History
by Anna Wrobel From the Autumn, 2014 issue of Jewish Currents Reviewed in this essay: Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Pre-history of the Holocaust, by Gotz Aly, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, New York, 2014, 276 pages. SINCE CHILDHOOD, I’VE ASKED why my beautiful grandmother had to die by gas at Treblinka with her younger children trailing; why my other grandmother should be perforated by Stuka bullets in September, 1939; why both grandfathers ended up shot and dumped in mass graves; why my mother’s pregnant sister’s head was split in two by a Police Battalion 101 rifle butt during an Aktion in the middle of the day; why all the others; and others; and others. I lived in a world devoid of grandparents and old people. Much of my life has been devoted to fathoming explanations for unfathomable questions. [caption id=“attachment_32586” align=“alignright” width=“300”]