The Unspeakable.
Breaking my family's silence surrounding the Holocaust.
By Nicola Hanefeld. To be published on Yom HaShoah, 23 April 2025, Holocaust Memorial Day.
What the book is about:
Researching family history means stepping into the unknown; I discovered that after an old passport (issued in 1935) unexpectedly fell into my life in 2004. The passport owner was my grandfather's older sister, but why had my great-aunt never been mentioned while I was growing up in England? Her name was Grete Lanzer.
Grete's document marked the start of my research journey into my paternal family's tragic past. The unspoken truth about never-mentioned relatives who were German-speaking Czech Jews the Nazis had murdered slowly emerged. In the book, I blend my first-person experiences while doing the research with the history of World War II. I encountered bewildering, sudden shifts in consciousness and was often overcome by stupefying sadness as I drew lost family members out of history, and they regained their identity.
Compelling, unpublished writings of relatives who survived World War II surfaced and revealed the quiet side of the Holocaust: dispossession, involuntary emigration, identity issues, and suicide. The narrative reveals how intergenerational trauma can evolve through silent Holocaust anguish embedded in a family. It explores reasons for the older generation not speaking about the past with younger family members. The Unspeakable also shows how present generations may discover that they know little of their forebears' background struggles and losses. The story is chillingly relevant to the present day.
Pro-democracy / anti-far-right speech at a demonstration in Freiburg on 2 June 2024.
