For teachers and all wanting to teach or understand Holocaust Memorial Day

What is Racism?


It's a clockmender who left his country to get a better living

and all is fine

until things start changing

there's an invasion

he and his wife run to another town

and the people who are supposed to keep law and order

decide to put him and his wife on a list

and then they decide that they will make them wear a special badge

marking them out as different

and then they decide that they will take all their money away from them

and the clockmender and his wife have nothing much more they can do

but sell old clothes in the market

where they must put a special badge on their stall marking them out

as different

and they send letters to America for help from their relatives

and they hear stories about how people like them are being shot

and transported to places where they never come back from]

so they run again

and they hear rumours of a place where they'll be safe

and they get there somehow

and then someone from the army that invaded

arrives and he hates people like the clockmender

and his wife and he has lists

and with the help of the people

who are supposed to keep law and order

he gets hold of the clockmender and his wife

and he puts them on a train to a housing estate

which has been converted into a kind of prison

and from there they are shipped to a big station

and from there they are shipped out of the country

to a special place where people will work till they die

where people are tortured

where people starve to death

where people fall ill and have no means of being cured

where people are shot

where people are gassed to death

and the clockmender and his wife

are never seen again..




No one in their family knows what happened to them

for years and years

until one of the letters that the clockmender sent to America

turns up

and bit by bit one of the people in the family

finds the books that have the lists of the people

who like the clockmender were rounded up and shipped out

and bit by bit he puts the story together

he doesn't fully know why he's doing this

other than that he doesn't want it to be

that no one knows

he doesn't want it to be that people specialise

in saying that such things didn't happen

so he finds out more and more about the clockmender and his wife

and the clockmender is called Oscar, known as Jeschie

and his wife is Rachel

and Oscar is Oscar Rosen who was my father's uncle

and now you know

what I found out

now you know what I wanted you to know

and now I know

that this isn't something that

no one knows.



[Here's a photo of a Memorial Plaque that has been put up in Oscar and Rachel's hometown and you'll see their names in the top right hand corner. Apologies, I don't seem to be able to make it a live link, so please copy and paste it into your browser and it will become 'live']

http://memorial-genweb.org/~memorial2/html/fr/photo.php?id_source=36913