Germany's parliament commemorates Holocaust victims

Sports journalist Marcel Reif, whose father was a survivor of the Holocaust, has told German lawmakers about how his father did not speak about the persecution he experienced under the Nazis. 

"My father was silent. Not a word about everything he had experienced and survived. He didn't speak and I didn't ask."

It was only after the death of his father that Reif's mother would tell him about the reason for the silence, he told the Bundestag.

"It shouldn't be the case that his children too be haunted and tormented by the terrible shadows that had darkened and destroyed his childhood and youth," he said.

"We shouldn't suspect that every postman, baker, and tram driver is a possible murderer of our grandparents. It had to be a protected, unburdened, carefree childhood. He didn't want to open this locked room in our home, not even a crack."

Reif said he eventually did realize that his father had conveyed something of his experiences in a few words of wisdom.

"At some point, I almost suddenly realized that my father had spoken after all, and told me and conveyed to me what was important to him; what he had saved, what he had distilled as an essence from the inhumanity of the captors and murderers."

"I remember more and more every day how often he gave me this sentence — sometimes as a warning, as advice or even as a reprimand. Three words only in the warm Yiddish that I miss so much: 'Sej a Mensch!'  — be a human being!"

Members of the German lower house have listened to a musical interlude with a recital of the work of Günter Raphael — part of a tradition of the Bundestag listening to music suppressed by the Hitler regime.

Under the Nazis, Raphael was declared a "half-Jew" and lost his position at the church music institute in the city of Leipzig. 

Raphael was banned from working in 1939. His compositions were no longer published and boycotted.

Holocaust survivor Eva Szepesi has been telling lawmakers in the Bundestag about how she slowly started to learn to speak about her experiences.

Szepesi, who talks to schoolchildren about what happened to her, arrived as a 12-year-old at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

"I had no idea, then, that my mother and my brother Tomasz had arrived there four months before me and were gassed upon arrival," she said.

Szepesi was at the camp when it was liberated by the Soviet Red Army, and eventually went to live in Germany where her husband had been working and she had a family. 

"For 50 years I did not speak about what happened to me and then I slowly started to write it down. When I read, many students at schools ask me 'How can you live in the land of the perpetrators of these crimes?'"

"I say 'It's my fate. In the beginning, I was very afraid of being here but I cannot hate. I received too much love as a child to do that.'"

"Every day I think of my murdered family and I often wonder why I survived. It has become the meaning of my life to speak for all of those who can no longer speak," she said.

"Believe me, it is not easy at the age of 91 to stand here and speak to you, but if I can reach even a few people with my words then it's all been worth it."

Bundestag President Bärbel Bas has opened events in the German parliament to remember the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. 

Bas noted that a plethora of questions tormented the survivors of Auschwitz and other death camps.

"For the survivors and their families there are many difficult questions. How can you continue to live if you've survived Auschwitz?"

"How and should you pass on your memories of the Holocaust to others? How, as a child and grandchild, do you deal with the pain of your parents or grandparents?"

"Many were silent about what they had gone through — that seemed to be the only way they could cope." 

"Many suppressed these memories to try to find a balance in what looked lke a normal life. Others wanted to protect their children from these atrocities."

"Many were the only survivors of their families, so on top of the pain of what they had gone through, they felt guilt as well. Why had they survived and none of the others?"

Ahead of the event, veteran sports journalist Marcel Reif spoke about how he could not watch documentaries about the Holocaust on television. Reif is a representative of the second generation of victims. His father survived the Nazi mass murder of European Jews.

"I can't watch it because I immediately think: It could be my grandparents or my relatives who are lying up there on the mountain of corpses," said the 74-year-old to the German mass-circulation Bild newspaper. "I don't close my eyes — but I close my eyes to the detail. I can't deal with that."

German lawmakers have gathered in the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. 

The ceremony comes after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on January 27 and was marked with events across Germany on Saturday. 

Bundestag President Bärbel Bas was to speak at the special gathering of lawmakers on Wednesday.

Holocaust survivor Eva Szepesi, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp as a child, is expected to share her story with the politicians. 

Marcel Reif, whose father barely survived the Holocaust, will speak for the so-called second generation.

Over the weekend, Chancellor Olaf Scholz urged vigilance as Germany marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He called for a determined fight against antisemitism and racism.

"'Never again' is every day," he said in a weekly video published on Saturday. "January 27 calls out to us: Stay visible! Stay audible! Against antisemitism, against racism, against hatred — and for our democracy." 

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May 1945, Germany. The Nazis have been defeated; the concentration camps were liberated. But tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors remain in the land of the perpetrators. DW tells the story of their struggle to rebuild their lives — and the present-day campaign to keep their memory alive.