To remember their suffering is to recognize the danger and evil that are possible whenever one group persecutes another; … know that wherever prejudice, discrimination, or victimization are tolerated, evil like the Holocaust can happen again.
—New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston
I have been here to this memorial before, but today I wept as I walked through, thinking especially of my great-grandparents, Raphael Alfandary and Lea Caraco.
They escaped Berlin for France soon after Kristallnacht, and remained mainly in hiding, first in Marseilles and then in Nice. Their last place of hiding was in Les Moussieres, in the Jura mountains in France, about an hour across the border from Geneva and the safety of Switzerland which they never reached.
Raphael was tortured and later shot and killed by the Nazis while in hiding in France. Lea was transported to Auschwitz in 1944, and died during the death march out of Auschwitz in 1945. There is, I am told, a monument or memorial in Les Moussieres, naming Rafael and three other men executed.
