Ihr Seid Nicht Vergessen

The narrative of this book moves backwards across the generations from two brothers – George and Richard Dreyfus – who came to Australia from Germany on a Kindertransport in 1939. The circumstance of their forced migration situates that narrative squarely in relation to the Second World War in general, and the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust in particular. Untimely death dominates the stories of many of these ancestors, relatives whom the brothers never knew. The chronicle of the extended European Dreyfus family provides a template for German Jewish history across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It includes rural Jews, people living in small towns or village communities, who were very different in outlook and lifestyle from those assimilated, secular, affluent, urban Jewish relatives who George remembers better. Using materials from George Dreyfus’s extensive personal archive and the collections of other family members, supplemented by the resources of the internet, the book aims to capture as much as is possible of the story of the European family for the sake of the generations to come, since such history can be so quickly and easily forgotten. In Jewish culture, remembering is a duty, a collective responsibility, a mitzvah, even when – as in this book – remembering is discomforting and confronting. In those familiar words of Immanuel Kant, “Tot ist nur, wer vergessen wird” [Only those who are forgotten are dead].