Answers to Quora Questions by Yair Davidiy
Did anyone have a family member who died in the Holocaust?
https://www.quora.com/Did-anyone-have-a-family-member-who-died-in-the-Holocaust/answer/Yair-Davidiy
(30 March, 2018, 14 Nisan, 5778)
My mother had relatives in Germany who were killed for being Jewish. The family of my mother lived in England but they had family in Europe. Before the war my grandfather helped Jewish refugees who had fled to Britain acclimatize. I now live in Israel and all over the country one finds survivors who lost members of their family. In some cases there were very large families with hundreds of cousins, second cousins, etc, all living close to each other and all killed except one or two. People lost parents, spouses, children, grand-children, etc.
I grew up in Australia and met immigrant Gentiles who had been on the other side and spoke about it in a guarded but quite clear manner. The people who did the crimes are not usually the ones who deny it.
The sister of my father had been a nurse in the British forces. She was on a ship that was captured by the Japanese off Singapore. She never returned from captivity. The family was told that she had died from hunger and that her Japanese captors themselves had been on the verge of starvation.