Always Remember...
Our Koppel Family Heritage Tour in Sopron, Hungary in 2009 with our recently departed Aunt Vera in sun glasses behind the Koppel monument…standing next to our other Aunt Vera in hat and white t-shirt.
Every now and again I see a movie that stays with me, making its point long after the lights come up. One that grounds me in today’s “now” with a whole new perspective.
The soon-be-released film, Nuremberg, is one of those movies.
This week, I saw a premiere of that powerful and important new film. It’s based on a book written by local friend, Jack El Hai. His book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, focuses on the interactions of Hermann Goring and psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, hired by the US military to determine whether members of the former Nazi high command were fit to stand trial.
Not an easy film to watch - but a compelling reminder of a history we don’t want to forget or repeat.
The film reminds us that prior to that post WWII trial, there had never been an international court established to bring the leaders of any country to account for crimes against humanity. That military tribunal made up of the four Allied powers (U.S., French, British, and Soviet Union) established a framework for holding the leaders of aggressor countries accountable for the havoc wreaked on innocent families and communities.
Russell Crowe plays a bone-chilling Goring and Rami Malek is the psychiatrist Kelley, whose relationship to his “patients” was frequently blurred between professional and personal.
The timing of this film is powerful personally as well.
Our family recently lost the last of our relatives who survived the Second World War in Europe with the death of Aunt Vera earlier this month.
Vera was our particularly spunky Aunt, who survived the war in Hungary, then escaped with her mother during the brief 1956 Hungarian Uprising against the strictures of Soviet Union rule.
Vera was the youngest of the Koppel aunts, the bonus matriarchy I inherited when I married Jacques. She was married to Uncle Andre, the youngest of the five surviving Koppel siblings. Uncle Andre survived Auschwitz with many of the well-documented physical and mental health issues of survivors. And he was always kind and wonderful to us.
Before the war, there were ten Koppel children of that generation. Two got out of Europe before they were taken to concentration camps and three survived the camps. The Koppel men all married - or remarried - after the war. Uncle Konchi lost his family in the camps, but met and married Aunt Fifi in the displaced persons camps. Uncle Rudy married our other Aunt Vera and immigrated to Canada. Uncle Alex married Aunt Pearl, the only American of the group. There was Aunt Helen, Aunt Greta, and Aunt Mimi, who was Oskar Schindler’s actual secretary who produced the famous list.
Vera was the first of the Koppel Aunt matriarchy that I met nearly forty-five years ago. I never had to wonder what Aunt Vera thought about anything - she told me whatever was on her mind whenever we got together. That’s one of the many things I loved about her.
Her strong opinions were balanced by an open mind and deep caring for her family. She would listen to a good argument, think a bit, and could change her mind.
I traveled to Hungary with Vera and Andre two times. The first was in the early 1980s, when Andre wanted to return to his home place in Sopron with his son Robert. We were invited to join them, but Jacques was just starting a new position and unable to go. So I went.
As someone born and raised in Ohio, I was surprised with Vera’s caution about candid conversations inside hotel rooms. She was convinced that the secret police had bugs in place and would arrest her for having escaped thirty years earlier. I didn’t understand the depth of that fear then. I do now.
By the time we returned in 2009 for the well planned Koppel Family Heritage Tour, organized by Vera and her granddaughter Rebecca, some of those fears had abated. She led a group of 21 Koppels - nieces, nephews, great nieces and nephews, and cousins - to Budapest and Sopron where we saw the remains of thriving Jewish communities that were no more. And learned the human stories of what had been.
Nuremberg, the film, brought back so many memories from that trip - of the relatives that survived and those who didn’t. And of our fun and feisty Aunt Vera who was the last of the survivors in our family.
See the movie that opens November 7th. The final line, delivered by the U.S. prosecutor is prescient - “We are able to do away with domestic tyranny only when we make all men answerable to the law…so that it can never happen again.”
This is a good time to remember what humans are capable of becoming when any one man is worshipped above all others or above the rule of law designed to contain the worst of human tendencies.