Ihr Seid Nicht Vergessen: A Chronicle of Memory of the Dreyfus Family

The narrative in this book moves backwards across the generations from two brothers - George and Richard Dreyfus - who came from Germany to Australia as children on a Kindertransport in 1939. The circumstance of their forced migration situates the story squarely in relation to the Second World War in general, and the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust in particular. The Dreyfus family as it survives and thrives in the world today has been shaped by one inescapable fact: those who did not leave Germany and Europe by 1941 at the latest all died. Viewed more broadly, the European Dreyfus family provides a template for German-Jewish history across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It offers up two prototypes. On the one hand, we find families living in small towns or village communities, often engaged in small-scale commerce or working as itinerant agricultural middlemen, as horse-traders or cattle handlers. As emancipation and the removal of previous restrictions limiting the number of Jews in any town enabled Jews to migrate freely to cities in the second half of the nineteenth century, the urban Jew - the second prototype - became representative of German Jews in general: assimilated, secular, well-acquainted with German culture and with a greater degree of wealth and education than the average German, sharing many of the values of educated bourgeois Germans. These Jews were manufacturers, merchants and bankers. Photographs and descriptions of business premises, apartments and houses bear witness to the success and prosperity of these families in the years before the Third Reich, to a way of life and a culture that was irretrievably lost. The purpose of this chronicle is to capture as much as is possible of the rich 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 remembering is discomforting and confronting. In the words of Immanuel Kant, "Tot ist nur, wer vergessen wird" [Only those who are forgotten are dead].