February 3, 2025

We met Constance Holmes when we participated in the last fall’s Stolen Beam program.

Connie is a founding member of the Reparations Interfaith Coalition and serves on the Episcopal City Mission Reparations leadership team. Here is Connie’s meditation for us on Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 28, 2025.

“I am writing today on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, one month after my birth in 1945. Words fail the enormity of the tragedy of the Holocaust as words fail the enormity of the tragedy of slavery in America and its enduring consequences. The word reparations also fails in its abstraction to address the enormity of these tragedies. How can they actually be repaired?

My mother, born into a Jewish family in Vienna, fled in 1939 leaving behind her beloved grandfather, aged 86. He refused to leave, saying he would not be pushed out of his country by hoodlums and hooligans. Arrested in the middle of the night, he perished, who knows how, in Theresienstadt deep in the woods of Czechoslovakia.  A convert to Catholicism, my mother insisted on my baptism at age 7 against the strenuous objection of my father. She received financial reparations from the Austrian government 45 years after the invasion of Austria. I moved to the Bay Area to take care of her for the last 16 years of her life.

Every month, after the “Vienna money” arrived, she would take us out to lunch and then to pray at the Catholic church across the street. Sitting in the pew, she would say she appreciated the money. However, the acknowledgement of the enormity of the tragedy made it possible to approach even imagining forgiveness of the perpetrators.

May her memory, and the memory of all those who perished, be a blessing.”

Thank you, Connie, for sharing your memories and family experience with us at Emmanuel.

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin