The Holocaust Started With My Great-Uncle’s Murder
Here is the foundational narrative on which I was raised: In March 1933, my great-uncle Arthur Kahn walked out of his apartment in Würzburg, Germany, for what was supposed to be a short Easter-break trip to see relatives. He was 21, training to be a doctor. He didn’t know it, but his name had been placed on a list of students suspected of Communist ties. He had none, but he was arrested in Nuremberg. A few weeks later, he was transferred to Dachau, which had just opened as a prison. Adolf Hitler had been in power for 10 weeks. Within 24 hours of his arrival, Arthur was killed—believed to be the first shot among a group of four Jewish men and the Holocaust’s first Jewish victim.
I learned about Arthur from the elder of his two surviving brothers—Herbert Kahn, the man I called Opa. Arthur died on Passover; at the time, Opa was 12. During the second seder, when I was a child, the whole table would seem to brace itself for his palpable despair. I liked it better when Opa would sidle up and tell me stories. Arthur was a meticulous draftsman. He was a state chess champion. He had hoped to be a cancer researcher, just as the field was first developing.
Opa died three months before I graduated from college. It was a shock to realize that I was now older than Arthur had ever been. That summer, I tracked down the New York Times article that announced the Dachau murders. Its headline parrots the Nazi lie: “Nazis Shoot Down Fleeing Prisoners.” I read Timothy W. Ryback’s book Hitler’s First Victims, a meticulous account not just of the killings themselves, but of the prosecutor who tried to indict the men responsible for them at tremendous personal risk. He hadn’t believed the official explanation. He couldn’t overlook the obvious—four victims, all Jewish. The Nazis suppressed the case. The killers went free.
I became obsessed. I wanted to know where the police found Arthur in Nuremberg—had he known he wasn’t the right word. I felt too embarrassed to write . Scholars invited me to tour their institutions. I scoured footnotes, submitting files concerning Arthur’s fate to a translator so that I could read them. I took notes on the names of his torturers. I ransacked libraries. I filed research requests. I read about how he bled.
