On May 17, 1943 Mathilda van Praag-Cassutto turned 28. Did her family gather around a table with a cake - made from ingredients saved for a special occasion - and sing Yiddish birthday songs in muted voices? Or did they have no reason to celebrate?
That same month the Nazis were rounding up the remaining Jews in Amsterdam, where Mathilda and her family lived, for deportation. 7000 had been demanded to show up at one of the city's squares. Only 500 complied.
Was her family one of the few who had complied and been part of the first wave of deportations? Did they refuse, unwilling to leave their last bastion of home, of familiarity, of their selves and be sent off to camps? Or had they already been sent off earlier on? The details are unfortunately sparse but I conjecture they were probably still in Amsterdam in the summer of 1943. However, those who did not readily submit themselves to the Nazis were forcedly removed from their homes and inevitably deported to Auschwitz.
Mathilda, along with her husband Philip van Praag, her son Frits, her brother Juda and her mother Vrouwtje lived at Tilanusstraat 39 I, Amsterdam. Upon deportation the men were sent off to Dachau, the women and child to Auschwitz.
Unlike me she never had the good fortune to celebrate her 29th birthday. On October 14, 1944 (almost half a year before her birthday) she, along with her 4 year old son were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
As I walked through the camp on my birthday... on her birthday... I thought of her, of who she was, of what her life had been before everything... before having been relegated off to such a cruel death. In the hallways of a barrack I looked upon the pictures of some of the prisoners that had been at the camp, my eyes furtively dancing across the names and numbers in hope that I would catch a glimpse of her.
Is there anyone who would still remember her: a distant relative, a friend, someone carrying the memory of her on? Or was the memory of her extinguished along with her family and anyone else who cared and loved her?
Every waking moment of a person is a testament, and inadvertently a celebration, of one's existence. On our birthday I did not feel the need to celebrate myself. Instead I felt the need to reflect and remember: to remember her and the countless others who lost their lives in concentration camps during World War II. Through the act of remembering life, remembering the lives of all those victims is an act of defiance before the heinous attempts by the Nazis to rewrite the world and its history.
And so I remember life. I remember Mathilda van Praag-Cassutto.
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