{"id":13706,"date":"2026-01-05T15:49:31","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T14:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/?p=13706"},"modified":"2026-08-15T19:46:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T17:46:45","slug":"i-20-history-does-not-repeat-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/i-20-history-does-not-repeat-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"I &#8211; 21 &#8211; history does not repeat itself &#8211;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>History Does Not Repeat Itself &#8211; <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>After 1945, the swastika\u2014the symbol of the German Nazi state\u2019s reign of terror in Europe\u2014disappeared, but the history of murder and humiliation, of corruption and collaboration, the history of everyday acts of cruelty toward others, of emotional coldness and hatred toward family members and neighbors, the history of enrichment through looting and robbery, and the history of lies, betrayal and annihilation remains to this day a largely unknown and deeply buried historical reality within people in the wake of an extreme experience. We must reconstruct this internal reality, if we want to understand this dimension within ourselves.<\/p>\n<p>History does not repeat itself. History leaves its mark on us. Reconstructing it brings us self-awareness. It is up to us whether we understand the reality of our histories, whether our analyses accurately reflect that reality, and whether and how we act in the present.<\/p>\n<p>We can break the spell and prevent the atavism that drags us back into inhumanity, but we must tell the true story within our families.<\/p>\n<p>Photo: Ilse Rewald, a german Jewish woman and holocaustsurvivor on a ferry to Naples in the early postwar period. I found this photo in Ilse\u2019s home after she passed away in 2005 in Berlin.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>History Does Not Repeat Itself &#8211; After 1945, the swastika\u2014the symbol of the German Nazi state\u2019s reign of terror in Europe\u2014disappeared, but the history of murder and humiliation, of corruption and collaboration, the history of everyday acts of cruelty toward others, of emotional coldness and hatred toward family members and neighbors, the history of enrichment [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10190,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-preserving-family-history"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13706"}],"version-history":[{"count":58,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17813,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13706\/revisions\/17813"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}