Transcription
What baby name immediately makes you lose all respect for the parents and why?
The day I took my son to kindergarten, I found out one of the girls in his class had a hideous name. In fact, the name was so offensive to me that I cried, also partly for that little girl.
You see, I lost a lot of family due to the Holocaust, and my grandmother and great-aunt were the only two survivors. Sadly, I lost them both this year.
When I went to pick my son up from school, I heard a mother call out to her daughter. At first, I thought I'd misheard what she said. Maybe it was an Eastern European name. Then she said it again. I couldn't believe it. It shocked me to my core.
I tried to subtly engage in some small talk and commented on how unusual her daughter's name was, asking her how she came up with it. She said she heard it somewhere, the name stuck, but she couldn't remember. She just thought it was a beautiful name. She had named her daughter Treblinka.
Treblinka is the concentration camp with the second most victims, right after Auschwitz. I didn't tell her. I'm not angry at her, but realize this: the name probably didn't ring a bell with anyone in the families of both parents, nobody in the school, none of the other parents, and clearly not with the civil servant at City Hall registering her birth. And particularly that last one is whom I lost all respect for. A civil servant should make damn sure a kid can't be named after a concentration camp.
So the next time someone comments on the national commemoration that surely we know enough about the Holocaust by now, please show them this.