18 April 2010: Shoah Remembrance Week, April 11-18, 2010
It is good to set aside more than one day to remember the Holocaust and its impact on posterity. One day comes and goes, but a week allows the time to go in and out of the event; come back to it and realize that there is still time. For what?
It's as if not only the horrific event occurs again, but the victims return. You can see a prosperous man walking down the street one day and then three years later see a human skeleton, barely recognizable as human, looking into the camera lens of a liberator and smiling.
Shoah is with me constantly. I was born into it, named after my grandmother's sister, who died in Auschwitz along with her husband and three children. There is a photo of them a year earlier, Holocaust deniers themselves, refusing the entreaties of my great uncle, their brother, to come with him back to American before it is too late. The black and white photograph taken by this professional photographer breathes with life and pride, prosperity and well being.
Those relatives who did survive look back at you differently from photographs. They do not vibrate with life. The pain of forced emigration and loss of everything they knew and loved and violent death of beloved family emanates instead. The relief of successful resettlement, English spoken with an accent replace the glow of rootedness and security.
Moments of horror in my life only hint at the suffering of that generation. Grandmothers somaticizing the pain of their past as if a physician could cure them. Grandfathers uncomplaining, one rescued from Dachau after three months, the other brought here when he was twelve, penniless, immediately sent out on the street to sell shoestrings, thence to become a successful merchant and philanthropist.
Despite a childhood immersed in this incurable grief and the bitter hatred and fear of outsiders, xenophobia, I came into my own among Christians, close friends swearing to shelter me in the event of another massacre, to be sure. Judaism became for me a sad, beautiful song I didn't know what to do with. I never hid it but somehow the otherness possessed me even in the midst of best friends at cozy, happy times.
I have been and always will be a stranger, wherever I am, an identity I cherish, one legacy of the Holocaust that runs through my blood. I realized the horror to its full extent while studying German, which was required as part of my graduate school curriculum. I collided with Goethe in amazement, hearing lines that I loved, fighting off the barrier of hatred, leaning heavily on my professor as he guided me across an ocean of blood. I let go to Goethe and the tears finally fell. Goethe freed my soul to weep. I walked down streets weeping, stood in store lines with tears streaming down my eyes and no one seemed to pity me, no one asked why. A few people smiled, as if they'd all been there.
I was in my mid-twenties at the time. The last line of a poem I had written about visiting Auschwitz as a child, at last came true. "I was there," I barely whispered to the professor. "I was there."
He became less German by the end of the course, after walking in the first day looking like a Hitler youth, slim, blonde, and indestructible, the future a red carpet to cushion his every step.
"Wir haben sehr viel davon gelehrnt" (We've learned a lot from that) I remember saying at the end of the term.
Who knew he'd carry me on his back, Anchises, beyond the cement wall that Shoah had happened to others and not me.
Other holocausts have come and gone throughout my life. As much as I asked "Where was everyone while this was happening?" I shuddered hearing about similar events in Rwanda, Kosovo and Darfur, Congo, sitting in my living room.
Shall I drop my life and go there and try to stop it? I asked myself. If we all did, it would stop. But we let holocausts happen again and again. What can we do, really? The answer again boils down to human nature, as heinous as it is beautiful, and how we must induce evolution away from the wickedness that so scars history and each of us individually.
Dust we are, some of us walking through life on red carpets, others born into the atrocities of persecution, or poverty, or disease.
My reality consists of others better off but the vast majority less fortunate.
With the Jewish Holocaust on my back like Anchises, I can stand up straight if I think about it.
Every question, every epitome arises out of Holocausts--nectar and blood, joy and horror. Why were the eyes of those photographed victims so deep set?
The week draws to an end this evening. Judaism is a crown of thorns I wear proudly but will burn before I die. No descendant of mine will be yanked out of everyday, secure routine into hell--torture and starvation--just because such hell gave birth to me.
Let it also die with me. I have suffered for any and all that come after me.
I will write into my will the freedom of assimilation. Martyrs we have enough.
Learn to learn from the past, certainly. Read about it. But then rebel.
Learn not to repeat history. Climb into a new world. Stop torturing each other. Live life.
