Reclaiming Holocaust History: The Past Lives within Us

Sam Gerson, a psychoanalyst and child of Holocaust survivors, describes the irreparable wound and absence that permeates survivors and their offsprings’ lives. Yet, what is absent? Is language partly what is missing? Haydee Faimberg in The Telescop-

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ing of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic Links between Generations (2005) describes a young man whose existence and struggles hint at a darker Holocaust history, and yet the word Holocaust never appears in the chapter. Despite greater historical acknowledgement of the Holocaust, for many the past continues to remain unnamable.

Is the lack of an acceptable language to express survivor experiences what is missing—the missing third? (Sam Gerson, “When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust” in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90, 1341-1357, 2009). Survivors’ children inevitably served the first role of the badly needed “third” or witness, filling the void left in the wake of cultural, communal, and state silence. Living with their parents, who were still reeling from their own harrowing experiences, there was an implicit need to process this legacy.

In collecting survivor testimony, Dori Laub, the Yale Fortunoff Video Archives, and later the Shoah Foundation have created a way to fill the void and perhaps introduce the relational/ cultural third. Gerson stresses the need for an engaged witness, an “Other” who cares to listen. For survivors’ children like me, besides historical documentation, intergenerational dialogue between parent and child is reintroduced via the doing, hearing, and sharing of the testimony. Ironically, many survivors eloquently and willingly describe their experiences in their testimonies, despite the oft-repeated assumptions that they were unwilling or not able to do so. When questioning my mother about her not speaking much when my sister and I were young, she responded: “I had to wait till you were old enough. Once you asked questions, I knew you were better able to handle my responses. I didn’t know the impact on a young child of all that I had witnessed and experienced.”

My mother was clearly concerned about flooding us at too young an age. Struggling to protectively shield her children, she saw us as separate, vulnerable beings in need of protection. Unfortunately, traumatic histories lurk in the background, ultimately communicated in the most innocent of words and phrases, capturing a reality far beyond those words.

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When my parents finally gave testimony in 1999 for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, my sister and I were grown. They described their painful losses and experiences, including my mother’s 37 months in Auschwitz, having arrived on the second transport from Slovakia in 1942, and my father’s one year in Hungarian slave labor and two Austrian camps, Mauthausen and Gunskirchen. In 1999, the world had come to accept the Holocaust as a reality, both sugar coated and yet showing features not captured previously. My mother was relieved to see Schindler’s List’s (1993) portrayal of the sadism of the camp commandant, Amon Goeth, different from previous depictions of machinelike brutality, and consistent with her experience of the engaged, sadistic enjoyment of the Nazis who brutalized them.

The Holocaust was a witness-less crime. The perpetrators hid their crimes behind obedience to authority and bureaucratic detail as they carried them out. Those who lived nearby denied any knowledge. After the war, those fortunate enough to survive years of harrowing experience were asked to quickly resume “normal” life with no resources, family, and an interrupted education. They were instructed or encouraged not to speak of their ordeals. Many described this as the greatest pain of all. In the camps they had each other, sustained by the thought that they must survive to bear witness, as Terrence Des Pres poignantly portrayed in The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976). Yet, after the war, alone, they were confronted with little to no acknowledgement of the horror they had experienced. Within this context many married, began families, and created (or for some, recreated) lives lost. The resilience it took to achieve this was rarely acknowledged.

I chose to share my family’s story several years ago in a classroom. Indeed, with the presence of other witnesses, I felt the courage to watch my parents’ testimonies for the first time. Perhaps for me to fully witness my parents’ stories, I needed the presence of other live, empathic witnesses at my side. Witnessing their testimony opened up channels of communication, as I felt less afraid to ask questions and better able to appreciate their history and its impact on me.

My mother grew up a sheltered youngest child. Despite feeling integrated in the Slovakian community where she grew up,

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her brother’s best friend “came with a gun to take her” to the transport. Torn from her family, home, and community, she struggled with the profound betrayal she and her family faced at the hands of those whom they had trusted.

Another phrase she frequently used was “I opened Auschwitz.” I learnt that she arrived before they opened Birkenau, the site of the gas chambers. While initially kept in a building with running water, she remembered Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Hoess saying “it is not bad enough,” leading to the opening of Birkenau. My mother worked many jobs, including the Aussenkommando, where one rarely survived for very long, and the Lei chenkommando, where she “carried dead bodies.” When her work enabled her to procure a pair of shoes, she gave it to those who needed them, as shoes impacted survival. Despite the horror, my mother did not let herself plummet into self-involved despair, retaining her care taking nature and humanity and placing herself at personal peril to rescue others.

While living seemingly average lives in 60s New York, the dark clouds of the Holocaust and the rich history of my parents’ childhoods always existed in the background. I learned not of the Holocaust, but heard of the “war” and the “camps” with so many missing, as my parents were the sole surviving members of their families. I recall feeling dread at the idea of my going to summer “camp.” Although wanting to go, in keeping with my need to be a normal American kid (along with my wanting straight blonde hair), I was also fearful. Indeed, the word “camp” encapsulated loss and horror, and while aware I was going to a fun place upstate, my own homesickness was suffused with Holocaust imagery. I still recall my mother’s face as she said goodbye to me, an image juxtaposed with her saying goodbye to her own mother at the train station when she was deported. Both my children also hated camp.

My mother described in her testimony the “Famous Chicken,” lovingly cooked and given to her by her mother at her deportation, not fathoming the starvation that lie ahead. Is this what sustained her? She held tightly to it, until it was violently confiscated from her. Although remaining haunted during the war by the wish to have consumed it, I believe the “Famous Chicken,” despite being uneaten, symbolically embodied her mother’s love.

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Its internalization continued to sustain her and her caring capacities, and perhaps even contributed to her resilience. The Holocaust did not rob her of an internalized loving mother, enabling her to take care of others even in Auschwitz. This capacity was also apparent in her later parenting, which included her concern of overwhelming her young children. Her amazing resilience has been her legacy, from her mother to her children and grandchildren. However, the excruciatingly painful real loss of her mother, my grandmother, was also transmitted to me, particularly in the word “camp.” Camp felt alone, infused with a loss of mother’s closeness and care.

My mother, having been on the second transport to Auschwitz, has the low number of 2988 tattooed on her arm. While some react to it as a reminder of the horror, it represented security to us, even serving as the code on their home alarm system. Recently I shared with my mother the autobiographical reflections of the psychoanalyst Anna Ornstein in My Mother’s Eyes: Holocaust Memoirs of a Young Girl (2004) on her own number. Ornstein described her sense of pride as it signified survival. Those destined for immediate death in Auschwitz did not get tattooed. Ornstein’s testimony, alongside my mother’s, has helped validate my mother’s feelings and my own perceptions.

Watching my parents’ testimonies has helped me fill in gaps and reduce my dread. Despite the sadistic brutality aimed at my parents, their interviews also reflect their ability to cope using humor, as well as their vitality to love life, each other, and to invest in the future through work and family. While I have witnessed and shared my parents’ fear, pain, rage, and loss, I have also experienced their nurturance, love, resourcefulness, and resilience. Hearing their testimony about their past has reduced my own dread. It comes with greater appreciation of our present and future, while continuing the impossible task of finding a way to mourn our many losses.

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