Clearing out a drawer for Pesach, I came across a piece called “Second Generation Speaks” which I wrote for the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem. In it I tried to convey the feeling of confronting a family whose members – my very nearest and dearest – were fenced off from me by a knowledge I could only strain to touch. In this lifelong encounter they would always be the adults, introspective and aloof, and I would always remain the wide-eyed innocent.
I am a child of survivors. I stand as near to the gates of Auschwitz and Belsen as anyone who was not actually there, and that is still a million miles away. I have sat in family gatherings and listened to them speak with that curious, quiet detachment about things my ears heard, but my brain could not encompass. Clever, naive, baffled child, none of your answers fit this time.
“I saw them playing football,” one survivor says. “The ball seemed an odd, ragged shape. I went closer and looked. It was a baby.” The words mean nothing. I feel nothing. But unease hangs heavy in the air, and my family sit shamed, like guilty ones condemned. Suddenly I am full of anger.
“Isn’t it enough?” I want to shout, “Isn’t it enough what our enemies did? Must we be their conscience, too?” Then I think it is the shame of having been there and seen the last vestiges of feeling stripped away, of witnessing the final insult. Humanity is a common possession, after all. And I, the infant, also felt the shame, and whatever is in me that is akin to all mankind held its face in its hands and wept.
Even then I am denied my tiny comfort of us and them. “You must understand,” says my mother, kindly, “none of us stayed human. Not they, not we. We became mindless, crafty. We stole bread from one another. The important thing was to survive. Later, not even that mattered. We just stopped caring.
“I didn’t steal anything,” she adds. “I’m not clever that way. Too slow-witted.”
An absurd feeling of happiness comes over me. My mother didn’t take anyone’s bread. Stupid child, what does it matter, what do you understand of that nether world, those nether times? Do you know what you would do for a piece of bread, your stomach tearing apart? A thought strikes me. These people are heroes. They can still find the courage to get up in the morning, they are heroes. I have an uncle who seems to get by reasonably well on a third of a stomach. He’s a hero, too. When he’s finished a particularly good meal, he jokes to his wife, “Haven’t eaten this well since the camps!” Then he takes the pills that will help him digest his meal without pain.
The family toll is long: two grandfathers, two old-fashioned lives, rich in wisdom, gone at a stroke; Heidi, a witty, talented aunt, with all her family; an uncle, Alexander, gentle philosopher my father says they called him. In our brown-eyed family, only mine are green, as his were. I wish I’d known him. Another Alexander, my mother’s only brother. Something went wrong at birth, he couldn’t walk. They wheeled him away in his wheelchair. He was 16. She never talks of him. I think of my own brother. I understand why she never talks of him.
My mother told me of a beautiful cousin of hers, deported with her baby. At the selection point, she was sent to the right, the child to the left. She begged them to let her stay with her baby. They graciously consented. Mother and child were gassed together. Who said there was no family feeling in the Third Reich?