Hiding the Holocaust
The slaughter is over and the survivors are gone. Can I remember now?
“The injury cannot be healed. It extends through time." — Primo Levi
When I was a kid at Jewish day school (in Ottawa, then suburban Washington DC) starting in the late Seventies, Holocaust remembrance was a simple matter. We kids were ushered into the gymnasium and sat down on the floor. It was the one day of the year that there could be no messing around. Completely silent, we waited for the Rabbi-principal’s grim opening remarks followed by a film or maybe a film strip. Year after year the images were always the same — piles of corpses, dead-eyed emaciated survivors in tattered striped pajamas, heaps of eyeglasses, shoes and empty suitcases. The lights would come back on and and there would appear what to me looked like an incredibly old man, sometimes actually wearing the prisoner pajamas. This person would recite their experience surviving a concentration camp and exhort us to never forget, always remember, etc. etc. Afterwards we would somberly allow ourselves to be led back to class where would meekly do math or Hebrew or science, the entire morning’s proceedings not to be mentioned again until next year.
At home the Holocaust was never discussed. In fact my grandparents on both sides were from Polish shtetls and suffered unimaginable losses. These included the murders of their grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins and brothers and sisters. Since they fled to the USSR and survived the NAZI scourge, no one considered my grandparents “survivors”. No one asked them to tell their stories. Silence thusly endured though every once in a while it would be accidentally broken by a sudden jarring moment: The appearance of a photograph, say four young people posing by a river. My grandmother pointing at one and saying, “My sister. Dead,” before abruptly jamming the crumpled photo back into its hiding place.
In the film The Zone of Interest, the Holocaust is ever present but hidden behind the garden wall of the Auschwitz Commandant’s idyllic family home. At first, this reminded me of how I grew up — encouraged to turn away and ignore what had happened, only to have some horrible moment suddenly lurch into my awareness like an escaped zombie quickly rounded up and dragged back into its pit.
Though the movie focuses entirely on the perpetrators, it is ultimately about searching for any insight into a matter of great interest to me now that I am a father of children old enough to have their own Holocaust education memories. What I’m wondering these days is less what happened or how or even why, but — what comes after? What comes next? I wouldn’t call the film a failure, but I wish it had sharpened its focus on that question of transference, namely how (or perhaps how much of) the daily grind of organizing and living next to mass murder enters or does not enter into the consciousnesses of its characters. I was particularly entranced by the Commandant’s children, seen occasionally as if from a bird’s eye view, having eerie dreams and playing strange, violent games. What ever happened to those kids? How much is transferred from generation to generation? And for how long? Perhaps forever?
There is no question that my brother and I have inherited a predisposition to, among other things, anxiety and depression. My Dad — born in a Siberian work camp1 — has always been nervous and depressed, not to mention obsessed with food. As a kid it used to appall and fascinate me, the way he’d eat a huge meal then almost immediately begin a nightly routine of non-stop snacking. This was not discussed much in the family, it was just how he — how it — was. But the rages he would fly into were terrifying to me as a child, and though in other respects he was a good father and parent, they were, I see now, part of that space we would suddenly find ourselves in. Call it the Hidden Holocaust, a kind of white noise of anger, erasure and horror.
Around eleven or twelve I became obsessed with the Shoah the way, I suppose, a kid who is forbidden video games might become obsessed with secretly playing them. I thought about it all the time. Where in our suburban house in bucolic Rockville, Maryland I would hide (basement closet). What it would be like to be rounded up and sent to a death camp. How I, unlike the Jews at the time, would fight back bravely to the bitter end.2 I never discussed this with anyone, it was all internal, stuff I thought about while lying in bed at night waiting to fall asleep.
It reached a fever pitch when our English teacher handed us all copies of The Diary of Anne Frank to take home and read. I was terrified of the book. Literally. I would read a page then hide it somewhere in my room — in the closet, or under the bed. I was particularly horrified by the cover. A reddish purple border framed a picture of the very normal looking girl wearing a normal looking white blouse. Anne Frank smiling sweetly out at me. But she was pale, scrawny, with dark bruises under her eyes. I did my best to keep the cover out of sight at all times.
I only ever managed to read a small portion of the book. To this day I do my best, like the Auschwitz Commandant’s wife, to avoid having to directly confront the truth. To that end, I actively avoid not just books but also movies and exhibits that portray the slaughter and elimination of the Jews of Europe. The angels tell Lot and his wife — don’t look back. Orpheus is warned — the pits of hell are best forgotten. But what to do if you are bound to remember, no matter what? The house falls down around me. But still I hide in the basement, trapped under the weight of those layers of childhood terror, adolescent shame, and the white noise of adult rage.
Actually born just after they were freed from Siberia and sent to Kazakhstan. According to my brother.
Many more fought back and resisted than I knew at the time.