The Shoah – How The Past Becomes The Present |
There are no words that can ever explain the scale and gravity of what happened during the Shoah. My mother lost her parents, four sisters and a brother, who were murdered in the gas chambers of the Auschwitz and Belzec death camps. She was left alone by the time she was 16, living in the Krakow Ghetto and was deported to the Plaszow concentration camp in June 1942, before her 17th birthday. The camp’s SS commander became Amon Goth by early 1943. He was known as the “Butcher of Plaszow.” How could anyone even begin to really understand what she went through, not to mention the magnitude of the atrocities inflicted on so many other Jewish and non-Jewish lives that survived and didn’t in the Holocaust.
My mother had been defined by her past, and probably many of the nearly 6.5 million survivors of the Holocaust. It’s the legacy of trauma for their memories of something that unconscionable that has never probably left their minds. How could it? Their past became the present.
My mother’s holocaust survivor trauma, even if some of it had been reconciled nearly 20 years after liberation had to be retriggered, probably even impacting her far more than during her past when her husband left her when she was pregnant for a German woman. We were living in one Chicago’s largest Jewish communities in the early 1960’s, filled with Holocaust survivors. But her underserved lifetime of hatred for my stepmother and every other German that my brother and I inherited never should have happened. How she penetrated him with hatred, even far more than me helped lead to his nervous breakdown. He was institutionalized before he reached 30. His fate also nearly became mine.
I’d mentioned how my mother’s trauma manifested to remember how the Shoah happened. The origin of the Holocaust was racist ideology – fundamental Nazi idealism. The hatred of others that were perceived as a threat to the Aryan race, especially Jews. Its effectiveness was executed in the manipulation of people’s minds – channeled through propaganda and conspiracy. It was seen as ethnic cleansing based upon nothing that was real.
My mother’s hatred for my German stepmother and every other German was also based only upon perceptions of who they were. But her beliefs rested upon nothing more than her own bias. They were shaped by what she’d gone through, not something that was being done to her. Still, how can I blame her for how she saw the world and probably many other survivors after what they’d been through in the Holocaust. I know how often it’s probably haunted them in so many ways. But even with every bit of compassion I’ve had for my mother and what every other survivor had gone through, the past for mother and for every survivor can’t be turned into the present. If nothing else, the consequences for me and unconscionably for my brother can’t be measured.
I guess remembering the Holocaust and the trauma of survivors, even far more nearing Yom HaShoah that probably often uncontrollably has been passed on to their children, subsequent generations and what future generations may need to bear is the plea for the world to see how the past continues in the present. I am not in any way implying the trauma of survivors actually could be ever be unconditionally reconciled. But we do have to learn from what happened in the Shoah to let only the truth be the truth. The Nazis illusion of reality being nothing more than the racist perceptions of people – namely Jews, but also the racial hatred of far too many other ethnicities and the marginalized, which penetrated throughout nearly everywhere in Germany, the rest of Europe, and within far too many others in every other part of the world.
But the unrelenting irony of my mother’s hatred for Germans and how my brother and I grew up, as told in my memoir, “In The Midst of Darkness” – her life and over 1200 other Jewish lives in during the Holocaust were saved by a Nazi German – Oskar Schindler. She never told me that she was a “Schindler’s List” survivor. On Yom Kippur day, October 1993, my rabbi’s sermon in synagogue was the story of “Schindler’s List.” The film would debut in the next six weeks. It had been five years after my mother passed away. At the end of the Rabbi’s speech, my father who was sitting next to me in synagogue leaned over and told me something that she never did. It was six words that I would never forget – “Your mother was on that list.”
In synagogue that day, 40% of the congregation were Holocaust survivors. Some I knew personally having lived in the neighborhood where the synagogue was located growing up. I can’t even imagine what they might have been feeling, hearing in their schul the first major story of the Holocaust that Steven Spielberg turned into a movie. Most importantly, it was a story of a Nazi German saving Jewish lives. A person who turned righteous when so few did, in history’s darkest era the world has ever known. Some of the survivors in synagogue that day might have been like my mother, who were traumatized and hated all Germans. But could hearing this story have changed anything for them? I have to believe it might have reconciled at least some of what they felt. How could it not?
The trauma of survivors does feel real and needs every bit of reach we have given them to share their stories, more often probably being part of the healing process. But as I’ve told, it doesn’t only impact them. Too often, it also shapes their descendants. The numbers are staggering: 10 to 15 million people, if not more may be living with the legacy of this trauma, yet it’s often unspoken. Of which, 7-8 million direct descendants of survivors are Jewish and may be impacted by generational trauma. That is approximately 50% of the world’s Jewish population. Their stories also need to be heard to the same reach I feel that we’ve given survivors. If they’re not, how can they change the behavior they need to confront. The silence may continue to leave them without enough awareness needed to really let them reconcile their trauma.
As the survivor population has abated over the past 25 years, the stories of descendants of survivors become even more desperately needed to be told. The Shoah Foundation that Steven Spielberg founded in 1994, being his vision for “Schindler’s List” and its right of passage for survivors to tell what happened to them in the Holocaust would have meant everything to my mother. If she would have been able to share what she endured and lost, it may have helped prevent some of her trauma that my brother and I inherited. That type of voice is also needed for the descendants of survivors, especially understanding the scale of how many are potentially being impacted by generational trauma due to the Holocaust.
How can we just let the past continue to become the present?