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........