In general, in order to sleep, we long for silence. Yet there are certain kinds of silence that preclude sleep, silences that are cries of terror which – suffocated by pain and shame – strain to be heard. Among those who have suddenly been assaulted by this discovery, there are some who have chosen to quickly plug their ears; they cannot be blamed: they only wish to protect their sanity. Others plunge into the sounds, but do not perceive the words they are composed of. A few, very few, dare to decipher the words, to become participants not only in the pain but also in the knowledge and, thus, in the terror that unavoidably accompanies it, hand in hand.
Diana Wang is one of those few. I believe that what characterizes her is precisely that: her daring. After daring to open her ears and discover what took place in her own family, she ventured to open her eyes to the reality of the Shoah; she began to voraciously read everything she could that was related to the topic, attempting to penetrate the topic through chronicles and general historical information, to enter into the “self” of each and every one of the victim-survivors (as she refers to them), trying to rescue their identities, their humanity. Thus, for example, she feels compelled to view them as they were at the age when their worlds changed, suddenly and forever: young, healthy, with plans and dreams for the future, like all young people. In the same way, with startling clarity, she observes how everything possible was done to rob these victims of their dignity, to deny them of even the smallest degree of free will; Diana dares to go so far as to formulate the most terrible of all questions: what would she have done had she been there...
But her daring does not stop there: having opened her ears and eyes, she feels called upon to raise her voice and confront us with more truths: the truth concerning children who grew up without aunts, uncles, cousins or grandparents, without family photographs or medical histories; the truth about parents who hide their pasts believing that, by revealing it, they will no longer serve as good models for their children; the truth about children who wonder about the shameful acts their parents must have committed in order to survive; the truth about others who would have liked to believe that their parents had performed acts of heroism, but were disappointed to learn that, in general, their salvation was due to nothing more than chance; the truth about children who, like many young people, believe in the goodness of man, and the truth about parents who, as genuine experts on the most sordid aspects of human beings, fear destroying the innocence of those children.
How was it born, from where did it come, this silence that accompanied and still accompanies so many children of survivors? Diana states it very well: there are secrets in all homes, they coexist with all families; but in the homes of the “appeared,” the secrets are not just sporadic moments in the past, but rather long years that were converted, for those who lived through them, into the prism through which they view reality. On the other hand, in this case, the roots of secrecy are not in what one did in the past, but rather in what was done to the person. So, why keep silent?
The reasons are varied: first and foremost, the impossibility of understanding – and even of believing – what happened; among other things, they could not – and many still can not – understand that they were persecuted not for something they did, but for the simple fact of being what they are, as if they possessed within them some dangerous mystery of which not even they were conscious. We are accustomed to seeing them in classes and conferences on the Shoah, or in the archives of Yad Vashem, searching for documents that might confirm their memories, and fervently longing to find a satisfactory answer to the questions that perturb them.
According to Aaron Appelfeld (one of the best writers among the survivors), many of the survivors who repeatedly told themselves that, if they survived, they would tell the world in detail what they had been forced to suffer, now confess that when the moment arrived, they preferred to forget, unable to believe that what they had experienced could have been real. If during the war this desire to inform the world was what kept them alive, after the war it seems that only the attempt to forget is what enables them to go on living. If it were not for those survivors who could not repress their need to relate their experiences, the victims themselves would have denied the horrors. This is not surprising: right before their eyes, the world had been transformed into a violent chaos of unpredictability... Others did not consider themselves suitable as mouthpieces for so much death. Many felt, very simply, that language itself distorted their experiences to such an extent that it was better to keep silent.
They were not few, however, who did wish to speak out, in spite of everything, with a sense of desperation: but there was no one to listen, no one to believe them. After the death of Primo Levi, a reporter from the newspaper, Corriere de la Sera, wrote the following: “His works will even confront us on Judgement Day,” but his first book on Auschwitz was rejected by the prestigious publishing house, Editorial Einaudi; the decision was made by an important Jewish writer. It would appear that not even she could approach the universe of the Shoah at that time. According to Appelfeld, even when people expressed interest, their questions were not helpful. “They were questions from this world that had nothing to do with the world from which we had come; as if one were to ask for information about the primordial abyss or, for that matter, about eternity itself.”
It is important to highlight that not only the survivors found it nearly impossible to communicate their experiences; historians and artists as well, each in his respective field, have strugglee to find adequate resources for transmitting what took place. Jean-Francois Lyotard compares the effects of the Shoah to the effects of an earthquake of such magnitude that it would destroy not only lives and buildings, but also all the seismographs capable of registering it.
What language shall we use for describing the planning, the calculation of materials, and the construction of facilities for the express purpose of carrying out the efficient murder – “by the most humane means possible,” in Himmler´s words – of millions of people? Would it be correct to employ the same terms used for describing any other engineering enterprise? How can we avoid the sin implied by speaking about all of this coldly and objectively without falling, on the other hand, into the easy trap of sentimentalism, which cheapens and trivializes reality? How shall we explain that a century-and-a-half after the apparently definitive triumph of the ideals of Equality and Fraternity in the heart of Christian Europe, the President of the Judicial Court of the Nazi Party, Walter Buch, could have said that the Jews were not human beings, but rather symptoms of putrefaction? What analytic method will enable us to finally understand how so many millions of persons were moved to commit horrendous crimes in the interests of such statements which propose an ideology that is so obviously false? What vocabulary is adecuate for describing the treatment suffered by the victims of the ghettos and concentration camps? How can we explain that the heroism in those places cannot be measured according to the concepts we normally employ?
As a surviving witness of Treblinka said during the trial of Ivan Demianiuk: “Whoever was there can never leave, and whoever was not there, can never enter...”
This “can never leave” is what Diana refers to as “the stone in the shoe” with which the victims who survived must walk through life. The stone cannot be dissolved by forgetting what they experienced; but the courage and empathy of those who sincerely try to understand surely makes it easier for them to endure it.