I often refer to the survivors of the Shoah as victim-survivors, or “the appeared”[1]. This word is borrowed from Jorge Semprun’s book, L’écriture ou La vie[2], (2) in which, with a goldsmith’s hand, he relates his experiences in Buchenwald, sifting through the intricate impressions of his memory, the recollections stored away for fifty years.
As children of the appeared, the people who returned from Death, we often wonder about our parents’ pasts. These are questions that cannot always be expressed.
Some of us are unaware that we are wondering about these questions.
We have learned not to notice certain things.
We have been instructed to behave as if everything were just fine, we have learned to keep silent.
How have we been instructed to keep quiet?
How have we accepted this complicity of silence, this simulacrum of leading “normal” lives similar to everyone else’s?
Why is it that many of us are unaware that, as children of the appeared, victim-survivors of the Nazis, we unavoidably belong to a singular category of identity?
How is it that this double blindness has been produced, this “not seeing that one doesn’t see”?
These are a few of the questions I will consider here. Of course, there are as many questions as there are families and people. And not all of us children of survivors ask the same questions, but there is always that lingering uncertainty, lurking in those shadowy blind spots of the mind, prohibited topics we are not supposed to mention, having to do with ourselves. Surely, this might be common to all families. Are there any families without some secrets, without compromising episodes in their pasts that they’d prefer not to remember?
Nonetheless, two elements stand out in our situation:
1) A psychological, subjective aspect: this seems to be a memory whose nature resists admission to the historical continuum; memory that attacks and subverts the very notion of the “self” (I will return to this aspect below); and
2) An objective aspect: never before in history, nor since, has an entire country undertaken a war on the scale of the Second World War with the goal – cold and calculated – of exterminating an entire people. The benefits of the war for Germany, on all levels, in both geopolitical and economic terms, did not depend upon the extermination of the Jewish people, that is, the war in the field and the annexation of territories were certainly enough. Nonetheless, they set in motion a calculated process of genocide, with Teutonic business-like efficiency and all the technical and human resources available, without prospects of specific benefits whatsoever, I repeat, simple extermination for the sake of extermination. As a consequence, Germany undertook two wars: in addition to military actions in the theater of operations (in France, Russia, the skies over Europe, the seas, etc.) typical of a nation at war, Germany also marched against interior frontiers, at home and in the occupied territories, and waged war against an innocent and unarmed adversary, the Jewish people, dedicated to forcing them from the face of the Earth. The unprecedented nature of the act, the industrial proportions of Germany’s achievements, the calculated meticulousness of the procedures, the sophistication of the destructive and fatal Nazi machine, placed the Jewish people, primarily, in this position of dubious and sorrowful privilege.
It has been calculated that approximately six million Jews died, one and a half million of whom were children. Estimates suggest that in Nazi-occupied territories about one million Jews survived. People are usually surprised by these figures. The common idea seems to be that only a few hundred, perhaps thousands, survived. But never a million.
How did they survive? What happened to them?
Were they aware of what was happening to them? Did they foresee events? And if so, why did they stay? Today we know that such questions are inappropriate, they reveal gross ignorance of the situation. But for many of us these and other questions nourished our youth. There is much that we know and even more that we do not know, and so much that we are just beginning to question in loud voices. The stories stored away in silence for so long, packaged away like secrets, may have been well-hidden, but they have never lost their toxicity.
All families have secrets. Perhaps all people have secrets they prefer to keep as such. Nonetheless, belonging to the group of people known as survivors, the appeared-of-the-Shoah, we feel that the stories of survival kept hidden and silent, for so many years, are in some way different from the usual family secrets and dishonors, perhaps belonging to a wholly different order of what is personal and intimate. Ours is a case in which the secrets transcend what merely pertains to ourselves, they implicate all humanity, they question the very idea that we, as human beings, have of ourselves.
For those of us who are curious about the questions posed at the start of these reflections and want to understand this category of identity, let us now review the most important issues with respect to what it means to be “second generation.”
Throughout these reflections the issue of context – temporal, geographic, social, political, etc. – must be kept in mind. It is essential to remember that things are what they are according to how and where we place them: context determines a thing’s significance, its interpretation and its evaluation.
Take for example the topic of age[3]. The survivors of the Shoah are more than sixty-five years old today. At the end of the war they were almost all between the ages of 15 and 30; the number of survivors outside that age-range sharply declines, that is, there were very few children, very few older adults and almost no elderly among those who appeared.
Not all of the appeared are the same. The infinite, permanent and multiform torture of memory and recrimination is different for everyone. Apart from individual differences, the case of small children is especially unique; many of these reflections will not be applicable to their case because, at their age, they could not consider themselves, nor could they be considered, responsible for anything that happened to them. Feelings such as guilt and the need for expiation are not as relevant in their case as in the case of those who appeared at more advanced ages. However, as always, we must avoid tempting generalizations. Many if not all child survivors of the Shoah bear painful memories, grievous experiences from the first years of their lives. Let us consider, for example, those children adopted and raised by Christian families and the heartbreak for some at the traumatic moment of reunion with their surviving biological parents. So often, they experienced guilt and confusion when confronted with their preference for their adoptive parents. These are sentiments that remain painfully buried forever. But the fact that they were children, defenseless, incapable of making decisions, makes it clear to them and to the rest of us that they were the purest of victims and possessors, therefore, of an incontrovertible innocence. Those who were children, although they suffered unforgettable injury, are freer to remember what they remember, or to forget what they left behind. There is no self-reproach or recrimination, nor profound existential soul-searching. There is, however, great loss and suffering that somehow may be lived through without the need for mitigation or disguise.
This is not the case for those who had already entered adolescence, those few who indeed made decisions and who may see themselves in some way responsible for the things that happened, who may accuse themselves and may be accused of somehow being to blame, who torture themselves, almost without exception, with the idea of not having managed to save their loved ones’ lives. These are the people who fifty years later are more than sixty-five years old and who for fifty years have been walking around with a “tiny stone in the shoe.”
When we consider the appeared of the Shoah, we can only consider those persons we know, that is, people older than sixty-five. I propose our making the effort to rejuvenate their skin, smooth their wrinkles, strengthen their muscles, reinvigorate their reactions, revive their hopes, and re-place them in that moment when the years behind them were so few and those ahead seemed infinite. When we consider the appeared, we must see before our eyes the figures and bodies of boys and girls, of youths between fifteen and thirty years of age, none prepared for what they would live through, none prepared for anything other than what had been the dream of their parents: to grow up, to raise families, and to die of old age in their own beds.
Many of us have children, nieces, nephews and acquaintances, who are that age now. Let us whisper their names, let us remember their faces, their energy, their joy, their weaknesses and fears, their talents and concerns, their emotional needs, their romances and their dreams. Our parents, the appeared, were the way these children are today, when they were overcome by the sudden cataclysm that was the Nazi invasion. (So young, they knew so little! Suddenly they were hurled into an every-man-for-himself chaos with none of the usual referents, in a constant and mind-boggling process of daily adaptation and re-adaptation to the changing and arbitrary laws of the occupying army. To enumerate the losses could take many pages, and they would never be sufficient for providing an accurate idea of the degree to which they had become vulnerable. I imagine them scratching, scrambling, improvising, inventing, deaf and blind when necessary, also alert and attentive to every new alternative, capable of maintaining themselves afloat in the eye of the storm, sleeping while longing for those familiar beds with foreseeable fragrances that they surely believed they had lost forever.
We should remember, each time we use the word “survivor,” or the “appeared” of the Shoah, whenever we think of them, whenever the topic comes up, that within each of these elderly people we see today, within that coat of skin worn thin by life, there is a fragile and tender bud preserved and carefully stored away, the adolescent or youth that was, who had to hold back tears and hide desperation because there was nowhere to turn for consolation, understanding or protection.
But the topic was Silence.
I mean, of course, the silence of those who remained silent. Not all did. Nor can those who spoke out be neatly filed into general categories; not all behaved in the same way.
As in so many situations concerning human conduct, it is dangerous to establish generalizations. No one has told everything. Nor has anyone remained absolutely silent. However, we can loosely establish two categories: first, a group that predominantly chose to remain silent in the presence of their children and society, and second, a group that, to a significant degree, chose to speak out.
For those of us who grew up in homes where silence was maintained, the principal question that many of us have posed to ourselves is: Why the silence? Why weren’t we told more? And here there are a number of sub-questions:
Why were we only told some things?
Why weren’t we told everything in an organized way?
Why did they prefer not to speak out?
What was it like?
What was done to them?
What were they forced to do?
Although no situation can be generalized, the sensation of “not knowing,” at least to some degree, seems to be a common circumstance for all of us. Even in those families where parents spoke out, the children’s memories are only of related fragments, without chronology, with essential portions remaining in the shadows, generating suspicions and threats. Perhaps they are the mysterious avatars of memory, of the fragility of memory, which is common to all people. However, it may be suspected that in our case there is something else, something that is central and critical.
It seems that this silence is one of the pillars sustaining our identity as second generation. And it is this same silence that paradoxically has rendered it impossible for us to recognize ourselves as the second generation inasmuch as we remain isolated from each other.
We were unaware that we were unaware.
We didn’t know that there were others who didn’t know.
This silence is, then, both a platform for our identity and an obstacle for its very recognition.
From this perspective, I believe it is crucial for us, the children, the second generation of the appeared, especially for children of parents who remained silent, to begin asking the questions and seeking the answers that may explain, or at least give some sense to, the silence and, finally, to a part of our identity.
Many of us have believed that for all these years these were things that only happened in our own families. In our meetings, we have been moved by the discovery that that the silence surrounding what happened during the Shoah was a constant in almost all of our families. Naturally, with certain variations.
Over and over in our meetings we have observed the same coincidences: the search for answers and explanations, the need to accustom ourselves to a new identity and to feel secure with that identity in order to, in turn, pass on to our own children a sense of what we are, and how they may participate in this identity.
The Shoah did not end.
The war did not end with the surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945. This is something we have learned and that we must learn to pass along.
It did not end for the families of the murdered victims who will never know consolation.
It did not end for the victims who managed to stay alive, the appeared, and their families.
It did not end for the perpetrators of these crimes either, not even for their children: additional and seldom considered victims who ask, or dare not to ask their parents dangerous questions.
It did not end for the world at large, and this is perhaps one of the most difficult consequences for us to live with, for the world must bear the knowledge of what men can do to other men, not solely out of hatred, nor in the heat of some overwhelming passion, but with the cold calculated decision to murder, to follow murderous orders as if carrying out mundane bureaucratic procedures.
The mission.
In conversations with people of the second generation, it is common to hear the word “mission”. We feel – we like to believe – that we are entrusted with a mission: we are part of the consequences of the Shoah, our lives and our testimonies shed light on some of the corollaries regarding what happens to people in war and in extreme situations of humiliation, victimization, intolerance and dehumanization. We are like radioactive particles that, even buried, maintain some potency after long periods of time. We and our children and their children after them all carry the memory not only of the pain but also of the shame, the humiliation and the extension of human evil.
Perhaps, if it is true that we are embarked on a mission, then it is a mission to impregnate the world with our testimony and to keep the flame of memory burning. Like vaccines against an endemic social disease. Perhaps the idea of a mission is just an expression of desire after living with so much impotence and frustration, a need to give a more transcendent sense to the quest we have set out upon.
Perhaps it serves no purpose whatsoever.
Perhaps as with survivors, no one will listen.
Not even to us.
Reasons for the silence.
In what follows, I propose a series of non-exhaustive topics or, perhaps, apertures, for embarking on a discussion of our parents’ silence:
1) Post-war society did not want to listen;
2) Adequate words did not exist;
3) Categories of suffering , lack of heroism and their relation to silence;
4) Avoidance of suffering on behalf of the children (if they don’t know, then they can live normal lives);
5) Breaking with the flow of life: the “Gap;”
6) Collective memory and other memories.
1) POST-WAR SOCIETY DID NOT WANT TO LISTEN.
One reason for the silence may be found in the way survivors were received when they appeared in their new environments.
At the end of the war, Europe became a huge traffic jam. Some fourteen million displaced persons were trying to get home....
All told, there were about a million Jews remaining in the territories that had been under Nazi rule, most of them in Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Poland: many were on the road. The migration began spontaneously, without a plan. The Nazis were defeated. The concentration camps were liberated and people set out, first of all, to search for their families; the hope of finding them alive had been a source of strength in the camps. Most of the wanderers turned east; others returned from the Soviet Union, to which they had fled during the war....
Many who returned found their houses and property destroyed, plundered, or handed over to others....
The heaviest blow for the refugees was not finding lost loved ones; and once they realized they were alone in the world, they no longer saw any reason to stay where they were. They began to return west, to look for a new life, far from the lands of devastation. Many of them mingled with the waves of German refugees expelled from the East.[4] (p. 123-4)
The appeared-of-the-Shoah, Jews coming predominantly from central Europe and arriving in Argentina[5], the new immigrants, were quite different from the type of Jew that had developed previously in the local community.
There were two major groups in the local Jewish community: the descendants of the great Russian immigration at the turn of the century, and those that had arrived in the thirties, before the outbreak of war, coming mostly from Poland and, to a lesser degree, from Germany and Austria.
The first group arrived with the great waves of immigration that landed in Argentina at the end of the 19th century and continued into the 20th century. By the end of World War II, they already had two or three generations behind them and had integrated into Argentine society at many different levels. They maintained Jewish culture and traditions, as well as habits and customs pertaining to their place of origin at the time of their migration; the majority had also acquired and adopted native cultural values and were integrated into the local cultural and political life.
The second group, those who had arrived shortly before the outbreak of the horror, were still in the process of learning the Spanish language when the war finally ended; they were still adapting to this land that was so different from the one they had lost. They had spent the war years with their ears pressed to the radio, listening to the lists of survivors in the hopes of hearing mention of their parents, a brother or sister, some friends, anyone they had left over there, fearing for their fate, overcome by impotence and desperation. They were aware that they had escaped from hell by mere chance, that they could have easily been trapped over there. The news, for them, was embodied by faces and people they had known and been close to. They could feel what was happening in their own bodies and, during the years immediately following the war, they received those who arrived in Argentina, the appeared, as brothers, as if they were of their own flesh and blood.
The first group, the native Argentines, had not been part of the great integration movement that spread through central Europe in the 1930s[6], whose result was that, among other things, many young people stopped speaking Yiddish in order to communicate in the language dictated by the country, primarily Polish, Hungarian, German, etc. Another result was the increasing “de-schtetlization”[7], which lead to a more urban lifestyle in accordance with parameters set by the new media (radio, film, recordings, books, magazines) as to what was considered “modern”. While Jewish communities in Argentina, established decades before, were observing traditional cultural customs from the turn of the century, the newly arrived, the grine[8], had undergone a process of aggiornamento (updating) that was unknown and strange to the locals, and, in addition, they brought with them a whole new form of Jewish identity. The recent arrivals spoke Polish, Hungarian, German, all languages that were disdained by the locals as languages used by their enemies; the women smoked in public and sometimes wore trousers, they wore make-up shamelessly and were seen as prostitutes or, at best, sluts and lunatics.
These notes may help us in imagining the context that today has been all but forgotten, they may help give us an idea of the true culture-shock that was produced at this time[9].
Life in the Argentine Jewish community during this period was very intense. Schools, synagogues, cultural centers, theaters, bars, all kinds of publications, demonstrated a level of activity that today is no more than a nostalgic remembrance. In the early post-war years, the most distinguished groups, both culturally and politically, adopted attitudes that were combative, militant and very committed; they received the survivors with encouragement to make their stories public. Those were years of desperation, impotence and rage for those who listened. Some of the appeared, especially those who arrived early on, had the opportunity to get their stories told. But this was not the experience of the majority who remained silent, both outwardly and inwardly. In fact, many of us, the children of the appeared, remained “ignorant”[10] of what had happened for most of our lives. Probably, the children of the victim-survivors fall into two groups: those who knew and were able to find out, and those who knew they shouldn’t even ask. The first, children of survivors who spoke of their previous lives, will probably be surprised by much of what they read here[11]. The second group will perhaps encounter some of their most familiar ghosts in these pages.
As a member of this latter group, I will focus mostly on the group of victim-survivors that I know best: those who remained silent, those who were not received by the community with open arms and a favorable disposition toward hearing about what they had lived through, those who were isolated and never became politically militant nor acquired specific cultural interests, those who had nowhere to go and no one to talk to.
An unexpected reception.
The appeared of the Shoah discovered dark areas in the reception they were given by their countrymen. And, apparently, this situation was not exclusive to our country. Tom Segev, for example, who studied the phenomenon of integration of Shoah survivor-victims into Israeli society, offers a hypothesis regarding members of the local Jewish communities that may be useful to us as well:
It was an incomparably cruel reality: every Jew who received an immigration certificate during those years lived in Palestine knowing that some other Jew who had not received that certificate had been murdered. This was the basis for the sense of guilt that would later trouble so many Israelis who escaped the Holocaust.[12]
The appeared arrived in the new environment carrying with them stories of death and suffering. They were viewed by this new environment as strangers, outsiders who represented a different type of Jew, one that was not of their own kind. It is not difficult to understand, then, that many of the appeared sought out others like themselves, fleeing contact with the rest of the community.
The reception they received was generally reserved and, not uncommonly, wrought with suspicion. Questions were asked, that much is certain. They were asked questions about family members who had remained in Europe, the appeared were asked to provide information on the fate of friends and relatives. But it was not common for them to be asked questions directly related to their own experiences as victim-survivors, it seemed that people did not want to know the details of how their lives had been, the torturous tales of inequities and constant, hopeless humiliation. It must have been unbearable.
According to Semprun[13], upon his return to France:
“... I encountered only two kinds of reactions from people on the outside. Some avoided questioning you, treated you as though you’d returned from a banal trip abroad. Oh, so you’re back! The thing is, though, they were afraid of what you might say, terrified of the moral discomfort your replies might cause them. Other people asked heaps of superficial, stupid questions (of the It-was-rough-huh? type), but if you answered them, even succinctly, addressing the truest and deepest part, the opaque, unspeakable heart of the experience – they became quiet, agitated, wrung their hands, hoping to heaven they could just leave it at that. And then they’d fall silent, the way you fall into a void, a black hole, a dream.
Neither group asked questions because they wanted to know the answers. They asked questions to show good manners, be polite, observe social conventions. Because they had to make do or make believe. As soon as death turned up among the answers, they didn’t want to hear anymore. They became incapable of listening any further.”
Only if there was a possibility that the story would touch on honorable, tolerable and digestible events, would some people be willing to lend an ear. But the stories that they needed to hear, stories that ennobled battered human dignity, that elevated the spirit of Judaism to heroism and glory, were not forthcoming.
Here are two such testimonies as related by Tom Segev[14]:
Miriam Weinfeld felt shunned by the young people at Degania Bet. Although she did not speak Hebrew, their cliquishness hurt; she sensed arrogance, sometimes even mockery and hostility. The older members were more welcoming; they tried to adopt the new couple, but did not know how to make life easier for them. She sensed in their kindness guilt, even shame. She wanted to be asked about herself; her story was the only thing she had to contribute to her relationship with the new country. But no one asked.
.... Often, the stories were simply not believed. (p. 155)
A few days after he came home from his mission to Hungary, paratrooper Yoel Palgi went to a veterans´ club in Tel Aviv. It was June 1945. Everyone received him warmly and with admiration, he later wrote. They all wanted to hear what had happened over there. But no one was interested in accounts of Jewish suffering. They wanted a different story, about the few who had fought like lions. “Everywhere I turned” Palgi wrote, “the question was fired at me: why did the Jews not rebel? Why did they go like lambs to the slaughter? Suddenly I realized that we were ashamed of those who were tortured, shot, burned. There is a kind of general agreement that the Holocaust dead were worthless people. Unconsciously, we have accepted the Nazi view that the Jews were subhuman.
... History is playing a bitter joke on us: have we ourselves put the six million on trial?”
The bluntest expression of this was in yishuv[15] slang. At some point the word savon, “soap”, came to be used to refer to Holocaust survivors. (p183)[16]
Members of the local community also often asked questions that revealed the degree of ignorance that prevailed regarding the conditions people endured during the Shoah. Why didn’t you leave sooner? Why did you let yourselves be driven like sheep to the slaughterhouse? As if there had been a possibility to choose, as if they had had the opportunity to foresee what was going to happen.
In this context, Professor Rachel Hodara, researcher and teacher of the Shoah, identifies the kinds of questions that should not be asked: “How could you not know that this was going to happen? How could you not foresee it? Why didn’t you leave in time? Why did you march to the gas chambers like sheep to the slaughterhouse? Was fighting back the only form of resistance? Why did the Judenrat[17] collaborate? Why did people help the Nazis in their task? Why do survivors remain silent? Professor Hodara comments that the formulation of such questions only reveals the interrogator’s ignorance concerning the Shoah[18]. These questions are judgemental, they derive from prejudice, the kind of thinking that is based not on actual facts but on ignorance and myth.
However, there were even more profound, insidious and disturbing difficulties that only now are coming to light as some of the appeared are finding the words to apply to those painful, early immigration experiences, as they are finally becoming capable of reentering the continuum of daily life.
Hypotheses and suspicions as to why they remained alive.
The world entered a new era with the end of the war. A new distribution of power, the reconstruction of what had been lost, the Soviet Bloc in confrontation with North America, the Cold War. Camps for displaced persons, millions of people moving from one place to another, migratory fever, searching and uncertainty.
Segev[19] comments:
Like the survivors, the entire country was in the throes of an emotional crisis. Thousands of those who had come to Palestine before the War had also lost relatives; they too were in mourning. Many tortured themselves with the same guilt feelings that plagued the survivors. Shouldn´t they have died in place of a loved one? There were, of course, many who felt an obligation to help the survivors, as if the survivors were their lost parents and siblings. But many others blamed the survivors, as if these had survived at the expense of their relatives and so shared part of the guilt for their deaths. One survivor, Simha Rotem, wrote, “In almost every contact with the inhabitants of the country, the question would come up of how we had remained alive. It was asked again and again and not always in the most delicate way. I had a feeling that I was being blamed for having stayed alive” (p160)
There were also those questions that went not formulated but were always present, latent accusations that were sometimes veiled, sometimes quite open:
“How is it that you managed to save yourselves?” which served as a screen for other more terrible questions:
“What did you do in order to avoid the same fate as the rest? Did you inform? Were you accomplices? Did you collaborate?”[20]
The Embarrassing Jew. The post-war period saw the creation of the State of Israel. One of the struggles of the yishuv, ever since the dawn of agrarian colonization, has been the establishment of a new Jewish identity. The State of Israel would be the home and matrix of the valiant, arrogant and proud Jew, brought up in contact with Nature, in direct contrast to the contemptible image of the submissive, cowardly and humiliated Jew cowering in the shadows and condemned to a life of commerce and usury. The State of Israel set out to produce a very different Jewish prototype from that constructed by anti-Semitic ideologues (the French, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of the Czarist police, and the Nazis). The yishuv had laid claim to the image of European Jewry disseminated by anti-Semites.
In this context the appeared of the Shoah arrived in the land where they would be free.
According to Segev[21]:
The yishuv was permeated with a deep, almost mystic faith in its superiority, as symbolized by a hardy cactus whose fruit was spiked on the outside and sweet inside –the prickly pear, the sabra. Author Yehudit Hendel once said on Israeli television:
To put it bluntly, there were almost two races in this country. There was one race of people who thought they were gods. These were the ones who had had the honor and privilege of being born in Degania, or in the Borochov neighborhood of Givataim, and I belong, as it were, to those gods. I grew up in a workers' neighborhood near Haifa. And there was, we can certainly say, an inferior race. People we saw as inferior who had some kind of flaw, some kind of hunchback, and these were the people who came after the war. I was taught in school that the ugliest, basest thing is not the Exile but the Jew who came from there. (p 179)
The sabra represented a national ideal, and the Holocaust survivor the reverse. (p180)
David Shaltiel proposed a theory to his party (Mapai 1945): “I believe that those who remained alive lived because they were oigotists and looked out for themselves first”.
Ben Gurion (1945) said “Among the survivors of the German concentration camps, were those who, had they not been what they were –harsh, evil and egotistical people- would not have survived, and all they endured rooted out every good part of their souls”.
“We have to see things with open eyes” Haaretz wrote (1945), “the few that remain to us in Europe are not necessarily Judaism’s best. The nation’s jewels were destroyed first and many of the survivors are suspected of low morality. (p 118-9)
But this is contemporary history: today, it is still very difficult to confront the issue of the appeared of the Shoah in just measure, free of prejudice and preconceptions, in relation to the State of Israel as well as to the Diaspora.
How much of what was believed in 1945 is still considered valid today? The Warsaw ghetto uprising, for example, is still glorified, a praiseworthy event to be sure, like other acts of Jewish armed resistance, but its glorification may have harmful consequences: 1) the fact that it was impossible for the vast majority of Jewish survivor-victims to react may, on the contrary, hold these people up as inept, useless cowards, and, 2) that the daily and “insignificant” heroism of remaining clean and dignified, of encouraging hope, of clandestinely writing and publishing, of keeping schools in operation, of running the theaters, of organizing support networks, might be overlooked and unrecognized. It is painfully clear to me that the need to celebrate the date of the Warsaw uprising has a direct relation to the still valid idea that “they went passively like sheep to the slaughterhouse,” as if the complex scenario of the Shoah could be reduced to this oft-used and highly damaging image.
It is easily observed that, in principle, there has been a persistent need to discover acts of heroism and to cover up the reality of weakness and arbitrariness in which the victims lived with a patina of supposed exemplary behaviors oriented toward survival. The idea that people survived for the sake of survival, by pure chance, coincidence or arbitrariness, is by no means popular. This holds true even among the survivor-victims themselves, the appeared. And also among us, the children. The notion that they simply could not resist is, apparently, unacceptable to us.
Can we expect any different from the rest of the Jewish community and society as a whole?
The “survivor syndrome.”
In the field of psychotherapy, where so many important and productive advances have been made in recent years, the appeared-of-the-Shoah have also been treated rather uncharitably. Dr. William Niederland coined the term “survivor syndrome,” describing survivors with indelible labels of pathology and powerful psychotic ingredients.
In 1968, Dr. William Niederland[22] wrote the following:
The syndrome appears to be characterized by the persistence of multiple symptoms among which chronic depressive and anxiety reactions, insomnia, nightmares, personality changes, and far-reaching somatization prevail, he wrote in 1968. More specifically, clinical observation of about eight hundred survivors of Nazi persecution revealed that the Survivor Syndrome is composed of the following manifestations: anxiety; disturbances of cognition and memory; chronic depressive states; tendency to isolation, withdrawal and brooding seclusion; alterations of personal identity; psychosomatic conditions and “living corpse” appearance.....
Another importance characteristic of such patients is their inability to verbalize the traumatic events. (p. 104-5)
Thus, the appeared not only had to shoulder the heavy burden of memory, the peremptoriness of forgetting, the questions that still remained unanswered, the fruitless attempts to reassemble their fragmented lives, the memories of lost contacts and intimate friends, but they also had to bear the additional burden of the disqualifying label of insanity. Although some of the appeared, as well as a percentage of the population at large, certainly suffer characteristics of seriously disturbed individuals, this does not represent the reality for the vast majority. In general, the appeared resumed normal lives, the same, in almost all respects, as the rest of society.
What was suffered during the Shoah, however, was not gratuitous. The appeared still walk with that tiny stone in their shoe, though frequently they themselves are unaware of it. For all, there remain indelible scars, pits of horror fixed in the memory from which it is often only with great difficulty that a person can emerge into the light. Of this, we the children are acutely aware and have often been intimate witnesses.
The “survival syndrome” offered a scientific framework for what ended up being a prejudice, one that often led to discrediting testimony given by an appeared person due to “insanity” or “instability.” This, in turn, constituted one more reason to maintain silence, to avoid exposure and disqualification.
So then, where did this term, “survival syndrome,” come from, having caused so much damage to the understanding of victim-survivors in their attempts to obtain psychotherapy, and their rejection of the label, “disturbed?”
After 1957, when Germany enacted the Federal Restitution Law, or Wiedergutmachung (approved in 1953), psychiatric evaluations were required for anyone pressing financial claims against the German State.
The community of the appeared, if we may call it a “community,” became divided between those who flatly rejected any type of compensation from the Germans – “we want none of that blood money, they will not buy off their guilt, there is no forgiveness for them” – and those who hoped that in this way Germans would recognize their guilt – “take them for all they are worth, don’t let them keep any of what they have stolen, let the world see what they have done.” Complicated and often humiliating evaluation procedures were established for determining if a claimant had grounds or not. The appeared had to demonstrate their status as victims, they had to allay German suspicions that they might be lying. To this end, in addition to providing witnesses and submitting themselves to exhaustive interrogations during which they had to provide exact dates and references to places, names, and all other information establishing that they had, in fact, been victims of the Nazis – that they had lost property, social and professional positions, etc. – in addition to all of this, they had to submit to meticulous medical and psychiatric examinations to determine whether or not there were any physical and/or mental aftereffects. The “Survivor Syndrome” was a term created in large part as a consequence of these interviews to which the appeared submitted in order to convince psychiatrists of their madness, of the irreparable damage caused them by the Nazi machine, in order to qualify as recipients for some kind of financial reparation. They knew that the money would not compensate for one single second spent in the inferno, but they needed some kind of recognition, an official word that would restore to them some bit of their lost humanity. Furthermore, they were finally able to speak out, to spill everything, to tell their stories and the stories of so many others, without having to protect or worry about their listeners.
The Wiedergutmachung was legislation for making financial reparations. It was a legal action. In legal actions, damages must be quantifiable, capable of being measured. But we cannot measure pain, blood, death, or the loss of our loved ones. All that can be proven, all that can be sought as reparation, is that which can be considered as damage to property, health, professional or economic situations. Many of the appeared had no way of demonstrating loss of property or employment. Their only recourse was to press claims for disabling psychological disturbances. Clearly, faced with the impossibility of their word being taken for truth relative to the loss of property, they did not hesitate in exaggerating psychological disturbances when they felt it necessary for winning this small and personal battle against the German people. These desperate individual attempts at obtaining some degree of recognition for their condition as victims, were the raw material for the fabrication of what is known as the “Survivor Syndrome.”
With the passage of time, the ideas proposed as part of the syndrome were seen as requiring revision by therapists who could not confirm the syndrome, as such, in their own patients. However, this required much time owing to, among other things, the fact that it is uncommon for an appeared person to seek psychological help for his condition, explicitly, as a victim-survivor. The presence of such a person in the therapist’s office would be due to some other problem and, thus, the condition of victim-survivor would not be the focus of conversation. To date, the total number of such consultations does not permit drawing general or universal conclusions.
Even though compelling and heartrending descriptions of their experiences have been produced by literary figures such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Jorge Semprún, Charlotte Delbo, and others, it has not been until recently, especially with the release of the film “Schindler’s List,” that the victimization of the Jewish people began to be seen in a more realistic way by people in general. Some years earlier, Claude Lanzmann produced his remarkable documentary, “Shoah,” which opened the doors to new perspectives, but, of course, it did not have the enormous distribution and repercussion that Steven Spielberg’s film achieved (due to the massive response and attraction commanded by the director himself as well as the powerful distribution and colonization mechanism of the North American film industry). For many people, for the vast majority, the images presented in “Schindler’s List” were their first exposure to what occurred during the Shoah.
But the phenomena of reexamining the subject had already begun during the 1980s. Some forty years after the end of the war, voices were being heard, especially from the second generation. And it is no coincidence that this should have occurred simultaneously with a growing interest in film-recorded testimonies, at first in isolated cases and, now, in a more organized and comprehensive manner. After so much time spent keeping silent, longing for an opportunity to speak out, some of the appeared had the opportunity to be heard, to describe what happened and what they themselves did. These testimonies are hesitant, fearful, and personal, revealing unthinkable suffering and humiliation, exhibiting intolerable extremes of degradation through dense silences, confusion, and paralysis, punctuated by the insistent and penetrating question of “Why?” and the more specific question of “Why me?” rendering impossible the continuing simplification, mystification and hypocrisy that had surrounded the topic of survival during the Shoah for so long.
The youngest of the appeared are now approaching seventy years of age. Many have already succumbed to silence forever. Meanwhile, in response to the urgency of the situation, desperate efforts are now being made to record the testimonies of those who are still alive.
It is now our turn, the turn of the second generation, those of us who have been, until now, subjects of the silence and the simulacrum of amnesia.
2) ADEQUATE WORDS DO NOT EXIST FOR DESCRIBING WHAT OCCURRED.
Irene W. was in Auschwitz for a long time, including six months in the Kanadakommando (a work detail whose job was to sort out the clothing and belongings of those sent directly to their death), where she arrived at age fourteen. Her mother and three younger siblings were sent straight to the gas chambers; her father and older brother went “to the right”, but she never saw them again. She and her older sister remained. Although she narrates these details dispassionately, she is firm in her conviction that they are the genesis of the problem she still wrestles with today: how to talk about them meaningfully to an audience of outsiders.
She first encountered this dilemma immediately after the war, when she returned briefly to the town of her birth and tried to tell people there what had happened to her family. She remembers thinking that “my family were killed” was totally inadequate, because “killed”, she says, “was a word used for ordinary forms of dying, but to say matter of factly that my mother and brother and two sisters were gassed, as soon as they arrived at Auschwitz” seemed equally unsatisfactory, because plain factuality could not convey the enormity of the event. She was specially reluctant to reduce her family´s disappearance to a mere statistic, because she was sure that was what her audience wanted to hear about it. That night, she insists, she could not describe it in that way, but her refusal to speak had nothing to do with the oft, repeated bill that perhaps silence was the only appropriate response to such catastrophe. The seeds of anguished memory are sown in the barren belief that the very story you try to tell drives off the audience you seek to capture. Those seeds often shrivel in the farther suspicion that the story you tell cannot be precisely the story as it happened. Reluctance to speak has little to do with preference for silence.[23] (p.61)
So, another reason for keeping silent has been the sense of desperation felt due to the absence of words capable of expressing what was lived through.
In recorded testimonies and conversations, it is frequent for the victim-survivor to say, sooner or later, “it can’t be expressed”, “the words don’t exist”, “I can’t explain it”, “nobody can understand”, “it was as if...” (with a gesture of mute impotence, a sigh, a long silence).
One might almost suppose that these were people with difficulties in expressing themselves, the so-called Survivor Syndrome, when they mention the “inability to verbalize” an idea. One might also suppose that a literate person, someone with some expertise in words, would find the adequate way to express or describe what happened. Yet, curiously enough, not even the “literati” have succeeded. Neither Primo Levi nor Elie Wiesel, to name just two of the most talented, have come close to what they themselves felt was an accurate description of what happened. I don’t know how Jorge Semprún felt upon publication of his book, did he capture it? Is his piercing and majestic narration a fair representation of the way it really happened? Is he satisfied? In these freshly disinterred memories, imbued with fifty years worth of meaning, how much of what he says is the way it truly was?
Judging from the experience itself, there are no adequate referents in the language.
Language, the words we use for speaking and within the confines of which we live our lives, are a consequence of the reiteration of experiences. They are constructed through successive social interactions as a way of denominating and representing, to give existence to one’s own experience. We have no manner of expressing what is unknown to us, for objects or phenomena that supposedly do not exist. If something does not exist, it has no word, that is, it has never been necessary to activate the social mechanism for its denomination.
One of the persisting struggles for the appeared of the Shoah, fifty years beyond the end of the war, is that of finding the words to account for the things they lived through. It is just one more frustration among many that they must suffer.
Let us examine a few examples.
The word Life, the verb To Live. I have a permanent residence, a bed, a bathroom with a door that I can leave open or close as I please, I eat as often as I like, I dress warmly when I feel cold, I am at liberty to go outside in the fresh air when I feel too warm, I can look up at the sky every night, when I go to sleep I have reasonable expectations of waking up refreshed, I know that I am immersed in a social circumstance that permits me to predict with near certainty what behaviors will be accepted and which rewarded and which shall be rejected and even punished, I have created a family with which I live, I work, I earn money, I plan for my free time, if I get sick I go to the doctor, I have hopes, dreams, some utopian others more realistic, I enjoy getting together with my friends, I listen to music, I take vacations, I read a lot, I write, I go to the movies and the theater, I like traveling around my city, sometimes I treat myself to a trip abroad, I love and I am loved, I raised and cared for my children who have studied and developed as persons, I was with my parents until the end of their days, I cried when they died, I buried them in a cemetery beneath a gravestone that bears their names. All of this is for me the verb, to Live.
How can the same verb be applied to what was experienced by the appeared-of-the-Shoah? Can we employ the verb “to live” in describing that sensation of eternal transience and arbitrariness, that lack of even minimal conditions for subsistence and dignity? Can we say that the denial of choices, being treated like zombies and submitted to the whims of others, is “to live?” Was it “to live” not knowing what to do in order to go on breathing: at one moment it was necessary to run, at another, to remain still, at another to scream, the next, to keep quiet? Can we use the same word in reference to two things that are so different? But what other words are there? Some people have suggested using the word “to remain,” which alludes to inertia, the inability to make a decision, the sensation of being beneath the rest, of having lost efficacy and the ability to take any initiative whatsoever. But there is no consensus. The only word that we have is “to live” and the victims cannot use it without feeling that they are betraying the essence of their experience. If the word “to live” applies to their situations today, then they cannot use the same word for describing what happened to them during the Shoah.
The word Death, to Die. How can we apply any word that has its origin in the natural experience of human life to the horror, the humiliation, the degradation, the progressive dehumanization to which our family members were submitted before the ultimate moment of “death” to which they had to bear witness time after time? In many cases, this death represented a liberation, a tremendous relief. Many chose death for their loved ones rather than having them pass through the torturous anterooms of the Nazi death machine. At certain moments, to die was attractive. To die was not natural, it was not the logical consequence of a complete, fulfilled and finished life. To die during the Shoah was an abrupt interruption, an arbitrary event, an injustice, but also the interruption of arbitrariness. It wasn’t just the sick, the old, or the injured that died, everyone died, especially the children, but there was no rhyme nor reason. How should we speak of it, then? In what category of experience can we include this form of dying? It was not a form of dying linked to personal hatred, to some ferocious passion unleashed at one person in particular. How can we comprehend this form of killing that is so distant from human experience, carried out with neither hatred nor passion? What is the correct word?
What words do our parents have available to them, besides “to live” and “to die?” What to call their life experiences, how to remember them, how to transmit them?
It would be the same, even with other words.
The word love. One of the many dilemmas for parents during the Shoah was that of keeping their babies with them, which implied certain death, or leaving them with a Christian family, or an orphanage, or wherever, in the hopes that the child might survive; but what would happen later, if and when the unexpected took place, in the event that the parents survived and the child did not? What can we call such conduct, the delivering of a child to its death? Can that be called love?
The word guilt. This is a feeling that troubles many of the appeared but it is not the same “guilt” as most of us feel as we live our normal lives; the concept of guilt itself is inappropriate as it implies the possibility of making and effecting decisions; one is only guilty for conduct that one freely and consciously chooses to perform. If, out of laziness, we use the word “guilt” in referring to the recurrent thoughts and reproaches of the appeared, this implies inserting them into a context where free will was operative, a context that was absolutely non-existent during the Shoah. Much of the moral misery suffered by the appeared has to do with this error, this particular trap: the inappropriate gauging of conduct according to parameters that pertain to normal life before and after the Shoah. I will refer to these sentiments as “torturous thoughts”[24].
Similar observations could be made with respect to many other words, such as the words hunger, dream, tomorrow, I, etc. (We will turn our attention to the word “I” below).
Words and social manipulation.
Even as we recognize that adequate words for describing these experiences do not exist, we should also recognize ways in which the use of certain words has served for the social manipulation of the topic of the Shoah.
The words we choose are never objective or completely innocent. In general, opinion-makers – journalists, politicians, social commentators – know very well the evocative and contextual power of the words they employ, they are aware of their manipulative potential. Nazi propaganda was based on this concept, as is generally recognized by politicians and the mass media today.
Let us take a simple example: given an episode in which one person caused the death of another, we might say,
1) (So-and-so) committed a brutal murder, or
2) (So-and-so) killed in legitimate self-defense, or
3) (So-and-so) stabbed in a fit of insanity.
The statement given in the example, “one person caused the death of another,” is merely descriptive, assuming no particular position nor qualifying the conduct of the actor in any way. This is not the case in the other three statements.
In the statement, so-and-so “committed a brutal murder”, the speaker accuses so-and-so with guilt, the words “committed”, “brutal”, and “murder”, lead to a clear and singular understanding of the event.
Saying that so-and-so “killed in legitimate self-defense” is a more benign formulation. The person appears to have been justified in his/her action given that he “killed in legitimate self-defense”. The word “killed”, which implies the idea of “murder,” is tempered by the words, “legitimate,” and “defense,” which refer to a context of justice, an action that was merited.
When the formulation states that so-and-so “stabbed in a fit of insanity,” the qualification leads to the idea of innocence by virtue of insanity, which in turn leads to the impunity of the actor. The word “stabbed” suggests a carnal and passionate context, reinforced by the clearly exculpatory words, “in a fit” and the definitive, “insanity.”
Within the statement itself there is an implicit opinion with respect to the innocence or guilt of the actor.
Every choice of words expresses an opinion. An event is inserted into a significant context, thus conferring meaning upon the event itself, meaning that is expressly intended by the speaker. The listener must be aware of the manipulative power of language and must constantly exercise critical discretion. If the listener validates the statement by accepting it, then the entire context in which it is included is also confirmed.
If, during a conversation, someone mentions “the Jewish race” and the listener lets it pass, he is confirming the idea that there are races of human beings, implying genetic differences such that Jews, Negroes, Asians would have human qualities that are different from those of other “races.” In addition to the fact that the concept of race itself is biologically incorrect[25], the word “race” leads to the Nazi view of human beings and, suddenly, the conversation is suffused with anti-Semitic paraphernalia detailing the size of the nose, the cranial orbs, the color of the skin, the eyes, and the skin, not to mention greed, cruelty and conspiracy. What is surprising is that if one asks the speaker what was meant by referring to the “Jewish race,” if he was referring to all of the above, he will probably object, asserting that he didn’t mean to say as much, that it was just a “manner of speech, not to be taken so far.”
However, it is through words that we construct consensus, meanings and frameworks that give form to our perception of reality and the way we see ourselves. Jews and other ethnic or social minorities are conscious of the pragmatic consequences conveyed by language, we have learned to respect words and to fear the actions that may correspond to them.
Another example of social manipulation may be found in the choice of the word, Holocaust. Holocaust, as mentioned in the footnote in the introduction, means purification by fire, sacrifice or ritual. None of these meanings may be applied to the experience of the victims of the Shoah.
There was no connection to purification, nor sacrifice, nor ritual, nor anything related to divine designs or greater justice. This idea, appearing like an uninvited guest, implies the idea of guilt, of deserved punishment, because if God permitted it, “there must have been a reason.”
To lay blame on the million-and-a-half children that were murdered, and the four-and-a-half-million adults (to name only the Jewish victims), is to distort the facts. It is offensive and removes the burden of responsibility from the guilty parties. It is to transfer responsibility from the victimizers to the victims: if they “deserved” such treatment, if some form of purification was produced in this way, if there was some kind of ritual performed that had to do with religion or divinity, then the Nazis were only tools in a much grander scheme, that is, they were innocent. Thus, not only are the victims accused of their own victimization, but the nation of victimizers are judged innocent and, in one swift movement, all of humanity is washed clean of guilt. If it was God’s will, then Man is not responsible.
Many skeptical and troubled victims have attempted to find some kind of lesson in what took place. If there is a lesson to be extracted from this tragedy, it is that what happened – this incredible, unimaginable and inhuman event – was enacted by human beings upon other human beings with the tacit acceptance of the rest of the world, also composed of human beings, which could not and would not intercede in the process and, much later, cannot assimilate the event into human experience. The image in the mirror is unbearable and yet could be the essential lesson.
The horror of what happened is the patrimony of all humanity. It is such an intolerable concept that the idea of the existence of a superior design, which exempts sacrosanct humanity from any such guilt, has been accepted and popularized. We even refer to it, and any such massive killing, with the word “Holocaust,” regardless of what the reasons for it may have been.
The word Shoah, meaning devastation, annihilation, seems more adequate. Without religious or fatalistic implications, without attributes of thinly disguised guilt, the word describes the void, the senselessness, the timelessness. However, it does have the problem of referring to natural disasters; for those of us who use the word it is necessary to indicate that a deliberate policy was applied and executed by people. On the other hand, the fact that it is a word of Hebrew origin reinforces the uniqueness of what happened: the Shoah was and remains a singular case of devastation carried out against the Jewish people. There may be many Holocausts, but there is only one Shoah.
A further example of social manipulation is evident in the use of the word survivor, a word that I dislike using. Although it is a word often used in the context of serious accidents and catastrophes, in which case it carries connotations of “chance” or “fortuity”, when it is used in reference to the Shoah it carries with it an added value, a hint of heroism, a degree of the will to live, of exerting effort and effecting appropriate decisions, it alludes to the human capacity for overcoming adversity, for emerging victorious, in short, the force of life itself. These are ideas and concepts that our society venerates, ones that reflect an ideal person who is superior, ethical and of divine material. It is as if we were making ourselves believe that we are a certain way, with no other device than that of telling ourselves that this is how we are. Our society, self-satisfied and proud, takes great pains to reflect images of ourselves that coincide with our loftiest, declared spiritual objectives. For me, the word survivor alludes to this entire context.
The words of the appeared do not coincide with these ideas. The majority of the appeared say that they do not know why they survived; some say that it was just by chance, others say that it was fate, others attribute their survival to some incomprehensible, surprising and sudden behavior, others say that it was due to a misunderstanding. In all these explanations there is an element in common: none feel that they were agents in keeping themselves alive, it was not due to intentional behavior or strategies, it was just something that happened.
According to Semprún[26]:
“...Of course, there was no merit in having survived. Unscathed, at least to all appearances. There was no difference in worth between the living and the dead. None of us deserved to live. Or to die, either... surviving wasn’t a question of worthiness, it was a question of chance.” (p. 155)
Victim-survivors of the camps do not appear to be proud of having remained alive, they don’t see themselves as representing any kind of triumph over adversity. They describe themselves living through the Shoah as anesthetized, dazed, automatons. With overwhelming insistence, they repeat that the only thought in their head was that of surviving for five more minutes, getting through the night, passing unnoticed through Appel (role call), obtaining food, escaping the cold or too much heat, finding the opportunity to take care of their needs whenever necessary... they speak of a reality composed of priorities, a reality that is unimaginable for those of us who have not lived through it. The issue of overcoming adversity, heroic conduct, ethical dilemmas, all of this was distant from their daily lives. For this reason I prefer not to use the term “survivors.” I feel more comfortable with Semprun´s distillation of the idea with the word, “appeared”, which alludes to the living-dead, or the dead-living, to the imprecise sensation of death with which they lived and still live, to their condition as subjects to others, to the hallucination, to the absolute arbitrariness that was their condition, to the memory of their inability to make decisions on how to live, how to die, or how to save one another, and their continued wandering through that limbo without clear frontiers, leading them to conceal their ghost-like conditions, as much as possible, from those around them in order to be accepted by the world and to be able to return once again, finally, to the land of the living.
The word “survivor” has still another painful dimension: it establishes a distinction between survivors and victims, it insidiously takes from the survivors their identity as victims, it devalues their suffering. The victims are those who were executed, the dead. The survivors are those who managed to live, those who saved themselves. Saved from death, most certainly, but not saved from disgrace and, much less, from excruciating memory.
“What are you complaining about?” the living-dead were asking immediately following the war. “So long as you’re still alive...” As if the fact that they were still alive warranted what had happened; as if the fact that they were alive had anything to do with the death of the others; as if they were somehow guilty...
There are, then, victims who died and victims who lived. For this reason, I precede the word “survivor” with the word “victim.”
The words we use – both tools and manacles – are powerful and must be carefully considered.
3) THE CATEGORIES OF SUFFERING
Another reason for the silence of those who have remained silent follows from the point made at the end of the previous section, the question of whether the appeared may be considered, and may consider themselves, as victims. Categories of suffering have been established that seem to doubt the degree to which survivors were indeed victims.
The establishment of hierarchies is a natural human behavior. We need to categorize experiences in order to place them in contexts that permit us to use them, to endow our experiences with meaning in order to understand them, in order to remember them, in order to incorporate them into our lives. We also need to place every circumstance in some kind of hierarchical order that will enable us to discriminate between them in terms of levels of importance, to establish distinctions, to compare, to know how to limit ourselves. This is true for all orders of life including suffering, pain and disgrace. This is also true in relation to the Shoah. These categories establish areas of authority, rights and attributes, though not always by consensus. Each person, according to the level of suffering experienced, feels endowed with certain rights that may be denied to those considered to have suffered at inferior levels.
On which side of the barbed wire?
An important distinction may be established directly for categorizing the experience of the appeared according to which side of the barbed wire they were on: those who were caught inside the Shoah, and those of us who were not. It is generally accepted that “survivors of the Shoah” are considered to be all of those who lived in Nazi-occupied territories, inasmuch as the popular view is that those who had the fortune to escape before the war do not form part of the group. Consequently, great numbers of people feel excluded, and have indeed been excluded, from the categories of victims because “they weren’t there,” the stains of iniquity did not stain them quite enough. Victims and witnesses of rising anti-Semitism, of progressive restrictions on Jews, of persecution, harassment, attacks by neighbors, are stifled into silence by this categorization from which they are excluded. Nonetheless, they too are among the appeared. They too know that they are alive only by chance. Most likely, many of them also feel the retrospective anguish of knowing that they could have died, that they brushed up against evil, the experience of arbitrariness and injustice, outrage and violation, humiliating anti-Semitism and even prison, torture or the death of a loved one.
These categories extend to the second generation: those of us who are direct descendents of appeared parents, those who lost more distant relatives, those who are children of parents who saved themselves in time, and, finally, those who lost no one.
Another distinction is made between the categories of the six million who died and the one million that lived. The first are viewed by all, no matter what side of the barbed wire, as victims, the quintessential victims.
Among those who remained alive, the so-called survivors, or the appeared, new hierarchies have been established: those who were in camps and those who were not.
Within this first category, there is a further distinction between those who were in the camps of extermination and those who were ‘merely’ in concentration and/or work camps. Even among the camps there is a certain preeminence conferred on those who suffered the misfortune of being in the most infamous camps, such as Auschwitz (the most heinous), Treblinka, Maidenaek, Mauthausen and Buchenwald, not because the hundreds of others were more benevolent, but because these have attracted the most attention and publicity. This is so much the case that, for many people, the mere mention of the word “survivor” is synonymous with Auschwitz. Inside the camps, still further distinctions are applied: there are those who worked in the infirmary, the kitchen, the warehouses, the supply houses or carrying out administrative tasks, and then, at the other extreme, there are those who worked in what was called the Sonderkommmando, assigned by the Nazis to do the “dirty work” (stacking bodies, extracting gold from the teeth, operating the ovens of the crematorium, and sorting objects). In a category apart, due to the generalized repulsion that they generated, though not always justified, are the Kapos, the Jewish prisoners designated by the Nazis as responsible for discipline in the barracks or work crews, who demonstrated a cruelty superior even to that of the victimizers themselves, in the hope of ingratiating themselves and perhaps gaining the right, usually frustrated, to live.
Then there is the vast majority of the appeared, those who were hidden in attics, basements, sewers, holes, barns; those who disguised their identities and passed themselves off as Aryans, little boys who pretended to be little girls, those who were protected by Christian families or religious institutions, those who wandered the land by the grace of God, those who escaped to Russia, those who hid in the woods.
Those who “Aryanized” or lived among the Nazis: Jews who saved themselves by integrating into the daily life of the occupied territories (servants, helpers, store-clerks, office-workers, waiters and waitresses, prostitutes).
Those who collaborated. Finally, the last and lowest level on this shameful and humiliating scale of suffering during the Shoah pertains to those who profited during the war, those who collaborated, the accomplices.
A special chapter is merited for those who formed part of the Judenräte that the Nazis established and forced upon Jewish populations. There is a generalized notion that the Judenräte were submissive and acted in complicity with the Nazis; consequently, it followed that anyone suspected of having participated in a Judenrat immediately became the object of community repulsion. Certainly, the phenomenon of the Judenräte is extremely complex. Each one was unique. We cannot generalize nor draw conclusions based only on the cases of the most well-known, such as that of Lodz, led by Rumkowsky[27]; each one had to respond to different challenges according to place and time; some were even involved in some kind of resistance and others collaborated in saving a portion of the population. But even within the Judenräte, beyond the particularities of each case, there is a kind of hierarchization and those at the bottom, in the lowest category, are those who collaborated, those who formed part of the Jewish Police, the Nazi henchmen, on a par with the Kapos in the camps. However, it is difficult to generalize as, in some of the ghettos, members of the Jewish Police were also members of the Resistance.
When the appeared speak about what happened, for the most part, they tend to relate events that do not expose them to the possibility of social condemnation. Nonetheless, no appeared person can tell a personal history that is simple and univocal; most likely they had such a vast variety of experiences during those years that it is not surprising when their stories, at times, lose chronological coherence, skip over large portions of time, give rise to unexplainable contradictions and surprising lapses of memory that lead to strange narrative disruptions. There are things that they will never relate, especially referring to humiliating or shameful events, things that they do not want anyone to know, things that they cannot even face themselves. The more torturous, shameful and humiliating a memory is, the less disposed the person is to speak about it[28].
The Heroes. I have left this category for the end, the category of those who took some sort of action against the Nazi system: those who participated in uprisings (the most famous was that of the Warsaw ghetto, though it was not the only one), mutinies, partisan groups, information networks, plots of sabotage, contraband, clandestine publications, in short, the handful of heroes who did something they can be proud of. They can speak freely of the moments in which they behaved bravely and decisively; what they have to say is what the world wants to hear, they are applauded, rewarded, recognized in a different way. They may bear or overcome their suffering and loss with a consolation prize that the rest of the appeared must do without: the trophy of heroism.
Those people who knew her story always asked her why she and her husband had not done anything against the Nazis early on. And they always, always asked her how she had been saved, until she began to feel that she had to apologize for living. The stories she and her husband told competed with the stories of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, she said, and could not win: they had only fought for their lives, not to be heroes. The country wanted heroes. The Brands could only offer a story of survival. People did not know how hard it had been just to stay alive. They didn´t comprehend that; they wanted stories of glory (p. 472)[29]
Self-disqualification.
This question of categories enables us to understand why there has been such a generalized silence. It is common for the appeared who did not pass through the camps to disqualify themselves in the belief that their suffering “was not so serious” compared with those who were in the camps. “Why talk about it if no one is interested? There’s nothing glorious or heroic about it if you compare it to what one hears about the camps, it’s embarrassing to say that one suffered.”
For some, there are only the two categories: those who died and those who came out alive. Many of the appeared feel that, having survived, they have no right to complain. And they don’t complain, at least not explicitly.
This was a common feeling; and though most survivors owed their lives to chance, not to another´s sacrifice, they still felt guilt for having survived. The feeling often served a psychological and moral purpose: it acted as a cover for the powerlessness of the victims. It allowed them to think they had had a choice, and had chosen to live. The sense of guilt had a contrary purpose, too. It was for the survivors a kind of pledge of allegiance to humanistic ethical values, another bid, after the fact, to counter the attempt to rob them of their humanity. The few who had resisted had it easier; many of them tended to set themselves off from the other survivors, even displaying a measure of arrogance. But they too tortured themselves; perhaps they could have done more. “When the Germans entered Poland, had we immediately recognized the danger and started to act,” Tzivia Lubetkin said, “perhaps the whole thing would have looked different”. (p. 160.)[30]
These categories, which we all establish in one way or another, are meant to give us an objective measurement of suffering, a concept that is untenable given that suffering is, by definition, a subjective, personal and non-transferable experience, like different degrees of pain.
These are mystifying categories, yet they are powerful and intensely persistent. They can be used – and in fact they are often used – to obtain rights and powers, to establish justifications, to enable those who consider themselves as deserving a higher position in this denigrating hierarchy of penury to feel that they are the principle actors now, at least with respect to who has custody over the memories, and that they have some dominion over their lives and can extract a paradoxical triumph from having been among those who suffered the most.
4) THEY DIDN’T WANT TO HURT THEIR CHILDREN
Among the reasons for the silence being maintained, we should also consider the question of love and concern for the children who were born in the new life, on the second opportunity.
The parents were not accustomed to speaking with their children. First, as in the case elsewhere in these reflections, I think it is appropriate to establish the context. Let us consider the ten-year period from 1945 to 1955, during which time the majority of the second generation was born. Let us think, specifically, in the educational techniques and communicational styles of the period. Our current world, our form of living and thinking and, especially, the emphasis we place on our children, is different from how it was then. The post-war world had not yet enthroned their majesties our children in the spotlight of family concern as we observe today. Parents then did not know much about infant trauma, autism, schizophrenia, hyperactivity, abulia, depression and all the other categories that today are common knowledge. Parents then were not as concerned as parents today with questions such as whether or not to advise the children of economic problems, deaths, or cases of adoption; in general children were not informed of issues that were considered to be for adults only. The increased diffusion of psychological viewpoints has defined a radical change in such behavior to such an extent that we have probably lost view of the fact that, until recently, child-rearing was very different. Whether the children learned certain things was not such a major concern. Parents focused on more concrete issues, such as nutrition and health, and were unaware of conflict assessment, negotiation differences, encouraging sibling alliances, sex education, etc. Dialogue, when it existed, followed other lines: it is common to hear, among those of us who are nearing our fifties, that “in the house we didn’t discuss what happened in the house.”
The child-rearing approach that was most in vogue was simply that it was quite unnecessary to complicate the lives of the children with the problems of adults, they would have plenty of time for that kind of thing later, it was better to let them enjoy growing up innocently while that was still possible.
The parents as role-models. Another general aspect to consider is the idea that we have today of parents as role models for our children. In this context, a generalized educational criteria prescribes supplying encouragement toward ethical goals (for example, not to lie, steal, or kill) and directing children toward personal fulfillment and professional success. Where in the parent-child relationship does the parent’s possible failure in any one of these areas fit in? Or the exhibition of weakness and vulnerability? Considering the ideal educational goals held dear by society, how can we account for or justify such behavior as lying, minor and more serious transgressions (not to mention acts of even greater magnitude)? The tendency is to cover up anything that might not be deemed pure, moral and proper, generating the usual double discourse that we see so often these days of saying one thing and doing another.
Our parents wanted to be the best they could for us. Just like all parents. They wanted our respect, our love, our consideration, our appreciation and our recognition. Just like all parents. They came into contact with unimaginable levels of misery and suffering, they witnessed the unbearable. They were submitted to extreme victimization. They lived through circumstances that led to their behaving in ways that they could not speak about with us, they thought it would be inappropriate as part of our education, that it would not only fail to enrich our lives, but that it could detract from the image we had of them. I am referring principally to issues that touch upon guilt, humiliation and shame, the unbearable issues for the appeared of the Shoah.
If they don’t know, they won’t suffer. This line of reason follows from the above and was the current line of thought at the time, though modern psychology refutes it. It was not customary, for instance, to take the children to the cemetery, or to have them visit the sick, or, as mentioned earlier, to share with them the pain, suffering, and difficulties that adults considered inappropriate for children to know about.
Out of sight, out of mind. In general, the question of telling the children things did not even come up, it was never an issue. Such things were just not mentioned, there was no reason to subject the children to such suffering, they had to be protected and made happy.
But things cannot be hidden from children. The silence, when it was present, was rarely an absolute silence. In spite of the parents’ best efforts to keep distressing information from their children, there were unintentional “leaks” that filtered through in vague and ambiguous ways. And for this reason they were infinitely more threatening.
Words are not the only form of communication, Frequently, they aren’t even the most important.
THE DAUGHTER OF SURVIVORS
Hilary Tham
She is screaming again.
You stand at your bedroom door.
Her dream claws her sleep to shreds.
Shivering, you will her to stop, will it
to go away. You father´s voice
rises and falls with the burden of her name.
She is awake. You hear her voice cling
To his, as a shipwrecked cat
Digs its claws into a floating spar.
You hear the creak of bedsprings as they rise.