REASONS FOR THE SILENCE

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.

We have been instructed to behave as if everything were just fine, we have learned to keep silent.

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?

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.

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.”

The importance of context

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.

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:

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.

Silence and our identity

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 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.

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.

In what follows, I propose a series of non-exhaustive topics or, perhaps, apertures, for embarking on a discussion of our parents’ silence:

4) Avoidance of suffering on behalf of the children (if they don’t know, then they can live normal lives);

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 19^th century and continued into the 20^th 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.

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.

“... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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,

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.

“...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.

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.

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.

The dead (the victims) and the living (the survivors): are not the living victims too?

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.

In the Camps

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.

Those who were not in the camps

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]

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.

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.

Clearly, it was not a very quiet silence. On the contrary, it was a silence impregnated by troublesome issues that persistently cast a shadow over even the most insignificant fragments of daily life. Uneasy moments and half-finished sentences, locked drawers, far-off gazes, insomnia, restricted topics of conversation and total avoidance of others, overprotective behavior, itinerant fears, unexplainable aversions to certain experiences, caresses overlaid with a strange nostalgia, photographs and objects that were always present but never mentioned or explained, fragments of the past that were erased along with the names of non-existent relatives – fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins. These were considered normal forms of household behavior, they were not recognized as indicative of anything beyond the ordinary but, rather, were surprisingly assumed to be completely natural, one became accustomed to not noticing, to never asking questions, simply getting along and learning the lessons of our parents, learning to live as if this special behavior didn’t exist, just as they had learned to live and to be able to live, as if what they had lived through during the Shoah had never happened. We signed a pact of silence: never to ask questions.

Many raised their children with the feeling that their own lives were barely worth living, that their only purpose in living was to ensure the good, the welfare and the future of their children. Many forced the children to bare the burden of memory by giving them the names of relatives who had died in the Holocaust. Many, perhaps most, could not, and did not want to, tell their children what they had experienced, and the children did not dare ask, as if the answer were a terrible, threatening family secret. Holocaust anxieties could suddenly break into daily life, triggered by routine events at home or at work or on the news. An illness, losing a job, or a border incident –everything took them back to “there”. For many, the past continued to intrude years after the end of the war.(p.159)[32]

The stories and reactions of the appeared were not univocal. Nor were the experiences of their children, the second generation. Whatever the manner in which each family confronted the issue, according to intrinsic characteristics of each particular family, it still remains that the issue was, I dare say, the issue. The greater the effort made to avoid the issue, the more pervasive it became, with that perverse insistence so common to painful memories and secrets that flutter before our eyes like pesky flies that cannot be frightened away.

There is another reason for the silence being maintained, which involves the interruption of continuity between life and memory.

Lawrence Langer[33] calls our attention to what he calls “discontinuity,” the interruption in the normal flow of life represented by the Shoah for those who lived through it. The idea speaks to us of a rupture, a surprising alteration; there is the suggestion of a gap, a black hole, invisible at first sight, into which one may seem to fall without knowing if there is a bottom or any notion of an exterior. One moment there is normal life, a day like any other, the next moment one falls into the gap, darkness, life without reason, only arbitrariness, a fatal break with the sublime breath of hope. Those who were able to emerge from the gap, the appeared, those who returned, albeit without completely returning, discovered that outside the gap the world was the same as before, life went on as usual and they had to quickly assimilate, no questions asked, without having the opportunity to visualize the enormous cataclysm through which they had been processed. They emerged from the black hole out of desperation and without looking back. They went on living without understanding, to the best of their ability, groping, improvising, fleeing, searching for other appeared persons similar to themselves, reconstructing their lives, commencing to dream all over. And between their two normal lives – their lives before and after the Shoah – there remained that great dark stain, the gap, bottomless, discontinuous, shattered (Grossman calls it “the World Over There” and “The Beast”).[34]

We must develop new ears. Only recently, with the advent of filmed testimonials, have we begun to venture into the gap and listen to the echoes. Langer says that we are unable to listen to the testimonials with the normal ears of our normal everyday lives, that we must set aside our usual assumptions regarding people, morality and traditional distinctions between what is good and evil. When the appeared insist that their experience was “different,” they must be believed, they are making a special appeal for us to listen with different ears.

It was another world. But not from another planet. These were human beings on Earth, the same as the rest of us. However, there were other laws of such an order that they subverted the basic notions that sustain life in society.

The basic notion of predictability. An essential pillar of our daily existence is the notion that there are things we can predict with a certain degree of certainty relative to our own behavior. We have a fairly good and basic idea of what is predictable and what is not, of which behaviors will be rewarded and which will be punished. This was not true during the period known as the Gap. It was impossible to predict what would be appropriate behavior at any given moment; what one had to do in order to stay alive, what one had to do to protect one’s loved ones. In one situation a person might have to lie, in another it would be better to tell the truth, or to remain silent, sometimes it was best to scream or remain motionless, to run, to try not to be noticed, or to attract attention... Consequences did not depend on behavior but, rather, exclusively, on the will or whim of whoever was in charge of a situation. Responses were unpredictable. It was a realm of arbitrariness that subverted the notion of predictability, one of the most essential tenets of civilized society.

The illusion that it was possible to make choices. Another notion that was profoundly altered and mystified in the Gap was that of free will. Langer affirms that the victims were prisoners to “choiceless choice,” that is, choices that were impossible to make (like that presented in the film, “Sophie’s Choice,” in which a woman must choose which of her children shall live and which shall die). As subjects of the most absolute arbitrariness, the supposed possibility that they could make choices was a mystifying illusion that was difficult to unmask. The idea of choice itself implies an array of different alternatives, diverse avenues. If we take time to examine the conditions in which they lived, we see that there were no alternative avenues, only illusions. In general, their lives took place under conditions of such extreme want and progressive deterioration, that they were unable to focus their attention and energies on anything beyond the primary needs of subsistence; they were reduced to animal states, living in conditions of extreme hunger and thirst, heat and cold, stress and anguish, and desensitized thought and emotion. The future was limited to the next few minutes, the night, getting through Appel[35], or surviving the akcja[36]. Death could overcome anyone at any moment. There was no hope. In many witness testimonies, the appeared say that they have no recollection of having thought about whether an action they were about to perform was either good or bad. Ethical behavior would appear to be an attribute or a luxury of satisfied bellies, one that comes with the certainty that one will go on living. The appeared often comment that they simply did what they did, their movements were almost instinctual, it was behavior that was previous to, or absent of, reflection. Reflections, questions and doubts came later. Many say that to think about eating, to only think a few minutes ahead, somehow provided a protective shell that helped take their minds off their immense sense of loss, it forced them to have an immediate objective, one that did not extend too far into the future but that gave them some semblance of a reason to go on living. Many speak of how, when they look back, they see themselves as if they were asleep, dazed, anesthetized, devoid of their most human essence.

Many of the appeared say that the absence of emotion was so complete that when the moment of their liberation finally arrived, they hardly took notice, they did not believe it, they could not feel happiness.

For fifty years they have tried to understand how they became that way. They do not recognize themselves. They do not understand themselves. They cannot accept themselves.

The two versions of identity. The word “I”. The gap, the discontinuity between the two portions of normal life, confronts the appeared with a dilemma that has no apparent solution: how to reconcile the two versions of their identity that are a result of such disparate experiences. When the appeared use the word “I” as they narrate their experiences during the Shoah, to whom do they refer? Often, they wonder about this very question themselves: how is it possible that I experienced this? How is it possible that I watched as they killed my brother and still remained in hiding? How is it possible that I let myself be so humiliated just to live a little longer? This phrase, “How is it possible...?,” refers to the question of how it is possible that both the I of then and the I of now correspond to the same person. For fifty years the appeared have struggled with this internal and eternal dialogue in which they try to integrate, to harmonize, these two versions into one. And they cannot. The gap remains in the shadows, inaccessible, sealed off, impossible to integrate into the continuum of their lives, the before and after, there is no place for it, it remains embedded like an often malignant tumor that can only be observed as it grows in the hope that it will remain silent, that it will not attack during the night, that they will be able to go on walking without feeling the tiny stone in their shoe.

There is an important reason for trying to understand the silence of those who have kept silent: to come to an understanding of the torturous ins and outs of memory and its mysterious vicissitudes.

Lawrence Langer[37] has published many texts on the subject of the Shoah. One of the principal sources of information for his work has been the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. These oral testimonies confronted him with the living word of the appeared, their silences, disruptions, incongruences, difficulties, mental blocks, and, at the same time, a vivid and personal sensation of the profound and indelible impact of the experiences they were compelled to live through. In the prologue of his book, “Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory,” from which I have borrowed his ideas on the different kinds of memory, he observes:

...they use a lexicon of disruption, absence, and irreversible loss. It took me some time to realize that all of them were telling a version of the truth as they grasped it, that several currents flow at different depths in Holocaust testimonies...

... If I have discovered anything in my investigation, it is that oral Holocaust testimonies are doomed on one level to remain disrupted narratives, not only by the vicissitudes of technology but by the quintessence of the experiences they record. Instead of leading to further chapters in the autobiography of the witnesses they exhaust themselves in the telling.

...Moral formulas about learning from experience and growing through suffering rapidly disintegrate into meaningless fragments of rhetorical consolation as the testimony of these interviews proceeds.

....When former victims, entreating our sympathetic understanding, insist that the situations in which they found themselves in ghettos and camps were “different”, they are making a specific appeal to us to abandon traditional assumptions about moral conduct and the “privileged” distinctions between right and wrong that usually inspire such assumptions.

....I often found myself naked before their nakedness, defenseless in presence of their vulnerability.

....From the point of view of the witness, the urge to tell meets resistance from the certainty that one´s audience will not understand.

Observation of witness testimonies led Langer to conceptualize five types of memory, all differing from one another as well as from what we generally consider “normal” memory. Each type of memory, in turn, gives rise to a distinct version of the self, one that is neither coherent nor possible to incorporate into a “normal” identity. One of Langer’s central ideas, one which he insists upon throughout his work, is that post-war society refused to recognize the psychic reality of the appeared victims, and he suggests that it is only through oral testimonies that we can gain access to it.

A common characteristic of the five memories described by Langer is implicit chronology, that is, a different and altered chronology, a period of time outside of time. The appeared all seem to coincide in speaking about something that both was and is; that both is and is not present; thus, they proceed, eternally following disjunctive paths.

1) Deep Memory® The Buried Self. Memory that remains alive then and there, but simultaneously here and now. When the appeared person seems to be remembering, he/she is really re-living, he/she speaks in the present tense. Langer[38] refers to Charlotte Delbo’s distinction between deep memory and common memory. Common memory – common to all of us – refers to a memory of normalcy, one that establishes chronologies and differentiates through the use of verb tenses.

One effect of common memory with its talk of normalcy amid chaos, is to mediate atrocity, to reassure us that in spite of the ordeal some human bonds were inviolable. For instance, a recurrent theme in the oral testimonies is the mutuality that sustained sisters who went through the camp experience together. Common memory recalls family unity as a nurturing value in one´s darkest moments-and there is no reason to dispute this. But simultaneously deep memory, often in the same testimony, burrows beneath the surface of the narrative to excavate episodes that corrode the comforts of common memory. Remembering and recording what happened operate on several levels, leaving atrocity and order in a permanently disrupted suspension.

Langer goes on to present the situation of two sisters, both adolescents, who were hidden for a year-and-a-half in a hole in a barn, a hole that was scarcely a meter-and-a-half in diameter, “with rats that chewed at our toes.” One day, one of their brothers, who was fighting in the woods with the partisans, came and brought them a gun. He told them that if the Germans were to come, they must not get caught alive but that one of them must shoot the other and then commit suicide. Celia K., who gave this testimony, continues:

We heard the farmer coming and he said: “Quick, Germans. Be as quiet as you can”. We were in this little hole. I don´t know what happened. So much water started coming in. We didn´t have any air to breathe, and the water was coming up to our chins. I don´t know how long we stood it but three days, four days, five days, I don´t know. And then we heard footsteps over us. So I said to my sister: “Now. You kill me first and then kill yourself”. She said, “No, you´re the older one. You want to kill me”. I said, “No, you´re the younger one. You are going to kill me”. And she had her gun poised at me already because we heard German [being spoken] and we heard a lot of footsteps. It just so happened they were retreating, leaving the barn, and the farmer gave us three nocks and we knew we were safe. And this was something that I´ll never forget in my life. We were drawning.

And the two sisters, their unique form of sibling rivalry temporarily suspended, remain –with what? A feeling of relief? Imperishable terror? Stupefaction, as the subject of their dialogue sinks in? If we can´t speak of mutual support, what can we speak of here? How do we define the role of the “angry” mother, who sends her daughter away, and the “nurturing” brother, who sanctions the pact of murder and suicide? ( p10.-11)

Such questions as these cannot be responded to with common morality, with a common view on life. Celia K. buried them in the deepest recesses of her memory, unable to respond to such a tremendous subversion of what is good, and what is evil.

Moral distinctions crumble even further in the following episode from the testimony from Moses S. The reported dialogue beginning with a perfectly normal gesture, quickly disintegrates into a “logical” sequence whose rules violates our expectations at every time. The witness does not tell the story; he reenacts it. The brusque economy of his narrative, the motions of his arms, as if placing the actors on the stage (and then playing all the roles himself), the brief, staccato, sentences, with connectives often omitted, all conspire to reduce the value of verbal effect and to remind us how often terms like “heroic”, and “dignified” become orphans in this obscure universe:

Two boys having one bunk. One said to the other “will you watch after my piece of bread? I´m going to the bathroom”. He said: “OK”. When he came back was no bread. Where was the bread?

So he reported to the Kapo [inmate supervisor]. Kapo come along, he said: “what happened?”

He [the Kapo] said: “No, come outside”. He took the fellow outside. “Lie on the floor”. He put a piece of Brett [a small board or plank] on his neck, and with his boots [imitating the action with his hands and feet] – bang! on his neck. Fertig! [finished].

How are we to follow the inner coherence of this exercise in “destructive reasoning”, an example of camp “justice” that eludes all traditional conceptions of crime? We grope for a context –and we are not the only ones. Careful examination of this witness´s testimony suggests that he intentionally seeks to offend our sense of order, reason, and civilized behavior, so as to break us out of the patterns of thought that desensitize us to the implications of his camp experience. His words virtually dare us to accept the condition of vulnerability he trusts upon us.

At the end of his film, “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann solicits a commentary from Itzhak Zuckerman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Uprising. Zuckerman says: “If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.” Langer says:

We know of course that many life-sustaining nutrients also seep from the human heart and that some of them nourished men and women even during the event Lanzmann and Zuckerman are speaking of. But we know as well that this did not stop the annihilation of European Jewry. We may peer into the deep memory from which a statement like Zuckerman´s rises without fear of contamination, because its sources are so obviously complex and private the nature of the taint, however, solicits our response; we enter that juncture between venom and antidote where one goes on living in spite of the toxin. If that tentative gesture teaches us something about what it meant to have been a victim of the inhuman during that abysmal period, it also teaches us something about what it means to be human in the post-Holocaust era.

2) Anguished Memory® The Divided Self. Memory that is often expressed in the conditional tense: if I had only done something, if I had only not done what I did. There is no relief, no answers. From the present, the past is constantly judged; one identifies with those that perished, one constantly revises one’s own responsibility in the events. Anguished memory imprisons the conscience rather than liberating it.

The impact of anguished memory derives from the witness’s inability to identify with who he was, his past and his present seem to follow parallel paths.

Zoltan G, for example, enters into a dialogue with himself on this subject, developing a pattern of looking back and listening to his own testimony as if no one else were present. He distinguishes between the self who “does” and the self who is “done to” but cannot reconcile to the two roles. Describing the roundups in his town for deportation to Auschwitz, he tries to explain why no one did anything to protest. We had no leaders, he reminds himself; we lacked confidence, were without choice. But this explanation exasperate rather than satisfy him. He still can´t understand why he didn´t grab an SS man´s gun and shoot some Nazis before they killed him. He insists that, given the opportunity again, he´d do it today. He suffers from a scarred memory, too honest to conceal the original wound, but helpless to heal it. “It bothers me, you know”, he confesses, returning to the world of the interview: “why, why, why” [didn´t anyone refuse to obey]?.

There is in fact no way to bridge his two identities: discovering this is a chief source of anguish, just as its revelation is perhaps the main drama of the testimonies. You´re not “going” to “nowhere”, says Zoltan G of this ordeal; they´re “taking” you to “nowhere”. Meanwhile, he says, the mind cheats itself into believing that “this” is not happening in the twentieth century.

Langer says that anguished memory, as observed in the victim-survivors, cannot be separated from the memory of the victims that perished,

...dividing the self between conflicting claims –the need and the inability to recover from the loss (p. 75)

3) Humiliated Memory® The Besieged Self. The sensation of impotence, lack of control; the constant battle with the memory of shame, memories that cannot be placed within parameters of what is moral and normal, memories that hardly deserve to be told, that offer no lesson, that are the antithesis of exemplary.

Of course there are all kinds of difficult periods that you cannot...... for example, in that camp of Langenstein [a Nazi labor camp] I was so hungry that I don´t know what I would have eat. We were sleeping on the floor and next to me was another camp inmate. I don´t know how old he was –he looked old. And we just got our ration of bread, and he was already so sick that he couldn´t eat that bread and I was laying next to him waiting that he should die, so that I can [prolonged pause] grab his bread. (p.83)

The pause between the words “can” and “grab” expresses, for Langer, the drama of humiliated memory, the necessity to tell the memory and, at the same time, the profound conviction that it cannot be told.

Leo P. speculates on the reluctance of some former victims to tell their stories. Though he is uncertain about the reasons, he suggests that for many the experience was too degrading to review. “I was ashamed” he confesses about his own encounter with the Gestapo, “And when I am ashamed, I don´t like to talk about it”. (p.88)

Another victim-survivor speaks of the consequences as much for himself as for all the others:

I was ashamed of the whole thing –I was so shameful. It was so degrading. You were completely turned. Hunger was devastating to the human spirit; it was devastating to the human body, and you didn´t know how to function. Families were beginning to –some were even fighting among themselves over a piece of bread. Some were stealing from each other. It was horrible. Some became informers to the Germans for a piece of bread. They thought they would be saved, and [would save] their families. Every body did what they could, just to save their family. (p.91)

Humiliated memory is compelled to dwell in a twilight realm that ethical insight can never illuminate. It can thus never be joined to the world he inhabits now. This suggests a permanent duality, not exactly a split or a doubling but a parallel existence. (p. 95)

...Humiliated memory is a content in search of a form. The moments it recalls float in a void because they cannot be connected to a conception of behavior that might establish meaning through analogy. Malka D is reluctant to tell part of her story because she cannot bear remembering them herself and refuses to believe that her audience has the capacity to understand her. Nonetheless, she haltingly offers her narration. Because of some irregularity, the SS at Radom took thirty Jews, including her, from the munitions factory were they were working and locked them in a dark cellar without windows. They couldn´t see, had no food, and were left fearfully awaiting questioning and torture. At this point, we might imagine a half dozen reasons for their anxiety. But according to Malka D, what troubled them most was the lack of toilet facilities. She seems to tear the words out of the silence that possesses her on this issue; people were civilized, she says, and afraid to relieve themselves in the presence of others. Finally, she whispers, the men took string and tied it around themselves. “You mean tied their penis?” asked the interviewer, and she replies, “yes, so urine wouldn´t come out”.

She´s so humiliated by the limits to which the quest for a minimal dignity had driven some men that she can scarcely finish this portion of her testimony. (p. 113)

4) Tainted Memory® The Impromptu Self. Related to behavior involving thefts, lies, cowardice, brutality, cannibalism; memories that contaminate and poison the entire life of the victim, that prevent his being empathetic even with himself, there is no forgiveness nor absolution.

Tainted memory, a narrative stained by the disapproval of the witness´s own present moral sensibility, as well as by some of the incidents it relates. Tainted memory is nonetheless a form of self-justification, a painful validation of necessary if not always admirable conduct (p 122)

Tainted memory cannot purify itself, because it is trapped by a moral design that is virtually useless in helping us understand the episodes that Myra L describes. Because the moral systems that we are familiar with are built on the premise of individual choice and responsibility for the consequences of choice... “We had to behave like animals”, she complains. “There was no other way to behave” (p.125)

5) Unheroic Memory® The Unheroic Self. Disqualification. Having to do with the illogic of having survived, or appeared. Witnesses insist that beyond the sheer will to live – as we would like to believe – they really don’t know how or why they were the ones to appear alive. From their perspective, neither their will to survive nor their behavior in any way affected whether they came out alive or not.

Chaim E, for example, arrived at Sobibor on a transport with about one thousand other Jews. The SS chose eighteen of them to work inside the camp; the rest, including his brother, were sent directly to the gas chambers. Asked why he thought he was chosen, he replies without hesitation, “just random picking”. The notion of some connection between individuality and fate had simply disappeared. Ignorant of the nature of the place on arrival, he had relied on the rudimentary assumption that work, no matter how hard, would be manageable: “whatever it happened, you will still be alive... you didn´t picture the extreme”. But even this misplaced optimism was a view without illusions, at least as Chaim E explains it today; it was not meant to convey the idea of a self in command of its situation. Chaim E then formulates some important redefinitions: “On the other side, you didn´t have any choices. You just were driven to do whatever you did. So it is not things that you plan that you do; it´s just whatever happened, happened. You don´t think. You think on the moment what will happen this moment, not what the next moment will happen. Because you´re just driven, you do whatever you have to do from other people (p.177)

Joseph K offers an example, in an effort to explain to his interviewers a dilemma as alien to him today as it is to them. If a Gestapo man were abusing his father, he could vent his anger. He could in fact, even injure the Gestapo man. But the punishment meted to him would be negligible compared to the knowledge that he would be causing the death of ten innocent men. Going to his father´s defense, he insists, viewed from the premises established by the Nazis (and which, like it or not, had replaced filial devotion, which now appears as a privileged value, not a spontaneous feeling), would not be resistance but a “foolish act”. Part rationalization, perhaps, but part redefinition too, his words reflect one wounded identity, which I call the diminished self, trying to come to terms with memories of the need to act and the simultaneous inability to do so that continue to haunt him today. (p.183)

In the testimonies given, the memories interrupt one another, they invade each other, they become confused and render the flow of the narrative increasingly chaotic and difficult to understand. The five memories of the appeared coexist with “common” memory in an attempt to give the narrative fluidity and chronology, an attempt that utterly fails. The different memories that surface in the oral testimonies demand a different set of ears, they compel us to pay attention to the verb tenses employed, they enable us to accompany the witnesses as they traverse back and forth over the territories of their fragmented memories, desperately and futilely trying to piece together, like jumbled jigsaw puzzles, the different versions of the self.

In this context, the idea of a “cure of silence and a concerted amnesia,” confessed to by Jorge Semprún in his effort to be able to go on living, is quite understandable.

Conclusion

In her book, “Memorial Candles,” Dina Wardi[39] transcribes the words of Mina, a fifty-five-year-old married woman with an adult daughter:

Nearly forty years have passed since then, and only now can I tell a little of what happened to me during all those months and years. The inability to express these horrors has severely affected my entire existence to this very day. Beneath my emotional apathy are hidden terrible traumatic experiences, human horrors, bodily torture, physical and psychological suffering that cannot be repaired. During dozens of miles of death marches, countless hours of backbreaking labor, from a certain moment a person loses himself. He is abandoned because he has become apathetic. People are not built to live alone, neither when things are bad nor when they are good.

When I heard the echo of the shot at my mother, who was marching behind us in that death march, I was stricken dumb. I couldn´t utter a sound. For more than a month I was unable to speak.

When I returned from the camps no one was able to understand me. I felt a hundred years old, ancient in my soul although my body was only sixteen years old. I no longer had any desire for a spiritual or social life, or for a marital life. Nothing interested me any more. Very slowly we returned to the cycle of ordinary life, but we never came back to ourselves. We did not remain embittered, we did not hate anyone, but we did not want to remember, we only wanted to forget. (p.10-11)

There are those who believe that it was precisely the ability to forget that kept them

All those who remembered were blown away afterwards like sawdust in the wind. Their brooding thoughts drove them insane, their memories drove them insane. Only those who had the ability to forget lived along. All those who possessed excellent memories died.

I would not venture such an assertion, but I would agree that those would could “forget” were able to recuperate a more complete normalcy in their lives, with less apparent suffering. By “forget” I mean to say that it is a particular and extraordinary kind of forgetting.

Ordinarily, we forget events, circumstances, painful or insignificant but, nevertheless, specific things. We forget the subject of a discussion, the place where we left something, detailed memories of our childhood, letters we have written, and so on. This would be our common way of forgetting, often linked to the psychoanalytic concept of repression. In the case of the appeared of the Shoah, I believe that it is a very different kind of forgetting, one that has to do with a question of identity.

Who was I? Overnight, as we have seen in the preceding pages, the appeared lost all recognizable parameters in their lives, they entered another reality for which they had no tools or preparation. The vast majority perished, overcome by the intensity of what took place, unable to defend themselves, to recuperate or to react effectively. For those that survived, the sheirit hapleita (those that remained alive, the remnants), the return to normalcy was another dramatic event, unexpected, which caught them, once again, poorly prepared.

After the liberation the survivors left the extermination camps, the hideouts and the forests, and began to wander about. Most of them eventually reached the displaced-persons camps that had been set up in various parts of Europe. Many of them hoped to find lost family members and began to search for them, to ask about them, and to anticipate their arrival. This expectation generally ended in bitter disillusionment. Of their entire extended family, they realized, no one was left but themselves. Their dear ones had indeed perished and they would never see them again. This disillusionment brought with it a sense of unbearable loneliness, which was soon accompanied by the realization that they had lost not only their families but also their homeland. The knowledge that they would never return to their bithplace, and that their houses and communities had been destroyed, was no less harsh a blow than the loss of their families. Only psychic emptiness could continue to protect them from being flooded with feelings of loneliness that threatened their very existence. (P.20)[41]

Not only did they confront this bitter and profound sense of loneliness along with hundreds of thousands of other people who, just like them, were wandering and searching for a place in the world, but also, and perhaps more importantly, they faced the need to harmonize and reconcile the recuperation of the normal self, as it was before the Shoah – accustomed to social rules and predictable behaviors – with the self of the Shoah, the two so often and strangely opposed to each other.

The questions, “Why me?” or, “How is it possible that I...?” which the appeared ask themselves ad infinitum, respond directly to the questions, “who was I when I lived through those things, when I bore those indignities?” and, “how is it possible that this self that I was during the Shoah is the same self that I am now?” The testimony given by Mina is very clear in this respect as she recreates one of those terrible moments that inhabit the memories of the appeared, the moment in which she heard the gunshot that ended her mother’s life, and all she could do was remain silent. She recreates the moment many years later, in a safe place, living a calm and predictable life, but at that moment during the death march, what else could she have done? Could she have thrown herself against the assassin? Could she have thrown herself in the way of the bullet and died? To overcome the inertia, the terror, the sense of helplessness and to just scream? There were many who did, of course, but they are not the ones who survived, as that was not compatible behavior with the circumstances of life during the Shoah. For anyone who is familiar with the arbitrariness and the ferocity of the Nazi officers during this period of retreat, the extreme weakness of the prisoners on the forced death marches, such questions as, “Why didn’t they do something?” are questions that cannot be formulated. Nonetheless, the appeared ask themselves these questions, over and over again, without ever being able to integrate who they are now with who they were then.

Still, if they wish to go on with their lives, they have to do something in answer to these questions, something that will help them to go on living. Society in this respect is not of much help as it is unaware of its own unawareness. They have been shut off. In celebrations and speeches, the Shoah is spoken of in terms of the six million murdered Jews and the handful of resistors: the dead-victims and the heroes, but there is no place provided for the victim-survivors, as if nothing good could be said of them, as if they had been tainted by a suspicious dye and, by contrast with the heroes, were morally inferior, as if the fact that they could do no more than remain silent had taken from Mina not only heroism, but also the dignity of a person who lives her life correctly.

The appeared have forgotten nothing of what they lived through during the Shoah. But they must live their lives as if nothing had happened, they must leap over the “gap” because if they carry it with them in their daily lives, if it becomes part of their routine, their identity itself is imperiled.

This is a unique kind of forgetting, a forgetting that is incumbent on the victim-survivors. They are not forgetting a specific event, a gesture, a person, or a painful experience. They have to forget an infinity of events, people and circumstances that they lived through during the Shoah. If not, they could seriously jeopardize the image they have of themselves, by sustaining these two very different, contradictory and incompatible selves. They must forget who they were, their actions, thoughts and feelings. I had a conversation with Berl K., a 77-year-old survivor, in which he spoke about what the ghetto was like in the beginning. This is part of what he said:

He was 22 years old, he and his 21-year-old girlfriend, Dora, had only each other. He loved his girlfriend. His voice grew distant, as often happens in the testimonies of the appeared, and it seemed as if he was both here and there, the past takes such a strong hold that it becomes the present. They were in hiding along with some other people. Because he had made a lot of non-Jewish friends before, he was able to obtain food for all of them. Hidden, frightened, unable to bathe or take care of their necessities, Dora and he discovered the possibility of speaking of love, of promising to get away together, of sharing their lives and having children. One day he set out in search of food, as he did everyday, and when he returned he found the hiding place empty. I listened, motionless, as he spoke, not wishing to disturb him, his pain was so intense, but in the moment that he relived his return to the hiding place and discovered that there was no one left, that his darling Dora was gone, my eyes filled with tears and I had to close them, thinking, “No! How horrible! Poor man...!”

A month later, he called me and said: “You must come urgently, I need to tell you something.”

“You were right to close your eyes. I have been unable to sleep since that day, I need to explain something to you.” I asked him, “What was I right about?” “To hold me responsible, that’s what I tell myself everyday since the end of the war. How could I have left her? How could I not have realized that our hiding-place was dangerous and that they could discover us? Why did I take all the money with me and not leave her any?” And without letting me say a word he told me the entire story again, in the same way as before, like a litany, recreating, reliving every minute, every step, every one of the things he had done well until that moment and that had enabled him and Dora to stay alive... “I don’t accuse you of anything,” I told him during a pause. “On the contrary, I not only don’t think you’re guilty of anything, but I don’t understand why you don’t see that they did this to you, that they are the guilty ones, they broke you down to the point that you don’t even see how you were forced to be. What are you guilty of, being alive when Dora isn’t?”

And at this moment, like a waterfall, the names of all those who had perished came gushing out and he didn’t stop until he had mentioned every one. He had never told this story before, except to his wife, who was with us during the entire conversation. None of his children knew this story.

“A Doll’s House”

When this book was already finished, this letter fell into my hands and I can’t resist including it here. It appeared in the July 1998 issue of “The Voice of Israel” in Buenos Aires. In it, Isaiah Kremer says that the daughter of the author found it, a little after her mother died, between the pages of “A Doll’s House,” by Ibsen, and that she was submitting it with her permission for publication.

I leave you these pages inside this book that I know you will look through someday without knowing that its title is the same one that brought disgrace upon my life. I will tell you part of this story now since I didn’t have the courage to do it while looking you in the eye. I have the number K.A. 32975 tattooed on my arm, the number of the Kazetler (prisoner) I have been for so long. I never spoke to you about it and you learned to never ask; knowing that you would revive the pain, you refrained from asking and I thank you. But now I can tell you because, if you are reading this, I no longer have the obligation to protect this memory against its being forgotten.

My childhood in Berlin was beautiful: long hikes, many hours seated at the piano with the music of the great masters and a future that promised to be wonderful. My parents and siblings loved me and my youthful appearance provoked admiration in the young men, among whom I had my choice for a good man with whom to form a marriage. In 1939 it all collapsed. I won’t go into details, with which you are surely familiar after having read what other survivors have written. I can hardly remember how it all fell to pieces. My parents didn’t want to, or perhaps couldn’t, escape and tried not to worry us. So, I would still get together with my Jewish girlfriends at midday at the house of one or another, gathered around the piano and oblivious to the outside world. Then began the great tragedy. Rapping on the door, shouting, the fearsome SS came crashing in shouting ‘farfluchte Juden’ (stinking Jews) and ‘Juden Jure’ (Jewish whores) and they took us to a truck where, with obscene jokes, guffaws and groping, they made us get in and they took us to a barrack. Once there, they put us with some other girls who were just as terrified as we were. One ‘Aufzeerin’ (assistant) came to speak to us but, in spite of our screams and cries, she left without listening to us.

At night we were assaulted by the Gestapo officials who, without the least consideration, outraged all of us savagely and brutally: beatings, screaming, blood, laughing, alcohol, humiliation, pain, there are so many things that happened to us that night, poor victims, that out of shame I can’t describe any more. That was our sexual initiation. The next morning, aching, bleeding and denigrated, we were taken to the central plaza where the ‘Kapo’ described our future: be “agreeable” with the soldiers, take care of the general cleaning, and a number of other things I prefer to forget; I only retain the image of the ‘Kapo’ beating us with her stick and taking us to the soldier who tattooed us with the number that would become our shame and dishonor. We were moved into barracks with lots of beds in each, separated one from another by thin partitions. Every afternoon contingents of soldiers arrived in search of the ‘Juden Jure.’ We had to obey them and show them gratitude for the honor they were paying us. Vicious orders, disgusting odors, degradations that I can’t bring myself to tell you, all this we suffered in order to survive.

One of my companions couldn’t take the living hell, she ran terrified towards the peripheral barbed wire. When she touched it she received a terrific electrical shock, but they pulled her away still alive. They didn’t want to miss the opportunity to punish her. We were all taken to the plaza to watch as they hung the rebel who didn’t value the “honor” of providing pleasure to the glorious warriors of the Reich. For several days her corpse hung on the scaffold as a lesson for the prisoners. We knew nothing of our parents and families, we only knew that we had to be “ready” for the innumerable afternoon visits. On one occasion, a soldier complained that I hadn’t satisfied all his pleasure-needs and the ‘Aufzeerin’ beat me and took me to the central plaza. I thought it was the end and I believe I resigned myself to that fact. When the ‘Kapo’ gave me 25 lashes, I thought I would die, but thanks to the caring of my companions, I survived, but not without terrible pains and scars. They hardly waited for my injuries to heal before they returned me to the “life of pleasure” in the doll’s house. The ‘Kapo’ monitored our periods and when they occurred we were given some disgusting rags. If someone didn’t get her period, she was given to the doctors in the laboratory. We didn’t know if that was good or bad until a prisoner told us about the experiments carried out on mothers and daughters which inevitably ended in death after terrible suffering. From that moment on we prayed we wouldn’t get pregnant and dragged off to the “laboratories of experimentation.” As we were “pleasure dolls,” we were fed better than other prisoners and each of us had a mattress soaked with urine and other stains where we could sleep in the mornings. But nothing could get us out of the afternoon degradation in which we had to ‘give pleasure’ to the soldiers who were then questioned by the ‘Kapo’ about our performance.

I cannot describe our life to you in detail, modesty prevents me. But I want to leave a testimony regarding the doll’s houses, it seems the least I can do as a tribute to the girls who died in those places. I know that other survivors don’t speak about these events because it is so denigrating, but who was denigrated most? Those of us who were obliged to be victims, or the “valiant” Nazi soldiers who, snickering and joking, vomited their filth all over us?

As the war continued, they would change the “meat” of the ‘juden jure,’ and so we learned about the concentration and extermination camps. According to where the battle fronts lay, we were transported to different barracks since the soldiers always had need of us. Few of us remained from the original group. We were having to take extreme measures in order to appear pretty and healthy; from pricking a finger and using the blood to color our cheeks, to improvising home dyes to hide our premature gray hairs, everything was valid in order to get through the selection that separated the living from the dead.

I would like you to try to understand me, dear daughter. We had no name, no dignity, no honor; our pain exacerbated the instincts of our masters, the blood and the bruises only heightened their levels of excitation. And that is how we had to live, and that is why I don’t want to get together with other survivors, because what happened to me was unworthy. Surely, to let myself die would have been better, but my instinct to survive drove me to act the way I did, with false laughter, fake orgasms, lying caresses. I know it was immoral, don’t judge me badly for it, I couldn’t find the courage to confront a dignified death, may God forgive me. It is hard for me to tell you this but you are a woman and although you will not suffer these horrors, thank God, I want you to understand something about the horrors I lived through and the reason for my silences in response to your first questions. I survived. I suffered many hardships I had to endure. I will not go into the details that I don’t wish to remember nor wish you to ever know about, interminable forced marches, the camps, murders, until the end of the war.

I never mentioned the “doll’s house” to anyone. I think your generation is unaware of its existence. We don’t have reunions for former dolls. In fact, at one of your elementary school parties my eyes connected with those of another former doll. We recognized each other but we looked away and kept our eyes down so as not to revive the memory of our degradation.

After the war, I met your father in a Displaced Persons Camp. We united our suffering, perhaps without love but with great respect for one another. Out of that union you were born and I could give birth to my own daughter, of my own blood and from my own people, who were, despite the degradation they suffered, still more honorable than their oppressors.

This is what I wanted you to know, my dear daughter. Perhaps I should have told you sometime before, but try to understand the shame and my embarrassment for what I had to live through. When I compare my lot with that of my brothers and sisters, it seems that I have been fortunate. Was I fortunate? Not one night of my life goes by that I don’t dream of awakening alone, bleeding in a filthy bed in the barrack called the “doll’s house.”

[1] The Hebrew word that is commonly used in reference to the survivors is sherit ha pleita, “the remnants”, or “those who remained with life”. Perhaps I am overly susceptible, but I prefer not to think of myself as a daughter of “remnants”. I am aware that the word “appeared” is only applicable to the years immediately following the war; therefore – although I don’t really like the idea – it seems appropriate to form a combination of the words “victims” and “survivors”; Lawrence Langer uses the words “former victims”.

“Splitting hairs”, some readers may think: this issue of the right word, as will be seen below, is one of the issues that must be considered when considering the Shoah.

[2] Jorge Semprún, “L’ecriture ou la vie,” Editions Gallimard, 1994. The Spanish translation, “La escritura o la vida,” Tusquets, Barcelona, mayo 1995, offers a translation in which the French word, “revenant” (returnee?) is translated to “aparecido,” hence the English word, “appeared,” which I have indirectly borrowed from Semprún.

The English translation, “Literature or Life,” Penguin Books USA Inc., 1997: p. 89, offers this translation of the pertinent passage (employing the French word, revenant): “We are not survivors, but ghosts, revenants. . . . One can only express this abstractly, of course. Or in passing, lightly, offhandedly. . . Or while laughing with other ghosts. . .”

In addition to the obvious allusion to the aspect of ghosts, of apparitions, the word “appeared” embodies a painfully immediate significance for Argentines, taking into account our dubious honor of having introduced the word “disappeared” to the world as a synonym for state terrorism. Here also, subsequent to what occurred during the period of military dictatorship known as “The Process,” subsequent to the torture and disappearances whose total number of victims may never be ascertained, here also, there are appeared persons, those who “came back from Death”. How many people were arrested, “chupadas” (sucked up), how many were temporarily disappeared, or went into hiding or into exile, or changed their identities, how many of these people remained alive? Except for the clear distinction between this experience and the unique phenomenon of the Shoah, would these persons who appeared, came back from Death, after The Process share certain characteristics with those who appeared, came back from Death, after the Shoah? Would something of our experience as children of the appeared, something like the shadows in which we grew up, have also darkened the infancy of the children of the appeared following The Process?

[3] There could be many others, such us: profession, social and learning levels, being part of political or religious movements, gender, psychological characteristics, physical appearance, etc.

[4] Segev Tom: The Seventh Million, Ed. Hill and Wang, New York, 1994.

[5] After the publication of this work, in its original Spanish edition, I learned that the Argentine experience was simmilar to that of other countries.

[6] In Poland, with the greatest concentration of Jews in Europe, the Polish government stopped subsidizing Jewish schools due, in part, to the interest in “Polish-izing” national minorities. Jewish schools as a result became more expensive, which meant that poor Jews had to send their children to Polish schools.

[7] From “schtetl” (Yiddish): village, small town

[8] Grine (Yiddish) often “greener” in English: greens, equivalent to “gringo” in Argentina, and applied to immigrants.

[9] Adrian Furnham & Stephen Bochner, Culture Shock, Methuen, New York, 1986.

[10] In fact, as will be seen further on, it may not be appropriate to say that we were “ignorant”. Vaguely, we knew but, at the same time and in a way that was equally vague, we knew that we were not supposed to know.

[11] In truth, some children of survivors vehemently complained that their parents never ceased to speak about “that.” They didn’t want to hear or be told anything about it. They preferred to be left in peace – they didn’t know what to do with this intrusive and disturbing information. This reveals another aspect of the difficulty of the situation: to speak out was considered bad, and not to speak out was also considered bad... Perhaps what was happening was that there simply wasn’t any manner of broaching the subject. Perhaps this is one of our missions: to discover such a manner.

[12] Segev, Tom, op.cit. p. 45

[13] Semprun, op. cit., page 134

[14] op.cit.

[15] Yishuv (Hebrew): this was the way the Jewish community was named in Palestine before the creation of the State of Israel.

[16] I heard that today, the Hebrew word savon means coward. This shows how the idea of the alleged shameful behaviour of the victims now permeats Israeli culture.

[17] Judenrat (German), plural Judenräte: The Jewish Council. The conduct of its members is one of the great and painful issues of the Shoah. Little is known about it and even less is understood. Some were accomplices to the perpetrators, but others were members of the resistance. They ruthlessly carried out what the Nazis had mastered: to confront the victims with ethical dilemmas that were incompatible with the rules of civilization and morality. The Judenrat took care of certain administrative aspects of Jewish daily life (the distribution of rations, health care, work, housing, etc.). They also collected taxes and, in later stages, had to fulfill quotas for persons to be “transported,” that is, to choose who would live and would die.

[18] Published in Nuestra Memoria, magazine of the Fundacion Memoria del Holocausto, No. 1, December 1994, page 20.

[19] Op.cit.

[20] I wonder how and to what degree these questions/suspicions resemble those asked about the appeared of The Process in Argentina between 1976 and 1982.

[21] Op.cit.

[22] Helen Epstein: Children of the Holocaust, Penguin Books, New York 1988

[23] Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies. The ruins of memory. Yale University Press, 1991 (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award). He also wrote: Versions of survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit; The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature; The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination; Admitting the Holocaust. Edited: Art from the Ashes: a Holocaust Antology.

[24] A troubling point in this respect is that it is very uncommon for the appeared to blame the Nazi system: torturous thoughts are self-reproaches that hold one’s own conduct up for judgement without taking into account the context that rendered free-will impossible. Torturous thoughts submit the appeared to the perverse idea, so well manipulated by the Nazi propaganda apparatus, of their own guilt.

[25] Mario Muchnik, Mundo Judio (Editorial Lumen, Buenos Aires, 1984) page 48: “...Racial differences are found in certain animal species, such as dogs and horses, among which, in addition to differences of bone structure, there are cellular differences of a genetic nature, that is, differences in the genes that form the nucleus of the cells that are active in the reproductive mechanism. In human beings there are no such differences. Physical differences hide, in human beings, a surprising genetic equality: genetically, there tend to be fewer differences between a white person and a black person, than between two blacks or two whites.”

[26] Op.cit.

[27] Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat, pages 152-167.

[28] See “Excremental Assault” by Terrence des Pres, in the appendix at the end of this book.

[29] Segev, op.cit.

[30] Segev, Op.cit.

[31] In “Her Face in the Mirror. Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters, Faye Moskowitz ed., Beacon Press, 1994, Boston, (p. 142-3)

[32] Segev, Op.cit.

[33] Langer, op.cit.

[34] Grossman David: See Under: Love, Picador, London 1991.

[35] Appel. German. This was the word used in the concentration camps for the roll call that took place twice daily and at which time those in charge had the opportunity to vent their sadistic impulses and to arbitrarily decide which prisoners should die.

[36] Polish (aktion in German, raid in English). This was an organized action with the objective of removing Jews from their homes and hiding places in order to relocate them – to work or death camps – or simply to execute them without further delay.

[37] Op.cit.

[38] op.cit.

[39] Dina Wardi: Memorial Candles.Children of the Holocaust. Tavistock/Routledge, London & New York, 1992.

[40] Aharon Appelfeld: The Skin and the Shirt, Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 1971, cited by Dina Wardi, op.cit.

[41] Wardi, op.cit.