I’ve been writing this all day. As I try to find words I am accompanied by resistance and fear.
Growing up, I had endless fascination to know about my forebears (three of my four grandparents died before I was born). I had broad strokes for grandparents. My father’s parents came from huge families, one side from Kiev, the other from Rumania, and when they gathered for seders, the kids slept the width of the beds to squeeze in more little bodies. My father’s mother loved the theater - Yiddish? American? She baked challah for her Brooklyn immigrant neighborhood. It turned out she and I had much in common.
From my mother’s side there were stories – we’d beg our grandmother Bertha, Tell us stories, stories from the Old Country. And she did. Also of great value to me were the shoeboxes of old photos. The ones that captivated me most were those of my grandfather’s family taken in a Slovakian town called Zilina, especially the photo from 1910 when my grandfather Maurice returned from America for a visit: seated in the center are Fanny and Hermann Uhrbach, standing behind, the five adut children, my grandfather Maurice the man on the right; I knew no other names. It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that the genealogical sparks I had tended as a child burst into flame: by blessed serendipity, I met and became fast friends with a second cousin who was born during WWII and grew up in Florence.
Erica knew the address of the family home in Zilina, Erica had a family tree created by her father who knew it all. For the purposes of this writing, I’ll move aside the anecdotes and precious details I discovered subsequently and focus on the family tree. I discovered the other names, and what became of them. Maurice’s brother Ferdinand died in 1934; then there were three sisters – Anna who left Zilina as a bride and wound up in Italy where granddaughter Erica was born, Lina and Kati who remained close to home. Kati’s son Ernest seems to have been deported in 1942; in 1943 Lina and her husband (he nameless, they childless) took poison and lay down together in their bed just before the deportations; widowed Kati was deported with her daughter Lola, Lola’s husband (also nameless) and their 12-year old child Hans in 1943.
That’s what it says on the family tree – “deported”- to my mind, a step or two at a safe remove from the truth – murdered, gassed in a concentration camp by the Nazis. More and more I’ve wondered through the years, why was I never told I had family - my grandfather’s sisters, their husbands and children - who were killed by the Nazis? I am certain my parents knew – there was correspondence throughout the war between the cousins in Florence and the cousins in Brooklyn. Why the silence? Did the New York Uhrbachs feel guilt that they couldn’t/didn’t/help/enough to save their family? Did they feel shame, as if it somehow made them less worthy, less kosher Americans to be connected to those who’d been slaughtered? Did the Shoah stir their own fears of anti-Semitism, and so arouse a need to bury or deny how close this genocide was to them, proof of how vulnerable they were? Was it just too monstrous to talk about?
This morning I joined in my synagogue’s Shaharit Zoom in order to say kaddish for Lina, for Ernest, Kati, Lola, Hans and the nameless husbands, feeling in my gut how difficult it is for me to do that, wanting to honor and remember them but somehow strangely resistant. I ask myself - what is this resistance? I feel unworthy, inadequate, not even legitimate to stand and honor them. I feel guilty, though I wasn’t even born then. What could I offer that would be enough against the agony they suffered? Unable to summon the release of emotion, stuck in a place where there are no tears and no words, I stand and recite the prayer.
May their memories be for a blessing.
[A note of explanation: I am hesitant to address survivors or children of survivors, not wanting to cause harm or pain, aware that for you these questions are ongoing, lifelong questions. They loom huge in your lives, not just a subject for Yom HaShoah. Please forgive me if my grappling wih this feels clumsy or hurtful to you. I am trying to articulate what this has been for me and many others like me who are not intimately connected to the Shoah but nonetheless tied by a slender thread which pulls and puzzles.]
Perhaps members of your family died in the Holocaust or were survivors–how did you learn about their experiences? How has it affected you and your life’s commitments?
Are you someone like me who has stories of extended family members who died in the Holocaust? What were their names, their stories? Who told those stories, and when, and how? What has been the power of those stories for you? Have you passed them on? Have you found satisfying ways to honor them?
It’s known that Jews in the generation after the war “didn’t want to know,” that that was commonplace, that survivors who wanted to speak felt silenced – why do you think that was so? Is this perhaps related to my parent’s inability to share family stories with their children?
How does the Shoah impact you? Are there ways in which it has informed your life? As a Jew? As an American?