The importance of remembering

So today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. I received an email, a chain letter of sorts, with a photograph of a baby’s hand resting on the arm of an elderly woman, the tiny fingers nearly touching the numbers etched into the woman’s skin. It was powerful, and I cried.

That was how it started for me. Years ago, seeing Schindler’s List in the theatre with an old boyfriend of mine. At the end, when the hundred of elderly survivors walk up to place rocks on Schindlers grave, I began to cry. Soon I was sobbing uncontrollably, the way my three year old son does during a temper tantrum, chest heaves and all. I couldn’t move. In fact, Bill and I were the last ones to leave the theatre and i think Bill also cried (he was a sensitive guy...in the end, a little too sensitive for me, but I digress).

 I had picked up a little bit about the past growing up. I had overheard something about a little boy on a train alone; the place with the ugly name: Auschwitz. I had witnessed my father’s somber face as he ate peanuts and silently watched Holocaust documentaries on public television on Sunday afternoons while the other fathers watched football. Once, when I was eight he took me outside to our driveway and had me pour paint over a swastika. He said little, and I didn’t ask. Still, ,as I got older, I walked around with a nagging sense of something dark  in the past, and with a shame and nervousness about being Jewish.

Schindler’s List and then my soon thereafter foray into the world of counseling psychology (a Master’s I never completed) prompted me to finally approach my father about his history. I was 28; he, 68. I was nervous about it, thinking I might cause my father’s breakdown or something. But to my surprise, when I did ask him, he wanted to talk. In fact, he wouldn’t stop talking! We did hours of oral history and when I asked him why he didn’t tell me any of this growing up, he said “Well, they weren’t exactly bedtime stories.”

This is already a very long post – so I will keep it brief. What my father told me about was watching the Nazi’s come to power in his hometown of Danzig (now Gdansk, in Poland), watching them stomp in their beautiful boots and sing songs about the blood of Jews dripping from knives the way I watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade. He told me about spitting in the face of one Nazi youth (his proudest moment), and then about having to leave his home as a young boy and flee to Warsaw as things grew worse. He told me about his sister dying at Auschwitz, about fleeing with his parents to Palestine where they started anew; about sleeping with a gun under his pillow at age 16, and fighting in the war for independence in Israel in 1948, alongside his HS buddy Ariel Sharon. He told me all this, and much more.

I have tried to write about my father’s history, as well as its effects (including  the effects of his silence) on the next generation (that would be me). In fact, this was my manuscript for my MFA thesis in creative writing. I have been told by editors more than once not to bother writing about the Holocaust. That there are too many stories already. I have been discouraged, certainly. But then, seeing that little baby with the hand on the elderly survivor’s arm, I am reminded once again of the importance of telling our stories. I am inspired, at least today, to perhaps give it another go.