And Who By Fire…

shlomi on January 27, 2020

Five Jewish teens re: Auschwitz

This is a more poignant Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Memorial Day — than usual for me. It’s been a couple of years since my mother, an Auschwitz and death march survivor, passed away. Life for many years before her death lost relevance, obliterated by Alzheimer’s Disease.

She survived. She returned to her hometown of Sosnociec, married, moved to Sweden and then the United States, and had two of children. She raised them and, when my father was struck by a series of brain aneurysms, was his caretaker for the last ten years of his life.

She survived but was never truly free. She left chunks of herself behind in her home town and in the death camps. For all the freedom she enjoyed, it was a brittle construct, always with a tinge of fear, of anger, of worry that it might all slip away. My sister and I experienced very different childhoods in the same house. My takeaway was that those feelings drove her vituperation, her xenophobia, her need to manipulate and control.

Not all who lived survived to be free again. For some, only death frees from struggle, the rest of oblivion.

Now, as we grow the next generations of traumatized children and young adults, let’s consider how their lives will color whole generations in places like Syria, Myanmar, and, yes, in America. How their pain will inform their lives, their hates, and their legacy, in turn, to their children.

We have to stop the cycle. As best we can, with the tools we have.

Here’s thinking of you, mom…

Nazi Anything

shlomi on April 24, 2017

Sometimes writing takes a back seat, as it should, to reality.

We spend a lot of time, in this Trumpian, Facebookish era, endlessly macerating previous texts, quotes, and media. It’s easier, it’s true, to quote others than to write one’s own clever words. Of course, some folks’ clever words will stand for ages:

People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people. (Alan Moore, from “V for Vendetta”

Writing is hard. Quoting is easier.

Memes are easier remembered than created. And easier appropriated than created. And memes, by the nature of their being, are slippery viruses that get to all kinds of places you might not consider.

This is difficult. It’s difficult because I’m a child of Holocaust survivors. My mom from Auschwitz, my dad from a nameless slate of forced labor camps. My aunt, one of Mengele’s survivors, was the only close relative to make it through those years. My grandfather, who survived by the grace of a Polish, Catholic farm family by being hid in their attic (his Polish neighbors burnt down his farm after my grandfather testified at their denazification trials).

I’ve faced Nazis (and forebore from killing them, what with this being a democracy and all.) America, after keeping Jews in the line of fire and bringing Nazis back to America after the war to aid in their rocket research, has been fairly good to my people. It gave my parents a home, and a home and opportunity to many of my kind, including the mafioso, the Nobel Prize winners, and the awesome, awesome, everyday people.

Mr. Seinfeld brought humor to American television, in a vapid, aimless way. While I ever found his show funny, he is a pretty good standup comic, and I wish him no ill.

The “Soup Nazi,” however, was definitely not a bright spot in his writing resume for that show. His parents were foreign-American: his dad fought in World War II, and his mom was Syrian-Jewish-American. And he spent time in the early 90s in Israel on a kibbutz. He had to know about the sensitive, “it’s still too soon” aspect of calling people Nazis under any reasonable circumstances.

But his dad was a US soldier. And US soldiers had no problem talking about krauts, spicks, japs, chinks, and gooks. It’s the nature of soldiers and their governments to demote their enemy to non-humans. I know: I’ve been a soldier.

So, the “Soup Nazi” was written, first to paper, then to episodic television, and eventually, became a meme. It was funny, ugly, and therefore quickly absorbed into what passes for the American etymological memory.

We were having a good meeting, this manager and I. He is a sweet, kind, honest, funny, straightforward married dad of a young child. He chuckles, a grownup version of a giggle, and he reminds me of myself, in the 1990s, at an IBM subsidiary, trying to empower and feel for my employees. My contractors. My peers. The world around me.

“I want you to be the documentation Nazi, if you—” he said, as we discussed process in his nascent group.

“Don’t ever say that again,” I said. “My parents were in the Holocaust. My father was in labor camps. Today is Holocaust Memorial Day.”

I’m very bad at reading faces, and expressions. I think he was shocked and taken aback (who wouldn’t) at my statement. I _do_ know that, from the tone of his voice, he was surprised at my reaction. And genuinely, honestly, deeply, sorry.

So was I. In some way, I was surprised I didn’t lose it. He said this on the Holocaust Memorial Day. He said this hours after I’d listed, carefully, clinically, the names and dates of all my my immediate family who died in the Holocaust. And how they were people, not numbers. Not even the number carved into my mother’s skin, until, after the war, she seared it from her flesh. 72197.

I can’t help me; I’m the creation distillation, and essence of what my parents, their actions, their family, my actions, and my family, have created. And I can’t help him, not that he needs it, a happy, funny, forward-looking person who wants the best for those around him.

But I can cry, without stop, at the surprising pain of this jab, silly, memetic and trivial though it may be.

And, after breathing, a viewing of “V for Vendetta,” and a possibly unhealthy dollop of wine, I realize that the Nazis really are dead. They’re not making soup, or making fun of it. They’re not standing in front of gun show, advertising their fear. They’re not doing anything. Their power is a function of their reach. And their reach, delusions of the fascist right aside, is the length of their small arms and even tinier hands.

72197

shlomi on April 18, 2012

My mom spent eleven months in Auschwitz. She watched her parents get machine-gunned before her. Has bullet scars on both sides of her breasts. She survived the ghetto, and was one of the young people chosen to work in a suitcase factory until the ghetto was liquidated on September 18, 1943.

After the liquidation was completed (and I don’t know where she was during that time), she was forced to drag out all the bodies from the apartments in the town in which she was born and grew up. After all the bodies were removed, she, along with the other young people left, were made to take all the furnishings and belonging to the ghetto residents outside, to be loaded onto Nazi trucks and taken to Germany.

Before she lost the ability to be nasty and hurtful she talked about some of what she went through. Art Spiegelman used her for notes for Maus and Maus II.

She was angry and afraid and emotions I’ve never understood since the day I was born. She was easy in telling tales, tales I couldn’t stop asking about — and couldn’t block out of my mind.

I’ve thought about her scar, and the blurred blue ink underneath, since I was old enough to touch her arm.

72197

I want your number, mom —

the number
first tattooed on your virgin flesh
then burned away
in a pique of freedom

I need the number
   for a new covenant
   to wear your shame as
   my badge of memory
   one star
   one number
for each family lost
by each family serving
   as a Ner Tamid^[1].

This is no covenant
   of secret mutilation
   passing a livestock brand
   from a time beyond memory
this –
   this is our new brand
   of bondage, body and
soul
   to the strength and power we lacked
   in ages past and present.

I claim this covenant everlasting
between me and my uncles and aunts
my grandparents and cousins
my parents and sister and children

This is a covenant between
   we new priests of memory
   and our havurot^[2]
   and temples
    and synagogues
    and shtibles^[3]
    and homes
   and hearts

This covenant is to teach and remind
   remember and relate
how god did not Pass us Over
and heard not the helpless cries from ghettos
   truck exhausts   rifle stocks   bullets
   boxcars   camps
   dry showers

This covenant is to preach
   that a people of memory without strength
   a people of knowledge without
   wisdom
   are a people doomed to repeat
   a history well remembered

I pray for wisdom to battle hate
I bind my mind with t’fillin^[4] of discipline of the hand
and love between my eyes
I mourn destructions and deaths in dirge and sirens
And celebrate Warsaw rebellions, Maccabean redemptions

Engage in pilpul[5] and hevruta^[6] among
   The untaught and unremembering
practice the arts of understanding
kindness
   firmness
   resistance
   and war without quarter
   or mercy

Baruch anachnu hasordimba’alei zikaron k’dosheinu asher kidashnu et atzmeinul’sherut ameinu la’ad

Blessed are we the survivors masters and owners of our martyrs’ memories who have consecrated ourselves to our people’s service forever

Amen.

Yom Ha’Shoah Ve’Hagvurah^[7]
April 19, 2001

[1] Eternal flame, a light of remembrance
[2] Groups of students who learn together, or Jewish Reconstructionist congregations
[3] Small congregations of Orthodox or Ultra-Orthodox Jews meeting is small synagogues or family homes
[4] Leather phylacteries, leather straps and parchment boxes worn on the arm and head during daily prayers by Orthodox Jews
[5] Argumentative give-and-take used to understand and learn an academic point
[6] A pair or group of students learning together
[7] Holocaust and Heroism (Remembrance) Day