Published: 25 January 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Life was insufferable in the Krakow ghetto where they lived. What seemed to await them in the Nazi camps was worse. What a relief to be able to flee.
But then Bronia’s parents made another announcement. “You and Fela are young. You have a better chance of surviving. But we must leave.”
Bronia’s parents were only able to obtain papers for themselves. They planned to leave their daughters behind in Poland. Shortly after their parents left, young Fela died in the Ghetto. Shortly after that Bronia was transported to a concentration camp.
Perhaps it was because of my grandmother’s pretty blue eyes that the Nazi doctors decided not to send Bronia straight to the gas chambers when she arrived at the camp. She remained in the camp system, and then joined the death march in 1945.
While marching through Czechslovakia with the other thousand walking corpses, she managed to escape to a Czech farmhouse and a saintly Czech farmer cared for her until the end of the war.
Bronia lived to 91. But in her long life, she could never explain one of the greatest mysteries of her life: how could her parents leave her to the mercy of the Nazis while saving their own skins?
Did they know what they were doing? How does a parent come to make such a decision?
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TEN YEARS AGO, the United Nations established International Holocaust Day. The UN chose the 27th of January, the day on which the Red Army liberated the concentration and death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. The purpose of this day is to remember the victims and events of the Shoah and subsequent genocides, and to educate others about what happened.
But when I think about my own family’s history, all I see are the gaping holes. It is an incomplete picture. How do we memorialise what we don’t know?
I can’t say I have always been interested in my family’s stories from the war - in particular - answering the mysterious questions of what happened to my ancestors.
My maternal and paternal grandparents were part of the wave of Jewish refugees that resettled in Melbourne immediately after WWII and then dominated the community thereafter.
Growing up in the Melbourne Jewish Community, one can’t help but experience “Holocaust fatigue”. All my childhood friends were, like me, grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Until my late teens, I assumed that every Jew over the age of seventy had a thick Yiddish accent, numbers tattooed on their forearms, and had survived genocide. I often joke that my community was comprised almost exclusively of people who grew up in the same shtetl in Poland, were deported to the same barracks in Auschwitz, and finally settled in the same suburb in Melbourne.
I spent most of my childhood regarding my Bubes and Zaidas with affection and amusement. They were doting and foreign. They showered us with liquor-filled chocolates, wet kisses and Yiddish endearments. While I intuited that they carried narratives of darkness and loss, I was content to focus on chicken-soup and tickles. Our expulsion from Europe and the tragedy of the “Korban” pervaded so much of Jewish communal life. I heard enough about the Holocaust at my Jewish day school. I did not feel compelled to ask these living museums to share anecdotes.
But then, in my twenties, my travels around the world took me to other Jewish communities, especially in the United States. When I described my community at home, my new American friends would remark that my experience of Jewish culture in Melbourne seemed much more “authentic” than theirs; they seemed to believe that the wounds from the tragedy that marks every aspect of Jewish communal life in Melbourne had produced a richness and intensity absent from the diluted and detached cultural life in the United States. ‘I’ll take your tenuous connection to your heritage over my family’s history of genocide and the resultant paranoia any day,’ I would think to myself.
But to some extent, I could not help but agree. Where Jewish life in Australia was dominated by the past, Jewish life in the United States felt severed from the previous generations, the earlier custodians of our culture. There was no past. No sense of continuity.
What I witnessed in the United States provided me with a glimpse into the possible consequences of my own willful disinterest in my family and community’s past. It roused a desire to begin capturing everything from that past.
To fill the holes, I have constructed elaborate narratives in my head based on my grandparents’ quirks and idiosyncrasies. I have “reverse engineered” the broad contours of my family members’ lives
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WHEN I RETURNED HOME to Melbourne, I began to interrogate my grandparents about the darkest chapter of their lives.
But, my eagerness to learn was not met with an eagerness to share. When I asked one of my Zeydes about his past, his response was sparse: “Well, I was born in Lodz, the war happened, we were liberated, we came to Australia and you know the rest!”
My Nana forcefully erected walls around her past. When I announced that I was researching survival in the concentration camps, she exclaimed: “Why do you need to write about the Holocaust? You don’t need to give our enemies any ideas. Just write about racism.” She wanted the whole world to forget the Holocaust.
There were a few precious occasions when a fragment or an aside would unfold into an elaborate personal narrative about the Holocaust. I devoured these rare outpourings, cancelling engagements so that I could spend the rest of the afternoon with my grandparents.
I would scramble for my phone or other electronic device on which I could record these stories that so rarely see the light of day. In between spreadsheets, university essays, and research memos, my hard drives were peppered with sound files titled “Heniek talks about the bunker he never used, June 2009” or “Moshe talks about the labor camps, December 2010.”
Eventually, their words would stop flowing. The silences between sentences would grow longer. My questions would become more verbose, but the answers would become briefer. We would reach the point at which we both knew that the day’s session was over. Silence followed. I would always honour that silence, either changing the topic or leaving.
To fill the holes, I have constructed elaborate narratives in my head based on my grandparents’ quirks and idiosyncrasies. I have “reverse engineered” the broad contours of my family members’ lives, their relationships, their experiences and the circumstances around their survival based on snippets of fact I have garnered and observations of their behaviour.
Based on my impressions of my Nana’s insufferable vanity, I have woven a tale of betrayal and heartbreak, in which a beautiful and charismatic 18-year-old had to charm her aggressors into letting her live after being abandoned by her parents. Her father was rumoured to have been unfaithful and cruel before the war. Her mother, desperately attempting to recapture his attention, ignored her daughter completely.
I have imagined my Nana observing her father’s philandering, while her mother tried to charm him into falling in love with her again. In my mind, my Nana repeated this dance with her own captors during the Holocaust, attempting to charm them so they would let her be. I imagine her hating herself for this, but drawing the lesson that in beauty lies power.
However no imagining or analysis delivered am answer to the greatest puzzle: why did her parents leave her to the mercy of the Nazis?
ULTIMATELY, MY FAMILY'S STORY is nothing but an elaborate web of fantasy, theories and hypotheticals, hanging off tiny pegs of fact that I have managed to piece together over the years.
As each grandparent has died over the past decade, so too has the possibility of joining the dots to construct a coherent narrative about their experiences.
Jewish tradition offers models for the expression of personal and collective trauma, a space to acknowledge absence and loss. When we leave a wall unpainted in a new house, we remember the destruction of the Temple and the ongoing imperfection of golus, “Exile.” Similarly, when we break a glass at the conclusion of a wedding ceremony, we remember that even at the greatest moment of joy, grief is also present. These symbolic acts both localise and focus the pain of loss even if we don’t really know what was truly lost.
Tomorrow, January 27, International Holocaust Day, invites us to focus on that collective loss. Remembrance brings with it an imperative to know and comprehend. As scholars continue to record and reconstruct the stories of that era, I will continue to grapple with my own family’s unanswerable question and the gaping holes in that story.
AND SEE
Yad Vashem stages ambitious show of rare photos taken by Nazis and their victims (Times of Israel)
Photo: Yad Vashem museum, Jerusalem
This article is based on a longer chapter by the author titled, “But What About our Persian Rugs”, which appeared in In the Shadows of Memory– The Holocaust and the Third Generation, Jordy Silverstein, Esther Jilovsky and David Slucki (eds)
