What we tell our children and what we tell ourselves

I was telling my daughter about a recent lunch at ours with friends who disagreed on a range of issues. Some were still reeling from personal antisemitic attacks because they are Zionists, and others thought it was too strong to conflate Jew hatred with criticism of Israel.

My nine-year-old granddaughter sat between us.  What issues, her mother asked. I was about to say “antisemitism in Australia” but I hushed myself and said I’d tell her later.

I couldn’t bear the idea of having to explain what antisemitism was to the child. How could I let her know that there were people in the world who wanted to eradicate her simply because she had been born into this family, from this mother and this grandmother, and all her Jewish foremothers?

I am a first-generation Australian who grew up without grandparents, uncles, cousins and the rest of the absent relatives that comes when your parents are the only survivors of the Holocaust. They tried not to talk about what had happened to them, probably for the same reason I stopped myself. When I was a child, however, it was hard to avoid the people in our circle with numbers tattooed on their left arms, and the nights waking up to their muffled nightmare screams. Something was clearly very disturbing to them.

I had avoided Holocaust accounts and the descriptions and the films and the books ever since I saw, when I was nine, the photographs in a commemorative publication on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The memory is tied to eating lamb and barley soup that night. It must have been winter for such a hearty meal. I couldn’t swallow anything. I felt like I was going to vomit. My mother asked me when I had begun to feel sick and I told her it was after dad had given me the magazine to look at, in which I had seen a skeletal boy sitting on a metal slide at the opening of a crematorium. Ashes and filth around him and his face a wasted rictus. Why was he smiling, I wondered? Wasn’t he about to be inserted alive into the flames? Why did dad show it to me? To explain perhaps why he was as was, damaged and broken and anxious?

My mother screamed at him and told him I was too young to see such things.

I found the magazine again in my parent’s wardrobe while rifling through the mysteries there as one does at that age. I should have stuck with trying on my mother’s heels and smelling the satin skirt she wore when they were going somewhere special. But I ventured into a shoebox hidden high up, by standing on a stool, and I remembered the gold-embossed cover and knew exactly what it was. I avoided the wardrobe after that. And I insisted that all wardrobes from then on, no matter where I was and how old I was, that I couldn’t possibly go to sleep in a room with a wardrobe door open. In case the image and the magazine might have moved through the years and through all kinds of geographies to lie in wait for me.

Since October 7 2023, when I saw photos taken after the pogrom unleashed by murderous terrorists, the bodies that had been set alight, invoking memories of seeing the crematoria in those photographs long ago, I have searched out holocaust accounts.  The murders, the rapes, the cruelty – all had somehow happened again.

Could I find the photograph that I can so vividly remember? Did I dare look for it? I don’t have to look through wardrobes now, the world is a huge forbidden wardrobe of images and history. And so, I give into the ease of searching and one thing leads to another. I see the familiar photos of the crematorium doors with their semicircular shapes. The metal feeding trolleys on which the bodies were placed and shoved into the flames. I can’t find the boy.

I do find the testimonies, notes and diaries of the Sonderkommandos, the poor men who were tasked under threat of death to process the people, Jews like me, who were fed to the gas chambers via the undressing room where they were promised that their clothes would be deloused, and they would be given clean clothes after the disinfecting showers. And how they led them to the gas chambers, tricked out to look like showers. And how after the chamber was sealed and gas had been applied, their job was to remove the bodies, shave he hair from the women’s corpses, remove the gold teeth from the mouths of the dead, incinerate the bodies, crush any bones left in place, and consign the ashes to pits or the river. Nothing must remain of the crime. And the attendants were killed every so often, so that they couldn’t survive to tell the story of the industrialised death factories.

Some buried their hastily written observations underneath the crematorium before they went to their own deaths, but a handful survived to tell their stories. For many years no one wanted to hear what they had to say. It was too horrible, and the stories were unbelievable. The men had to make their way into the new lives they had been saved to live. Most couldn’t get over what they had endured. The images came to them at night, during the day, whenever they saw children like the ones that had been led to their deaths or murdered on the way to the gas by one of other of the sadists in charge of the procedures.

I read the Sonderkommando scrolls, as they are called, and the Sonderkommando survivor interviews in a book by Israeli historian Gideon Greif, We Wept without Tears. I read the accounts left buried by Zalmen Gradowski whose descriptions have been translated from the Yiddish in the book The Last Consolation Vanished. For three days I was subdued and sad and dark. When I went to a concert at my granddaughter’s school all I could think about as they sang their lovely Yiddish songs was of them being rounded up again and fed into the industrial killing machine. I couldn’t sleep. And I took sleeping pills three days running. I had to stop.

I couldn’t eat lamb and barley soup for years. But I can now. And now I can read the accounts and descriptions and view the photographs, because I have understood that I am not a disturbed child anymore. And if I refuse to understand what happened, what it was possible to see, what it was possible for people to do to others, then this terrible knowledge would fade to grey in the world’s mind, and it would be as if it never happened, as if people made up terrible stories.

The road to the crematoria didn’t start suddenly, it was designed and planned and paved for years beforehand, for decades in fact, and I have a hunch that there must have been many people who were not particularly exercised by the antisemitism that they witnessed, the remarks, the avoidances, the kinds of expectations that turn in to the corruption of institutions, the regulations and then the laws that create the hotbed of hatreds that lead to the final destination.

When I was a child part of me was ashamed of coming from a group of ragtag survivors who had been hardly able to save themselves, much less give me the confidence that they could save me if push came to shove. I had not been informed of the many ways they must have been courageous just to outlive their tormentors.

I am not going to sit my grandchildren down and tell them all the ways in which the world might be cruel to them.

But I am determined to urge the rest of us, Jews, non-Jews, all of us who love this country, to open our eyes to the truth of history, to the bloody, bestial, vicious, murderous truth of what can happen when we stop remembering.

We are loath to bring it up because of politeness, or because it’s not happening now, or because we don’t want to be that kind of Jew, the noisy kind, the kind that was targeted and tattooed and eliminated. But it would be a mistake to think that there were good Jews and bad Jews, sophisticated ones or shtetl ones, Zionists or anti-Zionists.  In the end, all the hair was shaved, the gold teeth were pulled, and the bodies were burned.

Never again means reading and watching and telling and calling out when the first stench of antisemitism reaches our nostrils, not when it has been ignored and played down in the hope that the winds of change will blow it away.

Courage is what I was bequeathed by those who survived, even though I didn’t know it when they were alive, but now I do.