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?