Memories of the Holocaust are fading – my fiction helps me preserve the past
In 1968, when I was 12, I read The Diary of Anne Frankfor the first time. Closing the book’s cover created an ache of guilt in me because I seemed to be shutting the door on Anne in her hiding place in Amsterdam. I wanted to stay with her and somehow keep her from being sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
A few days later, Anne’s diary gave me the courage to speak for the first time to a Hungarian-Jewish neighbour in our New York suburb who had his camp number tattooed on his arm. His name was Aaron Goldberg and he was from Budapest. His wife, Sara, also had an identification number on her arm.
I couldn’t help wondering, might they have been with Anne at BergenBelsen?
I ran across the street to Mr Goldberg while he was washing his car in front of his house. It was a lime-green Cadillac. Mr Goldberg was slight, maybe only 5ft 2in. He had slicked-back hair, like my idea of a Jewish gangster, which gave him a sort of quirky, dangerous, 1950s-style charisma. He was barefoot and wearing Bermuda shorts that came down nearly to his knees.
“You vanta help vash my Caddy?” he asked with his thick Hungarian accent that made it sound as if his vowels were sticking to his consonants.
“Maybe, but first I want to talk about something,” I said.
“Sure, what’s on your mind?”
“I just read The Diary of Anne Frank,” I told him.
“I see.” He faced away from me and started hosing down the bonnet.
“Did you ever meet her, by any chance?” I asked.
He shook his head and smiled. But it wasn’t really a smile; it was more like a mask meant to hide something he wasn’t ever going to discuss.
“Would you tell me which camp you were in?” I asked, hesitantly.
“Listen,” he said, “it’s a nice day and I can’t talk about all that. I just want to wash my car.”
He smiled at me in his strange way once more, then began spraying water over the windscreen.
“Bergen-Belsen?” I found myself asking.
He looked at me hard, then shook his head again. I shivered and ran back home.
The next day, after school, I spoke to the Goldberg’s middle son David while he was mowing the lawn. He was a year older than me and already taller than his father. When I asked if his parents ever spoke to him about their experiences during the war, he leaned toward me and replied, “Dad told me it wasn’t anything I needed to think about – that what happened to them in Europe was finished. We were safe in
America.”
At the time, that seemed a perfectly reasonable reply. Only when I was already an adult did I think: how could being arrested and forced into a ghetto, then transferred to a camp where Jews were being murdered every day not be something for your kids to consider from time to time?
Nearly 50 years passed before I saw a smile like Mr Goldberg’s again. I was watching a YouTube video of an elderly Jewish man who’d been sent to an extermination camp as a boy. When he talked about the Nazis separating him from his parents and how he’d never seen them again, he smiled in that same odd way as my childhood neighbour, which made me so upset that I stopped watching.
I grew so troubled in part because I had recently become aware – while promoting a novel of mine that takes place in the Warsaw ghetto – that the Holocaust was fading from memory. Indeed, in talks I’d given in the UK and Poland, many readers made it clear from their comments that they had only a very superficial idea about what daily life was like in the overcrowded and disease-ridden ghettoes. Even more troubling, some knew precious little about the inhuman conditions in the extermination camps.
So how to balance our need to learn all we can about crimes against humanity – to try to prevent them from happening again – with the absolute right of victims to keep the details of their pasts to themselves? Although this seemed to me a question with no clear answer, it was still worth exploring. At this point I began planning a new novel; the effort of Holocaust survivors concealing their suffering – to try to prevent it from creating fear and des
pair in their children – seemed a noble effort very much worth writing about.
To create my two main characters, Benni and Shelly Zarco, I read autobiographical works by Primo Levi, Irene Butter, Felix Weinberg and other former prisoners of the Nazi camps. I also got back in touch with children of survivors whom I’d known when I was in high school and university. I discovered what most researchers have found: those who suffered under Nazi persecution reveal no uniform approach for talking to their children about their experiences. Some parents articulated details about their tragic early lives on a near-daily basis while others tried Mr Goldberg’s strategy and kept their experiences behind a thick wall of silence. A great many approaches fell between these two extremes. As sociology professor and Holocaust researcher Diane Wolf writes: “There are many other kinds of parental responses… demonstrating more variation and nuance than the binary presented widely in the literature.”
My high school friend Lorrie Pozarik told me, for instance, that her parents, who were confined in the Warsaw ghetto, then imprisoned in the Trawniki slave-labour camp, discussed their battles with hunger, illness and ill-treatment with her and her brother, but never with family friends or neighbours. With an ironic laugh, Lorrie added, “Not even a couple who lived on our street who were also survivors!”
Lorrie explained her mother and father “wanted to put the past behind them”, adding that their daily struggles to remain alive throughout the Second World War remained extremely difficult for them to talk about – too present in the hearts and minds – even after half a century. “Back in the 1990s,” Lorrie said, “I asked my mom why she didn’t want to take part in Steven Spielberg’s
effort to collect as many oral histories as possible, and she replied, ‘It’s still too soon’.”
In my novel, Benni’s son feels oppressed by his father’s complete silence about his experiences during the war. And he says something which a university friend of mine, Julie Hahn, told me while discussing her mother, who’d been a prisoner at the Ravensbrück camp. “As a kid, I was convinced Mom didn’t trust me. Because if she had, then she’d have told me all about what had happened to her. I know it wasn’t fair of me, but that’s how I felt.”
While conversing with friends and listening to the testimonies of survivors, I was often struck by how even seemingly small actions can have a lifechanging effect on those around us. Many of those who made it out of the camps alive credit fellow prisoners as having saved them from death by sharing bread or soup with them, or by explaining the cruel and absurd rules of camp life.
I was recently reminded of the importance of writing about the “true significance” of survivors and those who helped them – as well as their extraordinary courage – when I learned about the death of the father of one of my oldest friends, novelist Elizabeth Rosner. His name was Carl Heinz Rosner and he endured a year in Buchenwald as a teenager. During my tearful phone conversation with Elizabeth, I realised – with a feeling of despair in my gut – that in another decade, nearly everyone like her dad, with direct experience of the Nazis’ plans to murder every last European Jew, will be dead.
Already, surveys reveal that twothirds of Americans aged 18 to 34 have no idea what Auschwitz was. That ignorance terrifies me and motivates me to keep writing about the Holocaust and survivors. After all, those who have no knowledge of the death camps might very well prove all too ready to start them up again.
I also intend to remember Mr Goldberg’s smile. Because in its own odd and deeply moving way, it was an invitation for me – and indeed all of us – to learn more about what was done to him and millions of others.
How to balance our need to learn about crimes against humanity with victims’ rights to keep their pasts to themselves?