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Living with the Holocaust: The Journey of a Child of Holocaust Survivors<br><br>Sara Roy<br><br>Some months ago I was invited to reflect on my journey as a child of<br>Holocaust survivors. This journey continues and shall continue until the day<br>I die. Though I cannot possibly say everything, it seems especially poignant<br>that I should be addressing this topic at a time when the conflict between<br>Israelis and Palestinians is descending so tragically into a moral abyss and<br>when, for me at least, the very essence of Judaism, of what it means to be a<br>Jew, seems to be descending with it.<br><br>The Holocaust has been the defining feature of my life. It could not have<br>been otherwise. I lost over 100 members of my family and extended family in<br>the Nazi ghettos and death camps in Poland--grandparents, aunts, uncles,<br>cousins, a sibling not yet born--people about whom I have heard so much<br>throughout my life, people I never knew. They lived in Poland in Jewish<br>communities called shtetls.<br><br>In thinking about what I wanted to say about this journey, I tried to<br>remember my very first conscious encounter with the Holocaust. Although I<br>cannot be certain, I think it was the first time I noticed the number the<br>Nazis had imprinted on my father's arm. To his oppressors, my father,<br>Abraham, had no name, no history, and no identity other than that blue-inked<br>number, which I never wrote down. As a young child of four or five, I<br>remember asking my father why he had that number on his arm. He answered<br>that he had once painted it on but then found it would not wash off, so was<br>left with it.<br><br>My father was one of six children, and he was the only one in his family to<br>survive the Holocaust. I know very little about his family because he could<br>not speak about them without breaking down. I know little about my paternal<br>grandmother, after whom I am named, and even less about my father's sisters<br>and brother. I know only their names. It caused me such pain to see him<br>suffer with his memories that I stopped asking him to share them.<br><br>My father's name was recognized in Holocaust circles because he was one of<br>two known survivors of the death camp at Chelmno, in Poland, where 350,000<br>Jews were murdered, among them the majority of my family on my father's and<br>mother's sides. They were taken there and gassed to death in January<br>1942. Through my father's cousin I learned that there is now a plaque at the<br>entrance to what is left of the Chelmno death camp with my father's name on<br>it--something I hope one day to see. My father also survived the<br>concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and because of it was called<br>to testify at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961.<br><br>My mother, Taube, was one of nine children--seven girls and two boys. Her<br>father, Herschel, was a rabbi and shohet-a ritual slaughterer-and deeply<br>loved and respected by all who knew him. Herschel was a learned man who had<br>studied with some of the great rabbis of Poland. The stories both my mother<br>and aunt have told me also indicate that he was a feminist of sorts, getting<br>down on his hands and knees to help his wife or daughters scrub the floor,<br>treating the women in his life with the same respect and reverence he gave<br>the men. My grandmother, Miriam, whose name I also have, was a kind and<br>gentle soul but the disciplinarian of the family since Hershel could never<br>raise his voice to his children. My mother came from a deeply religious and<br>loving family. My aunts and uncles were as devoted to their parents and they<br>were to them. As a family they lived very modestly, but every Sabbath my<br>grandfather would bring home a poor or homeless person who was seated at the<br>head of the table to share the Sabbath meal.<br><br>My mother and her sister Frania were the only two in their family to survive<br>the war. Everyone else perished, except for one other sister, Shoshana, who<br>had emigrated to Palestine in 1936. My mother and Frania had managed to stay<br>together throughout the war--seven years in the Pabanice and Lodz<br>ghettos, followed by the Auschwitz and Halbstadt concentration camps. The<br>only time in seven years they were separated was at Auschwitz. They were in<br>a selection line, where Jews were lined up and their fate sealed by the Nazi<br>doctor Joseph Mengele, who alone would determine who would live and who<br>would die. When my aunt had approached him, Mengele sent her to the right,<br>to labor (a temporary reprieve). When my mother approached him, he sent her<br>to the left, to death, which meant she would be gassed. Miraculously, my<br>mother managed to sneak back into the selection line, and when she<br>approached Mengele again, he sent her to labor.<br><br>A defining moment in my life and journey as a child of Holocaust survivors<br>occurred even before I was born. It involved decisions taken by my mother<br>and her sister, two very remarkable women, that would change their lives and<br>mine.<br><br>After the war ended, my aunt Frania desperately wanted to go to Palestine to<br>join their sister, who had been there for ten years. The creation of a<br>Jewish state was imminent, and Frania felt it was the only safe place for<br>Jews after the Holocaust. My mother disagreed and adamantly refused to go.<br>She told me many times during my life that her decision not to live in<br>Israel was based on a belief, learned and reinforced by her experiences<br>during the war, that tolerance, compassion, and justice cannot be practiced<br>or extended when one lives only among one's own. "I could not live as a Jew<br>among Jews<br>alone," she said. "For me, it wasn't possible and it wasn't what I wanted. I<br>wanted to live as a Jew in a pluralist society, where my group remained<br>important to me but where others were important to me, too." Frania<br>emigrated to Israel and my parents went to America. It was extremely painful<br>for my mother to leave her sister, but she felt she had no alternative.<br>(They have remained very close and have seen each other often, both in this<br>country and in Israel.) I have always found my mother's choice and the<br>context from which it emanated remarkable.<br><br>I grew up in a home where Judaism was defined and practiced not as a<br>religion but as a system of ethics and culture. God was present but not<br>central. My first language was Yiddish, which I still speak with my family.<br>My home was filled with joy and optimism although punctuated at times by<br>grief and loss. Israel and the notion of a Jewish homeland were very<br>important to my parents. After all, the remnants of our family were there.<br>But unlike many of their friends, my parents were not uncritical of Israel,<br>insofar as they felt they could be. Obedience to a state was not an ultimate<br>Jewish value, not for<br>them, not after the Holocaust. Judaism provided the context for our life and<br>for values and beliefs that were not dependent upon national boundaries, but<br>transcended them. For my mother and father, Judaism meant bearing witness,<br>railing against injustice and foregoing silence. It meant compassion,<br>tolerance, and rescue. It meant, as Ammiel Alcalay has written, ensuring to<br>the extent possible that the memories of the past do not become the memories<br>of the future. These were the ultimate Jewish values. My parents were not<br>saints; they had their faults and they made mistakes. But they cared<br>profoundly about issues of justice and fairness, and they cared profoundly<br>about people--all people, not just their own. The lessons of the Holocaust<br>were always presented to me as both particular (i.e., Jewish) and universal.<br>Perhaps most importantly, they were presented as indivisible. To divide them<br>would diminish the meaning of both. Looking back over my life, I realize<br>that through their actions and words, my mother and father never tried to<br>shield me from self-knowledge; instead, they insisted that I confront what I<br>did not know or understand. Noam Chomsky speaks of the "parameters of<br>thinkable thought." My mother and father constantly pushed those parameters<br>as far as they could, which was not far enough for me, but they taught me<br>how to push them and the importance of doing so.***<br><br>It was perhaps inevitable that I would follow a path that would lead me to<br>the Arab-Israeli issue. I visited Israel many times while growing up. As a<br>child, I found it a beautiful, romantic, and peaceful place. As a teenager<br>and young adult I began to feel certain contradictions that I could not<br>fully explain but which centered on what seemed to be the almost complete<br>absence in Israeli life and discourse of Jewish life in Eastern Europe<br>before the Holocaust, and even of the Holocaust itself. I would ask my aunt<br>why these subjects were not discussed, and why Israelis didn't learn to<br>speak<br>Yiddish. My questions were often met with grim silence.<br><br>Most painful to me was the denigration of the Holocaust and pre-state Jewish<br>life by many of my Israeli friends. For them, those were times of shame,<br>when Jews were weak and passive, inferior and unworthy, deserving not of our<br>respect but of our disdain. "We will never allow ourselves to be<br>slaughtered again or go so willingly to our slaughter," they would say.<br>There was little need to understand those millions who perished or the lives<br>they lived. There was even less need to honor them. Yet at the same time,<br>the Holocaust was used by the state as a defense against others, as a<br>justification for political and military acts.<br><br>I could not comprehend nor make sense of what I was hearing. I remember<br>fearing for my aunt. In my confusion, I also remember profound anger. It was<br>at that moment, perhaps, that I began thinking about the Palestinians and<br>their conflict with the Jews. If so many among us could negate our own<br>and so pervert the truth, why not with the Palestinians? Was there a link of<br>some sort between the murdered Jews of Europe and the Palestinians? I did<br>not know, but so my search began.<br><br>The journey has been a painful one but among the most meaningful of my life.<br>At my side, always, was my mother, constant in her support, although<br>ambivalent and conflicted at times. My father had died a young man; I do not<br>know what he would have thought, but I have always felt his presence. My<br>Israeli family opposed what I was doing and has always remained steadfast in<br>their opposition. In fact, I have not spoken with them about my work in over<br>fifteen years. ***<br><br>Despite many visits to Israel during my youth, I first went to the West Bank<br>and Gaza in the summer of 1985, two and a half years before the first<br>Palestinian uprising, to conduct fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation,<br>which examined American economic assistance to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.<br>My research focused on whether it was possible to promote economic<br>development under conditions of military occupation. That summer changed my<br>life because it was then that I came to understand and experience what<br>occupation was and what it meant. I learned how occupation works, its impact<br>on the economy, on daily life, and its grinding impact on people. I learned<br>what it meant to have little control over one's life and, more importantly,<br>over the lives of one's children.<br><br>As with the Holocaust, I tried to remember my very first encounter with the<br>occupation. One of my earliest encounters involved a group of Israeli<br>soldiers, an old Palestinian man, and his donkey. Standing on a street with<br>some Palestinian friends, I noticed an elderly Palestinian walking down the<br>street, leading his donkey. A small child no more than three or four years<br>old, clearly his grandson, was with him. Some Israeli soldiers standing<br>nearby went up to the old man and stopped him. One soldier ambled over to<br>the donkey and pried open its mouth. "Old man," he asked, "why are your<br>donkey's teeth so yellow? Why aren't they white? Don't you brush your donkey<br>'s teeth?" The old Palestinian was mortified, the little boy visibly upset.<br>The soldier repeated his question, yelling this time, while the other<br>soldiers laughed. The child began to cry and the old man just stood there<br>silently,<br>humiliated. This scene repeated itself while a crowd gathered. The soldier<br>then ordered the old man to stand behind the donkey and demanded that he<br>kiss the animal's behind. At first, the old man refused but as the soldier<br>screamed at him and his grandson became hysterical, he bent down and did it.<br>The soldiers laughed and walked away. They had achieved their goal: to<br>humiliate him and those around him. We all stood there in silence, ashamed<br>to look at each other, hearing nothing but the uncontrollable sobs of the<br>little boy. The old man did not move for what seemed a very long time. He<br>just stood there, demeaned and destroyed.<br><br>I stood there too, in stunned disbelief. I immediately thought of the<br>stories my parents had told me of how Jews had been treated by the Nazis in<br>the 1930s, before the ghettos and death camps, of how Jews would be forced<br>to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes and have their beards cut off in<br>public.<br>What happened to the old man was absolutely equivalent in principle, intent,<br>and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize. In this instance, there was no<br>difference between the German soldier and the Israeli one. Throughout that<br>summer of 1985, I saw similar incidents: young Palestinian men being forced<br>by Israeli soldiers to bark like dogs on their hands and knees or dance in<br>the streets.<br><br>In this critical respect, my first encounter with the occupation was the<br>same as my first encounter with the Holocaust, with the number on my<br>father's arm. It spoke the same message: the denial of one's humanity. It is<br>important to understand the very real differences in volume, scale, and<br>horror between<br>the Holocaust and the occupation and to be careful about comparing the two,<br>but it is also important to recognize parallels where they do exist.<br><br>As a child of Holocaust survivors I always wanted to be able in some way to<br>experience and feel some aspect of what my parents endured, which, of<br>course, was impossible. I listened to their stories, always wanting more,<br>and shared their tears. I often would ask myself, what does sheer terror<br>feel like? What does it look like? What does it mean to lose ones whole<br>family so horrifically and so immediately, or to have an entire way of life<br>extinguished so irrevocably? I would try to imagine myself in their place,<br>but it was impossible. It was beyond my reach, too unfathomable.<br><br>It was not until I lived with Palestinians under occupation that I found at<br>least part of the answers to some of these questions. I was not searching<br>for the answers; they were thrust upon me. I learned, for example, what<br>sheer terror looked like from my friend Rabia, eighteen years old, who,<br>frozen by fear and uncontrollable shaking, stood glued in the middle of a<br>room we shared in a refugee camp, unable to move, while Israeli soldiers<br>were trying to break down the front door to our shelter. I experienced<br>terror while watching Israeli soldiers beat a pregnant women in her belly<br>because she flashed a V-sign at them, and I was too paralyzed by fear to<br>help her. I could more concretely understand the meaning of loss and<br>displacement when I watched grown men sob and women scream as Israeli army<br>bulldozers destroyed their home and everything in it because they built<br>their house without a permit, which the Israeli authorities had refused to<br>give them.<br><br>It is perhaps in the concept of home and shelter that I find the most<br>profound link between the Jews and the Palestinians, and perhaps, the most<br>painful illustration of the meaning of occupation. I cannot begin to<br>describe how horrible and obscene it is to watch the deliberate destruction<br>of a family's home while that family watches, powerless to stop it. For Jews<br>as for Palestinians, a house represents far more than a roof over one's<br>head; it represents life itself. Speaking about the demolition of<br>Palestinian homes, Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli historian and scholar,<br>writes:<br><br>It would be hard to overstate the symbolic value of a house to an individual<br>for whom the culture of wandering and of becoming rooted to the land is so<br>deeply engrained in tradition, for an individual whose national mythos is<br>based on the tragedy of being uprooted from a stolen homeland. The<br>arrival of a firstborn son and the building of a home are the central events<br>in such an individual's life because they symbolize continuity in time and<br>physical space. And with the demolition of the individual's home comes the<br>destruction of the world.<br><br>Israel's occupation of the Palestinians is the crux of the problem between<br>the two peoples, and it will remain so until it ends. For the last<br>thirty-five years, occupation has meant dislocation and dispersion; the<br>separation of families; the denial of human, civil, legal, political, and<br>economic rights imposed by a system of military rule; the torture of<br>thousands; the confiscation of tens of thousands of acres of land and the<br>uprooting of tens of thousands of trees; the destruction of more than 7,000<br>Palestinian homes; the building of illegal Israeli settlements on<br>Palestinian lands and the doubling of the settler population over the last<br>ten years; first the undermining of the Palestinian economy and now its<br>destruction; closure; curfew; geographic fragmentation; demographic<br>isolation; and collective punishment.***<br>Israel's occupation of the Palestinians is not the moral equivalent of the<br>Nazi genocide of the Jews. But it does not have to be. No, this is not<br>genocide, but it is repression, and it is brutal. And it has become<br>frighteningly natural. Occupation is about the domination and dispossession<br>of one people by another. It is about the destruction of their property and<br>the destruction of their soul. Occupation aims, at its core, to deny<br>Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right to determine their<br>existence, to live normal lives in their own homes. Occupation is<br>humiliation. It is despair and desperation. And just as there is no moral<br>equivalence or symmetry between the Holocaust and the occupation, so there<br>is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the occupier and the occupied,<br>no matter how much we as Jews regard ourselves as victims.<br><br>And it is from this context of deprivation and suffocation, now largely<br>forgotten, that the horrific and despicable suicide bombings have emerged<br>and taken the lives of more innocents. Why should innocent Israelis, among<br>them my aunt and her grandchildren, pay the price of occupation? Like the<br>settlements, razed homes, and barricades that preceded them, the suicide<br>bombers have not always been there.<br><br>Memory in Judaism--like all memory--is dynamic, not static, embracing a<br>multiplicity of voices and shunning the hegemony of one. But in the<br>post-Holocaust world, Jewish memory has faltered--even failed--in one<br>critical respect: it has excluded the reality of Palestinian suffering and<br>Jewish culpability therein. As a people, we have been unable to link the<br>creation of Israel with the displacement of the Palestinians. We have been<br>unwilling to see, let alone remember, that finding our place meant the loss<br>of theirs. Perhaps one reason for the ferocity of the conflict today is that<br>Palestinians are insisting on their voice despite our continued and<br>desperate efforts to subdue it.<br><br>Within the Jewish community it has always been considered a form of heresy<br>to compare Israeli actions or policies with those of the Nazis, and<br>certainly one must be very careful in doing so. But what does it mean when<br>Israeli soldiers paint identification numbers on Palestinian arms; when<br>young<br>Palestinian men and boys of a certain age are told through Israeli<br>loudspeakers to gather in the town square; when Israeli soldiers openly<br>admit to shooting Palestinian children for sport; when some of the<br>Palestinian dead must be buried in mass graves while the bodies of others<br>are left in city streets and camp alleyways because the army will not allow<br>proper burial; when certain Israeli officials and Jewish intellectuals<br>publicly call for the destruction of Palestinian villages in retaliation for<br>suicide bombings or for the transfer of the Palestinian population out of<br>the West Bank and Gaza; when 46 percent of the Israeli public favors such<br>transfers and when transfer or expulsion becomes a legitimate part of<br>popular discourse; when government officials speak of the "cleansing of the<br>refugee camps"; and when a leading Israeli intellectual calls for hermetic<br>separation between Israelis and Palestinians in the form of a Berlin Wall,<br>caring not whether the Palestinians on the other side of the wall may starve<br>to death as a result.<br><br>What are we supposed to think when we hear this? What is my mother supposed<br>to think?<br><br>In the context of Jewish existence today, what does it mean to preserve the<br>Jewish character of the State of Israel? Does it mean preserving a Jewish<br>demographic majority through any means and continued Jewish domination of<br>the Palestinian people and their land? What is the narrative that we as a<br>people are creating, and what kind of voice are we seeking? What sort of<br>meaning do we as Jews derive from the debasement and humiliation of<br>Palestinians? What is at the center of our moral and ethical discourse? What<br>is the source of our moral and spiritual legacy? What is the source of our<br>redemption? Has the process of creating and rebuilding ended for us? I want<br>to end this essay with a quote from Irena Klepfisz, a writer and child<br>survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, whose father spirited her and her mother out<br>of the ghetto and then himself died in the ghetto uprising. I have concluded<br>that one way to pay tribute to those we loved who struggled, resisted and<br>died is to hold on to their vision and their fierce outrage at the<br>destruction of the ordinary life of their people. It is this outrage we need<br>to keep alive in our daily life and apply it to all situations, whether they<br>involve Jews or non-Jews. It is<br>this outrage we must use to fuel our actions and vision whenever we see any<br>signs of the disruptions of common life: the hysteria of a mother grieving<br>for the teenager who has been shot; a family stunned in front of a<br>vandalized or demolished home; a family separated, displaced; arbitrary and<br>unjust laws<br>that demand the closing or opening of shops and schools; humiliation of a<br>people whose culture is alien and deemed inferior; a people left homeless<br>without citizenship; a people living under military rule. Because of our<br>experience, we recognize these evils as obstacles to peace. At those moments<br>of recognition, we remember the past, feel the outrage that inspired the<br>Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and allow it to guide us in present struggles. For<br>me, these words define the true meaning of Judaism and the lessons my<br>parents sought to impart.
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