(This is a first attempt on the beginning of my book about my grandparents’ Holocaust survival.)
Hildeschen
Background
One day when I was five years old, my mom was pulling out of my grandparents’ garage in her old blue Datsun 210. She mentioned that my grandparents had lived in China. “Are we Chinese then?” I inquired of my mom. “No sweetie. It is a long story you are too young to hear.”
By the time I was ten I was learning in school about the holocaust. Women like my mom and a few of the teachers at the private school, felt it was important that we future generations know of the events so close to our recent past. Those events are also close to children of survivors’, like my mother’s, hearts. Us kids saw films and visited museums where we heard survivors speak. I saw within these films, people who looked just like me. What I understood was that my own blood related relatives had gone through these horrifying, unimaginable experiences.
I felt the need to not be visibly Jewish as a result. I would not wear Jewish symbols in public without wondering if I would be judged negatively based on those symbols. Originally, I called my dad Abba, the Hebrew word for dad. There were few people in my school or in programs like the scouts who were Jewish. My parents had sent me to a local Jewish preschool. Once that ended, it also ended my being in school with other children of a similar cultural background. In order to fit into my world, I did not want to be blatantly other by wearing things like little gold Chai earrings I owned, or a Star of David necklace. I also opted to call my father dad, as the other American children did.
As I watched the various films they showed us in school, I assimilated photo-montages of little girls taken into bushes to be raped; felt my skin crawl upon viewing images of adult men and women stripped and lined up to be shot. Saw in the documentaries bodies laying, one on top of the other, while a narrator explained how she was on the bottom of that pile of naked human flesh, recounting the horrors of still being alive on the bottom of that pile. The same film would go on to show pictures of ordinary German citizens on hillsides with picnic baskets, watching this hellish drama unfold as if the events were every day spectator sports.
Through out my life I continued to hear accounts like those and more of the stench you smelled as you neared the camps, the smell of burning human flesh coming from the crematoriums. Accounts of the camp victims having to use shared toilet facilities, built to be as dehumanizing as possible; more accounts told of camp inmates sleeping on stiff wooden bunks, eating disgusting dredges of watery soup for years with nothing else.
Later I heard tales such as the one on NPR, of a Nazi prison guard convincing a little boy to open his mouth so he could give him a candy. The mother in typical German fashion telling her son to obey, and the German soldier then sticking a gun into the child’s open, waiting, obedient, mouth and shooting the child in the head. I knew of the soaps that were made of Jewish fat, of people who were burned alive, naked in ovens, of the lamps and car upholstery made of Jewish flesh. The list of horrors I heard and learned about seem to be endless. Rarely did these stories relate any human compassion, or reason to hope that people weren’t complete monsters if given a chance to be so. Another effect of knowing all of this, is the realization that the majority of the people around me do not know what occurred there in Europe during World War II.
In Sunday school and in regular school my question was always, “Why? Why did people allow this to happen? Why didn’t the U.S. of A. rush in and save people? Didn’t people know what was happening? How could our government turn back ships of refugees to be burned alive in the ovens of Europe? Why was humanity filled with such uncaring people?” It was impossible to fathom, and difficult to live with the knowledge of these evil acts that had occurred, and still occur around the world today.
