Photoessay #2841 - Exodus theme

I learned in memoir class AND in geneaology class that the more you (or a person you interview) talk and write about a part of your life, the more you remember.

Another book I'm reading is Hasia Diner's "We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1845-1962. I was born in 1952 to a Jewish family in California. This book jogs my memories about related childhood events.

As I grew up, the Holocaust (it wasn't called that then, it didn't have a name, people did refer to the events as the 'six million') was always tied to the establishment of the State of Israel. One led to the the other. The existence of Israel signified that NEVER AGAIN would this happen.

 Never Again. Never Again. Never Again. We would Never Again let this happen. That's what I was taught.

Remember "Exodus"? The blockbuster novel by Leon Uris? Made into the blockbuster movie in 1960? With that overwrought emotional theme? I used to pound that song out on the piano. "This LAND is MINE!!!! God gave this Land to ME!!" I tried to remember the lyrics. I found this version on youtube. I found that I could remember each the lyrics to each line right before it showed up. Such early sixties gender suggestions too.

Though I am just a man
When you are by my side,
With the help of God,
I know I can be strong

You think the narrator is a man and the companion is a woman? Yeah, that's how it was.

When I was young the Jewish revolt in the Warsaw ghetto had iconic status. I think Jews pointed to that event, romanticized it and used it to fight the myth that the Jews meekly went to their death. Maybe they deserved it.

It just never was that simple.

 You never hear about that uprising any more. If you look it up, it gets confused with a later uprising.

But I remembered some other things.

My parents hosted some exchange students in high school. Once a family member came to visit with her friend,Eleanor, an exchange student from Germany. Mid 1960s. She showed pictures of parents. My mother got a tremendous emotional jolt when she saw that Eleanor's father was shown in a German army uniform. Don't remember if there was a swastika on the uniform.

My mother told me that German students were not placed with Jewish families.

 Later in her life, my parents planned a houseboat trip down European rivers. Partly in Germany. I asked her "Do you really want to go to Germany?" She replied "I don't know, I'm not sure." They went.

When my son was in the sixth grade in the early 1990s, he did a project on the Holocaust. When I first moved to Seattle, I worked as a volunteer transcribing Holocaust survivor interviews so I arranged through a contact for my son and I to visit one of the survivors. An older man with a gentle demeanor talked quietly with my sensitive son. He showed my son the number tattooed on his arm.

My heart sank like a rock. I realized that, as a child, I had seen many arms with those tattooed numbers. How many? I don’t know. Nobody told me what they meant, certainly not the wearers. But I remembered them, the sight looked so familiar. Seeing those tattoos made a huge impression on me that I had never acknowledged.