Photoessay #2880 - Why I want to take History 269

I wrote this on a quiet Monday morning.  Several factors motivated me.  I'm thinking of what class to take next quarter.  I wondered why I could take a whole quarter of The Holocaust.  Also, it's my week to have a writing piece for my group this Sunday.  I considered starting an outline of the Maier Zunder Scrapbook paper which certainly needs doing.  Instead I wrote this essay.

Picture of Prof. Devin Naar. Credit Meryl Schenker

Why I want to take History 269

Holocaust; History and Memory by Devin Naar

I saw Professor Naar speak at the Jewdub Talks program.  The Jewish Studies department, through a grant presented a program of four short talks video recorded in the style of TED Talks.  The speaker so young, it was kind of like watching your own kids teach.  His talk concerned his discovery of the fate of his extended Jewish family in Salonica, Greece as the Nazi occupied their city.  He discovered these relatives through hidden away letters written in Ladino.  His family said that no one could understand the letters because no one could read Ladino. 

He learned.  His emerging understanding of ‘The Holocaust’ and the reaction of his elders interest me the most.

I’m not sure how I feel about  the term ‘The Holocaust’.  In some ways, it’s useful as it puts a name to the whole bloody mess.  It gives all of us survivors and the rest of the world a compartment  to store all of the travesties on European Jewry.  That compartment also allows the world’s citizens an easy way to store the genocide away.

Other genocides have taken place in our time.  Pol Pot, Rwanda come to mind.  How do you compare them?

I was born in 1952, eight years after the worst years of extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.  The story doesn’t end in 1944 as the survivors of the Jewish worldwide community and the survivors of the events along with their families certainly still suffered in the year of my birth.

Both of my parents came from exclusively Ashkenazi Jewish families at least three generations in America.  Born in the mid 1920s, they would be squarely in the crosshairs of the Nazi death machine if they lived in Europe. 

But they didn’t.  They were American descended from emigrants from  Bavaria in the 1850s (my mother) and Poland and the Ukraine in the 1890s (my father).  Nowhere near the immigrant experience themselves.  No contact at all with any relatives still in Europe.

As I grew up in the California suburbs, my family kept up membership in the Reform Temple across town and I went to Sunday School.  But the teachers and the congregation seldom mentioned this indiscriminate slaughter.  I think some Temple members had survived the Nazi era themselves in Europe.  There was no neatly packaged ‘Holocaust’ to refer to or to teach.  I think the experience only partly understood was too raw to acknowledge.

As part of my Maier Zunder projects, I read some essays written in 1940 on the occasion the 100^th anniversary of Mishkan Israel in 1940.  They wrote about their uncertainty for their European brethren in vague uneasy terms and the instability  of their world.

Worse than they could have imagined.

And how did my parents feel as they came of age, married in 1950, moving to California, leaving their communities to take advantage of that post-war sunshine, and starting their family?  Too far away and too foreign to bother with in their busy young lives?  Bringing up their three young Jewish children in American safety?

I’m more interested in the written material of the 1960s and early 1970s as the enormity of the catastrophe began to emerge.  For me and everybody else.  No clean chronology or advantage of distance.

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 Holocast 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 who 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, they made a deep impression on me that I had never acknowledged.

If a child safe in America felt that way, what other horrible injuries still persisted as the survivors now have almost all perished.  What about their children and their shattered lives?

I don’t know if I can take a whole quarter of the slaughter and destruction of the Jews.   I already know a lot about the events.  The view of the Americans, my parent’s generation, that interests me.