KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING

In the decades since the Holocaust, a “children of survivors” literature has grown up. The phenomenon is world-wide.  From my days as a book reviewer, the following titles come immediately to mind: See Under: Love by David Grossman (Israel), Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman (United States), What God Wants by Lily Brett (Australia), and Nightfather by Carl Friedman (Holland). Different as these books all are from one another—and each is wonderful in its own way—what they have in common is the child’s struggle to come to grips with the parent’s unspeakable legacy.

Inevitably, the iniquities visited upon the parents return to haunt the children. The ways in which this happens are as varied as the individuals themselves. Even when the children know very little of their parents’ ordeals, they cannot but be affected.

My poem Curse VII (“Now in her eighties...”) is about one such mother-daughter dynamic. In this case the mother’s life was saved by her inclusion in the Kindertransport.  The poem was inspired by a Yom Ha-Shoah  program at my synagogue. Erika, the survivor, told her story to a group of assembled Hebrew school parents and children that included her own grandchildren as well as her daughter. Erika’s personal journey to share her story took nearly 70 years—a Biblical lifetime. Until she began to speak out publicly, her own daughter was ignorant of much of her mother’s history.

For me, the cement that holds the poem together is the tension between what parents know and what they choose to tell their children—in this case, what Erika’s parents knew or suspected and did not tell her, and what Erika knew and did not tell her own children.

When someone like Erika, who has suffered so greatly, chooses to break her silence, it is important to pay attention. I tried to pay attention, and the poem seemed to write itself. I sent the poem to Erika. “I’m glad to know that at least one person was listening to me,” she said.

CURSE VII.

Now in her eighties,
Erika sits in a chair in a circle of chairs
to tell us her story for Yom HaShoah.
“During the Second World War,
the British took in ten thousand children
from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.
I was one of them, sixteen years old in 1938.

“I was scared, lonely, unhappy.
When the blitzkrieg started,
the bombs fell indiscriminately all over London.
Then I felt better;
I had wanted to be like everyone else,
and now I was.

“I never dreamed my parents were murdered.
I didn’t learn until after the war.
I was completely unprepared.
The way I felt – it’s more than anger,
it’s the deepest despair.
I lost my faith in God.
I’d made a bargain—
I’ll get through all this,
and You’ll reunite my family.

“The bargain was one-sided.
When I found out,
it was Yom Kippur, 1945.
I went to a non-kosher restaurant.
The meal I ate stuck in my throat,
but I wanted to make my point.

“After Chamberlain and Munich,
I remember my father saying,
‘It’s a good thing there’s no war.
If there’s a war, they’ll kill the Jews.’
My parents might have known
they were saying goodbye for good
at the dock in Hamburg in 1938.

“I was the youngest
and they considered me useless.
All my efforts were for them.
I wanted to show them what I’d accomplished.
In some ways I’ve never gotten over it.
I think of what they did for me.”

Erika’s daughter Kim says,
“My mother was P.T.A. President
and led the Girl Scout troop.
She never talked about herself,
but I knew she was different.
When a friend said,
‘Your mom has an accent,’
I replied, ‘She does?’
my voice rising in a question,
knowing and not knowing.”