This past May I took part in an amazing journey to Auschwitz as part of an Arab-Jewish trip into the heart of the suffering of the Jewish people. During the trip, I cried at the causeway in Birkenau when the guide told of families who didn't know to part from their loved ones selected to die. I cried, when Ruth Lavie placed the picture she had drawn 59 years earlier, in her father’s barrack. And I cried in the field where the ashes of my grandparents, uncles and cousins were scattered. But even though I was with my son, I cried alone, not in his arms. When the pain was too great, I sought out the arms of others, not my son. Even as I write the words, I feel there is something coldhearted about what I write. Could it be that I was wrong in not embracing my son at my time of need? I am certain that many of you reading this would say yes, especially since Auschwitz, if it teaches one lesson, it should be should cherish one’s family, not to repudiate them. So I feel I owe an explanation. And maybe via this explanation another lesson from Auschwitz can be learned.
The explanation should begin with my mother’s experience in Auschwitz, but it will not. It will not, because I know too little of what she went through and can only guess at the horrors that she endured. I knew of the Holocaust without it ever being mentioned, yet the knowledge permeated my entire existence, shadowing the luminance:
How did I know about the Holocaust
Amidst the silence.
Or was the knowing enciphered on my soul
Trickling, in time, to my consciousness.
An awareness that is never taught
Can never be unlearned,
Can never be forgotten…(Eclipse)
So I will start my story in my childhood. And what typlified my childhood was a silence. Beneath this silence was a suffering that I thought could never be told, that could have no words with which to express, because she has never found the words with which to tell of her pain . And because of this I saw this pain as unending, a suffering that was meant to last forever, passed down as a legacy for all generations.
It is this pain and suffering that tainted my childhood. As I was never allowed to be weak or vulnerable, becasue I had to take on her burden of pain, and certainly not be a cause for more :
Her mother away
The child spoke on the phone,
And her voice cracked,
I miss you.
And through the crack poured out
The vulnerability and the fear
As if she might fall.
But quickly recovering
She straightened
Closing the rift
Smiling with glistening eyes.
It reminded me of children past
Tutored to be impervious,
Criss-crossing the cracks
With layer upon layer
Till nothing would show,
Sturdying the wall
Against the churning inside
And eyes that would not glisten
Most of my Mother’s psyche was still tied up with what happened during the War, what happened at Auschwitz. My own needs seemed so petty against the horrors of the Holocaust.
So as my mother hid her suffering and pain in order to function, so I too denied my needs and wants, shrouding my reality in gray, ever cognizant of the suffering that lingered just beneath the surface of our existence. My fear of not being deserving of love caused me to deny my need and embrace instead solitude and self-sufficiency.
Thus from a silent lonely child I grew into an adult who denies his feelings and is afraid of intimacy fearing a repeat of the emotional abandonment of my childhood. Yet hungry for warmth and love:
Distance yourself from me
and I can mold you
to a shape I can contain
and love.
When you are near
all I manage is to silence
the static that crackles in my mind,
Quietness not love.
Go from me
so that I can love you
The distance shelters me,
and allows me
my stealthed love
As I grew older, I came to believe that there is no pain that cannot be overcome. Perhaps it had come time to visit Auschwitz to confront the pain that I though untouchable, hoping that if I can make the pain real and expose it to the light of day then I can somehow I can transform myself.
I allowed myself no emotion in the shadow of Auschwitz,
There was no room for my hunger in a reality filled
With the hunger of then,
My fears dwarfed to unworthiness.
It was better to not feel than to share in its shame,
Shredding the fabric of reality to build a nest of denial,
I concealed my feelings beneath,
Muffling the disquiet.
But today I burrow to free them,
For a hunger can never be sated unless it is owned,
Nor a fear smitten until it is named.
So I clasp them to my heart in furrowed fists
Praying that if I might unclench.
They will wither.
So I went to Auschwitz. To find the words to express what I had thought ineffable:
But if a language is found
to touch the desolation,
To parse therewith the syntax of the pain.
Then words entombed shall resurgent flow
Words whose tears may heal the soul again.
But as I confronted the pain I realized, with my son at my side, that I did not want the pain to go any further. That I did not want this pain passed to the next generation. It was enough that I took upon myself the burden of my mother’s pain and I did it willingly because no human should bear such pain alone. But the pain I felt need not be passed on. I did not seek out my son even though he wanted to salve my pain. But I am all too aware of the transposition of generations that has plagued the Survivor families. I do not want him to care for me, as I did for my parents, when he should still be a child. It was then that I decided to distance myself from him and choose not to collapse in his arms but rather into the arms of strangers. In the time of my greatest pain, when the tragedy of my family became real, rising from amidst the silence, from amidst the ashes, I decided to deal with this pain alone.
The relatives who died “in the war”
have faded in and out of our lives,
Not alive, not even the littlest bit alive
But then not dead,
Gone or lost in the war,
Maybe once or twice mentioned as dead or killed
But this is stated
With such dispassionateness
That it seems not true.
But these wraiths neither alive nor dead
Have a prevalence beyond persons here or gone.
So I am going to Auschwitz
To give them life,
To find them within the ledgers and the lagers
Within the piles of shoes,
Within the ashes.
For you cannot be destroyed unless you were once alive
So amongst the destruction I will prove their existence
Like a latter-day Descartes
“You were killed - therefore you were“
And I will finally grieve
And they and I will find,
In that terrible place,
Some solace
Some peace”.
I think the experience I went through it Auschwitz has its lessons for the reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict today. If you would ask me what is the tragedy of the conflict is that just as my mother’s childhood was taken from her, and to a lesser degree my childhood taken from me, I am seeing the childhood of the Israeli and Palestinian children being destroyed before my very eyes. These are children who are forced to grow old before their time, children without the joy, children without the sparkle in their eyes. These are children who are being burdened with the pain of their parents, as I was burdened. Recently the documentary of our trip was broadcast together with an item about Holocaust education in the West Bank. What bothered me about the broadcast was not the lies and distortions of the historical reality of the Holocaust that the Palestinian high school students had been taught. What really bothered me was their faces, their eyes as they spoke. It was as if the light had been extinguished within their souls, and the embracing of the possibility of life that should have been there, was not. These children have had their childhood stolen from them. As someone who tried to protect my children from the legacy of pain that is the Holocaust, was deeply saddened by this. I have become acutely aware of the tragedy that is occurring to these children. The nightmares of that haunted my dreams and of mine are returning in the dreams of Israeli and Palestinian children. Perhaps their parents, as members of a people seeking their national right, this is a legitimate struggle that justifies this loss of innocence. But as parents it is our duty to protect the childhood of our children and no strip of land should be worthy of the destruction of this childhood. The solution to this struggle will not come out of the dialogue of two peoples but from the humanity that these two people share, from within our love for our children and our want to protect their innocence. We must not concentrate on our own pain so that it overflows our entire existence and taints the lives of our children. We must focus instead on our humanity and our desire as parents to let our children be children and not ideologues, serving the struggle.
This is what I learned at Auschwitz, that loving one’s child means sometimes shielding him from the pain so that he can grow differently that how we grew. That I would not cry in my child’s embrace at Auschwitz was for me a commitment of love and an effort to stop the legacy of pain from tainting further generations.
It is my hope and prayer that this lesson can be learned in our conflict here. That by increasing the awareness of our compassion, (and perhaps nothing raises one more awareness of their humanity and compassion like parenting a child) we will focus less on our suffering so as to stop the pain in our generation. There are those who learn from the Holocaust the legacy of suffering and self-sufficiency but the journey I made to Auschwitz opened up the possibility of transformation. A legacy of unending suffering and isolation was transformed to a legacy of sensitivity, of compassion, of our common humanity. And it is only when this legacy that can be learned here in Israel then perhaps the conflict can finally be resolved.