After a lifetime of not thinking about it much, I suddenly stumbled into Holocaust memories, and now they are tangled around me. They are not my memories, but their meaning is part of my life. It has to be.
Why am I posting this in the midst of the holidays? Because it's a dark time of year. It's also the time when the light starts to return, when families come together after absence. Both are a luxury I tend to take for granted.
Judith Sherman, Holocaust survivor and author of Say the Name: A Survivor's Tale in Prose and Poetry, published by University of New Mexico Press, recently spoke to my Religion class at Harvard (taught by Professor David Carrasco). She shared her poems and her memories of being a young girl in Ravensbrük Concentration Camp.
Soon after her lecture, I saw another young girl, my niece (who I'll call D.), and other students at The Blake School in Minneapolis perform Korczack's Children by Jeffery Hatcher, a play about Jewish children in a Warsaw ghetto orphanage. The orphanage is putting on a play, The Post Office, by Indian playwright and poet Rabindranath Tagore, about a little boy who dies. Soon after their performance, the orphans are also taken away to die in a concentration camp.
This is all layered and wrapped up together: my encounter with Ms. Sherman, D.'s encounter with the play, our connection to the play within the play through our Indian heritage, the heritage of the Holocaust for all of us. D., a writer in her own right, on stage, pretending to be Jewish orphan about to die pretending to be a night watchman in Tagore's play, talking to a young boy who is going to die. Judith Sherman's interrupted girlhood and grief for her own lost little brother. All the kids on stage draped in Indian scarves, the colors of my own girlhood memories.
What is all this? Pain seized me.
I mourned, uselessly, for about three days. It was both meaningless and not enough. I lit a candle every day of Hanukkah. I didn't mean to co-opt or dishonor this ritual, but I had a confused urge to do something, anything: to acknowledge my connection to a truth that that I can't understand. I am achingly grateful that neither I, nor my bright, lovely niece, will ever have to understand. On some level, I am afraid to understand. But we both try: She told me that sometimes she cried during rehearsals.
The play is based on true events; every child named was a real child and Korczac was a real person. He was offered protection by the Nazis but chose to go with the children. I have nieces, and that much, I can understand.
eight--perhaps as much as nine
I teased him around our kitchen table.
Did anyone want to
care to
was strong enough to
touch his pale hair
when gas was filling?
and his breathing
his breathing
I want to be there
and help him breathe
and postpone dying
and I do not want
to die
until he does
and--and--
My brother will forever be nine.
("Karpu in Auschwitz" by Judith Sherman)
Ms. Sherman's poems fall open to words, to worlds, I can't look away from.
The Holocaust is a family affair. When Ms. Sherman was at Ravensbrük, she was there with her aunt. When she came to speak to my class, she was accompanied by her daughter and granddaughter. They put the words together and told her story, the story of their family, the story of the people she knew. After each person's name was spoken, each person who died, they stopped, bowed their heads and sang the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Then they lifted their heads and went on.
Say the name
Announce pronounce
Recite the name
Six million times the name, the name
You master race
Who smashed and gassed
--erased the name
Script, engrave
Imprint the name
And say and say and say the name,
When every name is said and heard
Repeat the name again again
May you outlive eternity
And say the name eternally
God, please attend
God, please assure
That every name
Is accounted for
("Say the name" by Judith Sherman)
The Holocaust is too horrible for me to face full-on. The numbers are so overwhelming; they hardly seem to mean anything. It is just too big. My inadequacy pierces me. There is no way to make sense of it.
We have to make things up, poems and plays, to make it comprehensible. Sometimes layers of words, layers of fiction, even, are needed to connect human experience to shared reality. The reality flows through us as actors, writers, listeners. We can't stop it or control it or understand it. We can only open ourselves up and be seized by another's experience. We can bow our heads and hold memories, in trust. We can raise our heads and struggle to really see our world. This is the world we are all part of, all tangled in. Be in it, as much as you can.
I can't experience the reality of the Holocaust but I can walk tenderly alongside ones who did, guided by a poet's real words and my niece's real tears. They helped me lose myself a little so I could get closer to understanding what Ms. Sherman meant by Say the name. She meant: we might never understand but we have to keep trying. She meant: tell every story. She meant: remember.
My deepest thanks to Ms. Sherman for permission to use her poems, and to Professor Carrasco for introducing us.