70 Years Later...How Should I Feel?

Today marks 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces in World War II. As a third-generation survivor of the Holocaust, today I wonder: how am I supposed to feel?

I inherited the history of my grandparents' survival. From a young age, I heard the horror-stories second-hand through my mother's words. As I grew, I became increasingly obsessed with the topic, this word, this Holocaust, and I read and learned as much as I could, trying to make sense of it all. I eventually heard the unfathomable tales distilled down to individual stories told to me by my grandparents; stories of unloading rotting corpses from cattle cars, sweeping up ashes of the dead from large crematoriums. Tales of being chased, persecuted, lied to, beaten and starved, of eating out of trash cans to survive and working through malnourishment and exhaustion to avoid being murdered. In the devastating poignancy and matter-of-factness of my grandparents' telling, I came to the only rational conclusion I could about the Holocaust: that there is no making sense of it. That human beings are capable of literally creating the nightmares that they imagine is not up for debate. History has proven too many times that people are capable of terrible things - and history continues to prove its point, over and over again.

I came to another conclusion about the profound impact that my heritage had on me in my life: I'm alive because my grandparents survived. Had they not managed to beat the odds and survive the camps, if they hadn't then chosen to continue living their lives and create life despite the fact that the world had robbed them of them of the only lives they knew, then myself, my parents, my aunts and uncles, brothers and cousins, my nephews, and who knows how many countless generations to come would never have existed. We're alive because they survived.

So today, knowing what I know about what happened, knowing that what happened seems to have made little difference in altering the course of history and preventing modern genocides from recurring, fearing that the only living survivor I personally know is nearing the end of his life and that within the next few decades there will be no first-generation Holocaust survivors left - how am I supposed to feel?

I feel sadness and trepidation. I feel optimism and hope. I feel a bottomless despair and an insatiable yearning to make the world a better place in any way that I can.

I don't think I'll ever fully come to peace or make sense of the existence of a place like Auschwitz. I don't think that what I write at this moment will offer me any relief, nor do I think I will necessarily provide any sense of life-affirming contextualization or resolution for the reader. But I guess it's better to feel something than to feel nothing - to care enough to read or write or simply remember than not to. It's worth feeling the pain of the millions of unlived lives for even just a moment if it makes us more grateful to live the lives we live today, if it makes us better parents, lovers and friends, or if it makes us think twice about how we treat the strangers we meet on the paths we traverse in our lives.

Here's a song I wrote about the Holocaust at the age of 15:

Zaidy John

          I

My Zaidy didn’t have to

read about the Holocaust,

to hear anecdotes,

watch videos,

or sit in a history class.

My Zaidy didn’t “hear about it” from someone

or need to ask what it was

or debate whether or not it happened

and how many died

and “was it really as bad as they say it was?”

My Zaidy didn’t hear about the brutality;

my Zaidy was there.

He saw the horror with his own eyes,

heard the screams with his own ears,

smelled the stenches, the fumes, the smoke…

He told me about lining up after getting out of

the cattle cars—

about the babies yanked violently

from their mothers’ arms,

the children and elderly to one side,

to their deaths,

himself and the others

into the concentration camps

without consent.

            II

And after the war,

after being liberated from hell on earth,

Zaidy told me how he waited,

how every day he checked the lists,

hoping, yearning, anticipating

the reunion with his family.

But that day never came.

I can only imagine the depression,

the despair and the loneliness

upon realizing that they were all gone,

not knowing if, how, when, or where they died,

the uncertainty of whether or how

to move on, to start again,

to live.

“I was lucky,”
he told me,

“that I was only in the camp for a year;
some of them were there for two, three years.

I think that’s the reason I survived.”

            III

Emaciated,

a grown man,

my Zaidy weighed only fifty-eight pounds

when the British troops arrived at the camp.

He told me the story

of the man that he and his friend

tried to keep alive,

how they carried him

to see the armies coming through the gates,

only to have him die in his arms

on the day of their liberation.

            IV

“Sometimes the past still comes up,”
Zaidy told me.

“It’s a part of me that will never go away.”

He told me how he got a phone call

about some “restitution money”

that Germany was dispensing to the remaining Survivors.

“A couple thousand dollars

is better than nothing.”

They could give him a million dollars,

they could give all the survivors

all the money in the world,

and it wouldn’t even skim the scars

that the past has left upon them.

            V

I’m grateful

that my Zaidy was courageous enough

to tell me what he went through.

I’m grateful that my grandparents were survivors,

that they not only survived

but lived on after their real-life nightmares.

I’m grateful that they didn’t use going through hell

as an excuse not to create heaven on earth.

And I’m grateful that despite all the love they lost,

despite the pain of losing their entire families,

the memories, the dreams,

the questions without answers,

I’m grateful that they still love me,

that they still gave and continue to give of themselves,

that they refused to let their pasts

shape who they were in this world

and who they still are to me.

Six Million Not in Vain

Six million Jews
were killed
in the Holocaust.

My Grandparents all survived
being targets
of the putrid
Nazi regime.
They survived
and so I live.

Today
it is said that
thirty wars
rage all over the world.

Answers, in midst
of lost answers,
in mysteries that will never be solved,
with atrocities unspoken,
leave me only to imagine
the fates of those six million Jews;
of those 1.5 million children.

60 years ago
I would either be dead
or in a concentration camp,
and still today there are children
locked up in sweat shops,
wrongfully imprisoned,
in cells, in cages.

Nazis with different faces,
different skin colours,
but all of their minds
are the same:
infected with lies,
protected by guns and money,
shadowed and driven by hate.

The walls are bloody
and closing in.
The ceiling is weak
and soon will fall.

I drift
and remember what my grandparents
told me about the concentration camps.

Somewhere in 1942
Jews were forced to build
giant crematoriums
where their families’ and friends’
bodies would be burned.

When my Zaidy Ziggy
was in his third concentration camp,
he was given the inhuman task
of loading rotting
dead bodies
into the giant ovens.

My Zaidy John
had the horrendous job
of sweeping away the ashes.
The Nazi tyrants
told him to be careful
not to sweep away any
gold teeth.

“Lest we forget,”
people say,
“what happened in the Holocaust,”
but by saying that alone
we do not truly remember.

We do not remember
each of those unlived lives;
each of the horrible atrocities
that befell the Jewish people.

Lest we forget
that six million Jews
did not die in vain.

Lest we forget
that if not for the tremendous amount
of Germany’s war resources
being used to build gas ovens
and concentration camps,
if not for the Nazi “final solution” of genocide
to wipe out all fifteen million
Jews in Europe,
if not for all his racism,
malice and hate,
Hitler may have won the war.