Reflections on the Holocaust

The Holocaust is a word that makes me feel cold, a picture of some nuclear winter stretching into oblivion. To me it’s always sounded like the death of everything, an evil spirit with green blazing eyes ripping the earth into open mass graves. But this wasn’t a Halloween costume that appeared once a year; it was something that happened to the Jewish people, my people. The Holocaust made me understand that I was Jewish. Someone could want to kill me because I was Jewish. I had olive skin with dark hair and brown eyes and my lips were thick and I was chubby from bread dipped into the gravies of Friday night pot roast dinners. I wasn’t like the blond and blue-eyed kids who appeared on the back of cereal boxes, society’s chosen who were always smiling with white teeth.

The Holocaust was a word that was not uttered in my house, maybe for fear that its power would gather like a tornado and blast our glass windows into shards. I heard references to the Holocaust at home, never at school, in snippets of conversation regarding FDR’s awareness of the concentration camps, and the English trying to turn the Jewish refugees away from entering Israel.

I’d also met Shaddie and Irving whom my Aunt Jeanette and Uncle Harry from Brooklyn had rescued from the concentration camps. Shaddie surprised me with her blue eyes and curly blonde hair and Irving, a gold tooth that gleamed when he smiled. He worked in New York City’s jewelry district on 47th Street and wore what I thought looked like some kind of small telescope in his eye when he examined diamonds. They both spoke with thick Hungarian accents. My Aunt Jeanette told me that Shaddie had escaped the Nazis when she was 16 by hiding beneath a hay mound and holding her breath. I practiced holding my breath. One summer they came to New Hampshire where we stayed for a few weeks to escape the New York City heat, and the polio epidemic. I saw blue numbers tattooed on their forearms, uneven numbers that leaned in two directions no more than one-half inch tall. My Aunt Jeanette, an artist who twisted her voluminous hair into a knot that was held in place by long bobbie pins which she dug into her scalp, said that Shaddie and Irving were thinking of getting plastic surgery to remove them.

“Why?” I asked. I was probably around six or seven years old.

“So they won’t be reminded of what happened.”

Shaddie and Irving didn’t talk much to me, probably because I was a child. Later, they had a baby, a little girl with those same blue eyes and blonde ringlets who laughed all the time. I didn’t know anything about the Holocaust. Together with Shaddie, Irving, and their daughter, those memories faded. I became older and left New York City where I imagined that the walls of brick apartment buildings had absorbed stories of the millions who had perished.

Shortly after I arrived on the West Coast, I decided that I wanted to learn more about the Holocaust, perhaps to put down roots as a Jew who was living in a new place. I read books written by survivors, and located cinemas where I watched sepia skeletons cry out in striped pajamas before being shot to death. I kept reading until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Somewhere I understood that my very existence was a miracle because I was Jewish. I was one of survivors who lived to light candles, to dedicate myself to understanding how humanity had the capability for such terrible cruelty. But it was almost impossible for me to allow into my consciousness; it was like trying to imagine infinity or God.

In the end, the Holocaust was a pile of shoes, a mountain of discarded clothing, green fields growing on mass graves.

I was Jewish. My pores exuded centuries of prayer. I knew that wasn’t enough.