A Week of Remembering

My friend Kelly Wilson posted a gold bracelet on Facebook with the words "choose joy." The picture here is hers, her bracelet, her fingers holding joy.

Last night I dreamt about Nazis and woke up at 3am, gasping for air. As if my lungs, the four lobes that remain, shut down in solidarity with what happened. Breathing in gas instead of oxygen.

There were cousins lost to those gas chambers, redheaded girls who sang, like me, cousins who disappeared on a train they might have thought was going someplace safe after the rounding up of Jews, but instead was an end-of-the-line ride. Something incomprehensible yet as real as the photos of the bodies of starved and tortured Jews piled high next to a mass grave in the ground. Smiling Nazis stand on either side holding shovels as they pose for the camera. They're proud of their work.

We watched black-and-white films with the same images when we were children in my Hebrew School, east of Boston. It was 1967 or 1969. Nazi propaganda films from the war. The old Jews who survived stood in the back of the room praying, uttering the words, "Never Forget" over and over. We were too young to watch those films, but they felt it was essential. It was twenty years after the war, and we were what remained... they wanted us to remember.

Still, there are people who deny that the Holocaust happened, who claim the photos and films are fake.

There's a deep insidiousness in denying atrocities. In saying something didn't occur because there were no witnesses. But the thing is, there were witnesses. People who got out, to tell.

Four years ago, at Muhlenberg College in Allentown Pennsylvania, I watched Holocaust historian/crusader Deborah Lipstadt speak. I flew in from Hawai'i and sat up front at one of the round banquet tables. Deborah Lipstadt was played by Rachel Weisz in the 2016 film "Denial," based on Lipstadt's book, "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving."
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Irving accused Lipstadt of libel because she called him a Holocaust denier, and this was in a London court where you are guilty until proven innocent. Lipstadt refused to put the Holocaust on trial even though so much was on the line for her, and without asking survivors to take the stand to try to prove the Holocaust happened, she took down Irving. He'll be remembered as what he was, a Holocaust denier. Something unfathomable, the denial of all those millions exterminated. In London, she called him out and won.

I watched Deborah Lipstadt at that podium, her riveting keynote speech about all of it - and then I watched my girl, my daughter Marena, flown in from grad school in London by Muhlenberg College to make another keynote speech that day, to talk about her own work with othering, bullying, and antisemitism when she was an undergrad at that college six months earlier and again the year before, through a play she directed and performed. A powerful Holocaust story. Her keynote speech was also riveting.

My girl, a millennial born five decades after the Holocaust, telling the story of what happened.

I stood in a line for Deborah Lipstadt to let her know what her words / her work meant to me, and to maybe get her autograph on the book I held in my hand, but she only wanted to talk about Marena when she learned I was her mother.

"She's me," the Holocaust crusader said. And my knees buckled. I sat down in one of the white cushioned banquet chairs that tucked into her table, a chair that reminded me of my Bat Mitzvah in a similar social hall where Jews gathered to celebrate what survived.

In 1995, on a street in Park Slope Brooklyn, my then two-year-old daughter looked at another girl in the front of a line pulling the children behind her in another direction. My girl said those same words. "She's me." A foreshadowing on so many levels.

Words that repeat must be given attention.

My son Sean wrote a play about the women's Concentration Camp, Ravensbrück. Harriet Robinson posted about Ravensbrück last night, and it reminded me.

Sean's play, "The Undocumented," was performed on a stage in NYC. I wasn't there, but I watched the video over and over. To remember the words. To try to let the impossible images land. Sean wanted to tell the underbelly of the story of the women. What was done to them is not something we can comprehend. The experimental surgeries, injections of gasoline and poisons, organs removed without anesthesia, new tortures invented during the Holocaust by people with names like Mengele and Oberheuser. Oberheuser was a German woman torturing and murdering Jewish women and girls. Her experiments were particularly heartwrenching.

Sean's play explored what we'll do to survive and what we can endure, or can't possibly endure, even with every hope to stay alive.

I have a boy who writes plays about those on the outside. About loneliness and loss, about the search for salvation. Survival. And this play... the surgical torture and mass murder of Jewish women during a time of profound shame in our world.

My boy, a millennial born five decades after the Holocaust, telling the story of what happened.

There's always a mother in Sean's plays asking the question, "Are you happy?" She appears in different costumes and circumstances. I know that mother is me, at least in part. Even if she seems too eager in one play, or lost in another. Or controlling. I did ask that question. I do ask it. I am, if I'm being honest, desperate to know if they're happy, my children. Because there's so much heartbreak. And in my own mother's lifetime, there was a Holocaust.

It's been a week of remembering.

My mother telling me stories of Uncle Itsy and the babies the Nazis used for target practice; of Uncle Eddie, who was in the Army medical core and a first responder in the camps in Germany right after the war ended. Eddie couldn't put words to the stories of what he witnessed; it was too horrific. Uncle Eddie is long gone, but I wonder if my cousins Shelly and Julie, his daughters, remember. Know more than my mother knows of what he saw there. I wonder if anything was spoken later. I wonder what memory can hold when the events are unspeakable.

And my children, both of them, telling the story on stages, navigating what can be navigated through art. I stand back, in awe, occasionally asking the ineffectual question, "Are you happy?"

When the reminder of what was is too present, there's nothing else to ask.

But there's a bracelet that Kelly posted on Facebook, a gold one, that says "choose joy." And with all that knowing in my genes and DNA, all that was lost that wakes me up at night trying to remember how to breathe, I choose joy.
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Because there's no better way to rise up. To say this is what wasn't taken. And there's so much beauty. I see it. I choose it. And still, on behalf of my own family and the six million... I Never Forget.