Monday January 27th was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s not something I pay much heed to despite the fact that my family was directly affected by the Holocaust. My grandmother was a survivor; 2 of her brothers fought in the underground; and her parents, youngest brother, and oldest sister and child were among the many who died a brutal death at the hands of the Nazi regime. All this I know and yet it all seems so far away, so absurdly violent to the point where it’s more of a fiction than a truth.
My grandmother, surviving Auschwitz, returned to her home town, Komarno, on the Slovakian border with Hungary following her liberation. The story, as far as I know, goes that she didn’t trust the Allied troupes and chose to return home by foot. With whom? I don’t know. How long did this take? How did she survive such an ordeal, malnourished and weak as she must have been? I don’t know. Her personal story of the Holocaust, her feelings, thoughts and memories are now lost. She chose not to return to that time with me around.
When the Soviets backed a coup d’état by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1948, my grandmother and her husband were forced to make a hard choice or risk suffering at the hands of another oppressive force. My grandmother who was 4 months pregnant at the time and her husband, a man she referred to as her knight in shining armor, considered living under the new regime, given that they were neither staunch “capitalists or religious” and that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. A few years later, it became clear that life would be terrible and dangerous under the communist regime. They left in the middle of night, becoming Displayed Persons and wanting nothing more than the democracy and peace that had so far eluded them in their adult lives…
A sad and shocking irony is that in order to seek a better life they had to go through Germany to illegally enter France where they applied for Canadian citizenship, which they eventually got. There’s a humiliating and shameful story of the citizenship process, where they had to strip naked in front of the immigration officers to prove they were healthy. I can’t imagine the memories that must have resurfaced at that moment…
Once in Canada, my grandmother, intelligent, madly in love with her husband, and genuinely optimistic at starting afresh, chose to strip down once again. However, this time it wasn’t the clothes she took off, it was the arbitrary identities she was born with. She wanted to be known as Lilly Dvorsky and what she made of herself: nothing more and nothing less. She stripped herself of being a woman and the baggage that came with that, stripped herself of her Judaism and while she never hid her Jewishness to my knowledge, neither did she make it a central tenet to who she was. If she was to start from scratch, it was something, she, as an individual, felt she had to do. She worked hard at integrating with Canadian society. I admire her for doing so. In an autobiography she wrote (not published) where the Holocaust is mentioned in passing, and her time in Auschwitz is summarized as “I am not going to write in this story about the horrors that awaited us (in Auschwitz),” my grandmother also wrote the following:
I promised myself there and than, that if I survived, I wouldn’t let my whole life be hijacked by the Holocaust. (…) The only way I could deal with my past is SILENCE.
Silence on my lips and silence in my mind.
I grew up in a home that was modern, very Canadian – with a mother of Jewish lineage and a French Canadian father of Catholic upbringing who raised me without religion – and very far from Europe and the tragedy that was WW2.
A consequence of this upbringing is that, and I’m not alone in this, most of my knowledge of the Holocaust comes from third parties: museums, teachers, writers, filmmakers, artists…
This is what I’d like to explore. How do I remember the Holocaust? What were the sources that shaped the images, the emotions and my thoughts about it?
I did not go to Jewish school. I grew up in the Suburbs of Montreal, in a predominantly white French Canadian neighborhood. At a young age, my first real introduction to the Holocaust, beyond what my parents had told me, which was a synopsis of sorts, was Anne Frank’s book. I smile when I write this: it seems almost comical how ubiquitous Anne Frank became. I read the book at school, in a French speaking suburban elementary class. In the entire school, there was only one other Jew. My wife, also read it in a catholic elementary school in a small city in Argentina. I can’t really say what effect the book had on me. This was over 20 years ago and the safe and tiny suburban world of where I lived was too big a contrast to what takes place in the book for me to really understand and relate to it. I was young and so innocent.
Over the years, I learned about the war at school and with my parents at different Holocaust museums in cities we’d visit. One of the most striking experiences I’ve had about the Holocaust was visiting Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a museum where the form of its exhibition, of its architecture and that of its content was more harmonious.
Stories also proved to be a great source of learning. I remember Schindler’s List, Au Revoir les Enfants, The Pianist, Life is Beautiful and a great many other films and books that explore the war from different perspectives. All of these cultural artifacts play an invaluable role in shaping our memory of history. Documentaries and testimonies provide an even more shocking account of what took place, and yet, given my fortunate circumstances, in a beautiful and safe country, the war and the Holocaust are still a mystery to me, an account of a tragedy beyond my emotional ability to understand it; almost absurd in its premise; unbelievable in its crimes and motivations. No film has been able to capture the savage frailty and weakness of those assaulted by the Nazis; no amount of acting talent has ever really been able to accurately portray life in a concentration camp. And despite the documentary pictures and video footage of the time, its black and white quality is a cognitive divide that I find hard to cross. Perhaps color would prove too difficult.
I’ve come to an interesting realization. In all my years, in everything I’ve seen, heard, read and interacted with about the Holocaust, the most powerful and communicative artifact I’ve ever encountered is Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, MAUS. Strange isn’t it. Why should that be so? I’ve thought about it recently, following my second viewing of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, and memories of crying almost uncontrollably during Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies. These are 3 animated stories.
Waltz with Bashir, Maus, Grave of the Fireflies
In my experience, good animation provides a safe space for my emotional self to really engage with the story. In the drawings my mind allows me to travel, to explore, to wonder, and most importantly to relate. It’s as if real images of the Holocaust are too real to be accepted by my brain, comfortable in its existence in the peaceful streets of Montreal. And I think that for me having mice or drawn cartoonish characters instead of actors is more real, less jarring. Photographs, video footage, and real people need too much intellectualizing on my part, where as the animation allows my heart to roam free. Perhaps it’s a form of mental survival mechanism.
When I try and remember the Holocaust I realize that I’m remembering it from the perspective of a great many sources: factual data, historical analysis and art. The interesting thing about it is that art, in my case, has played the most important role. For some interesting food for thought, I wanted to share this, something I found on a blog entitled “Understanding Society:”
What is the relation between “history”, “memory”, and “narrative”? We might put these concepts into a crude map by saying that “history” is an organized and evidence-based presentation of the processes and events that have occurred for a people over an extended period of time; “memory” is the personal recollections and representations of individuals who lived through a series of events and processes; and “narratives” are the stories that historians and ordinary people weave together to make sense of the events and happenings through which a people and a person have lived. We use narratives to connect the dots of things that have happened; to identify causes and meanings within this series of events; and to select the “important” events and processes out from the ordinary and inconsequential.
Art, fiction and non-fiction are inseparable. In order to remember, it has been important for me to engage with art that strives to explore life in all its complexity. Fiction, in all its forms, about everything, is the fundamental basis I use to make sense of it all.
What works of art have been most impactful to you?
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