Kenna Titus

05/21/15

Oral History Project

At age 9 I went to see the Diary of Anne Frank, and found myself wrestling with heavy survivor’s guilt. I was an odd kid, a complex mix of intelligent, vivacious, and hugely sensitive. This left me in a constant battle between wanting to know everything, and being heartbroken by the truth; a contradiction I experienced perhaps most strongly as I learned about the Holocaust. Growing up in a reform Jewish community I attended religious school twice a week, where there was a strong focus on learning the history of the Jewish people. This meant a lot of talk about the Holocaust, from watching videos and looking at pictures of the camps, to discussing interpretation of Jewish laws during that time, to hearing the stories of survivors. On these days I could often be found crouching on the green tiled floor of the temple’s basement bathroom, wiping away tears and fighting an inner battle between the desire to hide my feelings, and the fascination that the information held for me. It took many years of wrestling with my empathy and my identity before I gathered the courage to learn my own family history. My freshman year in college I was struggling with my place in the Jewish community, both because of my political beliefs and my skepticism in the face of traditional faith. Without the community I had grown up with, I found myself feeling cynical about the idea of attending temple, or participating in religion at all. It was during this time that my strong interest in the Holocaust reemerged. I felt a tie existed between my religious disillusionment and my connection with this traumatic event that had occurred over 50 years before my birth. I decided it was time to reevaluate that relationship.

The search to find my family’s story led me quickly to my uncle, an Israeli judge, special forces commander in the IDF, Zionist, and father of four, who had made Aliyah (immigrated to Israel) at age 18. Though I was closer with my grandmother, and they were more directly her relatives, I knew that if anyone would have done all the research and be able to tell me exactly what had happened it would be my uncle. I phrased my email carefully, attempting to keep my language vague as I was not ready to explain my motivations or defend my possible theories. In answer, he sent me his “report from the IDF battalion and company commanders’ course delegation to Poland”, a personal essay he had written for family after his trip. While in Poland he had visited many of the camps, even seeing the shower chambers where his wife’s family members had been gassed. In this paper he also include the research he had done before the trip, upon learning that millions of testimonials could be found online, where he had followed my great grandmother (granny’s) family tree:

So I took the Binstock family tree which a cousin of Granny had sent her… and immediately found about 12 testimonials, all filled out by that same cousin of Granny.  A great many of the descendants of Avraham Binstock (one of Great Grandpa Yitzchak’s eight siblings) were murdered at the time that the ghetto in the Galician town of Tarnow was liquidated by the Nazis.  Of those, most were executed on sight when found hiding together in a basement; one of Avraham’s daughters was shot along with her child, when trying to sneak out of the ghetto during the liquidation and that daughter’s husband was taken in by a gentile, who later shot him to death.  Avraham himself was murdered in Auschwitz.  I also found a photo of the Mathausen concentration camp information card about another of Avraham’s adult children.  Most directly related to us was Great Great Grandma Miriam Feige… who moved with Great Great Grandpa Aron Wolf to America (along with Great Grandpa Yitzchak).  After Great Great Grandpa Aron Wolf passed away, Great Great Grandma Miriam Feige went back to Poland and was killed in the Holocaust.

Reading this essay my uncle had written swiftly brought me to tears, and I realized in this moment how deep an effect anti-Semitism and the trauma of the Holocaust had on my life, despite never knowing my own family’s sufferings. This led me to develop more clearly my interest in this project. I have a strong desire to better understand communal traumas, and how they shape generations removed. From descendants of African American slaves, to Native Peoples (here and elsewhere), to Japanese Americans who faced internment, and so many other communities who have been shaped by oppression or genocide, there are people walking through our lives today who still bear the scars. But for this particular project I stayed close to home, focusing on the Jewish population and talking to a rabbi and a couple of my peers about the ways we have been effected. We all grew up with this knowledge, this fear and sadness and sometimes even guilt, and it has been a fascinating journey to begin understanding the impact that has had.

What first struck me when I began to think about the Holocaust in depth within the context of our lives today was that in many cases we were literally created by this event. So many families were torn apart and later reformed in new and complicated ways, and these events led to the birth of our families. This struck me as the most immediate effect on our lives, and a good place to start because it serves as an indisputable way in which some of my generation has been affected. This thought was confirmed for me as I began my interviews and people shared with me the stories of their own family’s experiences and histories. A student around my age named Aryeh who I spoke to shared his story:

It’s just on my dad’s side, my mom’s family had been in the states for a few generations but my dad’s side they were in Poland and my grandma was actually dating my great uncle, my grandpas older brother. I think they were in a relatively close knit Jewish community in Poland. They got exiled from Poland and ended up in Germany in the camps. Both my grandparents were in Auschwitz, and my great uncle I guess died in the camps. So later my grandma was trying to get in touch with him and couldn’t but she got in touch with his brother, and they ended up getting married. A lot of that side of the family was lost though, and even the people that survived had a lot of trauma

Aryeh’s family would have been completely different without these events. His grandfather wouldn’t have been his grandfather; they might not even have left Poland. He and his family are, in a sense, entirely a result of the Holocaust. Rabbi Edelman’s story also reflected this effect:

Both of my wife’s’ grandparents were married before the war. Both had families, one had two kids one had five kids. Both were sent to concentration camps. Their wives and kids were all killed. My son was named after my wife’s grandfather. He was on a train to Auschwitz and they broke a window in the corner of the train and people were crawling out. He was pushed out of that corner and he was shot twice by the Nazis, but he made it. He lived by himself for two and a half years in the woods in Poland. His father was killed in front of him. My wife’s other grandfather’s wife and three kids were killed and my wife’s grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor. So you just think about the weight of that, to live through that, to remarry and have another family, it’s unfathomable.

Somehow, though, they did make it through. People lived and relocated and remarried and eventually, generations later, we were born. Of course many Jews today, myself included, had family in America far before the Holocaust and are not ourselves related to survivors. And yet my education, sense of self, and worldview were interminably affected by this event, and in this way it has “created” me. As Aleks, another student I interviewed stated, “My family is from Russia and Poland… my great grandmother came to the states as a child fleeing pogroms in her Siberian shtetl. I don’t think I had any family in the Holocaust… but, I mean, of course I had family, I’m related to all humans let alone all Jews.” And this is a view echoed throughout the Jewish community. There is a tradition around the holiday of Passover of saying things such as “we were slaves in the land of Egypt”, using the personal pronoun to acknowledge that they were my people, and therefore a part of myself. This connection is expressed in much of our storytelling, and it makes history feel incredibly personal. And so, as it was the great resilience of these people, my people, in the Holocaust that created our lives and our culture today, I am left wanting to examine this strength of the human spirit: the resilience and bravery that has become myth in our time.

Growing up, I heard many stories of bravery in the Holocaust. People fighting back in small ways, maintaining their religion in the hardest of times; figures whose faith and strength prevailed in spirit above their mortal pain. This idea is embodied well by to the violin music of Juliek in Night. This character’s immense strength and beauty was particularly connected with Aleks, who said “I read Night like three times… and I think I cried probably all three of those times. And actually one of the characters in that inspired me to play violin.”  What I saw in Anne Frank, and Aleks saw in Juliek, is reflected in many characters and stories that represent the vitality of humankind. They represent the moral of the stories we tell, or the “mythology” of the Holocaust, and these characters are perfect heroes for us to admire and relate to. There are also personal stories from which we draw these characters. Aryeh told me his own family’s story of resilience:

Both my grandparents were in Auschwitz but I think there was a lot of moving around between camps. So at one point I know my grandpa was in work camps and he and his dad would volunteer for extra work positions. I heard a lot of stories about my grandpa being kind of scrappy and trying to escape a bunch of times and sabotaging construction work. I don’t know how true it was because my dad liked to embellish but there was a lot of mythology there.

Rabbi Edelman also stressed the importance of this message (mythology?) when talking about the Holocaust:

One thing I think should be emphasized more is the role of Jewish faith during the Holocaust… people talk about the brutality and death and torture… which is very important and has to be talked about, but when you think about what is there in Judaism that can help you and give you strength?… There were tremendous amounts of spiritual rebellion. Every time the Jew stood tall and retained their human dignity and sensitivity… that was rebellion.

He told me about the book which has had the biggest impact on his life, A Man’s Search for Knowledge, and the moral it draws from this mythology:

So the book is by Dr. Victor Franco, a psychologist and a student of Freud. He was developing his particular school of psychology, basically that the most important drive in a human being is the search for meaning in life. Very different than Freud who believed that we were driven by sexuality and power, but Franco said that what he saw in the Holocaust could blow your mind, the kindness that people gave, sharing their last bit of bread with other people, yes even though there were people that did barbaric and animalistic things that doesn’t define what the human being is. The human being is capable of the most incredible good because we’re not animals, at the core people are angels not animals. And we have to feed that.

I think there’s value in this message, in recognizing strength in the face of pain, in being inspired by stories, true and fictional, that show us what it means to have faith. And I think that this feeling of admiration for those that were so strong is probably what’s intended in part by the large focus in Jewish education on the Holocaust. But hand in hand with this strength comes a fear that many of us carry. Growing up with the knowledge of such an immense tragedy, a genocide of our people, has affected us all. Though we have each reacted differently, I would argue that we are all coping. Rabbi Edelman told me a story that framed this fear and desire to be separate quite well:

Elie Wiesel grew up as a Chasid. And one day he asked his Rabbi,

“How can you have faith in God after the Holocaust?”

The Rabbi responded by asking him the exact opposite question.

“How can you have faith in man after the Holocaust?”

How do we have faith in man? The answer to this question differed between those that I talked to, and I’m sure there are millions of methods, but I did see this struggle for faith and in man, for wanting to be part of the community of man, affecting each of us.

Aleks talked to me about the way this awareness affected him:

It’s affected my Judaism and my sense of being Jewish. I feel like in the history of being Jewish we have a lot of history of being persecuted… but the Holocaust is such a big deal it’s almost a scar on our communal psyche. I guess because it was the literal destruction of a society of Jews that ended European Jewry essentially… I feel like it makes me feel kind of like a refuge, in the sense that I identify pretty strongly with the idea that my family used to speak Yiddish and now we speak English. We used to live in Siberia and now we live in Texas. That just really struck me, that we used to live this way, and it was a particular thing that happened that ended that and really changed the way we all live. The Holocaust and pograms and just European anti-Semitism from the 19th to 20th century. There’s just a real sense of how Jews were discriminated against and I think many people may not acknowledge that that’s a thing that still happens today.

I certainly felt the Holocaust as a scar on my psyche, and on my communities psych as a whole. There is a fear that permeates my body when I begin to read peoples personal stories, or to watch a documentary, or even to think deeply about the Holocaust. Rabbi Edelman said during our interview:

It is rather a huge kind of thing when you think about Germany as a country that was on the leading edge of science, of philosophy, and of culture. This is not in my lifetime but in people who are around today’s lifetime, this in not ancient history. To think that the modern world could go so nuts. Think about it, people coming into your house, kicking you out, throwing you into concentration camps, killing your people…  For you to think about what human beings are capable of doing, ya know? A lot of people think it could never happen again, and hopefully it could never happen again, but you know this was not the dark ages 700 years ago or something. We’re talking the modern world, sophisticated people. Of the top 50 Nazis over 40 of them are college educated! I mean you’re talking doctors, lawyers… they weren’t just uneducated peasants who hated Jews. What the mind is capable of, creating a whole philosophy and convincing a person of something, it’s pretty scary.

I have spent years thinking about this. It has indisputably changed the way I have thought about the world. What is humanity if it is capable of such horrendous things? And here I am hesitant to say we. I don’t want to include myself in the “we” that is humanity, because if humanity is capable of this destruction I cringe to associate myself with it. I think this is also at the root of Aleks feeling like a refuge among Americans. It is hard to want to be part of a larger culture that has historically chosen to disown us, and a culture that we perceive as being capable of the worst evils

Aryeh also felt the desire to distance himself in some way. He told me about how anti-Semitism affected him:

One of the stories my dad has talked about over and over again when I was a kid was one of his getting followed home from school. He was very obviously Jewish, and lived in New York and one day some kid threatened him with a knife and there was some altercation that was really intense around ‘you killed Jesus’, and I heard that from a very young age and that kind of colored how I viewed my world.

He described feeling combative in school, always waiting to be singled out for his religion. He felt different, and he felt that his difference would at some point put him in danger. His father also stressed that the only way to defy anti-Semitism was to stay in the faith:

I think my dad would bring up things his mom (who was a very religious Holocaust survivor) had said, like “this is a horrible thing” but then he would say it right back to me. One quote that’s come up a lot, he’s brought it up again and again, is “don’t finish the job that Hitler started.” That’s something his mom would say about him, when like he wasn’t being religious or not being Jewish enough… And then it came up with me dating non-Jews. That’s where my dad would bring it up. It’s interesting how he perpetuates that when he isn’t really religious, as a way to keep me in the faith.

Teaching the fear of anti-Semitism as a method to promote Semitism is something I’ve seen before. I think back sometimes on my Jewish education and begin to feel that this was all I was taught, that the focus was so strongly on the evil of anti-Semitism that they forgot to emphasis the merit of practicing Judaism. Rabbi Edelman addressed this as a problem in general American Judaism:

There are some Jews for whom the main focus of their Jewish identity growing up was the Holocaust, so they don’t like to talk about it now. A lot of people don’t know there is more to Judaism than people hating you.

This is a way of viewing ourselves that I have seen as a major thread throughout my discussion of the long term effects of the Holocaust, and is perhaps the general legacy of widespread anti-Semitism. The reality of being segregated, expelled, oppressed, and exterminated for hundreds of years is that through being othered, we have learned to other ourselves. Rabbi Edelman expressed this cultural reality but also opened my eye to the possible positive effects:

There are some Jews that have the opinion, on the negative side, that people who are not Jewish are just out to get us. They write off the non-Jewish world, and are very insular. But on the positive side there is a sensitivity from the experience we have had. When we say never again it’s not only for the Jewish people but that no one else should ever experience that. It’s pushed Jews to be at the forefront of all kinds of movements that are designed to help make sure these things never happen again… it’s pushing us to go beyond never again.

This leads me to thinking about one of the central principles of Judaism that I have taken with me into my adult life, the idea of “tikkun olam”, or “repairing the world”. Jewish teachings hold that we all bear a responsibility to lend a hand in bettering our world, that God will not do that for us. I feel that we are instilled with a pretty clear understanding of the ways in which our world is broken, but tikkun olam insures we are also taught that we have a responsibility to repair it, and this has been a redeeming factor in my desire to stay connected to the faith. Sometimes I struggle to believe that the world will ever be whole, that we will ever be united, but I think tikkun olam answers for me that question Victor Franco addresses, the question of finding meaning in life. There is meaning for me in attempting to insure “never again” for all people.

I believe that many Jews of my generation and my parents generation, like myself, struggle to this day with repercussions from and trauma around the Holocaust, in both conscious and unconscious ways.  The testimonies I heard while doing this project changed the way I thought about my own experience, both by making me feel connected to a larger experience and helping me to process why the Holocaust had such an impact on me.  I felt so strong a connection as a child with my repressed ancestors that it caused me intense pain and survivor’s guilt. Aleks feels like a refuge in the only home he has ever known. And Aryeh felt constantly afraid growing up of anti-Semitism, and that to leave his faith would be contributing to that anti-Semitism. I see these all as symptoms of the trauma that still plagues us, of our feeling othered and rejected, and of us being taught that anti-Semitism defines our religion. Although there is strength to be found in learning about the resilience of my people, I see even more power in claiming my faith in a present positive way, separate from, although not in denial of, the horrific events of the past.  I want to change the mythology so that Judaism might not be defined by the Holocaust, and by anti-Semitism, but by our desire to prevent oppression moving forward. In this way we can rediscover a desire to be part of the “we” of humanity, to stop othering ourselves, and to define ourselves by faith and not be trauma.