Kenna Titus<\/p>\n
05\/3\/15<\/p>\n
Oral History Project<\/p>\n
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. 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, when my strong interest in the holocaust reemerged. I felt a strong tie existed between my religious disillusionment and my connection with this traumatic event that had occurred over 50 years before my birth.<\/p>\n
The search to find my family\u2019s 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, avoiding any and all phrases that could spark a theological debate. In answer, he sent me his \u201creport from the IDF battalion and company commanders’ course delegation to Poland\u201d, 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\u2019s) family tree:<\/p>\n
“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. \u00a0A 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. \u00a0Of 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. \u00a0Avraham himself was murdered in Auschwitz. \u00a0I also found a photo of the Mathausen concentration camp information card about another of Avraham’s adult children. \u00a0Most directly related to us was Great Great Grandma Miriam Feige\u2026 who moved with Great Great Grandpa Aron Wolf to America (along with Great Grandpa Yitzchak). \u00a0After Great Great Grandpa Aron Wolf passed away, Great Great Grandma Miriam Feige went back to Poland and was killed in the holocaust.”<\/p>\n
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 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 people (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. I think Rabbi Edelman summed it up well when he said during our interview \u201cIt is rather a huge kind of thing when you think about a country that was on the leading edge of science, of philosophy, of culture, this is not in my lifetime but in people who are around today’s life time, this in not ancient history\u2026 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\u2026\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s experiences and histories. A student around my age named Aryeh who I spoke to shared his story:<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s just on my dad’s side, my mom\u2019s family had been in the states for a few generations\u2026 \u00a0my dad\u2019s 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\u2026 They got exiled from Poland and ended up in Germany in the camps, both my grandparents were in Auschwitz\u2026So 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\u2026 but a lot of that side of the family was lost\u2026 even the people that survived had a lot of trauma”<\/p>\n
Aryeh\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n
“My wife\u2026 both of her 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\u2026 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\u2026 His father was killed in front of him\u2026 My wife\u2019s other grandfather’s wife and three kids were killed and my wife\u2019s grandmother\u2026 she was an Auschwitz survivor. So you just think about the weight of that, to live through that, to remarry and have another family, it\u2019s [unfathomable].”<\/p>\n
Somehow, 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 \u201ccreated\u201d me. \u00a0And so, as it was the great resilience of these people that created our \u00a0lives and our culture \u00a0today, I am left wanting to examine this \u00a0strength of the human spirit: the resilience and bravery that has become myth.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kenna Titus 05\/3\/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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":827,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[6,5,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/827"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}