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Holocaust Remembrance Day

EG

So, today, 1/27, is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and this is the Primo Levi quotation making the rounds on my Twitter feed:

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.

– The Drowned and the Saved

Nowhere is so “civilized” that its people can’t descend into rabid genocide; Until the Holocaust, Germany had won renown for the “German-Jewish symbiosis,” the way Germany and its Jews had created culture and lived together.

I want to take this opportunity to talk about group membership and intergenerational trauma. My family has been in the US for over 100 years; I’m the…fifth fourth generation born in the US on my mother’s side, and the fourth third on my father’s. Here are some quotations from my family:

My grandmother, to my mother when she was a little girl: “Remember, if you ever have to flee, Ireland has never persecuted its Jews.” (What they didn’t know at the time was that Eamon de Valera saw the Nazis as kindred spirits, nationalists trying to claim Germany for Germans, and refused to take in any Jewish refugees post-war, even while granting asylum to highly placed Nazis. This came out a few years back.)

My mother, to me, when I was a little girl. We were getting our passports renewed, and I had asked if we were going somewhere. When my mother said no, I asked why we were bothering, then: “We’re Jews, so we always have to be ready to flee.” To this day, I keep my passport in my purse at all times.

My mother, to me, more recently. We had been discussing Israel. I had been raised as anti-Zionist as it is possible to me and my mother was now expressing some ambivalence over that: “The Holocaust ended five years before I was born. Am I just supposed to take on faith that it can’t happen again?”

My therapist, a Jewish woman of my mother’s generation. I had been talking about this statement of my mother’s, and mentioned that even if I ever had to flee to Israel, I doubted they would take me, because I don’t have any paperwork proving I’m Jewish. I would have to get my great-grandmother’s burial records, my grandmother’s birth and marriage certificate, my mother’s birth and marriage certificate, and my birth certificate, and what were the odds that I was going to be able to pull all those together as I was fleeing?: “You should start getting them together now, so you have them ready. Just in case.”

My father: “Never miss the opportunity to kill a (neo-)Nazi. Because they’d do the same to you.”

Not one of these people was joking, even half-way.

I can’t speak about my therapist’s family, but I know for a fact that nobody in my family has suffered significant trauma due to anti-Semitism since my great-grandparents’ generation. Sure, individual incidents here and there–my first significant boyfriend lied to his grandfather about my being Jewish and during the ensuing fight, compared my being Jewish to his cousin’s cocaine problem and said his grandfather was an old man who “shouldn’t have to worry” about the possibility of his great-grandchildren being Jewish–but nothing on a life-choices-abridging institutional level, as far as I know, since leaving Eastern Europe (good call, (great-)great-grandparents, and I’m very grateful). These comments are all about group membership, group trauma, and intergenerational memory.

What I’m saying is that I’ve long suspected that the effects of group trauma last a long time. It’s well established that trauma can be conveyed unto a second generation (the best analogy I ever heard was that it’s like growing up in a house where for years before you were born, there was a giant hole in the porch that nobody had money to fix. Then they finally fix it, but everyone is so used to walking around the space where the hole was that they keep on doing it, and you do it too, because that’s how everyone walks, and you never even know the reason why. I think about this a lot when I have reactions that seem more appropriate to my mother given her childhood experiences than me.). But I was fascinated by this article outlining work being done on the cumulative effects of generation upon generation of trauma. I was less convinced by its use of African-Americans and Native Americans as examples, because those groups are still living in an ongoing traumatic situation–it’s less convincing to me. But when it comes to Jews in the US…I can’t help but wonder if this is why we’re all so fantastically neurotic. I’m a little facetious here, but only a little. My family, my friends–we’re all a bunch of anxious, depressive neurotics. Is this the after-effects of generation upon generation of violent trauma, of not being able to feel or be safe anywhere? I don’t know. But I found the article really suggestive.

And yet…as the article itself says, there’s a very bad history to locating the cause of injuries in the injured person rather than in the experience of injury. The idea that some people are just more predisposed to misery and that’s that, rather than spurring medical interventions, has all too often been used as an excuse for luckier people to shrug their shoulders and reassure themselves that they deserve their place at the top of the heap. Or sometimes it’s spurred horrific medical interventions. I don’t want to open the door to that sort of thing. On the other hand, I think it speaks to the power of repeated group trauma that it may be able to imprint itself on the biology of those three or four generations later, and give us all the more reason to fight against such horrors. I don’t know.

Thoughts?

21 thoughts on Holocaust Remembrance Day

  1. my friends–we’re all a bunch of anxious, depressive neurotics.

    Who, me? (Yes, actually. Although my experience is a bit more direct, and doesn’t really come from the same place as most neurotic New York Jews I’ve known from spending my life in this area! If there’s one thing I learned from my mother at a very early age, it’s that nothing is certain, and everything — home, family, country — can be lost at any moment, as hers were lost when she was 15 and left Berlin and her parents on the Kindertransport three weeks after Kristallnacht. But even if my mother hadn’t had those experiences, I suspect I would still have some of that from my father’s side, which has a history similar to your family’s. I wonder if that will change once there’s nobody left alive among us who personally knew family members who came over from Eastern Europe to escape pogroms and persecution during the 1880-1930 period.


    Until the Holocaust, Germany had won renown for the “German-Jewish symbiosis,” the way Germany and its Jews had created culture and lived together.

    That’s really something of a historical exaggeration. There’s obviously a complicated history which varied depending on the geographic region, but it was only in the 1860’s that Jews in most German states were fully emancipated, and allowed to live in major cities like Freiburg and many others. By the 1880’s, “modern” anti-Semitic organizations started promulgating their Jew-hatred, which never really abated before Hitler. There was a period of about 50 years when German-born Jews in Berlin and other places with substantial Jewish populations were able to live their lives in relative peace, and some had great success, and many considered themselves Germans as much as Jews (in a way that, say, Polish and Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jews never, ever identified as Poles or Lithuanians or Ukrainians), but it didn’t last very long, at least compared to the entirety of the 1500+ year history of Jews in German lands.

    1. I admit I was thinking more of the late 18th and early 19th centuries than anything more recent–The Pity of It All makes much of the “German-Jewish symbiosis,” but it doesn’t seem to have meant, as you note, that Jews weren’t subject to persecution and discrimination, just that they contributed much to Germany’s cultural and economic life.

      1. That’s true, although of course the very wealthy Berlin Jews involved in that represented only a tiny minority of German Jews at the time. It’s also interesting, I think, that of the 20 or so wealthy German-Jewish women in Berlin who hosted and participated in the famous salons during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, all but three ended up converting to Christianity, and most married Gentile men. And even after converting, they never really were fully accepted into German “high society.” Similarly, all but one of Moses Mendelssohn’s children converted, including his daughter Dorothea, one of the salon women, who married Friedrich Schlegel.

        Even those few who didn’t convert saw many of their relatives do so. As Sarah Levy, who lived to be 93, wrote towards the end of her life, “I appear to myself as a leafless tree; all of my relatives have become strangers to me, by their conversion to Christianity.” (See the book Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (1998) at p. 201.)

        But I agree that the salonières, etc., and the Enlightenment ideas they fostered, ended up contributing both to German culture and German-Jewish culture, the latter primarily through Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah. So in that sense, there was a symbiosis — as in the mutually respectful relationship between Mendelssohn and Kant.

        But once the Prussians experienced the humiliation of defeat by Napoleon (who emancipated the Jews in all the German territories he defeated and occupied, although it didn’t always last), followed by the reactionary growth of nationalism and romanticism and the idea of the German “Volk” after Napoleon’s defeat — all of which were pretty much antithetical to acceptance of Jews — that era of cultural symbiosis came to an unfortunate end, I think.

      1. No offense taken! I fully acknowledge being an anxious, depressive neurotic, and have no doubt that my Jewish heritage has a lot to do with it.

        But does being a New Yorker also play a role? In your experience, are Jewish New Yorkers more anxious, depressive, and neurotic as a general rule than non-Jewish New Yorkers?

        1. But does being a New Yorker also play a role? In your experience, are Jewish New Yorkers more anxious, depressive, and neurotic as a general rule than non-JewishNew Yorkers?

          YES.

        2. Oops, my use of the strikethrough didn’t work.

          I was trying to say I think it’s about New York, more than Jewishness. I know lots of anxious, depressive, neurotic non-Jewish New Yorkers!

  2. This is what I posted on my Facebook timeline today:

    On this 70th anniversary [of the liberation of Auschwitz], thinking about the 11 members of my mother’s immediate family (two grandparents, seven aunts and uncles, two first cousins, all pictured here except one first cousin) who were murdered at Auschwitz, or otherwise died in the Holocaust. I will never forget them: [photos of 10 of them inserted]

    [Names of the dead] Lina Bloch geb. Rothschild (1862-1944) (my mother’s grandmother); Moses Bloch (1855-1941) (my mother’s grandfather); Joseph Bloch (1886-1942) (her uncle); Toni Bloch geb. Baum (1889-1942) (her aunt); Rosa Bloch (1888-1942) (her aunt); Marthe Bloch (1891-1942) (her aunt); Gustav Bloch (1894-1944) (her uncle); Lucie Katschinsky geb. Mosevius (1897-1942) (her aunt); Adolf Katschinsky (1921-1942) (her first cousin); Leo Katschinsky (1891-1943) (her uncle). Not pictured: Ruth Katschinsky (1924-1942) (her first cousin). Plus well over 100 more distant members of her family that I know of — her parents’ and grandparents’ first cousins and their children, grandchildren, etc.

    (I added “of the liberation of Auschwitz,” because a cousin of mine on my father’s side asked “70th anniversary of what?”)

  3. Sorry to monopolize, but just one more comment: I was fascinated by the article you linked to about the possible epigenetic (rather than simply psychological) effects of trauma over multiple generations (including on subsequent generations descended from survivors of the Shoah and the Cambodian genocide, as well as the cumulative effect of centuries of genocide perpetrated upon Native Americans). It does sound kind of Lamarckian and hard to believe, but it does seem to be real.

    As a child of a mother who was a survivor, I don’t know what to think. Obviously my mother was extraordinarily traumatized by what happened to her and her family, and obviously that had a great effect upon me, given the stories she told me, and the photos of her lost family that she showed me, over and over again. It’s quite a burden growing up knowing that you were your mother’s answer to Hitler (as she told me more than once) — not to mention feeling unworthy of that, for reasons known only to me, not to her. Or having a mother whose anxiety about me and fear for me were like a stereotypical Jewish mother’s, magnified.

    I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that I’ve spent so much time over the last 25 years studying Jewish history in general and researching the history of her family in particular — trying in my own small way to restore symbolically what was shattered in her childhood. I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that I spent so much of my spare time in college trying to find places on campus (steam tunnels, basements, attics) where I could hide if I had to. (Just a game, I told myself.) It’s not a coincidence that my mother’s anxiety and over-protectiveness have been — despite my best efforts — replicated to some extent in my feelings for my son.

    Psychological? Epigenetic? I don’t know how anyone could distinguish.

  4. Looks like totally rational behavior to me. The Holocaust was in no way the world’s last act of genocide. The human race is neither kinder nor more tolerant. The US has a resurgence in hate groups. Calling yourselves and other Jews neurotic for planning for worst-case scenarios looks like victim-blaming, something you certainly don’t intend.
    My heart goes out to you.

    1. I definitely didn’t intend to victim-blame–I’m very sorry that it came across that way (gently and self-deprecatingly tease a little, but not victim-blame). Your thoughts are deeply kind and compassionate, and I thank you for them.

  5. The epigenetic work is fascinating. Thanks for posting the article. I have had the same experience. Most of my great-grandparent were born here, and I’m older than you, I think – I’m 54. I was 12 when the Israeli athletes were murdered in Munich. I watched that whole day, sitting in the den, with my mother beside me saying, over and over, “Don’t you ever forget that this is what it means to be Jewish. Don’t you ever forget”.

    After 9/11, I was truly bewildered by my friends and (non-Jewish) family who talked about suddenly not feeling safe. I didn’t feel any different – because I’d never felt safe in the first place.

    That translated into some very specific anxieties and difficulties, especially in professional settings. When someone first talked to me about group trauma, it really was a light dawning, an explanation for experiences and feelings that had never really made sense to me. The epigenetics explains the *how*. I already knew the *what*.

    1. My mother is about a decade older than you, and once told me that she, my uncle, my father, “our entire generation [of Jewish kids] grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust” and were at a loss for how to process it. She remembers a woman rushing at a movie screen screaming when the movie she and her brother were seeing showed Nazis. And I thought of what she said when my uncle, normally the most peaceable, compassionate, loving, kindest person I could imagine, told me about going to a counter-demonstration being organized against a neo-Nazi rally in Chicago, where he lives. He told me “I wore my steel-toed boots, so if the lines broke and any of them went down, I could crack skulls.” I absolutely refuse to condemn him. I don’t have a problem with it. The feeling of life-and-death struggle does not go away, I think.

    2. And I had the same reaction around 9/11–I had a student say “We’ve never felt unsafe in our country before,” and all I could think was “Who’s we, kiddo?” There’re lots of reasons to think that–the Cold War, for starters–but I think being part of a marginalized group with a history of major persecution pretty much guarantees it.

  7. Some long comments in moderation — EG, you can leave them there if dividing them up into shorter comments works:

    My father, who was born in the USA in 1920, once told me that his sadness about what was happening to the Jews of Europe in the late 1930’s (even before the true extent of what was happening became known) was the main reason he dropped out of college before graduating in 1940. He wasn’t affected as directly as my mother, of course, but his father had an uncle and many cousins still living in Lithuania. (My father used to save the envelopes containing their letters, for the stamps.) Of course, the letters stopped coming — they were all murdered shortly after the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, since their town was near the border and the Einsatzgruppen started their “work” right away, with substantial assistance from the Lithuanian police.

  8. I was able to find some official Nazi reports listing the numbers of Jews — Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish children carefully enumerated — liquidated in each town in Lithuania (including the one where my father’s family lived) during the months after the invasion. Hundreds of thousands just in that time and place, all slaughtered in the fields and forests by rifle and machine gun, falling into ditches the victims were forced to dig, or by pumping carbon monoxide into portable killing vans. (The death camps with gas chambers started because it was more efficient to kill large numbers that way than by wasting bullets.) There’s a series of translations of such reports at http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/einsatz/situationreport.html. (Trigger warning for photo at top of a woman clutching a small child, right before they were executed by a soldier standing behind her, pointing a rifle at her head.) And see http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/document/DocJager.htm for a translation of the Jäger Report, which summarizes the activities of one unit over a six-month period: it

    was written on 1 December 1941 by Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, a killing unit of Einsatzgruppen A which was attached to Army Group North during Operation Barbarossa. It is the most precise surviving chronicle of the activities of one individual Einsatzkommando.

    The Jäger Report is a tally sheet of actions by Einsatzkommando 3, including the Rollkommando Hamann killing squad. The report keeps an almost daily running total of the liquidations of 137,346 people, the vast majority Jews, from 2 July 1941 to 25 November 1941. The report documents exact date and place of the massacres, number of victims and their breakdown into categories (Jews, communists, criminals, etc.). In total, there were over 100 executions in 71 different locations listed there. On 1 February 1942, Jäger updated the totals to 136,421 Jews (46,403 men, 55,556 women and 34,464 children), 1,064 Communists, 653 mentally disabled, and 134 others in a handwritten note for Franz Walter Stahlecker.

    So this is the background of knowledge I grew up with, just from my father’s side.

    1. One also has to remember that when I was 12, in the late 1960’s, the end of World War II (and of the Shoah) was only a little more than 20 years in the past, as recent as 1992 is now. The gas chambers were still in operation a little more than a decade before I was born. Television, movies, books, comic books, the games kids played, my friends all talking about their fathers having been in the U.S military during the war — it was pretty much “all World War II, all the time” (if not so much the Shoah itself) in popular culture. And the 1960’s is when a lot more books and memoirs and novels and academic historical studies, and documentary movies, about the Shoah, started coming out — more than in the late 1940’s and 1950’s.

      So that era, and what it meant for Jewish people, was at the forefront of my mind as well, growing up, and probably would have been (albeit less so, I’m sure) even if I hadn’t had a German-Jewish refugee as my mother.

      I too watched the slaughter in Munich with my mother — I’m sure it was even more traumatic for her than for me.

      1. The closest I ever saw my mother get into a physical altercation was sometime in the late ’60’s or early ’70’s, when we were walking down Lexington Avenue — probably somewhere near Bloomingdale’s or the old Alexander’s — and saw a table with a late-middle-aged man behind it distributing Nazi and anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying leaflets. I think he was probably an original Nazi, not a neo-Nazi, because he had a distinct German accent. My mother walked up to the table, swept all the leaflets off the table and onto the sidewalk so they could be trampled, spat at him, and started shouting at him in German. He tried to get a nearby policeman to arrest her, but the officer refused, and I sort of grabbed her and dragged her away, while she started crying. I was just a kid, so I was a little embarrassed, but I was still proud of her. (She told me afterwards that it reminded her a little of the band of Hitler Jugend who attacked her one day in the mid-1930’s, when she was 13 or 14, in the Black Forest near her grandparents’ village, where she was taking a group of local Jewish kindergarten children for a walk, and beat her up and threw all the little children into a pond to drown. She was a good swimmer, and managed to fish them all out and rescue them after the boys ran away.)

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