Survivors’ Stories
Years ago in Berlin, I met a Jewish woman with four fingers on one hand. She held up the appendage, her finger not exactly missing, but torn off, just below the knuckle. The accident that maimed her saved her life, she told me. She had been a factory worker, a forced laborer in Berlin. The day the digit was mangled in 1943, she was sent to the hospital, so she was absent when her entire factory was sent to Auschwitz. She survived through luck and wits and the grace of do-gooders, especially one valiant non-Jewish woman who took her in. The survivor’s name is Hanni Levy. She was 19 when she lost that finger. She’s in her late 80s today.
Her story is like the ones told by so many other survivors - improbable, amazing. And perhaps what makes it most remarkable is hearing it from the woman herself. Hanni has lived in Paris since the war; her English is peppered with French. She is the kind of woman to whom the adjective “sparkling” would be aptly applied. She wore deep red glasses, a color to which her hair was closely matched.
For decades now, survivors of the Holocaust have told these stories - to students, to teachers, to anybody willing to listen - and in the process turned the past into something almost tangible: memory. A living witness does not dryly recite facts and statistics; she recalls her life. She uses body language, intonation and eye contact to convey meaning. She makes history real.
The Nazis had very specific goals: to exterminate the Jews and other “undesirables,” of course, but also to erase them. Render them forgotten. In Paris I met survivors of camps where Jewish slaves were forced to burn the personal items of all those deported from the City of Light - diaries, notebooks, photographs - to render them, literally, unmemorable.
It took time for remembering to begin. In the years immediately after the Holocaust, people were reluctant to hear the stories, and survivors were hesitant to tell them. The trauma was just too close. But over the last 30 years, as “bearing witness” became a mantra, we have come to rely on memory and on narrative as a means of taking in the enormity of the horror.
Now, as the last eyewitnesses to the Holocaust leave us, we face an enormous loss. The personal connection made the tragedy that is otherwise so very large, nearly tactile, almost graspable. How well can we learn about what happened without these powerful emotional tethers to tie us to it? Will the Holocaust mean as much to young people when they can’t hear from the woman who escaped her train to Auschwitz? What happens when the Holocaust becomes as dusty and distant as the civil war? Will the Nazi project - to render Jews and other victims unmemorable - meet belated, unfortunate, success?
There is a partial solution to this problem. Years ago, I discovered a folded note, of the kind we all passed in the pre-texting era, tucked inside an old photo album in my grandfather’s study. In each quadrant of the note was a pasted-in selfie from the 1930s, a photo of a girl. “Will Karl write to me today?” she wondered, her face open, happy, the words written in the paper below each picture.
Karl was my grandfather; the girl in the photos was not my grandmother. The note was dated May 1939, 10 months after Karl escaped Vienna in 1938, and she mailed it from Berlin to him in America. He had preserved this note, as well as other letters from her - hundreds and hundreds of words, the story of a life upended - in a collection of letters mislabeled “Patient Correspondence A-G.” Her name was Valerie “Valy” Scheftel. She was a doctor, like him. She had been his lover. And she was alone in Berlin, desperate to get out of the Reich. He had moved here and, eventually, started a family. But for decades he preserved their life together by saving their correspondence. Their romance is the subject of my just published book, “Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind.”
We like to believe we are adept at remembering. We excel at memorials. Americans - and American Jews, in particular- have spent millions of dollars on enormous buildings commemorating the Holocaust. But it is not the marble alone, or the grandiose gesture, that enables us to remember: It is the individual stories and the small details that give the Holocaust its uniqueness, its universality and its resonance into the future. As the eyewitnesses to the apocalypse of the 20th century leave us, museums and teachers and universities are seeking ways to explain the horror to the next generation. Some proposals are futuristic - projecting holograms of speaking survivors into rooms - but the most, and the best, are old fashioned: reading, seeing, using words and text set against the artifacts of lives.
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