Parts of Myself I Didn't Know Were Missing: A Personal Encounter with the Holocaust

We continue the journey

—John Fisher (1995)¹

once i became a folklorist, my father's double first cousin, whom I called "Uncle Nat," would say, "So you'll write a family history," to which I would think, Folklorists don't do history. However, since I had loved to listen to the grown-ups telling each other about the chaotic collection of oddball cousins and single-minded grandparents, their journeys from the seemingly mythical before-place referred to as the heim, and the new lives they made for themselves in England and the United States, I am known to have a repertoire of stories and am often referred to as the "family historian."

But what does Uncle Nat have to do with this paper? Why did his suggestion linger in my mind despite my ready dismissal? Nat, one of the three family professors, treated children as equals and would tell my parents in the face of my total failure at elementary school, "Oh, don't worry about young Simon, he'll find his way." As I grew up, he became intellectually curious about the subjects I studied and taught, and we developed a deep friendship. Therefore, his spontaneous suggestion that I do a family history, and his confident expectation of the outcome, could not be brushed aside and could even provide a way of repaying his quiet presence and solid support.²

When I say "Folklorists don't do history," I know it isn't true.³ What I mean is that while history is a search for, presentation, and accurate analysis of "what happened" or "what was happening," my passion growing up had been for what is often dismissed by social scientists as "unreliable" or "anecdotal" information. This is partly what drew me to folklore, where multiple narratives might be considered as significant as verifiable "facts," and recognized, when analyzed in relation to each other, as a traditional way of presenting the complexity of an individual's or group's perception, perspective, or aesthetic (Lichman 1989).

When I first started studying folklore scholarship, I was taken by the idea of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writing a doctoral dissertation on her family stories (1975), never thinking for a moment that perhaps I should or could do a formal study of my own storytelling traditions. And throughout my years as a folklorist I seem to have concentrated on anything but—my PhD research was an ethnographic study of the Marshfield Paper Boys' Mumming Play, which takes place in a small village in England (Lichman 1981); in Israel, I created a program in which folklore, the substance and practice, is used as a tool for bringing together Jewish and Arab communities that live within the ebb and flow of violent conflict. All of this is a far cry from the Jewish East End of London where my parents grew up and even further away from Eastern Europe, where their parents were born.⁴

I didn't really think about the issue of family history again until my wife, Rivanna, and I received a group email from two of her cousins asking if we were interested in going to Lithuania. They had researched deeply and organized a trip that would show where the family had lived and died during the Holocaust.⁵

In July 2009, 38 Miller-Berman cousins from all over the world (including our three children) and various in-laws, aged between 21 and 88, drove through Lithuania on a bus, ending up in Riga, Latvia. Each of us was considered to be either a second-, third-, or fourth-generation survivor.⁶

Miller-Berman Homes, Lithuania

From Riga, where the Miller-Berman trip concluded, my immediate family, joined by our siblings, continued on to explore the Lichman-Gabriel fate in Poland. In preparing for this part of the trip, I was suddenly confronted with Where would we go? What would we see? Since I had never asked my grandparents for a straightforward account of their lives, I now worried away at...