Over the Rooftops of Time: Jewish Stories, Essays, Poems

Writing the Holocaust: auch ohne/Sprache

Writing the Holocaust auch ohne/Sprache 1 Norma Rosen, in her collected essays, Accidents of Influence, writes in “Notes Toward a Holocaust Fiction”: “Whether or not we’re crazy with the weight and grief of it . . . we are astonishingly sane. Only sanity remembers. Sanity makes a home for the dead.” And in her essay “The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery,” she writes: One day, perhaps a young woman nursing her baby in her own safe house, who has read Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl,” will feel the pain of that mother’s sight of her starved infant in a way that is immediate and profound . . . though she and her child are protected and healthy in America, she will infuse her own experience with the terror these stories convey, a second life of art. And since that art is a Holocaust re-creation, the woman’s response will be a Holocaust memory of a sort, and we must let it be. And then perhaps a novelist will write of that woman’s experience. And so connectedness and continuity evolve. The manner of it may disturb us with its 1 3 3 impurity, but in the end this may be the deepest kind of ongoing Holocaust memorial that we can have.1 How are we to make a home for our dead, to abide their living memory ? How to appropriate what we have not directly experienced, yet has shaped our lives? The home for my dead began to take form one day when I was seven. In 1941. It was then I found my parents sitting in stunned silence on the wooden stairs between the first and second floors of our house one afternoon. I had no idea why my father was home in the middle of the day, nor what event or knowledge had brought them together that way. I gradually began to realize—as children do no matter how well secrets are kept—that our large family in Lithuania, those who had not come to the United States earlier, would not come. Ever. I remember discussions in Yiddish in my grandmother’s house, men standing up, heated debates, desperation. I know efforts of rescue were underway. I wondered why English schoolchildren came to live with American families, went to my school, when Jewish children from my family in Lithuania never came. Around that time I began to imagine the girl, my counterpart, my Lithuanian sister, who I might very well have been. And I have carried that sister with me all my life. 2 Not until now—fifty-six years later—is there direct corroboration that the impression of a seven-year-old child bore the truth. On this very day, a cousin hands me a letter that his father received. It was sent from Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania on December 28, 1940. It was the last letter ever to be received from my cousin’s uncle, Jacob Wolpe. Of his entire family, only one person would survive, his daughter. Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet-Nazi treaty of 1939, Eastern Europe was partitioned. The Baltic states came under the jurisdiction of the Soviets. The Soviet occupation began on June 15, 1940. A year later, June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. “Operation Barbarossa” opened its assault on Lithuania. The Red Army fled. In the following days, with the arrival of German occupation forces, the entire Jewish populations of over 150 villages and towns were massacred. In a document, “Total List of the Executions Carried Out in the Area of Einsatzkommando 3 by 1 December 1941,”2 we find execution lists by date, town, men, women, and children—and a summary: 1 3 4 OVER THE ROOFTOPS OF TIME “Jews liquidated—exclusively by partisans—through pogroms and executions before the take-over of Security Police tasks by Einsatzkommando 3: 4,000; Total [executions]: 137,346.” We read: “4 October 1941: Kauen—Fort IX [Kaunas/Kovno]: 315 Jews, 712 Jewesses, 818 Jewish children (Punitive operation because a German policeman was shot at in the ghetto); 29 October 1941: Kauen—Fort IX: 2,007 Jews, 2,920 Jewesses, 4,273 Jewish children (cleansing the ghetto of super- fluous Jews).” The list is long and detailed. Eight months following the sending of the letter, Jacob Wolpe and his family would be forced to move into the Kovno Ghetto; from there to Dachau and Stutthof Concentration Camps. Father and...