-
Introduction
- Northwestern University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
xxi Introduction Phyllis Lassner “The Story of Adam Paluch” begins with the doubt that arises from a forgotten Holocaust past: My name is Adam Paluch, but it was not always so. There are those who say I was born in 1942; others say I was born in 1939. I am a strong, athletic male: a former part-time professional boxer and wrestler. But the paperwork says that I was a girl. I was taunted for being Jewish before I knew that I was Jewish. I was told that I am the child of a childless woman. I was told that my search for my identity was hopeless—that I was “digging in the ashes.” So a Jewish childhood is lost and as his search continues, a Polish man unearths his Jewish future. Adam contributed a single story to this volume, but nine other authors wrote more than one story or poem. Their pieces appear in different chapters because the chapters are arranged thematically. Aaron Elster is one of these authors. Aaron ends his first story, “The Marketplace,” with fear and hope: “My father grimly looks at me as he orders ‘Loif, Arele, loif.’ Run, Aaron, run.” So a childhood is lacerated and a child is saved from the Gestapo and its roundup of the Jews in Sokołów, Podłaski, Poland. Sometimes, as in Judith Levy Straus’s story “My Grandfather’s Watch,” the facts are lost, but even the most fleeting feelings of parental love and anxiety can become indelibly shaping forces: It all started in 1938 or 1939. I cannot remember which. I was five or six years old—an only child—and we lived in Amsterdam, Holland. . . . There was tension in our house. My parents and uncle and some of their friends would gather in the living room to discuss “things,” but the door was always closed. I did not know or understand what they were talking about; I just knew it did not feel good; it made me afraid. The twenty-four child survivors who composed the stories and poems that comprise this anthology search for their childhoods as they write. What they find and transmit to us are the manifold forms and paths that memory and its language of expression take. No matter how partial, fragmented, and discontinuous, the memories encapsulated by these stories and poems create a graphic panorama of Holocaust experiences, responses, and memories. Altogether, this collection creates a chronicle of the survival of hidden children in Nazi-occupied Europe. I should say survivals—plural—because of their many types of hiding places and rescuers, xxii Introduction the interspersed moments of deceptive calm, of authentic caring and cruelty, and of various risks, terrors, and hopes. As the passage of time has created a sense of urgency about gathering Holocaust testimony from survivors, collective and individually written memoirs have proliferated along with audio and video testimony projects. Now that some video testimony archives have been digitized and acquired by university and Holocaust museum libraries, they are even more readily available. All these projects have proved significant to survivors and their families and communities as well as to scholars and teachers of the Holocaust. While historians have grappled with questions of authenticity, corroboration, and relationships to documented history, other scholars have studied the narrative forms and ethical and psychological issues that arise from close readings of the testimonies. Most scholars agree that even when testimony and memoirs fall short of precise historical validation, we learn a great deal about singular experience and responses from the survivors’ struggle to tell their stories. We find distinctive voices and responses in survivors’ chronological gaps, lapses of memory, inability to find the concrete language of expression, and other forms of narrative disruptions. In turn, as we respond to Holocaust representation , there is a mirroring effect in that we confront the problem of finding the language and forms in which to articulate our own struggle to understand experiences for which there are no analogies in our prior knowledge. Out of Chaos: Hidden Children Remember the Holocaust was made possible by the incalculable support of Elaine Saphier Fox, who edited it as well. Elaine worked with Hidden Children/Child Survivors Chicago for several years, defining and enacting her role as encouraging members to write, develop, and revise their stories to create individual responses. This was not a simple or easy task, as issues of absent and painful memories often overwhelmed the desire to testify. As Elaine and the group persevered, as...