Voices From the Holocaust

Introduction

INTRODUCTION For many years I have been studying the Holocaust from various perspectives. I did so first as a father, next as a Christian , third as a student, now as a writerand teacher. The event has overwhelmed my thinking in all of these areas. I would not have it any other way. Although I did not realize that a pattern to my thinking was evolving, it seems that one of the constants in my approaching history has been this: What has it meant for me? Whether I read a play by Sophocles, learn that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, imagine the terrors of Genghis Kahn, study the life of Lucretia Borgia, try to understand Martin Luther's frustrations, look at the collaboration of certain Mrican leaders in the slave trade, try to cope with the conquistadors, become more aware of the lnnuits in northern Canada, I ask myself how I am affectedand if there is some way I ought to be responding. This book is one response I make to the Holocaust and the evils that it implies. I was twenty-eight when I first became aware of the Holocaust , and it hit me in both a devastating and a liberatingway. I had become a father a second time. We had moved to New York City (I'm originally from Hamtramck, Michigan, then a rugged section of Detroit), and my idea of being a husband and father was corrupted by what I now call the John Wayne X Voices from the Holocaust School of Charm: the macho figure of the family had to be tough, show no emotion, never admit to being wrong, show confidence in everything he did. I was teaching and the athletic director at St. David's School Ia school for boys) in Manhattan. The father of one of the children edited Jubilee, a Catholic magazine of some excellence. The editor, Ed Rice, had been a college roommate of Thomas Merton, the monk and best-selling author. One Saturday I picked up a copy of the periodical, and that issue contained an excerpt from Elie Wiesel's memoirNight. It was the section in which the young boy, Elie, saw his father beaten to death in Auschwitz. It changed my life. I was staggered to read of a boy still loving his father even though the father was helpless to protect his child. I must have been thinking that John Wayne would never have let this happen, while Shlomo Wiesel did. And still Elie loved the man. Was there a possibility that my children could continue to love me if I showed weakness, if I failed at something , if I were humiliated in public? So I began to devour as many nonfiction books as I could on the Holocaust to see if family relationships among Jews were somehow different from what I thought that they "ought" to be. The tragedy of the Shoah began to be imprinted on my soul, slowly, but I was also being liberated from my own concept of fatherhood, which was so monumentally deficient. And as I read, I became more aware of the Holocaust as a Christian, particularly as a Catholic. One day it became apparent to me, in a way it had not earlier, that every killer of Jews, of Gypsies, ofJehovah's Witnesses, of homosexuals was a baptized Christian. It takes a lot of people to kill a lot of people-and the murderers, the traitors, the profiteers, the onlookers all had Christian backgrounds. What did that mean for me, for someone who presumed to take his religious commitment seriously? Next, I studied the Holocaust and World War II in order to know the circumstances better, circumstances that took place during my lifetime but of which I was totally unaware. 44.108] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 07:20 GMT) INTRODUCTION xi I remember interviewing a dying Holocaust survivor in the 1970s-he had asked me to write his autobiography for him-and he told me that he read as much as he could about the Holocaust because he wanted to try to learn what was happening while he was in a death camp, ignorant of anything beyond what he could actually see for himself. I felt at one time that I, too, was imprisoned in ignorance about the tragedy and tried to make up for it in an almost obsessive way. Finally, I came to teach and write about the Holocaust. The impetus stemmed from an interview I...