Picture This

Most people look at the pictures, glance at them really, and then look away.  The disturbing images of death, bodies loaded into ovens, mass graves, desperate eyes peeking out of cattle cars are too much to ponder.  If they scroll past quickly enough, the nightmare might turn to mist in the light of present day. 

I can’t look away.  I study the photos until my eyes burn, wiping the tears that are blurring my vision, seeking a family resemblance in the fading pictures of an evil regime.  You—you’re about the right age.  You—your eyes look familiar to me.  This boxcar—who is inside? I run my finger across the images to try to make contact across time.

I read a book called Still Alive by a survivor named Ruth Kruger whose experience was much like my family’s. She could have been in that boxcar, standing alongside my family for three days because it was too full to sit. Ruth Kruger could have been with my grandparents, my uncle, my aunts, and my mother as Mengele passed sentence on them. She could have been standing next to them when the guards laughed at the smell of burning Jews. In her book Kruger wrote of a girl named Shari, picking flowers in a field.  I gasp as I read, remembering my mother's stories about her sister, and wonder how common the name is.  I recall visiting my Aunt Shari in Israel, cheerful wildflowers in a jar under the massive branches of an old fig tree. Later I read how sick Shari was in the camps, how miraculous her escape. I didn’t speak any of the languages my aunt spoke, and I could never communicate to her with words.  But her hands cupping my face, and her sad eyes stay with me.

My family’s past is a field of flowers trampled by war. I ponder our singed family tree on the genealogical sites, and try to decipher the blur of cheap ink in the European death books once compiled for memorial services. Does that say Schnier? That’s who I was named for, a man named Schnier—but here’s another, and another. Which one of you is mine?

My family’s past is an explosion, shards of our story spread over time, no way to piece it all together. I ask the docent at the Mormon Geneological Library in Salt Lake City if she can help me trace my family.  She tuts and shakes her head.  The person who works finding those family members ripped apart by war is on another floor, and as luck would have it, on vacation.  I listen to my husband’s hoots in the background.  He’s gone back generations already, across an ocean of time and distance.  He calls his cousin.  “You’re not going to believe how much I found.”

My family’s history is a mystery, and I try to find clues. I sit on the deck of my house with an elder uncle.  My uncle is unsure of all the names, he married into the family and can’t remember.  But he has some great stories.  We listen to him laugh over my mother learning to drive a golf cart at the country club where he gave her a job.  He remembers that, but maybe not how little she was paid, or how she took rotting vegetables home to make a soup for us, to save money after my father died. He doesn’t know that hundreds of thousands of holocaust survivors are in poverty, starving again. I look across the table at my brother.  He is not laughing either.

I read Amcha, a book by Saul Freidman with a chapter about my mother.  It’s a poorly printed textbook, an oral history collected by a man who cared deeply about preserving the past.  My original copy has my mother’s handwritten notes in it, corrections made through the confused memories of a teenage girl. It’s delicate, the pages falling from the dried glue of the cheap binding like dying leaves.  That’s not the one I read.  I order another one to read, and underline, and cry on, but some of the pages are missing.  I read the words that are still there with horror. The ghetto. Auschwitz. The experiments.  Starvation. Disease. Leipzig, where 600 girls died in a bombing-- running out of the factory where they were slave labor only to be gunned down by fighter planes coming in over the trees. My mother’s sister in shock--slap her hard to snap her out of it. Then slap her again, and again, until she can run. I read on. A forced march to Hamburg, people dropping dead and left where they lay. Buchenwald. Waldenburg.  My mother tells it like a laundry list, there are no tears in her words. 

I read on in the crumbling book, a story she had told me many times, about a girl who had diarrhea, and hid it in the corner of the bunk so that the Nazis wouldn’t think her sick and send her to the ovens. The guard had reached for the bundle, sure the girl had stolen something.  My mother laughed when she told us how the guard opened the bundle of shit.  It was funny when she told it, but not when I read it.  “They burned 20,000 people a day, so that girl was scared” I read the words she had spared us children. “They made all of us get down on our knees and hold bricks over our heads for hours as punishment.  They punished us a lot.”

When there are so many dead, the living cling to each other.  I hold fast to the memory of my mother, the joy and love she lavished on the people around her.  How tightly she held the hands of her sisters. The way she taught her children how to be parents, through her actions. I write about her future, what happened to her after the war and how she survived through her hard choices, even as I read again and again about her past.

My mother wore her trauma like an expensive but uncomfortable sweater that constantly itched. Sometimes she showed her discomfort in small, subtle actions, like when she tucked my Jewish star into my shirt so it wouldn’t be obvious I was Jewish.  Sometimes her trauma was more apparent, like when ambulances drove by, sirens blaring, driving her to the floor, sure the bombs were coming.  Sometimes the horrors made her a tightly capped bottle, like when she couldn’t cry at my father’s grave. No tears for death, it was a familiar foe that she wouldn’t feed.

No, I don’t want to look at the pictures.  I have to.  It’s my curse to be the child of two immigrants who escaped post-war Europe, and fell into each other’s arms for comfort.  It’s my blessing to have been held by those same arms, to experience the fierce protection of people who know how much others can hurt you.