GHOSTS MIGHT NOT BE REAL,
BUT HUMAN RIGHTS SURE ARE.
|
Through storytelling, the arts, and serious games,
we unsilence hidden injustices and marginalized voices. |
GHOSTS OF AUSCHWITZ
- Danny M. Cohen -
|
As teenagers around the world were preparing for group summer trips to the sites of Nazi camps, I was preparing to break a promise.
FENCES My family and I are almost certain that the crematoria of Auschwitz and Sobibor consumed the family of my grandfather. At Jewish primary school in London, we sat on the scratchy carpet looking up at an old man who recited otherworldly stories of crowded railcars and forced tattooing and ovens in which his family burned. At home, if a reference to the Nazi genocide flashed across the television screen, my parents protectively changed the channel. But alone, I stumbled upon films I shouldn’t have seen in which a mass of undressed men trudged toward false shower rooms and German dogs mauled Jewish children as their mothers screamed. A shelf in my parents’ dining room held books on Jewish history and heritage. Flung open, they revealed pages of terrifying black and white and sepia photographs. Naked women at the edges of open pits, desperately covering their genitals and breasts with their arms and hands. Skeletal figures, still alive, reaching through barbed wire fences. Open mass-graves. NIGHTMARES During a weekend away with a Jewish youth group, we sat through a screening of Janusz Morgenstern’s Ambulans, a 1961 short film depicting Nazi soldiers redirecting the exhaust fumes from a Red Cross van into the lungs of oblivious children. Shock and silent weeping filled the youth club basement. Throughout my youth, I suffered from occasional nightmares in which German soldiers besieged my London suburban neighborhood and surrounded my school friends with brick walls and barbed wire. I stood outside, daring myself to enter. I began to ask my mother questions about my grandfather – Maurice Ziekenoppasser – a man I had never met. He was a Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, but my mother knew very little about the fate of his extended family. A PROMISE On a group trip to Israel for Jewish teenagers, I took myself to the archives at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. In the final volume of the final pages of the black books containing the names of the dead, I found the names of Dutch victims of the Nazi camps with the same unusual surname as my grandfather – Ziekenoppasser – murdered at Auschwitz and Sobibor. We assume they are our relatives, but we may never know for sure. Subconscious fears turned slowly over the years into an explicit promise: I would never visit Auschwitz. OVERLAPPING TRIANGLES I remember how, at age 18, when I came out as gay to my family, I was conscious of being connected to Holocaust history through two communities. I was Jewish and homosexual. I learned that some prisoners in the Nazi camps were placed into multiple categories. For example, in some camps, a prisoner incarcerated as both a Jew and homosexual would have been forced to wear a yellow triangle sewn over a pink triangle, to form a pink and yellow star. Overlapping triangles. While we have come to separate victim groups within our collective memory of Holocaust history, the Nazi regime acknowledged the dual-identities of individual targets. "Double-points for the Nazis," a friend of mine once joked. I'd heard about the student trips to Poland and I felt relieved that my school hadn't offered them. At university, new friends recounted their visits to "the camps." Their experiences sounded worse than horror stories. "We sang Hebrew songs and we all cried together; you really need to go there," some would say. They seemed to believe, clutching their travel photographs as proof, that they now understood something I didn’t. I felt guilty for staying at home yet skeptical that my friends had experienced some kind of Holocaust-epiphany. GHOSTS Even as I trained as a Holocaust educator, the idea of visiting the historical sites of Nazi atrocities frightened me. I imagined myself inside deteriorating gas chambers, the suffocating stench of disintegrating piles of human hair close by, the feeling of being taken over by profound horror or defeat. I didn’t want to stand where my people – or any people – or my family – choked to death. I didn’t want to be seen trying to make sense of what can never be understood, or to feel obliged to pray or sing, or to be judged if I couldn’t burst into tears along with everyone else. I had become frightened of the ghosts of my grandfather’s family who would only recognize me as a disrespectful tourist, queuing for that critically acclaimed attraction, seeking that thrill-ride at Birkenau, the ultimate game of dare. THE CAMP As a grown adult, determined to confront Holocaust history on my own terms, I plucked up the courage to visit the former site of the Nazi camp at Sachsenhausen in Germany. Sachsenhausen seemed to me a quiet echo of its horrific past. It was a cold day. The grass was muddy. When the concentration camp was in operation, I remember learning, there was no grass as the prisoners likely ate it all. We toured barracks and passed watchtowers and said nothing as we stared at the ruins of a small experimental gas chamber and crematorium. I didn’t feel sad or shocked or angry. The Nazis murdered thousands of people at Sachsenhausen over a period of nine years; people of Jewish or Roma or Sinti descent, homosexuals, political opponents of Nazism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mostly killed through starvation, disease, exhaustion through hard labour, or intermittent beatings, torture, executions. But Sachsenhausen represented something different from Chelmno with its gas vans and ovens belching out human ash, different from the Birkenau I had come to dread. Yet, after Sachsenhausen, I felt pangs of relief. Its ghosts – if they had been watching me – had permitted me to walk over their tombs. They had allowed me to breathe the fresh air. EXCLUSION I was now a doctoral student living in Chicago, studying the design of Holocaust education. Specifically, I had grown interested in the so-called ‘other victims’ of the Nazi regime: the disabled, Roma, homosexuals, and the many other groups persecuted under Nazism. I was beginning to ask questions about inadvertent and intentional exclusions of these victim groups from the mainstream, Jewish Holocaust narrative. I wanted to tell their stories. I began to create educational materials and easy-to-implement lesson plans for teachers and school districts interested in these hidden histories. But putting together an educational unit around historical data that relied on encyclopedic reports full of dry facts and figures wasn’t cutting it. After all, much of Holocaust education is taught through compelling film (Schindler's List, The Pianist, The Diary of Anne Frank, Fateless, and so on) and fiction (Number The Stars, The Book Thief, The Devil's Arithmetic, The Reader, and others), all of which humanize history through individual stories. These books and movies go beyond dates and events to underscore key concepts of human behaviour in the lead up and response to genocide. STORIES And so I began to write a series of vignettes to make the narratives of Roma, homosexual, disabled, political, and other victims of Nazism engaging and relevant to middle school and high school students. Based on historical truth, I created a handful of fictional characters – all teenagers – each of whom, through a compelling short story, would represent the central narrative of a distinct victim community. To tie the stories together, I set the stories in Nazi-era Berlin. And I found a way to place them all in early 1943. As those single stories developed, they became entwined with one another. I had accidentally written a historical novel, TRAIN, accompanied by educational programming, Overlapping Triangles. THE JOURNEY A new professor, I was accepted into the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program. The itinerary was daunting. We were to visit Kraków, Warsaw, and Łódź before travelling to Treblinka. We would spend a week in Oświęcim, touring the grounds of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, studying artifacts and learning from the curators and education staff at the Auschwitz State Museum. I would not be a tourist; I would be fulfilling my obligations as a scholar and Holocaust educator, I told myself. In general terms, I knew what to expect at Auschwitz. I’d studied the photographs and read the books and taken the online virtual tour. I had a good idea of what I would see and what we would discuss. But I didn’t know how I would respond in the moment or how I might be changed by the journey. Before embarking on the trip, part of me feared being entirely overwhelmed. Part of me feared feeling nothing. Part of me expected, at nighttime, to slip back into the surreal Holocaust nightmares of my childhood. If ghosts existed, I was no longer afraid of them. If anything, I was afraid of myself. Yet, I was ready to break my promise. |
Copyright 2014. Danny M. Cohen. All Rights Reserved.
A version of this essay first appeared on the author's blog.
An adapted version of this essay was published in the journal
The Holocaust in History and Memory.
A version of this essay first appeared on the author's blog.
An adapted version of this essay was published in the journal
The Holocaust in History and Memory.