(I read this piece at a Reading in April held by the Parma Writer's Group in the Ilari Alpi International Library. It was filmed for posterity, so hopefully I can upload the footage of me reading and then...choking up.)
How can I approach the topic of the Holocaust? I can’t, really. I wasn’t there. When I think about it, my mind is a collage of borrowed memories.
At age 16, my grandmother, her father and her mother were taken from Czechoslovakia on cattle trains, packed in with 120 strangers. They travelled for days, never knowing when one ended and another began for all the darkness around them. They slept on top of each other. In the middle of the carriage, there was a bucket. “Where are we going?” No one knew. At checkpoints they were sprayed with just enough water to wet the palms of their hands.
When finally the transport reached Auschwitz, my grandmother told me her spirit was not so much broken as in shock: her belief suspended above the twin realities of Nazi resolve and her family farm - the memories of two giant St Bernards licking her fingers still as fresh as yesterday’s rye bread spread thick with liverwurst. These memories have become assimilated with my own. I have heard them for as long as I have understood History. My mind is impressed with hiding places, false papers, turnip peels, bedsores, Typhus. When my grandmother makes apple compote, a sweet stew for digestion, I think of DDT – because that’s what they sprayed her with, naked, head to toe, to kill the parasites feeding on her slow decay. That’s what made her stomach weak.
“I don’t eat lamb,” she announces at family dinners. “You know why?” A rhetorical pause. “Because the smell reminds me of burning flesh.” We roll our eyes.
My grandmother has an unreal gift for associations. She can relate any topic you can think of to the Holocaust. There are only six degrees of separation between
Everything and Hitler.
My grandmother’s mother survived the camps. On the day when the American and British Liberators came, bearing flags and offering cans of beans, the 30-kilo woman died in her daughter’s arms.
I was 24 when the program 60 Minutes flew my grandmother back to Auschwitz for the first time, with my mother as chaperone. There she walked through the memorials stoically, her arm linked with her daughter’s. In the dirt under their feet, my mother saw pieces of human bones.
When the cameramen stopped rolling and my grandmother took a tissue to wipe her eyes, a screw in her glasses fell out. A few moments later, a screw fell from my mother’s. When she told me this, I got chills. I wish I had been there: to see what the cameras did not. To put my arm around her, tell her it was ok, that it was all in the past. The shaved heads and the bunk beds full of lice - they were all gone. But I know it’s not true. And I wasn’t meant to be there. I am only meant to listen to her tell the story, like she has always done.
Sometimes, I wonder what happened to the two St Bernards. Just how long did they wait for their Masters to come home?
As a boy, visits to my grandmother’s house were bittersweet. She fed us until we bulged with Bohemian delights: rye bread, Hungarian salami, frankfurts with sauerkraut. During dinner my sister and I listened to stories – I had an unusual curiosity for a boy of 10 – like the time she convalesced in hospital in Pilzen, nourished back to life from 22 kilos by a nun’s humanity. She’s told me the story more than once, but it’s one I never tire of hearing.
After dinner, the routine was always the same: my grandmother would wash the dishes by hand. We weren’t allowed to help. The sink had to be obsessively clean and dry. To leave a single drop of water was a serious affront.
So we waited in the TV room, enjoying ten minutes of reprieve, before watching a documentary about the Holocaust. An hour later, on our way upstairs to brush our teeth, she would remind us plaintively “Please don’t touch the walls.”
Before bed, filled with grainy images of marches and mass graves, she told us Slavic folktales of Struwel Peter with his long fingernails and wild hair. Then she’d trace her nails in a circle gently around my palm, reciting ‘Round and round the Garden, Like a teddy bear’ in Slovak - ‘Varilla varilla mishishka kashitchka…’ - lulling me to sleep and away from camps and hospital beds. It was soothing to feel her fingertips gliding along and watch her dimples winking at me in the dim light, the ones I had first noticed in a photograph from a beauty pageant.
Then she kissed me goodnight and I lay there, blinking. I will never forget how dark the room became after she closed the door.
