First, though, I find Chris. I have begun going to encounter groups on Waiheke Island run by Marvin, an American who’s trained with the Esalen Institute in California. It is 1981 but on Waiheke it is forever the ‘70s. My first weekend group is a motley crew: we look like escapees from a Diane Arbus photograph. On an outing to Palm Beach I run into a colleague from the university English department and find myself at a loss to explain what I’m doing.
The disappearance of my father comes up when it’s my turn to try and figure out what’s wrong with me, but the story feels remote, as if it happened in some other world to some other father and daughter. I make no connection between what happened to our family and my panic attacks, anxiety and hopeless passivity.
I don’t learn much in the group other than to make exaggeratedly intense eye contact when I greet people, something that startles my colleagues in the staffroom, but I go back to Waiheke, this time for a week. The co-leader of this second group is Chris, an architect and school teacher. Chris barely speaks to me, which makes me so nervous I constantly bludge cigarettes from him. For days we smoke together in charged silence. One day he asks if he can join me on the sofa. I say yes and scoot over to make room. “No, like this,” he says, and lies down with his head on my lap.
He is twenty-six, I am thirty-one. We are both rockily married and both have a son called Ben. Chris’s father is an Anglican priest. His mother died of cancer when he was thirteen. He’d been sent away to school camp and never got to say goodbye to her. In his family, too, there are silences. He knows his mother was born in Damascus under mysterious circumstances, and was raised in Israel. He will later find out that during the war she worked in British intelligence. Like my father she spoke several languages, including Hebrew and Arabic.
There are reasons, barely grasped at the time, why people are drawn to each other. I wonder what my father would have made of my new relationship. I think he and Chris would have understood each other. By accident I have ended up with a nice Jewish boy.
CHAPTER 9
A brief history of shouting at the newspaper
Anti-Semitism died the day the victors of World War II opened the Nazi death camps.
Columnist, The New Zealand Herald, 2004
WHEN MY DAUGHTER WAS EIGHT her class talked about the Holocaust. Her hand shot up. “Half my mother’s family were killed by the Nazis,” she announced. She learned early the meaning of the expression “conversation-stopper”.
Monika was born when I was forty, into an atmosphere of greater openness about our family’s history. By then a picture of my father stood on my dressing table. Chris had digitally extracted him from an old family photo in an album Dad had sent from Vancouver, had the image framed, and given it to me as a birthday present. I sent copies to my sister and brother. Jeff didn’t say much about it but his wife, Maureen, told me he put it by his bed.
I had been circling and gradually closing in on my father. It was like a game I had found thrilling as a child. In Mother, May I? players advance in increments on the “mother”, who, with her back turned, randomly dictates the progress—two baby steps forward, one giant step back—until you catch her. Even when I was taking a step back from thinking about the past there was always a hum of low-level engagement, a secret pleasure when people said, “Oh, you’re such a Jewish mother”, a kinder way of calling me a Woody Allen-grade neurotic. My children just called me paranoid—”Yeah, yeah, the Nazis are coming to get us, Mum” and “Not everything is about the Holocaust”—although when I instructed them to feel around and pull out all the wires to attract attention should they ever find themselves locked in a car boot, my information came less from reading about the Nazis and more from watching Oprah.
There was a tentative step forward in 1993, when my sister told me about the Auckland Second Generation Group for children of survivors. I went along initially with no greater purpose than to produce a feature for the Listener, where I was working. I wrote about the group, and about Lilla Wald’s Hungarian mother Helen Erdos, who had survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. Lilla’s daughter Rachel was twenty. Three generations of women talked with pain that was still fresh about the legacy of what Helen had been through.
The role of journalist can be useful for maintaining a safe distance, but when the article was published I acknowledged my background in a brief nervous disclaimer: “This story is, in part, about how the kind of massive trauma Holocaust survivors experience transmits itself to future generations. ... I was dismayed to discover that, at some deep level, I was worried that if I put it into print, if something like the Holocaust ever happened again I wouldn’t be able to hide myself and my children. That seemed like a good enough reason to do it.”There was metaphorical head-patting from some of my male colleagues. “Good you got that out of your system,” one said.
I next wrote about my father in an essay for a book called Mixed Blessings, edited by a friend from the group, Deborah Knowles; it was this essay that the trauma professor from Maryland would find online.
“I can’t do it,” I wailed to Debbie when she rang to check on the progress of my chapter.
“Well, just tell me what you remember,” she said gently. We talked for a long time. I had the chapter to her the next day.
When Mixed Blessings arrived at the Listener office in 2003 I’d been a writer there for nearly twenty years. I hadn’t mentioned the book other than to ask the editor, Finlay Macdonald, for his permission to contribute to it, which he gave without hesitation.
When it came across the desk of the art and books editor, Steve Braunias, he immediately said he’d like to extract my chapter for the magazine. The support of these two colleagues, together with the kindness of strangers who wrote and shared their stories with me after the piece ran, countered the panic I had felt about exposing so much that was personal.
“I knew never to talk to you about your father,” a friend said.
“Why?” I wondered, astonished.
“Because it upset you.”
I’d always fought to keep in my voice steady on the rare occasions I’d talked about my father. I was sure I’d done a good job. The stories you tell yourself to get by.
There’s an element of this engagement with being Jewish that can be loosely classified as “shouting at the newspaper”. New Zealand, as my children are sick of hearing when we walk along a beach, is paradise. It’s a lucky country with a unique indigenous culture and a vibrant diversity that was not so evident when I arrived in the more homogenised 1960s. It’s also a world away from the events that nearly extinguished my father’s family. I have sometimes felt stuck in a sunny suffocating South Pacific present tense. Don’t look back, or forward much either. “Do we really need another movie about the Holocaust?” is a popular way to begin a film review. I shout at the paper a lot.
When Monika went on to do a communications degree, one paper required an essay about experiences of racism. She wanted to write about anti-Semitism. She was told she could write only about something she’d experienced. She said she had experienced it. No, she was told, she hadn’t. There wasn’t any in New Zealand.
She fought her ground, texting me for backup. Some examples are obvious. There is the desecration of Jewish cemeteries; the anti-Jewish tropes in media cartoons and letters to the editor. There’s the “pity Hitler didn’t finish the job” school of online commentary.
When I first came to New Zealand I heard more casual anti-Semitism than I had in Canada. “Oh, so-and-so’s a bit of a Jew” might be the response when someone didn’t pay for their round of drinks. My daughter was told she couldn’t be Jewish because she ate bacon and didn’t go to synagogue, although she had, it was kindly pointed out, the nose.
It’s impossible to count the number of times I’ve been told that Jews run Hollywood and that a “Jewish lobby” exerts undue influence. I’ve had a hairdresser inform me that Jews in New York were told to stay away from work on 9/11. At a Christmas gathering a few years ago, a member of Ch
ris’s family asked me if I’d come across an amazing document he’d just discovered on the internet. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are the supposed minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders with plans for world domination through manipulating the economy, controlling the media, et cetera. I pointed out it was a notorious hoax. He didn’t look convinced.
I used to think the quiet that fell when someone asked about my family background, or the subject of fathers came up, was because people didn’t know what to say. I now think that some of those people just didn’t want to talk about Jews. The British writer and broadcaster Laurence Rees wrote in BBC History Magazine about the “myth of silence”. Many survivors did talk about their wartime experiences, he wrote, “though in some cases, while the survivors wanted to talk, their acquaintances and workmates were not that keen on listening.”
Even in Israel the reception of survivors was deeply ambivalent.“The desperately unfair taunt that Holocaust survivors went to their deaths like ‘sheep to the slaughter’ was not uncommon—a number of survivors in Israel have told me personally that they heard such insults on their arrival after the war,” Rees wrote.
We visited Israel in 2016 to meet newly discovered family members on Chris’s mother’s side. “Where have you been?” Chris’s cousin Motti said. In Jerusalem we went to Israel’s great Holocaust memorial museum, Yad Vashem. Our guide talked about how the tensions between the country’s heroic self-image and the perceived passivity of Holocaust victims informed the way the museum had evolved. The old museum, opened in 1957, had focused on the heroic: resistance and uprisings. Those were the stories that fitted with the ethos of a young assertive country. Canadian Israeli architect Moshe Safdie’s new museum, dedicated in 2005, highlights the stories of victims and survivors. Two and a half thousand personal items, from letters to artwork, ensure the lost have names.
The 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem had proved pivotal, forcing the world to pay attention to the demented mechanics of the Third Reich’s genocidal mission. “There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the S.S. saw to it that none of them was ever very far from the mind and imagination of their victims,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The New Yorker in 1963 of Eichmann’s trial. In such a situation no victim is passive: they are actively occupied in staying alive minute to minute when taking action, or not taking action, can mean instant death.
Journalism offered me rare chances to hear raw testimony firsthand. I spoke to the Nobel prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann for a profile in 2013. He was born in Zloczów, Poland, and survived the war hidden with his mother in an attic by a Ukrainian teacher. “I’ve just been looking at the behaviour of German physicists before World War II as one-quarter of their colleagues were fired from university jobs and they did nothing,” he said. When we got on to his life in hiding as a young child, he spoke for a while and then said, “Let’s talk of other things.”
In 2015, at her home in London, Hungarian Susan Pollack talked to me about surviving Auschwitz as a thirteen-year-old. She had just testified at the trial of Oskar Gröning, the so-called “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”. Gröning claimed to accept “moral guilt” but there’s always slippage when former Nazis talk about remorse. In a 2005 BBC interview he had described a scene at the camp. “A child who was lying there was simply pulled by the legs and chucked into a truck to be driven away. And when it screamed like a sick chicken, they then bashed it against the edge of the truck so it would shut up.” A witness at the trial offered Gröning forgiveness. Susan Pollack did not. “I couldn’t do it. I could not embrace him. I don’t forgive the perpetrators. They knew what they were doing.”
Publishing on the Holocaust yields interesting mail. There was the polite enquiry, when I wrote about the Treblinka death camp, seeking the sources “for [the writer’s] assertion that ‘Guards were allowed to grab babies and smash their heads on the boxcars’.” I was busy composing a reply, citing the numerous sources, not least the testimony of perpetrators like Oskar Gröning, when Chris said, “Don’t engage with them. It’s not worth it.” He’s had his share. “I have to wonder if you are a Jew of the Zionist persuasion,” a reader wrote in response to a story Chris published in The New Zealand Herald about Holocaust memorials. It was suggested he should “investigate who runs the world today. The same ones who ran it then.”
Another correspondent began with some bland academic questions before inquiring, “When have the Jews ever told the truth about anything?” America’s dropping of the atom bomb on two Japanese cities was, he claimed, “a Jewish-initiated holocaust”.
Yet another cited the work of discredited Holocaust deniers as evidence there were no gas chambers. “You are either very out-of-date or under some foreign control.” The lengths denialists go to in their efforts to distort the truth become, paradoxically, a testament to the enduring power of the crime they are so desperate to refute.
The historian Ann Beaglehole has pointed out that the New Zealand government limited the numbers of Jewish refugees admitted during the rise of Hitler. “Non-Jewish applicants are regarded as a more suitable type of immigrant,” Edwin Dudley Good, comptroller of customs, noted. Walter Nash, minister of customs in the country’s first Labour administration, which took office in 1936, argued: “There is a major difficulty of absorbing these people in our cultural life without raising a feeling of antipathy to them.” Also “anti-Semitism, never far from the surface, [is] very apt to emerge in the case of the talented race whose members can often beat us at our own game, especially the game of money making.”
Discounting of prejudice doesn’t make it go away. “I really wonder about anti-Semitism,” mused a New Zealand Herald columnist in 2004. “Anti-Semitism died the day the victors of World War II opened the Nazi death camps.” He had possibly never read about the Polish survivors who, when they tried to go home in 1946, were subjected to hostility, violence, and in the case of the town of Kielce mass murder: forty-two men women and children were mostly beaten and stoned to death.
Anti-Semitism is having a resurgence in Europe, as The Atlantic magazine pointed out in a 2015 story entitled “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?” In France in 2014 fifty-one percent of all racist attacks were against Jews. Two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015, a kosher grocery store in Paris was attacked and four hostages killed because they were Jewish. In the UK, the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn has been forced to address anti-Semitism within its ranks.
The column in the Herald was about desecration at Wellington’s Makara Cemetery, where Jewish headstones had been pushed over and a prayer pavilion set on fire. A swastika had been etched on the pavilion’s wall and another gouged into the grass. Strangely, the columnist saw himself as the real victim: “I am almost afraid now to argue for the freedom of a Holocaust sceptic to visit here or even criticise Israel as strongly as it deserves,” he wrote, concluding: “Israel and its apologists will continue to need the anachronism of anti-Semitism to silence critics and manipulate public opinion.”
The “sceptic” referred to was David Irving, a notorious Holocaust denier who had for some reason been invited to address the National Press Club in Wellington. It was an odd description of someone who once said, “More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.”
Then there was the curious case of the Canterbury University MA student Joel Hayward. Irving had been one of Hayward’s sources for his 1993 MA thesis, which concluded that “the weight of evidence supports the view that the Nazis did not systematically exterminate Jews in gas chambers” and that a “careful and impartial investigation of the available evidence pertaining to Nazi gas chambers reveals that these apparently fall into the category of atrocity propaganda.”
The thesis was awarded an A+. The New Zealand Jewish Council asked Richard Evans, a historian of modern Germany at Cambridge University, to give his opinion on its academic merits. “What I found was very shocking,” Ev
ans responded. “The Holocaust denial literature Dr Hayward was considering was well known to specialists and others as anti-Semitic, racist and frequently neo-fascist propaganda masquerading as scholarship.”
The A+ still stands, although the thesis now has an addendum by Hayward addressing its “flaws”. There was good work on the debacle by a few local journalists, but a disappointing number chose to see the affair as an attack on academic freedom, rather than a laughable failure of academic standards. A journalist in The Dominion Post warned, in a pro-Hayward piece, of a possible backlash against the Jewish community.
In 2015 a University of Auckland professor, Scott Poynting, sent a letter to the Waikato Times in which he compared the employment of Palestinians by an Israeli company, SodaStream, to a German company employing Jews during the Second World War. “Thank you for explaining in your article how SodaStream generously provided work for Palestinians,” Poynting wrote. “I understand that IG Farben provided work for large numbers of Jews. Not that I have anything against Germans, mind you.” IG Farben made the gas used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews. The university took no action.
HAVING CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN changes your relationship to the living and the dead. I worry about the effect on them of my Holocaust preoccupations. I worry about their DNA. There’s evidence that trauma can be transmitted to future generations and alter their stress hormones. As science magazine Discover put it in a headline, “Grandma’s experiences leave a mark on your genes.” Once, interviewing geneticist and author Richard Dawkins, I took the opportunity to quiz him about this. “Oh,” he said dismissively “maybe for a generation or two but it’s not a permanent change.”
I have quizzed my children about any collateral damage. For my son, the family history is just one strand of his identity. “I don’t remember ever not knowing about it. I’ve certainly told people the story. I’d say it means just as much as any other part of my heritage.” For my daughter, it’s a strong part of who she is. In every generation one child may take the role of what psychologist Dina Wardi calls the family’s “memorial candle”.
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