Growing Up in the Unseen Shadow of the Kindertransport

Crayons

Your faces, multiplied

xeroxed a hundred times

in a different form

in a different order

and then stuffed into

ten different plain paper bags

unrecognizable

but I can still see you

with the red marks

that I drew with crayon

and with the yellow star of david

drawn by me in crayon

I couldn’t help myself

the pictures being so youthful

so clean, so sterile

I wanted to know you, feel you

so I started to colour in

with the red, yellow, black and blue crayons

red, yellow, black and blue crayons

I highlighted your faces

and gave you red lips

I put a blue line

by the side of your nose

and drew in a yellow

star on your jacket

I blackened out your cheeks

and took away your hair

and tried to imagine you

in a concentration camp.

I filled in the white spaces

With red and black to see

You bruised and physically abused

I took away your jacket

And gave you rough, black

Stripes for a thin prison jacket

and I transformed you

with crayons red, yellow, black and blue

red, yellow, black and blue.

My connection to the Holocaust is not a given. When I was growing up my parents thought it was best not to mention the Holocaust or expose their children to the horrors of the past. In addition, my father who came to England on the Kindertransport and was not in a concentration camp secretly thought for many years that he was not really a Holocaust survivor since so many others had suffered so much more than he had. His story is one of leaving his parents at the train station and being cared for by a loving host family who treated him as one of their own. My father’s perspective is one of the kindness of some people in the world and the hate of others. He tells his story as one that avoids suffering and focuses on the positive and lucky aspects of life. He was loved by his parents and looked after in difficult circumstances by a family that truly cared about him in England.

I never heard a full version of my father’s story until I was 48 years old. I used to think this was my father’s reluctance to tell this story. But I have grown to realize that this is part of a much wider family reluctance to have my father tell this story. The telling of my father’s story was orchestrated by myself in an attempt to hear the story in first person so that it could be recorded while my father was still well and able to tell his own story. I thought we could gather the family in my parent’s apartment and he could tell his story to the grandchildren and it could be recorded. He was willing to tell the story for the grandchildren. On the days preceding the event both my mother and my sister expressed concern about this story telling. They worried about the emotions it would raise in my father, perhaps the past was best left untold. I felt that the story needed to be told. I needed to hear the story at least once from my father. I also felt that both my sister and my mother had their own difficulties with hearing the story. After all what did this story mean to those of us born into it and living with it on a daily basis. This story is incendiary and painful.

As it happened, my father told a benign story, starting out by saying that this was not a story of suffering but rather of kindness. It was a story of parting but without the expression of personal pain. I recorded the story but it did not help and visitations and nightmares have continued. I think that deep down I believed that hearing my father’s story from my father instead of imagining it would purge the ghosts from my dreams. But I am glad my father told the story, now we have his version of the events of the Holocaust that so influenced my internal perception of my life and the world around me. The Holocaust did not happen to me and according to my father the Holocaust did not happen to him either. The Holocaust happened to my grandparents many years before I was born. What does this event have to do with my life? And yet, it occupies a large part of my hidden thoughts, raises its head in the form of fears of uniforms, hate for the military and the police, verbal attacks on a particular form of rigid totalizing thinking and in nightmares throughout my life. So it means, it connects, it exists within me but is not historical except in the visitations that physically leave me drained and fearful. This paradox and uncertainty of connection until I recognized the legitimacy of my own dream-visitation as an experience, part of my life, made Holocaust storytelling, personal meaning making difficult to complete.

there is no death

as death in a concentration camp:

a faceless burning of distorted

imageless corpses. A death

that is pastless, futureless and

presentless. A death in which

no one cares, no one feels and

everything is in abstract. A

death that is completely impersonal,

detached and distant. A death

empty, all consuming that leaves

you nothing to clutch, nothing to hold

but a hollow memory.

There is something shameful about being a second-generation, Kindertransport-Holocaust survivor. The shame comes from the inability to explain the connection to the past. The shame comes from the nothingness of it all. I never even knew these people who were murdered and there is no grave site, no verbal memories, no last stories, no last words and no one wants to speak of such things. They are best left unsaid. It is shameful in the sense of the inappropriateness of it all. Also, there is something fearful about being Jewish in an age close enough to feel the stories of the Holocaust. In my childhood, I was sure that I would not live to the age of twenty. I imagined that the authorities (an abstract term designating anyone wearing a uniform) would invade our house and round me up and take me to be killed. How does one explain to people that deep down inside you know that there are people out there, regular people like the postman and the grocer, who in an instance can become antisemitic thugs who see you as inhuman, a disease? The shame and fear made me very quiet.

and with the burr and snip of clippers

they take away your long hair

and with machine-gun backed orders

they take away your fine clothes

and with truncheons and blows

they part you from your warn family

and with threats and lies

they part you from your intimate belonging

and with terror, hunger and brutal work

they part you from your own image, your own

body

and with gas and fire

they part you forever

The story of the Kindertransport is one of parting. It is the story of parents who loved their children so much that they were willing to send them off to a foreign land with the knowledge that they would never see them again. This is the story of parent sacrifice, when you give everything that your child may live. As a parent I cannot imagine the pain of this parting. I often think about what my grandparents thought as they said goodbye to my father. I would give my life for my children but for me this is just an empty statement. For my grandparents this was reality. Think of this parting at the train station. To trust your child to the unknown, to let him go at 10 with just a teddy bear and story book about boat travel. To lie and say that we will see you in a few months. I think that my father might have preferred to die there with them—at least they would have been together.

I do not believe in the afterlife, but I have been visited by my dead grandparents. I hope that my father will one day in the afterlife be united with his parents. What we could not heal in life can be healed in the afterlife. United after all these years and then perhaps the tear in the fabric of my fathers untold narrative could be mended in the hands of a loving G-d with life after death. If anyone deserves to be reunited with his parents it is my father and I pray that this will happen. I am a religious person who cannot bring himself to believe in G-d. What type of G-d would create my father’s life? My father prays every night and morning and finds sanctuary in G-d and prayer. He is, as I said, a positive person who can overcome this deep parting to see life and people as kind. I inherited the deep desire for the language of religion and the hope of a salvation that will wash away the horror of the Holocaust and allow my father to meet his parents once again.

For my father’s 79th birthday, I gave him a teddy bear. I had the bear especially made as a replica of the original teddy bear that still lives today, old and worn out, in a cupboard in my parent’s apartment. I so deeply want to heal the wound and turn history back. I want to restore my father’s parting so that I can sleep at night. And I know that this cannot be achieved and that this is all part of my imagination. My father liked the bear and put him next to his bed. I have a picture on my camera phone.

Glass

Invisible, see through

and therefore

all the more binding,

strangling

each family member

tied face to face

with each other

stuffed in a glass egg

in a glass incubator

glass of a special kind

through which no outer light can

center, everything filtered

to a pleasant pink warm colour

glass, that is utterly holocaust proof

a glass made

of fear and impotency

outsiderness, and guilt

a glass so thick

that it is absolutely emotionless

and from inside

nothing happens

nothing is known

anyone born is shown his slot

and squashed in

allotted

infinite

pseudo-safety

two blue bloated emaciated

invisible grandparents stuffed into

a black knapsack,

and a set of sterile glass emotions.

Relationships are fragile in my family. We all worry about my father and his physical and mental health. The presence of his unspoken story looms large in our family consciousness and its shadow has stretched from the past across the lives of my mother, my sister and myself. Growing up, having emotions was subtly discouraged in my family. At its source, we all worried that any emotion and particularly emotions about the Holocaust would open a Pandora’s box of hidden feelings that would destroy the whole world. We worried that my father would not be able to handle it.

My mother protected my father from the presence of the story that only my father knew. She protected my sister and myself from this story through silence and the request for calm. She herself was horrified by visions of the concentration camps and knew in her own soul that we should not see them till we were much older. However, the time for seeing and speaking never arrived till my sister forced it upon us all a year ago by travelling to Germany and unearthing the original Gestapo files of my Grandparents. Emotions are not hidden anymore.

My father never blamed the Germans or Germany for the Holocaust. He was always angry at the rest of the world for doing nothing about it. Why wasn’t he angry with Germany? I was very angry although I was very quiet about it. I was so quiet that even I did not know I was angry. I was scared of being angry. I hid it well. But hiding anger is not healthy as any therapist will tell you.

Once with my family on the way to America, we were forced to stay in the place that my grandfather had been first imprisoned. Here we were staying in Frankfurt. As we drove unexpectedly out of the airport, a sign appeared in front of me, a sign to the city of Hanau, the source of my surname, the surname I inherited from my murdered grandparents. A year later, I took my family in a taxi to Hanau. I stood with my wife and three kids in the central square of Hanau looking at the buildings. In one I saw an opening exhibition. It was of pictures of the gravestones of Jewish families that had lived in Hanau. I looked for one with the name of Hanauer. I found nothing. But as we left the exhibition, I asked to sign the ledger. I put my name down and looked deep into the eyes of the poor man who was in charge of the show. He glanced and asked me if I want to tour the gravesite myself. “We could go in the afternoon” he said. I declined. Back in the central square in Hanau, I heard many people speaking Russian and I thought to myself that although I had never been to this place and could not speak German, I felt that I had more right to this place than anyone else who was in the square. I walked around with the name of this place, it characterized me for myself. It is a name that I love and value. All these people around me had no idea that I was anything but a tourist. I was in reality nothing more than a tourist. But the linguistic remnants of this place were with me and connected me to this place that I knew nothing about and had visited for only a few hours. The old man in the exhibition knew, he knew and had seen before that look of anger and sadness of belonging and alienation. Perhaps a grave would have helped or perhaps it would have made me cry. Perhaps to cry would have helped.

I need many hours of sleep but sometimes I cannot sleep and wake up during the night. I wrote both my books of poetry during the night hours. At night it was quiet and I was very tired. When I write poetry, I have a deep sense of my self, of my literate emotions. Perhaps what I cannot feel in my internal life, I can feel through literature. I am deeply sensitive to how language means and what it feels like. All my creative writing is about the Holocaust.

I have written two books of poetry and one novel in the attempt to connect to the Holocaust and find my meaning in this event. The poems presented in this autoethnograpy come from these two books of poetry—Quiet Words and the meeting. The two books are different in their intent. Quiet Words, the earlier work, is an attempt to find peace and salvation in the everyday experiences of life against a backdrop of the supernatural visitation of the ghosts of my grandparents. The unseen shadow of the Kindertransport and the Holocaust hides in the beauty of the language and in the deceit of life that just continues to evolve as if nothing has happened. The second work—the meeting—as the book title suggest, allowed me to imaginatively meet in the flesh with my murdered Grandparents. It documents rituals of memory and the aftermath of appropriating a deeply intimidating history. Neither of my books of poetry brought me the salvation that I so desire.

Both these books of poetry end through the discussion of language. In one I call out my name and listen to the echo of my name in a desert: a hollow image of presence in emptiness, of language disembodied but reflective. In the other, I find sanctuary in the writing of poetry. I have made a career as an applied linguist interested in literary texts and inquiry trying to find ways in which language solves the core human question of meaning. Perhaps in the end I am an optimist like my father. What could not be achieved in life, can be achieved in poetry and in retelling. As I once articulated in therapy, perhaps my role in this world is just to enable myself and others to explore the meaning of their own experiences and this in itself is enough justification for my continued existence.

Echo

facing the red rocks and hills I stood

alone

in the hot unmoving air

and shouted out my name

echo echoed, echoing

my name came back

calling me

in a deep distant voice

I stood alone

bathing

in the silent hollow singer

murmuring silently my name