Oprah had an Auschwitz survivor on her show today. She met the survivor back in Poland to visit the concentration camp and recollect the man’s memories.
I felt a pit build up in my stomach, yet I continued to watch the show with morbid curiosity. I had never seen Auschwitz. I drove past Dachau once, unexpectedly, and stepped on the pedal to get past it as fast as I could. I felt my heart race and my desire to flee intensify as I neared the entrance.
These places are after all where my very own grandfather was housed and then killed…
…in his 40s…when my mom was two, and her six other siblings stretched in age through the teen years.
My grandfather was in Austria, living in an apartment with his family, stateless (without a country to call home because of the ever-changing borders), listening to an American radio broadcast which Hitler had deemed illegal, when the neighbor lady upstairs heard it and immediately called the police. I have a photo of the woman who did this.
Anyway, the military police came, arrested my grandfather and hauled him off to Dachau, a concentration camp (and we don’t even think he was Jewish, though we do not know), abandoning a family of eight into the shadows during World War II to fend for themselves. A mom and her seven children, left in destitution.
I can’t imagine the horror…on both sides of that marriage torn apart by a radio station and a sick man (Hitler), and his weak followers, let alone the utter devastation that must have caused their children who were old enough to know Daddy never came home again. My mom was too young to even have a sense of what it was like to have a dad, let alone realize he was gone.
Unimaginable.
I do know I take after my grandfather in my strong will and desire to be heard. I speak up when I feel violated. Loudly. And I suspect he spoke up too–perhaps fighting in the prison revolt of Auschwitz against the SS–just like I would have, and he was ultimately killed for it. My grandfather was a political prisoner.
I understand my grandfather in many respects. We are both of hard heads and strong minds. A prison of that hell would break us, eventually. We would endure and try to out smart and then, when beaten, we’d finally break in a violent outburst, fighting for the cause. Injustice rocks the core of our world and makes us irate.
During the war, before my grandfather was arrested, when my grandfather heard about what Hitler was doing, he went out into the courtyard of his apartment complex and publicly smashed a photo of Hitler. I think that gives you a sense of his frustration, and of his personality.
Oh how I would do the same: risky business and all. Right is right and wrong is wrong, god dammit!! If only more people would revolt at injustice, things like this might never occur again, but sadly, they do continue today. We just turn our back to it.
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If only more people would revolt at injustice, things like this might never occur again — but sadly they do continue today. We just turn our back to it.
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People don’t stand up. They remain silent, which is the catalyst to such atrocities. And very oddly, I just now realized that my very own favorite quote, that I memorized and carry in my heart, and repeat frequently in an odd way pays respect to my grandfather, and I never knew it:
“Evil persists when good people do nothing.”
Good people do nothing.
That resonates in my head.
Next time you are the good person, do something! Out of respect for all those who might not be able to if you don’t. Let Hitler be the reminder. Let Darfur come to mind today.
The Oprah show flashed scenes from the past: starving bodies, burned bodies, piles of bodies. It didn’t take but a minute before I had to stare at my hand instead of the TV when the horrific images kept returning the screen. I couldn’t bear to look in case I might recognize my grandfather in a clip. Instead, I kept listening to the broadcast, waiting for more benign images to return to the screen, peering every few seconds through the fingers directly in front of my face, hoping for the present images of the ghost town to return.
Memories from childhood filled my head as I turned away from the images on the screen. I saw my mom in my mind’s eye in our childhood home, back when I was about eight, sitting on the sofa sobbing, nearly uncontrollably. Curious and scared at that age, I asked her why she was crying. She tried to explain to me that her dad was missing, and never found–that he could be any one of the starved faces, staring back at her on the TV documentary about the Holocaust. I was mortified when I peered at the emaciated faces.
My grandfather? There? I cried along with her. She searched and searched through the faces, hoping to see her dad alive, as if it would mean he made it through to liberation, which had now passed some 30 plus years prior. I hugged her as she cried and searched, and I cried heavily along with her. I will never forget that day as long as I live: To feel the loss of a father from an adult who is still mourning like a little girl. I so wanted to comfort my mom lost in a hell I’ll never totally understand.
To this day, when my mom sees photos of her parents (who were both deceased when she was only 10 years old, leaving her an orphan without any care), she is still stricken with incredible grief I don’t know the likes of. She recently said as I showed her some larger-than-life restored photos of her parents:
“Who are these people? I so want to know them (as she stroked their faces), and I can’t!! It pains me sooo deeply. I so want to know who my parents are, and I never will be able to. It’s torture to look at them and know I will never be able to.”
The anguish that comes across her face stabs at me, piercing my nerves, weakening my soul to new, inexperienced levels. I expected excitement at these first-time revealed, life-sized images, as I was excited. Instead she feels raw, agonizing pain for her years of suffering, wondering and living without a rock to call mom or dad.
It was just this past winter that I really felt like I “met” my grandfather for the very first time. I took a digital photo of a tiny old photo I have of my grandparents that was no bigger than a an inch by two inches, and I enlarged it on my computer screen. There before me for the first time was a life-sized rendition of my grandparents staring back at me.
The photo startled me, at first, as I could really see them up close, yet it intrigued me. I almost felt like introducing myself. It was like I met my grandfather and grandmother for the first time. My grandfather had a Hitler mustache, of all things, was petite for a man, yet quite handsome, if I do say so myself. He looked wise and intelligent.
Returning to the Oprah show, and Auschwitz, the pain grew and grew within me as I continued to watch Orpah and the survivor recount the horrific world history. My history. My husband and I were transfixed as Oprah and her guest recounted the atrocities that took place within the last 65 years. It was as if my breathing became shallow and my husband held his breath in, knowing I was going to burst like a dam.
And I did.
I felt a deep bond. A deep bond you have with family even when you never met them. You somehow feel their pain in micro-bursts, you feel their lost hopes and dreams, if only for a second. You sense their horror, their unresolve in fleeting painful bites. Yet you struggle to truly understand because it is all unfathomable.
It finally all came to the surface for me, and I sobbed. I sobbed for my mom. I sobbed for my grandfather and my grandmother, and all the siblings who lost their dad. Forever. I sobbed for my mom’s lost brother, who disappeared into thin air. And I sobbed for myself: having never known a grandfather.
And then I got mad.
I got angry and hurt. I got mad that we let the world go on today with incredible genocides continuing on, and we turn our head in ignorance.
I am still mad at what has happened, most specifically when I see blind ignorance (ignorant nationalism for any country is dangerous business!!!), and this show brought it all up again. It makes me hate mankind (and I don’t hate), but tonight, I hated. Passionately. If only briefly.
Man can be the ugliest creature on this planet.
Hands down.
And yet amazingly, when I meet people–all people–I somehow have faith. I trust blindly unless I see otherwise. I reach out and I am kind, as if somewhere deep down I truly believe in the good of people.
I am torn, twisted and tortured at the thoughts of our history, my history.
