The Weight of History
“Who we are and how we live our lives is very much determined by the lives of our predecessors.”
My very
first recollection of life is of snow; the kind of new white fluffy snow that
sticks to your eyelashes and blows sideways into your open mouth; the Buffalo
snow that I would come to know as normal winter weather. I was wearing a pink snowsuit, and was
strapped into a sled, while my older brother ran down Commonwealth Avenue as
fast as he could, pulling my sled behind him.
I don’t know how I remember that my snowsuit was pink. Perhaps I’ve seen photos of myself wearing
that snowsuit. But the taste of the snow
in my mouth and the sound of our raucous laughter are as real today as they
were in 1940, when I was barely three years old..
We had
arrived in the USA in March of 1939, one of the last passenger ships allowed to
bring refugees to the Port of New York before the war. I had no idea of the circumstances that
allowed us to find refuge here, and I certainly didn’t know much about our
family history and the stories that would color my adult life. My father instructed all of us that we were
to become Americanized, forget about the past and move on. I was just a toddler
with no memory of Germany anyway, so his message meant nothing to me.
Conversely,
for the first five years of my life, my mother cried practically every
day. She would show me pictures of the
family we had left behind, pictures of her parents, her sisters and brothers,
her cousins, her niece and nephew, her friends, sobbing all the while. I couldn’t remember any of these people and
couldn’t understand why she was crying.
All I knew was that I could hardly wait for the older children to come
home from school, so there would be some cheerful activity in the house.
I grew up
in a modern American family with an international past, much of which wouldn’t
become known to me until I became a curious teenager; and even more information
would be revealed long after my parents were gone. My father was always willing
to talk to me about the past. He seemed
grateful that I was asking questions and was willing to share his feelings with
me, perhaps because I was the inquisitive one, or perhaps because he knew he
could trust me to remember and understand. But our past was only spoken about at home. To
the outside world, I was an all American girl, but inside I always knew that I
was different.
I see a
play about two sisters separated by the holocaust, and realize that those
emotional scenes could have been played by my mother and her only surviving
sister. Or perhaps they could have been portrayed by my cousin’s two daughters
who grew up separated by an ocean and a language. They recite a list of names
of family members who didn’t survive and I actually feel the pain my mother
expressed when I was too young to understand. I see movie scenes of the uprising in the
Warsaw ghetto, scenes from Auschwitz, death marches, people carried away in
trucks or trains. It goes on and on, and
all of it belongs to me. It’s in my DNA.
Even
though my sense of being Jewish may be different from those who do not share my
history, my sense of being American is different also. That young toddler in the pink snowsuit, who
enjoyed a sleigh ride with her 11 year old brother, grew up as American as
apple pie, but she always knew how lucky she was to be in the USA and still appreciates
the blessings of being American.
Moreover, I know now that many of my American friends share my
background as well my overwhelming gratitude that America opened her arms,
provided us with a safe environment to be Jewish, and gave us a true homeland.
We all
grow up with the weight of history upon us.
Most of the time, we go about our business and don’t dwell on the past.
But every year, as another anniversary of Kristallnacht approaches, the
feelings and emotions regarding my family history resurface. I think about that black hole in the middle
of the last century and still wonder why…..
