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…..