Gayle Saks-Rodriguez: Skirting the Holocaust

Gayle Saks-Rodriguez conducts the blog “My Life in the Middle Ages.”

I follow a brilliant blog written by a man named Robert Bruce who is reading (shockingly quickly, I might add) what Time magazine chose as the top 100 English-Language Novels Since 1923. Recently there was a rather heated discussion at his blog about Lolita and its subject matter, and he asked his readers where they draw the line in what they will read. Do we as readers have limits? Was it okay for people to like a book about a pedophile, however brilliant the writing? (Lolita happens to be one of my favorite books because of its writing and the sinister voice of Humbert Humbert. Hearing Jeremy Irons read it on an audio book clinched it for me.)

My answer was immediate. When I was in high school and college I chose to read and see anything having to do with the Holocaust. Being the daughter of a survivor, it seemed the logical thing to do. I took a Holocaust course in college and adored my professor, who really was moved by my direct connection to it. Yet I can’t write, myself, about the things I see and hear in my head about the truly unspeakable things that happened to children. It’s too much to bear — even more so since I’ve had a child.

The very last time I picked-up a book on the subject of the Holocaust was at least ten years ago: The Painted Bird by the late Jerzy Kosinski. It wasn’t even a Holocaust-linked passage that made me have to stop, but I slammed the book shut and that was that. Like my mother, also a Holocaust survivor, Kosinski went on to commit suicide by suffocating himself with a plastic bag over his head. My mother ended her life in a different manner, but both of them were clearly were scarred so deeply that suicide was the only end that made sense.

Yesterday my 10 ½-year-old daughter came across a book my friend had given me, a book full of photographs and excerpts from Anne Frank’s diary. I’m still not sure how much sinks in when I try to explain to her what happened to the smiling Anne and her family. My daughter wanted to read the book together and look at the pictures as if they were any other family photos — happy times in lovely places, all smiles and occasional goofiness. I managed to get through about six pages before I turned away, not wanting her to see the tears in my eyes. You see, I have this thing about people not being aware, as the reader is aware, that they are going to die a horrible death. I just couldn’t go on.

I reminded my daughter that my mother was also what is called “a hidden child.” The kid got a bit confused and thought that my mother was hidden with Anne Frank. I explained that they were in different countries and that my mother had hidden in a basement, Anne Frank in an attic (not that it made any difference). I didn’t tell her about the random raids the Nazis would make, and how every time there was a scare my grandmother, mother and uncle would have to pile on top of each other in a narrow false front. My uncle told me many years ago that he still has nightmares about the fleur-de-lis pattern of the rug that he was forced to stare at while lying on his stomach with my mother and grandmother lying on top of him.

Whenever my daughter and I look at old pictures and we find one of my mother (of which there are many), she’ll kiss me and say, “I’m sorry.” To this day she still hasn’t asked me how my mother died and I am dreading that conversation, which will inevitably make her even more anxious than she tends to be already. At her age, I knew about my mother’s brothers and sisters being taken away to the camps, never to be seen again. I knew that to be the root cause of my mother’s intense depression and the one suicide attempt I had already lived through.

I want my daughter to know her history and I don’t want to just throw a book at her on the subject without any context. Right now, it’s easy to say that Hitler was a bad man and that he made his followers believe that the Jews didn’t deserve the things that everyone else did, similarly to how slaves and, later, free Black people in the South were treated. Places like the Holocaust Museum would crystallize things for her, but I don’t know if I have what it takes to ever go back there. She’ll eventually read books like the brilliant Night by Elie Wiesel, and she certainly will read The Diary of Anne Frank as part of standard school reading lists, and I want to be there for her to discuss these books. I know I will have to steel myself, but I’m sure that there will be things that she, too, will have trouble processing — the sheer cruelty of a group of people who killed off six million individuals, all of whom should have gone on to have many years of smiling and goofy photographs.