Poetica Magazine

In the decades since the Holocaust, a “children of survivors” literature has grown up. The phenomenon is worldwide. From my days as a book reviewer, the following titles come immediately to mind: See Under: Love by David Grossman (Israel), Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman (United States), What God Wants by Lily Brett (Australia), and Nightfather by Carl Friedman (Holland). Different as these books all are from one another—and each is wonderful in its own way—what they have in common is the child’s struggle to come to grips with the parent’s unspeakable legacy.

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Inevitably, the iniquities visited upon the parents return to haunt the children. The ways in which this happens are as varied as the individuals themselves. Even when the children know very little of their parents’ ordeals, they cannot but be affected.

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My poem Curse VII (“Now in her eighties...”) is about one such mother-daughter dynamic. In this case the mother’s life was saved by her inclusion in the Kindertransport. The poem was inspired by a Yom Ha-Shoah program at my synagogue. Erika, the survivor, told her story to a group of assembled Hebrew school parents and children that included her own grandchildren as well as her daughter. Erika’s personal journey to share her story took nearly 70 years—a Biblical lifetime. Until she began to speak out publicly, her own daughter was ignorant of much of her mother’s history.

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For me, the cement that holds the poem together is the tension between what parents know and what they choose to tell their children—in this case, what Erika’s parents knew or suspected and did not tell her, and what Erika knew and did not tell her own children.

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When someone like Erika, who has suffered so greatly, chooses to break her silence, it is important to pay attention. I tried to pay attention, and the poem seemed to write itself. I sent the poem to Erika. “I’m glad to know that at least one person was listening to me,” she said.

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Curse VII

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Now in her eighties,

Erika sits in a chair in a circle of chairs

to tell us her story for Yom HaShoah.

“During the Second World War,

the British took in ten thousand children

from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.

I was one of them, sixteen years old in 1938.

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“I was scared, lonely, unhappy.

When the blitzkrieg started,

the bombs fell indiscriminately all over London.

Then I felt better;

I had wanted to be like everyone else,

and now I was.

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“I never dreamed my parents were murdered.

I didn’t learn until after the war.

I was completely unprepared.

The way I felt – it’s more than anger,

it’s the deepest despair.

I lost my faith in God.

I’d made a bargain—

I’ll get through all this,

and You’ll reunite my family.

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“The bargain was one-sided.

When I found out,

it was Yom Kippur, 1945.

I went to a non-kosher restaurant.

The meal I ate stuck in my throat,

but I wanted to make my point.

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“After Chamberlain and Munich,

I remember my father saying,

‘It’s a good thing there’s no war.

If there’s a war, they’ll kill the Jews.’

My parents might have known

they were saying goodbye for good

at the dock in Hamburg in 1938.

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“I was the youngest

and they considered me useless.

All my efforts were for them.

I wanted to show them what I’d accomplished.

In some ways I’ve never gotten over it.

I think of what they did for me.”

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Erika’s daughter Kim says,

“My mother was P.T.A. President

and led the Girl Scout troop.

She never talked about herself,

but I knew she was different.

When a friend said,

‘Your mom has an accent,’

I replied, ‘She does?’

my voice rising in a question,

knowing and not knowing.”

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Anne Whitehouse, Guest Blogger

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Anne Whitehouse’s books include the poetry collections, BLESSINGS AND

CURSES and THE SURVEYOR’S HAND. Her chapbook BEAR IN MIND is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2010. She is the author of the novel FALL LOVE, now available as a free e-book from Amazon Kindle as well as Feedbooks and Smashwords. Please visit her website at http://annewhitehouse.com  - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

As I wrote in my guest blog last week, some of the individual poems in Blessings and Curses are about me, and some are about other people whose stories impressed themselves on me. In the case of Curse XXII (“On September 1, 1939...”;), the poem came as a pure gift from a Holocaust survivor who told me her story. Ms. E (the initial is invented) was in her nineties when I was asked to interview her through my job for a not-for-profit agency that serves the elderly. I arranged to visit her apartment one evening in early summer after work. Like most of the other ladies I interviewed, she was a widow living on her own in a neat one-bedroom apartment. First we sat down at a card table where she plied me with cookies and fruit, and then I pulled out my Palm with the folding keyboard and took notes as she spoke.

                                                                                              .

Taller than average, slender, with thick white hair cut in a bang across her forehead and lively dark eyes, she expressed herself fluently in accented English. She had been widowed twice: her first husband was murdered in the Holocaust; the second was a survivor like herself. With her second husband, she had one son, who was her mainstay, and two grandchildren on whom she doted, both in college.

                                                                                     .

She proudly showed me the framed photographs of her family, starting with the grandchildren and moving backwards in time. The last photograph she showed me became part of the poem.

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“No matter how many books or movies about the Holocaust one has read or seen, it is impossible to understand what it was like to survive it,” she claimed. She was born and raised in Poland, and for the duration of the war, she lived in hiding under an assumed name. “I was taught to tell the truth always,” she declared, “and it does something to your psyche to live a lie. You have to be careful to remember what you say. It’s harder than you think. Sometimes, when I think of what I survived, I can’t believe I did it.”

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Her story affected me strongly. Instead of going home when I left her apartment, I went to nearby Riverside Park. It was a beautiful summer evening. I sat down on a park bench. The peaceful green park enveloped me, and the poem poured out of me—her words in my voice. When the poem was accepted by the literary journal, Earth’s Daughter’s, I asked her permission to publish it and received her blessing.

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“On September 1, 1939,

when war broke out,

I locked myself in the bathroom

and wouldn’t come out.

I was crying; I knew

my world was ending.

                                                                                           .

“We had a good life in Warsaw.

My father owned a business;

we kept two servants;

my sister and I went to private schools.

                                                                                                .

“After one week the city was bombarded

from morning to night.

Warsaw was beautiful,

and it was completely destroyed.

                                                                                                             .

“No one knew at first

of Hitler and Stalin’s secret pact.

Soon the city was reorganized

and the ghetto set up.

                                                                                               .

“Young Jews were going to Russia.

Before the ghetto was closed,

my fiancé and I escaped

across the green border to the East.

                                                                                                        .

“It wasn’t so easy.

He was very smart at arranging things

and on the black market bought me

an original birth certificate

of a person my age

who’d been taken to Siberia.

                                                                                        .

“I spoke excellent Polish

because we’d spoken Polish at home.

He and I lived in the suburbs of a city

that was Judenrein.

I looked Jewish but he didn’t.

He had blond hair and blue eyes.

“One day he left in the morning

and didn’t come back.

I still don’t know what happened to him.

The Germans picked him up.

They killed people for nothing.

With men, it was simple,

‘Pull down your pants.’

                                                                                                      .

“My parents perished

in the Warsaw Ghetto.

My sister died with her daughter

in a terrible concentration camp.

She couldn’t think like a person

after her husband died

in the Army in the short war.

                                                                                                              .

“He was wounded at the front

and brought to a hospital in Warsaw.

The Germans used poisoned bullets.

His wounds weren’t mortal,

but infections developed.

                                                                                                      .

“My second husband

saw his wife and daughter

killed before his eyes.

There are things you don’t talk about

or understand.

Until the end of his life

he screamed in his sleep

and I would hold him.

He was a good husband,

a good father, a good man.

                                                                                                  .

“For a year and a half,

until the end of the war,

I survived on my own without means,

with no family or home.

I had a twenty dollar bill

to buy my life if I were arrested.

No one knew I existed.

I believe I was fated to live;

I don’t know why.

                                                                                                        .

“Truman is my favorite president

because he let us in the U.S. after the war.

In New York I found my cousin.

She took me into her bedroom

and showed me her photo albums.

‘Take what you want,’ she said.

Can you imagine what it meant to me

to have a picture of my parents?”

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Thank you for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Anne Whitehouse, Guest Blogger

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Anne Whitehouse’s books include the poetry collections, BLESSINGS AND

CURSES and THE SURVEYOR’S HAND. Her chapbook BEAR IN MIND is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2010. She is the author of the novel FALL LOVE, now available as a free e-book from Amazon Kindle as well as Feedbooks and Smashwords. Please visit her website at http://annewhitehouse.com.  - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

This has been a big holiday season for me.  For some reason, in the several weeks around Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, I attended four funerals or memorial services.  I sat a long time in these various services and thought about the Book of Life and about these people I knew who hadn't been written in it and what that says to me as a writer.

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Ever since I began writing, I've felt an obligation to tell the stories of the people who died in my family who can no longer speak for themselves.  Since my parents were both Holocaust Survivors, there were, of course, the family members who died in the war, but I also felt an obligation to tell the story of my father, who died in 1975, as well as the stories of my two grandmothers and my aunt.  When writing, I can feel the pull of history and the pull of my family wanting these stories to be told.

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But there I was at a service for a high school friend who died too soon of breast cancer.  Besides our various reunions, we had just gotten back in touch in the last year on Facebook.  I had never known such a cheery, optimistic person, and she was cheery and optimistic while in active treatment for breast cancer.  I didn't know everything about her, of course, but as I sat at her service, her son read off a list of her character traits.  One was that she had wanted to be a writer.  Dead at 49, but she wanted to be a writer. 

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My first writing teacher told me one time that she didn't write poetry because she wanted to make money, she wrote it for eternity, because writing was the only immortatily she knew, short of heaven. That when we open a book by an author who's been gone 500 years, we know that's true - that words live on.

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My friend can no longer write her book, but her early death and this New Year make me wonder how I can best speak for those who will never get to write their books, those who will never get to tell their stories.  How can I, hopefully, not only be written in the Book of Life, but write a book that teems with life, that maybe even touches lives?

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Happy New Year from JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Often tried to look us down

Deliberately tried to knock us down

Premeditatedly planned to run us down

Though you could have left us down

Collaborated in secret to keep us down

However from the dust we shall rise

Gaining substance in His light

Triumphantly we shall stay alive

His love will always be in our sight

Filled with all His power and might

Like Pharaoh relieved of his negative plight

He is waiting to bring you into His light!

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© Joseph S. Spence, Sr., 8/19/09

© All Rights Reserved

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When I was a college student hanging out at the Hillel on campus, the Rabbi's wife had an Art Therapist come in one night to do a session with the students, including my sister and I.  We all were given canvasses and paints and were told to paint whatever we wanted. 

Afterwards, the therapist analyzed our work.  Things were going pretty smoothly as she found the standard stuff:  school issues, relationship issues, family issues.  And then she got to mine.  She immediately asked me if anyone had died in my family.  This was surprising to me, first because she hadn't asked anyone else that question and, second, because I had no intention of talking about this.  I thought I was long over this particular death.  So I told her that my father had died when I was nearly fifteen, but how did she know that?  She pointed to the ballerina I had painted pirouetting on a cliff while down below a flower sat watching.  A large, black-painted fist was wrapped around the flower's stem, snatching it away.  Needless to say, I was the ballerina. 

Interestingly enough, my sister, who had been seventeen when our father died,  had no such imagery in her artwork.  The therapist kept asking, "And you're sisters?  And this was your mutual father who passed away? You don't have different fathers?"  My sister and I, who once looked so much alike that our mother dressed us as twins, nodded and nodded again.  We all grow up together in different families.

Ever since then, I have been amazed that without making an conscious attempt at it, subconscious messages come out in my visual art and my writing. 

Much to my chagrin, the Holocaust pops up in my Mosaic work.  I believe that I'm picking the glass colors I'm using based on pure aesthetics and working on the composition that I designed ahead of time.  But when I look at the finished pieces, there it is:  the Holocaust.  With as much time as I've spent running from the Holocaust stories that my mother told my sisters and me growing up, I was, at first, stunned by this.  After a while, though, a strange type of calm came over me.  It's like my parents' DNA - I can't outrun who I am.  

Have you noticed subconscious themes that come out in your visual art or writing?  Has any of it surprised you? 

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

I was raised by two very practical Holocaust Survivor parents. While my mother enjoyed the pictures I brought home from school, pinning them up in the kitchen, and the stories I wrote for her, there was never any question about pursuing any of the arts for a career. Since it was the 1960s, first you got married. My older sisters were offered a limited set of occupations to choose from: secretary, teacher, or nurse. By the time I was a teenager the world had changed and there were more options, but artist and writer was not one of them.

You can’t blame much on parents who live through the Holocaust. Mine came out of the war with an uncanny ability to concentrate on food and any occupation that would get them food the quickest. They had great survival skills, skills that saved them from starving. Everything was assessed by what its usefulness would have been during the war - to my father in Siberia and to my mother living among the Partisans in the forest. Being an artist was worse than useless; once they got to the U.S. it wouldn’t have helped either of them earn a living.

But when I think back, I see there was art all around me; I just had to look closer. There was my mother’s constant decorating, creating beauty in our tract home in Skokie; having our foyer tile done over and over until there was a swathe of interlocking tile flowers undulating in a path from the front door to the kitchen. There was one of my sisters who drew in pastels on the wall of her bedroom creating a gigantic flower garden, while the rest of us drew windows and curtains on the interior walls of an unused closet creating a tree house. And there was my father, the most practical of men, carving perfect rectangles out of the bushes under our front windows and trimming our trees carefully, until they resembled bonsai plants.

How did your family encourage or discourage creativity? How are you able to see art now from your perspective as an adult that you may not have been aware of as a child?

Welcome to JWorld Café, the new Poetica Magazine Blog.

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor