Holocaust survivors always 'Survivors'
Posted: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 7:47 AM
Filed Under:
Tel Aviv, Israel
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Tel Aviv Bureau Chief
Recently -- and for the first time -- I have been reading survivors’ accounts of the Holocaust.
Turns out I am not alone in being delayed in addressing the subject.
I was surprised, for instance, to find that Primo Levi’s first account of Auschwitz was only widely published a full 13 years after his liberation. (And it took the medical report he co-authored for the Russian liberators sixty years to be released to the public.)
Meanwhile, Eli Wiesel -- who like Levi was used as a slave in the Buna-Werke, a subcamp of Auschwitz -- couldn’t write about it for 10 years, and even then he had to be persuaded to do so. And then it took him several years to find a publisher for his first book, "Night," a memoir about his experiences that was published in 1956.
So why did it take decades for me to read Wiesel and Levi's testimonies? Maybe because of the pain passed on by my parents, whose entire families disappeared in smoke in those same extermination camps, I couldn’t face such open wounds, even dried by time.
Two things happened this week that picked off the scab.
First was when I joined a roomful of happy Holocaust survivors eating cake, drinking coffee and dancing at the new Café Europa near Tel Aviv. The goal of the café is to create a place for Holocaust survivors to meet and share their common experiences.
Survivors
Happy is probably not an apt word to describe these 80-plus survivors of the death camps. Their lined faces wrinkle in shy smiles at the concept -- happiness is denied to people with such memories -- but moments of joy, even frequent moments, are their right, as babies are born and birthdays celebrated. Yet the shade of their history darkens and chills every occasion.
As they smile and chatter, lean on each other and shuffle their feet in time to the music, one cannot forget. They are always a Survivor. Any reference to their common tragedy reddens and waters their eyes.
Thus the events at the Europa. Social workers in Ramat Hasharon asked them if they wanted to get together to talk about their lives. "We’d love to get together," the old folk said. "But we don’t want to relive the camps. We want to dance."
The second moment came as I joined thousands of Jews, crammed together and trudging through a densely packed tunnel leading out of a soccer stadium into a parking lot. The occasion was the England-Israel Group E qualifying match for Euro 2008.
The experience took me back to those elderly survivors.
Shoulder to shoulder we soccer fans plodded, laboriously matching our steps, shoulders rolling from side to side, like Levi’s prisoners returning from hard labor: "stiff puppets made of joint-less bones." We edged further down the narrow, dim tunnel, pushed from behind into the backs of the person in front.
I thought of Levi and Wiesel. Sixty years ago, Jews would have been naked and shivering, limping along an icy, muddy path, to a concrete room, with pipes and taps and no windows. Some really would believe that it was a place for a nice, hot shower. Others would understand: their destination was a gas chamber and their bodies would be burned in the crematorium next door.
Levi wrote that everyone in Auschwitz knew there was only one way out: through the chimney. But it didn’t matter what they thought because the end was the same for everybody; inevitable, inescapable, and, by the time it came, a relief.
The strength and will to survive
The experience in the stadium tunnel led me to other thoughts. If I had gone the way of my grandparents, would I have known how to survive? Would I have willed myself through such horror to bear witness, like Levi and Wiesel?
Thank God I’ll never know, but for one moment, trudging in a low tunnel with a thousand Jews, a chill went through me.
