Telling Holocaust history must continue for the purpose of preventing evil denialism

Holocaust. What It Means to Be a Witness Three Generations Later- echo opinion essay published in The New York Times by Sarah Wildman.

In 2021, I received an extraordinary message on Twitter.

In 1942, the Gestapo, together with French police, were in pursuit of Lotte Wildman, my grandfather’s niece, the message explained. As the police closed in, Lotte was sheltered by a woman named Lucienne Oliviéri, the message writer’s aunt.

During the war, he said, Ms. Oliviéri protected a group of Jewish women in Southeastern France, helping some cross the border into Switzerland. The author wondered: Could I help Ms. Oliviéri, by then nearly 104 years old, be recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, as a righteous person? 

I had written a nonfiction book a few years earlier about my search for my grandfather’s girlfriend, whom he left behind when he fled Nazi-occupied Austria. Still, I did not know how I might help. I had no eyewitness testimony about this story.

I thought of this note, and of Lotte, when I read “The Postcard,” by Anne Berest, a lightly fictionalized account of Ms. Berest’s investigation into her own family’s Holocaust history. 

In France the "The Postcard" was wildly popular, a finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt.

“The Postcard”, in the central narrative, is true: Ms. Berest’s mother received a curious postcard in 2003, bearing only the names Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques — her mother’s maternal grandparents, her aunt and her uncle, all murdered in Auschwitz. A decade later, Ms. Berest and her mother set out to find out not only who wrote the postcard and why, but also to understand who Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques were — their lives, their hopes, the decisions they made as the walls closed in.

Millions of people were murdered by the Nazi during the Holocaust (1933-1935)

“During the Holocaust, millions of people were killed,” Ms. Berest told me recently. “But not only people were killed, also all the books they had to write. All the paintings they had to paint. All the music they had to compose,” she paused. “I think that is why we, the children and grandchildren of the survivors, are obsessed with working and writing books.”

I too have long been haunted by the breadth of the loss of human life, of dignity, of property and also of potential. The story Ms. Berest tells in “The Postcard” is an encapsulation of the effort of the third generation — of which I am also a part — to insist that the reader engage with the war at a granular level, murdered individual by murdered individual. Ms. Berest began her project as she was expecting her first daughter, conscious that the next generation will not know survivors the way we did.

Ms. Berest explained she was not told the fine details of her family’s war story as a child. That’s not unusual. Growing up, I imagined a time-lapse flip book of horror — Anschluss, Kristallnacht, the yellow star, Auschwitz — but I understood less how those events fit into the long rollout of a slow collapse of normalcy, the years of restrictions, humiliations and deprivations that led up to genocide. I had only a vague awareness of the trapped aunts and cousins and schoolmates and friends my grandfather could not take with him. I turned toward those stories only after his death, when I came across several stacks of letters he had stashed away, testimony after testimony on brittle onionskin pages.

In “The Postcard,” Ms. Berest considers what allowed Jews to be ensnared by their surety that an entire society could not turn against them. For her great-grandfather, she imagines it was simply impossible to envision being excised from a world in which he believed himself so firmly ensconced.

I told Ms. Berest that when I contacted one of Lotte’s children during my book project, he told me that references to the war years were “unspeakable” in his childhood home.

Ms. Berest’s grandmother, too, did not speak of the era. The pain was too great. In her book, Ms. Berest changes the names of the town, the mayor who proudly announced he had rid his town of its Jews and the neighbors who had stood by, to protect the third generation of French bystanders and perpetrators from the stain of their ancestors. Still, the terror mapped by the book is real: the screams heard from Drancy, the terrible transit camp, as women were forcibly ripped away from their children; the mercurial decision that protected Ms. Berest’s grandmother, Myriam. A neighbor really did hear the French national anthem sung by Myriam’s siblings, Noémie and Jacques, as they were taken away.

The third generation’s effort to reconstruct our own past and to understand the present is a means of passing on this legacy. It is also a bulwark against Holocaust denialism.

“A world with witnesses and a world without witnesses is two different worlds,” Ms. Berest said to me. Until recently, she continued, “The witnesses could say to the deniers: ‘No. I was there. That is what I saw, that is what I experienced, that is what human barbarity was able to do to another human being.’ Without them, it is very dangerous. We know the third generation has a duty of transmission.” We discussed how we have learned to use text and geography as witnesses when there are no people to be found.

It’s not incidental that “The Postcard” was researched and written during a particularly fraught climate in France regarding history and memory. In 2017, Marine Le Pen, the far-right French presidential candidate, claimed, contrary to historical record, that the French were not responsible for the Vel d’Hiv roundup of 13,000 Jews in Paris. (Some 76,000 Jews were deported from France.) More recently, Éric Zemmour, another far-right politician, was pilloried for racism and Holocaust minimization despite his own Jewish background.

Understanding how the Holocaust, and the hatred at its root, was nurtured and enabled by a society that adapted itself to the Nazis is also part of the responsibility we have to the past. And yet it seems as a society that we remain somehow unsettled about what it means to claim responsibility for the horror beyond a shadowy cartoon version of incomprehensibly terrible villains and blameless victims. Some of that is helped by stories like “The Postcard,” which forces readers to consider ripple effects across generations.

I showed Ms. Berest the messages I received about Lotte’s apparent rescuer. I told her it was a message from the past as well as the present, shocking and yet plausible: I had never understood how Lotte had survived. I knew her parents, Manele and Chaja, were killed in concentration camps. Her first husband, Eugene Stryks, only 27, was arrested in Lyon and put on a convoy at Drancy, bound for Majdanek and Sobibor; some 950 people in that convoy were murdered on arrival.

I very much want to believe in the goodness of this woman. I understood, as well, how important it was to the rescuer’s family that she receive an acknowledgment of her valor during a time when such actions were mortally dangerous. It could be a passage of bonheur across generations, a lesson in what is possible.

A few months after I received the first message, I learned Ms. Oliviéri’s resistance work was recognized with a small local medal ceremony in December 2021.

She died the following spring.

“You can feel how the Second World War is still alive,” Ms. Berest said to me, animatedly. “When we were children we thought the war was last century, a long, long time ago,” she said. “But the more you get older, the more you feel that the war was yesterday.”

Sarah Wildman is a staff editor and writer in Opinion. She is the author of “Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind.”

An inspiring essay about being Jewish in America

The Bat Mitzvah Question - I Wasn’t Expecting: "Are We Safe at Synagogue?" Jan. 23, 2022 echo opinion published in The New York Times by Sarah Wildman.

In many synagogues in America, especially large congregations like the one my family and I attend, children receive a date for their bar or bat mitzvah years in advance.

Jewish in America

On this day, that child stands in front of the congregation and assumes the responsibilities of an adult, reading from the Torah and offering a commentary on the week’s teaching. It is a time of enormous celebration; it requires months of preparation.

So we knew, already in early 2019, that our daughter Orli would become a bat mitzvah on Jan. 15, 2022. It seemed auspicious: It would be the week of her 13th birthday; it was Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, a time of national introspection; and the portion of the Torah assigned to that week was resonant. In it the Jews cross the Red Sea, fleeing slavery, and enter the wilderness.

In the intervening years, our family began to better understand wandering in the wilderness, not only from the endless drag of the pandemic but also because some months after Orli received her bat mitzvah date, a CT scan revealed her liver was laden with tumors. Through two years of surgeries, chemotherapy and extended hospital stays, we held on to the idea that she might still stand in front of the congregation.

In families like ours, joy has a specific urgency. It cannot be delayed. We refused to move the date, even when COVID and Omicron changed our ability to invite everyone we wanted to see. 

Facing morphing uncertainties and vulnerability, we adapted. We did not have to reach deep to say the prayer of thanks for allowing us to reach this moment.

Torah in a synagogue

In congregations like my own, we do not use our phones on Shabbat, so we were unaware that around the time Orli began to recite from the Torah, 1,300 miles away, at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, a man had taken the rabbi and congregants hostage. Later that night, when we learned what was still unfolding, my partner and I whispered to each other, hoping to shield Orli and her sister, Hana, a moment longer, to delay the inevitable question we knew we’d be asked: “Will it happen to us?” Orli had asked me the same question the week after Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was attacked in October 2018. She worried that we could be bombed. In other words: Are we safe at synagogue?

To these questions, I can offer no concrete answer. I do not want to lie, though I am tempted to simply insist we will be fine. I tell them: Our synagogue is well fortified. But my uncertainty in a time of hate and violence, not unlike my uncertainty in the face of illness, destabilizes me. It is unsettling to allow your children to know, early on, just how very little control you really have. 

Indeed, vulnerability is always jarring; it is somehow more terrible when you are meant to be a comforting presence. Plus, I have no good models for these queries.

When I was a child, I had little to challenge my belief in my parents’ ability to keep us healthy. Conversations about fear were largely retrospective. We grew up with our Holocaust refugee relatives who had fled destitution and destruction to deliverance in an American promised land. The past was terrible, but we were in the present.

My children, meanwhile, are familiar with mediports, home fluids and daily pill regimens. The girls intimately know the difference between minor surgeries and major ones. They have grown accustomed to our synagogue’s metal detectors, bag checks and security guards; they know by name the permanent security officer at the door. Indeed, the officer knows Orli’s story well. When he saw us arrive on that Saturday morning for the bat mitzvah, he and my partner, Ian, embraced. They both cried.

In “Beshalach” (“When He Let Go”), the Torah portion read on Jan. 15, the Israelites celebrate their freedom, then panic in the face of uncertainty. They bitterly complain to Moses, who has led them out of Egypt, that they fear death by thirst or starvation awaits them in the wilderness. The portion ends with a battle with the Amalekites, a conflict, the Torah tells us, that continues from generation to generation. The Amalekites become a stand-in for a mythical eternal enemy, a symbol of any evil that subsequently arises against the Jewish community.

Star of David in a synagogue

As the months of Orli’s illness turned into years, and even when her scans were finally clear this past summer, uncertainty remained. In her sermon, Orli pushed back against the idea of an omnipresent God, or a God that favored Jews, or even God at all. She told the congregation she understood what it meant to feel alone, even abandoned. No deity had shown up in her hospital room, she said. Perhaps, she said, divinity was in being present for each other. When one of our rabbis offered Orli a blessing, she did not say that our daughter’s life would face no further hardship, but rather that hardships would be faced with the support of her community.

Illness has, at various points in these last two odd years, displaced my kids from their home, their sense of surety in what tomorrow will bring and in their belief that we can protect them. 

Security breaches have shifted their sense of safety. And yet, both experiences have shown us the capacity of our hearts not just to break, but also to stubbornly repair. We are far from the only community to feel insecure; we are not the only family to have experienced trauma. We have seen this country reckon with violence, and we recognize now it was a privilege to think we were protected. We have all felt alone in these last two illness-bounded years. Instead, we might see ourselves as together, but in a different, uncharted way, bound up in an effort to protect one another.

Orli’s middle name is Chaim, for my grandfather who fled Nazi-occupied Vienna at age 26. He was known for his knack for reinvention and unmitigated joy, even in the face of unimaginable loss. Upon my bat mitzvah, some 30 odd years before Orli’s, he sent me a letter: Now that I was coming of age in the Jewish community, he offered the words Moses says to Joshua, as he assumes the mantle of leadership. They are words meant to gird oneself in the face of challenge and responsibility, of obstacles and uncertainty. It is a command not to back down but to forge ahead. And so he did not write mazel tov, or congratulations, but hazak v’ematz, have strength and be courageous: The expression is not an endpoint, but a beginning.

Sarah Wildman is a staff editor and writer in The New York Times Opinion. She is the author of “Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind.”