Early 1990s, Northern California

By Elizabeth Rosner

I am the daughter of Holocaust survivors, raised in America by parents who reinvented themselves in a landscape that showed no visible signs of the war they had endured on the other side of the Atlantic.

I grew up listening to the miraculous details of their stories, attuned to the silences in between the words. I learned about hope, about what it meant to be almost annihilated. They carried their scars on the inside, mostly.

In the everyday atmosphere of my childhood, I breathed a strange mixture of trust and mistrust, messages about Us and Them that my parents seemed to cherish like souvenirs. Safety, they insisted, meant being among your own kind. Danger lay in assimilation and in letting your guard down.

On Saturday mornings, my father walked with us to synagogue, short-cutting through the parking lot of the notoriously anti-Semitic country club, as if daring to be refused passage.

Although I attended public schools, our observances of the Sabbath and of kosher dietary laws kept me constantly aware of being different. Separate. My parents had accents. I was not allowed to attend Friday night basketball games or Saturday morning football games. Two afternoons a week, after stepping off the bus at the end of my school day, I climbed into the backseat of my mother’s car to be driven to Hebrew school.

I hated much of this double life. My closest friends were not Jewish, and though they were sympathetic toward what we agreed was my oppressive existence, I knew that they couldn’t really understand what it was like to be me.

They read about World War II in history books and occasionally heard about a distant relative who had fought against the Nazis. We watched Hogan’s Heroes on television, and I pretended that we were all laughing at the same jokes.

Eventually, I left my small town behind and headed all the way to California, the place farthest from the coast my parents had landed on. I wanted to face a new ocean, establish an identity that felt like I had invented it myself. And yet, amazingly, what I found myself searching for were clues to help unravel the stories I had left behind.

I went digging into the secrets and silences of my parents’ lives, examining the places where their scars seemed to have left marks on my skin too. I became a writer. Lines and pages spiraled out of me, emotional autobiographies posing as poetry and fiction.

I wasn’t, exactly, in search of others like myself, but it seemed an unsurprising coincidence that all the way here in California, I heard about a group of people calling themselves the Second Generation. And in the midst of that collection, I met a drama therapist, a son of Auschwitz survivors, who was bringing together descendants of Holocaust survivors with descendants of Nazis.

Armand called the project Acts of Reconciliation, and he gathered us to exchange stories and enact scenes from our childhoods. Using psychodrama and improvisational theater, he encouraged us to discover the threads of our shared legacy, the complex burdens we had in common, despite our seemingly disparate histories.

I remember my curiosity and dread as I sat in a circle of strangers, everyone waiting to introduce oneself. Invisible and palpable tension filled the room; we must have all been wondering if we could tell one another apart without hearing accents.

When we had to say aloud the names of our parents, I was surprised into nervous laughter, realizing how easily I could have been “mistaken” for a German. “Frieda and Carlheinz,” I said. My mother was from Vilna, Lithuania. My father was from Hamburg, Germany. Then we had to name ourselves. “My name is Elizabeth,” I said. “I am a Jew.”

There was Rudi, son of a high-ranking Nazi whose brother, Rudi’s uncle, was a Communist who died in Buchenwald — the same concentration camp in which my father was imprisoned. Rudi was a police officer; he had a Ph.D. in Medieval German and a Jewish girlfriend.

There was Hans, a psychotherapist with a house-painting business he called German Quality Painting. He, too, lived with a Jewish woman, and he was a writer.

We talked about our parents and about ourselves, finding to our astonishment and discomfort and, ultimately, relief, that we were more alike than we were different. As we recognized one another’s pain and mistrust, we began slowly to understand that the simple formula of Us and Them was not simple at all.

I had bumped into my so-called enemies, finding them to be the ones most able to know and understand me. And what seemed most promising was that we knew we had inherited a war that wasn’t truly ours, a set of beliefs and nightmares that might be transformed if we reached toward one another with courage and hope.

Like so many of us carrying the stories of our ancestors like uncertain talismans, I found myself asking if it was possible to recover trust if it had been lost by the ones who came before us. I wanted to know if we might ever find a way to restore peace when the war began before we were alive.

I wrote a poem addressed to Hans, calling it, Speaking to One of Germany’s Sons.

Did any of us ask
to be born into this place
or that one?
None of it and all of it
belongs here.

Thus began a practice that has lasted to this day: my desire to write across the vast and confusing gaps between myself and others, even and especially those I’ve been warned to avoid.

Years later, I kept recalling one of the group’s most haunting stories.

Ingrid was a German woman whose mother, as a child during the war, had been touched by Hitler. When I began to write my second novel, Blue Nude, and to imagine the early life of one of my characters, I found myself there, inside that German girl’s skin.

When Ingrid said she “always felt dirty” because Hitler had touched her mother, I wept. I embraced her without her permission, offering forgiveness she hadn’t asked for and may not have felt able to receive. What made me think that I could comfort her? I offered it anyway.

Over the next several years, that offer led me deeper into a writing practice focused on the landscape of art and healing and transformation. I strive to transcend our seemingly relentless waves of fear and grief, our blaming and “othering.”

I want to use compassion and imagination to allow us to move closer together instead of farther away. It was the very separateness that led, ultimately, to the murders of so many, the genocide that would have killed my parents and extinguished me.

Even as a child, I knew that this message of Us and Them, of trust and distrust, was one I had to refuse. “Only connect,” E.M. Forster wrote, not long after one Great War had ended.

Can we remember the past and move beyond it, creating art in the process? I hope so.

Novelist, poet and essayist Elizabeth Rosner is the author of two highly acclaimed novels, The Speed of Light and Blue Nude. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Elle, and several anthologies.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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