By Sara Roy
Senior Research Scholar, Harvard University
Second Annual Holocaust Remembrance Lecture
April 8, 2002
Download a booklet of this article.
Some months ago I was invited to reflect on my journey
as a child of Holocaust survivors. This journey continues and shall
continue until the day I die. Though I cannot possibly say everything,
it seems especially poignant that I should be addressing this topic at
a time when the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is
descending so tragically into a moral abyss and when, for me at least,
the very essence of Judaism, of what it means to be a Jew, seems to be
descending with it.
Child of Holocaust survivors
The Holocaust has been the defining feature of my
life. It could not have been otherwise. I lost over 100 members of my
family and extended family in the Nazi ghettos and death camps in
Poland—grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, a sibling not yet
born—people about whom I have heard so much throughout my life, people
I never knew. They lived in Poland in Jewish communities called shtetls.
In thinking about what I wanted to say about this journey, I tried
to remember my very first conscious encounter with the Holocaust.
Although I cannot be certain, I think it was the first time I noticed
the number the Nazis had imprinted on my father’s arm. To his
oppressors, my father, Abraham, had no name, no history, and no
identity other than that blue-inked number, which I never wrote down.
As a very young child of four or five, I remember asking my father why
he had that number on his arm. He answered by saying he once painted in
on but then found it would not wash off, so he was left with it.
My father was one of six children, and he was the only one in his
family to survive the Holocaust. I know very little about his family
because he could not speak about them without breaking down. I know a
little about my paternal grandmother, after whom I am named, and even
less about my father’s sisters and brother. I know only their names. It
caused me such pain to see him suffer with his memories that I stopped
asking him to share them.
My father’s name was recognized in Holocaust circles because he was
one of two known survivors of the death camp at Chelmno, in Poland,
where 350,000 Jews were murdered, among them the majority of my family
on my father’s and mother’s sides. They were taken there and gassed to
death in January 1942. Through my father’s cousin I learned that there
is now a plaque at the entrance to what is left of the Chelmno death
camp with my father’s name on it—something I hope one day to see. My
father also survived the concentration camps at Aushwitz and Buchenwald
and because of it was called to testify at the Eichmann trial in
Jerusalem in 1961.
My mother, Taube, was one of nine children—seven girls and two boys.
Her father, Herschel, was a rabbi and shohet—a ritual slaughterer—and
deeply loved and respected by all who knew him. Herschel was a learned
man who had studied with some of the great rabbis of Poland. The
stories both my mother and aunt have told me also indicate that he was
a feminist of sorts, getting down on his hands and knees to help his
wife or daughters scrub the floor, treating the women in his life with
the same respect and reverence he gave the men. My grandmother, Miriam,
whose name I also have, was a kind and gentle soul but the
disciplinarian of the family since Hershel could never raise his voice
to his children. My mother came from a deeply religious and loving
family. My aunts and uncles were as devoted to their parents and they
were to them. As a family they lived very modestly, but every Sabbath
my grandfather would bring home a poor or homeless person who was
seated at the head of the table to share the Sabbath meal.
My mother and her sister Frania were the only two in their family to
have survived the war. Everyone else perished, except for one other
sister, Shoshana, who had emigrated to Palestine in 1936. My mother and
Frania had managed to stay together throughout the war—seven years in
the Pabanice and Lodz ghettos, followed by the Aushwitz and Halbstadt
concentration camps. The only time in seven years they were separated
was at Auschwitz. They were in a selection line, where Jews were lined
up and their fate sealed by the Nazi doctor, Joseph Mengele, who alone
would determine who would live and who would die. When my aunt had
approached him, Mengele sent her to the right, to labor (a temporary
reprieve). When my mother approached him, he sent her to the left, to
death, which meant she would be gassed. Miraculously, my mother managed
to sneak back into the selection line, and when she approached Mengele
again, he sent her to labor.
A defining moment in my life and journey as a child of survivors
occurred even before I was born. It involved decisions taken by my
mother and her sister, two very remarkable women, that would change
their lives and mine.
After the war ended, my aunt Frania desperately and understandably
wanted to go to Palestine/Israel to join their sister who had been
there for ten years. The creation of a Jewish state was imminent and
Frania felt it was the only safe place for Jews after the Holocaust. My
mother disagreed and adamantly refused to go. She told me so many times
during my life that her decision not to live in Israel was based on a
belief, learned and reinforced by her experiences during the war, that
tolerance, compassion, and justice cannot be practiced nor extended
when one lives only among ones own. “I could not live as a Jew among
Jews alone,” she said. “For me, it wasn’t possible and it wasn’t what I
wanted. I wanted to live as a Jew in a pluralist society, where my
group remained important to me but where others were important to me,
too.”
Frania emigrated to Israel and my parents went to America. It was
extremely painful for my mother to leave her sister but she felt she
had no alternative. (They have, however, remained very close and have
seen each other many times both here and in Israel.) I have always
found my mother’s choice and the context from which it emanated
remarkable.
I grew up in a home where Judaism was defined and practiced not as a
religion but as a system of ethics and culture. God was present but not
central. My first language was Yiddish, which I still speak with my
family. My home was filled with joy and optimism although punctuated at
times by grief and loss. Israel and the notion of a Jewish homeland
were very important to my parents. After all the remnants of our family
were there. But unlike many of their friends, my parents were not
uncritical of Israel, insofar as they felt they could be. Obedience to
a state was not an ultimate Jewish value, not for them, not after the
Holocaust. Judaism provided the context for Jewish life, for values and
beliefs that were not dependent upon national boundaries, but
transcended them. For my mother and father Judaism meant bearing
witness, raging against injustice, and foregoing silence. It meant
compassion, tolerance, and rescue. It meant, as Ammiel Alcalay has
written, ensuring to the extent possible that the memories of the past
do not become the memories of the future. These were the ultimate
Jewish values. My parents were not saints; they had their faults and
they made mistakes. But they cared profoundly about issues of justice
and fairness, and they cared profoundly about people—all people, not
just their own.
The lessons of the Holocaust were always presented to me as both
particular (i.e. Jewish) and universal. Perhaps most importantly, they
were presented as indivisible. To divide them would diminish the
meaning of both.
Looking back over my life, I realize that through their actions and
words, my mother and father never tried to save me from self-knowledge;
instead, they insisted that I confront what I did not know or
understand. Noam Chomsky speaks of the “parameters of thinkable
thought.” My mother and father constantly pushed those parameters as
far as they could, which was not far enough for me, but they taught me
how to push them and the importance of doing so.
Path to Israel and Palestine
It was, perhaps, inevitable that I would follow a path
that would lead me to the Arab-Israeli issue. I visited Israel many
times while growing up. As a child, I found it a beautiful, romantic,
and peaceful place. As a teenager and young adult I began to feel
certain contradictions that I could not fully explain but which
centered on what seemed to be the almost complete absence in Israeli
life and discourse of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the
Holocaust, and even of the Holocaust itself. I would ask my aunt why
these subjects were not discussed and why Israelis didn’t learn to
speak Yiddush. My questions were often met with grim silence.
Most painful to me was the denigration of the Holocaust and
pre-state Jewish life by many of my Israeli friends. For them, those
were times of shame when Jews were weak and passive, inferior and
unworthy, deserving not of our respect but of our disdain. “We will
never allow ourselves to be slaughtered again or go so willingly to our
slaughter,” they would say. There was little need to understand those
millions who perished or the lives they lived. There was even less need
to honor them. Yet, at the same time, the Holocaust was used by the
State as a defense against others, as a justification for political and
military acts.
I could not comprehend nor make sense of what I was hearing. I
remember fearing for my aunt. In my confusion, I also remember profound
anger. It was at that moment, perhaps, that I began thinking about the
Palestinians and their conflict with the Jews. If so many among us
could negate our own and so pervert the truth, why not with the
Palestinians? Was there a link of some sort between the murdered Jews
of Europe and the Palestinians? I did not know, but so my search began.
The journey has been a painful one but among the most meaningful of
my life. At my side, always, was my mother, constant in her support,
although ambivalent and conflicted at times. My father had died a young
man; I do not know what he would have thought but I have always felt
his presence. My Israeli family opposed what I was doing and has always
remained steadfast in their opposition. In fact, I have not spoken with
them about my work in over fifteen years.
Comprehending occupation
Despite many visits to Israel during my youth, I first
went to the West Bank and Gaza in the summer of 1985, two and a half
years before the first Palestinian uprising, to conduct fieldwork for
my doctoral dissertation, which examined American economic assistance
to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. My research focused on whether it was
possible to promote economic development under conditions of military
occupation. That summer changed my life because it was then that I came
to understand and experience what occupation was and what it meant. I
learned how occupation works, its impact on the economy, on daily life,
and its grinding impact on people. I learned what it meant to have
little control over one’s life and, more importantly, over the lives of
one’s children.
As with the Holocaust, I tried to remember my very first encounter
with the occupation. One of my earliest encounters involved a group of
Israeli soldiers, an old Palestinian man and his donkey. Standing on a
street with some Palestinian friends, I noticed an elderly Palestinian
walking down the street, leading his donkey. A small child of no more
than three or four years old, clearly his grandson, was with him. Some
Israeli soldiers standing nearby went up to the old man and stopped
him. One soldier went over to the donkey and pried open its mouth. “Old
man,” he asked, “why are your donkey’s teeth so yellow? Why aren’t they
white? Don’t you brush your donkey’s teeth?” The old Palestinian was
mortified, the little boy visibly upset. The soldier repeated his
question, yelling this time, while the other soldiers laughed. The
child began to cry and the old man just stood there silently,
humiliated. This scene repeated itself while a crowd gathered. The
soldier then ordered the old man to stand behind the donkey and
demanded that the he kiss the animal’s behind. At first, the old man
refused but as the soldier screamed at him and his grandson became
hysterical, he bent down and did it. The soldiers laughed and walked
away. They had achieved their goal: to humiliate him and those around
him. We all stood there in silence, ashamed to look at each other,
hearing nothing but the uncontrollable sobs of the little boy. The old
man did not move for what seemed a very long time. He just stood there,
demeaned and destroyed.
I stood there, too, in stunned disbelief. I immediately thought of
the stories my parents had told me of how Jews had been treated by the
Nazis in the 1930s, before the ghettos and death camps, of how Jews
would be forced to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes and have their
beards cut off in public. What happened to the old man was absolutely
equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and
dehumanize. In this instance, there was no difference between the
German soldier and the Israeli one. Throughout that summer of 1985, I
saw similar incidents: young Palestinian men being forced by Israeli
soldiers to bark like dogs on their hands and knees or dance in the
streets.
In this critical respect, my first encounter with the occupation was
the same as my first encounter with the Holocaust, with the number on
my father’s arm. It spoke the same message: the denial of one’s
humanity. It is important to understand the very real differences in
volume, scale and horror between the Holocaust and the occupation and
to be careful about comparing the two, but it also important to
recognize the parallels where they do exist.
As a child of Holocaust survivors I always wanted to be able in some
way to experience and feel some aspect of what my parents endured,
which, of course, was impossible. I listened to their stories, always
wanting more, and shared their tears. I often would ask myself what
does sheer terror feel like? What does it look like? What does it mean
to lose one’s whole family so horrifically and so immediately, or have
an entire way of life extinguished so irrevocably? I would try to
imagine myself in their place, but it was impossible. It was beyond my
reach, too unfathomable.
It was not until I lived with Palestinians under occupation that I
found at least part of the answers to some of these questions. I was
not searching for the answers; they were thrust upon me. I learned, for
example, what sheer terror looked like from my friend Rabia, eighteen
years old, who, frozen by fear and uncontrollable shaking, stood glued
in the middle of a room we shared in a refugee camp, unable to move,
while Israeli soldiers tried to break down the front door to our
shelter. I experienced terror while watching Israeli soldiers beat a
pregnant woman in her belly because she flashed a V-sign at them, and I
was too paralyzed by fear to help her. I could more concretely
understand the meaning of loss and displacement when I watched grown
men sob and women scream as Israeli army bulldozers destroyed their
home and everything in it because they built their house without a
permit, which the Israeli authorities had refused to give them.
The meaning of shelter
It is perhaps in the concept of home and shelter that
I find the most profound link between the Jews and the Palestinians
and, perhaps, the most painful illustration of the meaning of
occupation. I cannot begin to describe how horrible and obscene it is
to watch the deliberate destruction of a family’s home while that
family watches, powerless to stop it. For Jews as for Palestinians, a
house represents far more than a roof over one’s head; it represents
life itself. Speaking about the demolition of Palestinian homes, Meron
Benvenisti, an Israeli historian and scholar, writes:
It would be hard to overstate the symbolic value of a house
to an individual for whom the culture of wandering and of becoming
rooted to the land is so deeply engrained in tradition, for an
individual whose national mythos is based on the tragedy of being
uprooted from a stolen homeland. The arrival of a firstborn son and the
building of a home are the central events in such an individual’s life
because they symbolize continuity in time and physical space. And with
the demolition of the individual’s home comes the destruction of the
world.
Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians is the crux of the problem
between the two peoples and it will remain so until it ends. For the
last thirty-five years, occupation has meant dislocation and
dispersion; the separation of families; the denial of human, civil,
legal, political and economic rights imposed by a system of military
rule; the torture of thousands; the confiscation of tens of thousands
of acres of land and the uprooting of tens of thousands of trees; the
destruction of more than 7,000 Palestinian homes; the building of
illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands and the doubling of
the settler population over the last ten years; first the undermining
of the Palestinian economy and now its destruction; closure; curfew;
geographic fragmentation; demographic isolation; and collective
punishment.
Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians is not the moral equivalent
of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. But it does not have to be. No, this
is not genocide but it is repression and it is brutal. And it has
become frighteningly natural. Occupation is about the domination and
dispossession of one people by another. It is about the destruction of
their property and the destruction of their soul. Occupation aims, at
its core, to deny Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right
to determine their existence, to live normal lives in their own homes.
Occupation is humiliation. It is despair and desperation. And just as
there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the Holocaust and the
occupation, so there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the
occupier and the occupied, no matter how much we as Jews regard
ourselves as victims.
And it is from this context of deprivation and suffocation, now
largely forgotten, that the horrific and despicable suicide bombings
have emerged and taken the lives of more innocents. Why should innocent
Israelis, among them my aunt and her grandchildren, pay the price of
occupation? Like the settlements, razed homes, and barricades that
preceded them, the suicide bombers have not always been there.
When memory fails
Memory in Judaism—like all memory—is dynamic, not
static, embracing a multiplicity of voices and shunning the hegemony of
one. But in the post-Holocaust world, Jewish memory has faltered—even
failed—in one critical respect: it has excluded the reality of
Palestinian suffering and Jewish culpability therein. As a people, we
have been unable to link the creation of Israel with the displacement
of the Palestinians. We have been unwilling to see, let alone remember,
that finding our place meant the loss of theirs. Perhaps one reason for
the ferocity of the conflict today is that Palestinians are insisting
on their voice despite our continued and desperate efforts to subdue it.
Within the Jewish community it has always been considered a form of
heresy to compare Israeli actions or policies with those of the Nazis,
and certainly one must be very careful in doing so. But what does it
mean when Israeli soldiers paint identification numbers on Palestinian
arms; when young Palestinian men and boys of a certain age are told
through Israeli loudspeakers to gather in the town square; when Israeli
soldiers openly admit to shooting Palestinian children for sport; when
some of the Palestinian dead must be buried in mass graves while the
bodies of others are left in city streets and camp alleyways because
the army will not allow proper burial; when certain Israeli officials
and Jewish intellectuals publicly call for the destruction of
Palestinian villages in retaliation for suicide bombings, or for the
transfer of the Palestinian population out of the West Bank and Gaza;
when 46 percent of the Israeli public favors such transfers and when
transfer or expulsion becomes a legitimate part of popular discourse;
when government officials speak of the “cleansing of the refugee
camps”; and when a leading Israeli intellectual calls for hermetic
separation between Israelis and Palestinians in the form of a Berlin
Wall, caring not whether the Palestinians on the other side of the wall
may starve to death as a result.
What are we supposed to think when we hear this? What is my mother supposed to think?
In the context of Jewish existence today, what does it mean to
preserve the Jewish character of the state of Israel? Does it mean
preserving a Jewish demographic majority through any means and
continued Jewish domination of the Palestinian people and their land?
What is the narrative that we as a people are creating, and what kind
of voice are we seeking? What sort of meaning do we as Jews derive from
the debasement and humiliation of Palestinians? What is at the center
of our moral and ethical discourse? What is the source of our moral and
spiritual legacy? What is the source of our redemption? Has the process
of creating and rebuilding ended for us?
I want to end this essay with a quote from Irena Klepfisz, a writer
and child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, whose father spirited her and
her mother out of the ghetto and then himself died in the ghetto
uprising.
“...I have concluded that one way to pay tribute to those we loved
who struggled, resisted and died is to hold on to their vision and
their fierce outrage at the destruction of the ordinary life of their
people. It is this outrage we need to keep alive in our daily life and
apply it to all situations, whether they involve Jews or non-Jews. It
is this outrage we must use to fuel our actions and vision whenever we
see any signs of the disruptions of common life: the hysteria of a
mother grieving for the teenager who has been shot; a family stunned in
front of a vandalized or demolished home; a family separated,
displaced; arbitrary and unjust laws that demand the closing or opening
of shops and schools; humiliation of a people whose culture is alien
and deemed inferior; a people left homeless without citizenship; a
people living under military rule. Because of our experience, we
recognize these evils as obstacles to peace. At those moments of
recognition, we remember the past, feel the outrage that inspired the
Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and allow it to guide us in present
struggles.”
For me, these words define the true meaning of Judaism and the lessons my parents sought to impart.