As I remember it, my mother's uncle, aunt, and young cousin all perished in concentration camps. I remember it mostly because the young cousin -- whose name I may have once known, but have forgotten -- was my mother's age, and looked just like her. It always made me think about how random life is, how being born in one place as opposed to another can be a matter of life and death.
My parents were both born here, in America, and their parents were all here long before Hitler marched through their homelands to exterminate all the Jews, having escaped hatreds of an earlier time. I grew up far removed from any first hand narratives, two generations away from anybody who actually bore witness. I have friends who, unlike me, are first generation Americans. Some know their family histories in intimate detail, from their parents. Some know little more than I do, because their parents had tucked the horrors of their childhoods neatly away; it was the only way they could move forward.
Even first hand recollections, whether told or buried, can become fuzzy, as fuzzy as the fraying photographs I've been sifting through all morning. But time (if you're lucky enough to have it) keeps the essential details in tact. Not so with re-tellings. Maybe it's human nature to revise, on purpose, or maybe it's just the way our brains work, to protect us. My son has become curious, as he always has been about all sorts of history. The stories we have been told, we realize, do not exactly match.
My mother joined me on the floor by her father's old desk, where the old photographs have been stowed, helped me to identify the people I never knew. My own grandfather, his parents, my grandmother's parents. Some I could recognize from memory, even though they were gone by the time I came around. All these people, who helped shape the ones who shaped my mother who, for better or worse, helped shape me. I want so much to know what they were like; I wonder what they would think of us, of me, the way we all turned out. I wonder what they could tell me about life when people like us were hunted down like vermin, when anti-Semitism drove the fortunate ones across a vast ocean, to start over again in a strange place, a place where they would always be safe. Where the ones who were here, in the late 1930's and early 1940's, never really grasped what was going on over there. How could they?
My mother is certain, now, that my grandfather's brother sent his wife and his little girl to Sweden, while he stayed behind in Warsaw. She is certain, because she remembers when the letter arrived, that her uncle was killed in a camp. She is uncertain about what happened to her aunt and her cousin. My guess is, and my recollection is, they did not survive. Otherwise, we would know. My son is curious, and so am I.
It was mostly pictures, in my grandfather's old desk, but I also found my nana's glasses, and a change purse she carried, filled with coins and a "Chai" key chain. Life. I am taking the small artifacts home with me. The lenses in the glasses are too powerful, and the frame, on one side, is cracked. I will put my own lenses in, fix the crack, and keep searching.
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