For Holocaust Memorial Day 2023, I put pen to paper about some thoughts and feelings I’d had inside me for a long time. It was published in The Times (behind their paywall). I had an astonishing response from people who opened up, for the first time, about similar feelings – or about ideas and thoughts they’d had but never crystallised. If this speaks to you, please comment below.
The full text is here:
My sister and I used to climb up the tiled walls of our narrow upstairs toilet, pressing the soles of our feet against one side and our backs against the other. It was fun. It was also a huge relief to me that I could climb higher than the level of the doorframe, so that if the Nazis ever came I could hide up there. When they looked in the toilet they wouldn’t find me.
I probably wasn’t the only child to pick my nose and eat it. I doubt, however, that there were many others who wondered whether doing so would help them survive longer in Auschwitz. This was not straightforward – I would after all have required sustenance to create the nose pickings before I could eat them – and I puzzled over this for hours, just as I spent hours wondering why I couldn’t levitate by winching my feet off the floor with pulleys attached to my shoulders like dungarees. I puzzle over this now, because the childishness of these thoughts makes me realise how very young I must have been when I first knew about the horrors of the concentration camps. I don’t remember how old I was. Perhaps I don’t ever remember not knowing.
Later this year I am going with several family members to visit, for the first time, the small village in the former Czechoslovakia where my paternal grandfather lived before his family were murdered. My three siblings and I are going a day earlier. They will spend the day in Auschwitz. I have chosen not to join them. Why not?
As a child I had a recurring nightmare. My family was being chased, by the army, the police or the state – people in uniform at any rate – and we had to flee, because we were Jewish. I had the dreams for years. I even remember the front garden and door of one of the houses we fled. Again, I don’t remember my age, or, except for one, the actual stories I heard which prefigured them. My maternal grandmother was an 8 year old girl in Lodz during the time of the pogroms. One day she was met by a neighbour who told her that it wasn’t safe to go home, and that she should go straight to the train station after school. She never went home again.
At some age I started reading. The Silver Sword, I am David, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, The Diary of Anne Frank, MAUS, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, The Upstairs Room, The Hidden Children, children hidden in cupboards, under sheds, in mud holes… I read and read and read until by about 12 I was so sated that I was reading out of grim compulsion. Horror porn, for thrill and grotesque curiosity. I especially sought out pictures. How thin could a person get? Could I find a photograph which showed in any detail the dark sores on the cadaverous bodies?
And now those stories are inside me. So deep that they’ve grown into the rest of my experiences and memories like a surgical mesh embedded in tissue. So no, I am not going to visit Auschwitz. I do not need to visit Auschwitz. People say you need to be there, feel your feet on the ground. I feel my feet on the tile of my
toilet walls. For better or for worse all the lessons are inside me. The shadow of history is a part of me. Actually, not a shadow. A shading. The shade of light and dark, the sadness with the joy, the sound of glass smashing at a wedding.
For better or for worse? This too takes some puzzling out. The childish relief at finding a place to hide has matured but not vanished; now, when my children argue and won’t shut up I think, why won’t they listen to me? They must listen to me. If I ever need to keep them quiet and hide them in a shed with a huddled group of terrified people, we would die.
But for better… there is much here. Solidarity with the persecuted, marginalised or vulnerable, whoever they are. It is second nature to me to feel kin to the descendants of Black slaves and all those who inherit their stories. I feel the tragedy of the Uigur, the refugees crossing borders. I feel the casual harassment and attacks on Muslims in hijab and beards on UK streets just as I feel the attacks on ultra-orthodox Jews. There is no hierarchy in genocide or persecution. No use in being the top corpse in the pile. I am connected to the world in a very particular way, as are so many Jews who carry forward the message of Never Again.
I wish that I didn’t have to teach this to my children. I will. But I fear that once you learn that humans are capable of such cruelty, it immediately makes it imaginable, rather than unimaginable. A goalpost you can see past.
My Jewish community, culture and practice is a constant source of pleasure to me: lighting candles and singing with my family on a Friday night; being greeted by friendly faces at synagogue and knowing that if I’d had a bad week, or suffered a bereavement, I’d be recognised and supported; enjoying the music, stories, food and noisy argument which characterise my cultural life, and connecting to an epic and poetic literature, and an unbroken tradition of practice and celebration that insists on the importance of the things in life that can’t be touched.
I can’t disentangle any of that from the shade of the Holocaust. And I do not need to venture any further into that shade. I do not need to have my feet on the barrack floor to actually feel the horror, or to understand the abject destruction that follows from prejudice and hatred. My feet are on the tiles. The challenge is to do good with that learning.
And that is why I am not going to visit Auschwitz. I will spend a day by myself in Krakow. I will visit the central square and the castle and cathedral. I may eat pierogi and take a tram ride to the Nowa Huta. I will enjoy myself, and learn something new.