As the phone rang to speak with Frieda for our interview I felt somewhat nervous, but also excited (though I felt that this was not an appropriate emotion). It was not the type of excitement one experiences when they are about to do something fun, but an odd feeling of importance and singularity--an excitement because of my ability to speak with someone with unthinkable resilience in the face of trauma, someone with a story of both tragedy and hope, and someone of a nearly destroyed generation who survived. I felt nervous because I wanted to get it right; and I hope I did.
As we eased into conversation, I tried to write every detail of Frieda's account so that I would be able to share her incredible story; however, there were times when I wrote nothing at all. Certain things that Frieda shared would not leave my memory because they were so beyond my experience of the human capacity to destroy and the human capacity to endure.
When Frieda told us about her baby brother, I felt a type of connection to the immense sadness of the Holocaust that I had never before experienced. When the Holocaust is discussed, the word "horror" seems to enter each conversation. What I felt in that moment was real sadness. It is so easy to lose the sense of loss, of sadness, when it is overpowered by images of hatred and destruction. It is so easy to regain this sense when you think of one specific baby boy in his mother's arms, waiting to board a cattle car.
I have carried this sadness with me as I have continued to think about Frieda and her story. I called my dad one afternoon to tell him about our interview, and could not accurately express what I took away from Frieda's story. I wanted to tell him that it was an affirmation of the will to survive, or a greater understanding of how to maintain hope in dire circumstances, but all I could manage to say was, "He was just a baby. A real baby. Do you understand?"
I do not recall where the phrase "If one dies it is a tragedy, if thousands die it is a statistic" came from, but this phrase came back to me. It is not possible to consider the individual lives of thousands. It is possible to feel sadness for one child. And I am still affected by Frieda's story because of this. I am so grateful to have had the experience of sadness for a particular family, a particular child. It makes the Holocaust real. It gives faces and families to those lost.
-Genevieve La Rocca
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I felt the same way about interviewing my survivor. I was nervous before I first called my survivor, Miriam, as well. I didn't know how to talk to her or how I should act. I was afraid I'd sound immature about it because I have no knowledge of the Holocaust whatsoever besides what I have learned from this class so far. I didn't know how serious or lightly a survivor takes this topic. But to my surprise, Miriam was very enthusiastic and very helpful. She was willing to accommodate to our schedule and she was very willing to meet us wherever we wanted. She made me feel very comfortable and excited about talking about the Holocaust with her.
ReplyDeleteWhen we finally went to her house for the interview, she was exactly like what she was on the phone. She offered us sweets and showed us pictures of her family and documents she kept from the past, including those Nazi papers that ordered the shut down of her family's factory in Poland. Like your experience with your survivor, I didn't feel the need to write everything she had to say down. In fact, I didn't need to write it down because like you, I knew I would remember what she had to say.
I really like the phrase you mentioned at the end of your entry. Miriam is a child survivor of the Holocaust too-- she didn't feel or remember the pains for the Holocaust like other survivors did, but the sadness she has from the Holocaust was clearly evident as she talked about the time when she went back to Poland and visited Auschwitz for the first time and saw a pile of children's shoes through a glass window of a room. At the moment, I knew I would never understand what it may feel like to be affected-- in any way-- by the Holocaust. Miriam, like Frieda, is just one out of many victims of the Holocaust, but I will always remember her story forever.