The Holocaust: Views of the children of survivors

On Holocaust memorial day we should remember the relatives and friends who died or were permanently affected and those who would have lived had the others not been murdered. The Holocaust affected not just Jews, but Gypsies, other Poles and the generally viewed as useless or different by the Nazis. We must never forget, we must never stop being vigilant to racism and hatred in general, be it social or government sponsored. If we do stop, it will happen again and again and again. The official numbers put the toll at between 11 and 12 million, but the truth is closer to 15 to 20 million.

 The Holocaust wasn't just another genocide, it was the the consequence of forgetting about or ignoring the Armenian genocide. It happened because Hitler saw the world pretend the Armenian genocide never happened. NEVER FORGET, NEVER IGNORE, NEVER DENY. 


And yet there is more to the day than just that sentiment .

There is a permanent black spot on the heart of every Armenian regardless of where they live now. It affects generations who otherwise grew up like anybody else, much like my family who have those who died in Katyn, Siberia, the camps or right where they stood. We'll never be quite the same and sometimes it seems like we're the only ones who see the ghosts and what could have been. 

You'll note I said have not had;  in dying in the manner they did, those people became permanent individual black marks on the hearts of millions of people. They live still in the moment they died  and in the lives they led and in the lives they would have led. The children they would have had, the words and actions they would have given us had they lived. Where some of you see ruins and anonymous bodies or piles of shoes and suitcases  or just an empty space, we see the people, the villages and towns, the homes, the churches and synagogues and shops and schools that were forever wiped out. We hear them talking to themselves, to us. They tell us to live like nothing is impossible, they tell us to beware of  the signs of danger and treachery  but to never stop being kind, never stop protecting the weak and to never stop laughing. Because when we stop laughing and caring, Hitler and Stalin and all the other haters win. 

They tell us to never stop trying to succeed, never stop learning, never stop living, because in doing so.... they too still live. You may not see them, but they are there and every time somebody acts like none of it mattered, they kick us in the shins and we try harder still. 

Every family has a roll call of the dead brought up at supper, in school, while making breakfast, when we have a moan about having to wait for something  or not having our way NOWWWW. 

There are survivors of the Holocaust: Jews of every European nation, Gypsies, Polish Catholics, political prisoners etc, survivors, anonymous faceless historic figures, we called them Father, Mother, Uncle, Auntie, Babcia, Zaydie. To us they are our relatives. Some have tattoos with a number, some have a triangle, some have nothing, but all of them played a role in raising us. Guilting us, teaching us, making us who we are, and in turn we have passed this on to our own children. The effects of the Holocaust did not end when the last camp closed or when the last bullet was pumped into an innocent brain, it is a scar on humanity that keeps on affecting generations for decades after the event. 

Some of the signs are the ability we have acquired to spot bullshit when it takes ages for others to see it. Our fight or flight instinct is more acute and we are far less innocent than the doe eyed prophets of love and mushiness. As well, we cannot and will not tolerate the kind of political expediency that sweeps under the rug the building blocks of fascism and hatred up to and including when it's done by our own kind, be they Catholic, Jewish or some kind of patriot  speaking for the good of the nation, regardless of how they frame the nation. 

You'll find we're also a lot less tolerant of ambivalent overly emotional reactions. We are blunt, life is short and cruel and if we stop to waffle about so as not to offend somebody, we waste precious time. We don't have time to debate when  the truth is plain, we don't have the  patience or the ability to wait for cooling off periods if that means something bad will happen like it has in Syria or just in our own neighbourhood. 

As for the act of  mourning, unlike those who have never had to have the complete and unadulterated effects of total war and genocide personally delivered on them and their families and communities, we don't cry nearly as much as accepted social norms require of us. We don't break down in quite the same way other people do. We bottle, we don't do emotion, we don't feel that dying at the age of 87 or 90 is a great tragedy for which we need to tear our shirts and weep bitter tears. For us it's a chance to celebrate that this person didn't die of natural causes like the rest of his or her generation did. They lived long enough to have children, to laugh , to cry, to teach and not die from a bullet between the eyes or the back of the skull or worse. 

In my family, my step mother who finished the war in Ravensbruck, witnessed appalling horrors as a 12 year old, I know because she told me.  As a catholic girl she was taken to the walls of the Warsaw ghetto and forced to watch as they slaughtered babies, old people and dangled the dead from windows as dogs ate them. If  anybody flinched, they were shot on the spot or arrested. 90 % of the people in my parish who survived the war were in the camps or lost somebody in the camps and the firing squads and the Soviet Horror that is Katyn, I know because I was told by the time I was 7.  The fact that my father views the time he spent in Siberia and the subsequent death march of the Poles to Iran where 80 % died on the way as "being lucky", speaks volumes. My wife's grandfather was given a full crucifixion by Ukrainian partisans for being Jewish  but somehow survived, survived three separate firing squads, was interned but escaped Treblinka, was the only person to survive his village untill we learned  thatt some of his siblings were saved by the catholic church. Uncle Abie  shovelled corpses into the furnaces. Her Bubbie was in Bergen Belsen and was so desperate to die by the end she punched out in SS Guard in order to be guarantee a quick death, as her two older brothers had been killed earlier in the war, after being arrested for blowing up train tracks in the village so the Germans couldn't transport  munitions or people to the camps, and were thanked by being sent to Warsaw to brick up the Jewish ghetto,  when that finished ,each received a bullet in the brain. One aunt was sterilized in the camps so she could never have children, another was implanted with cancerous cells and died in the early 1950s from the disease. Another uncle was saved by being arrested by the soviets first and sent to Gulag in Siberia instead of a death camp. I could go on and on but the crimes are gruesome and not for the faint of heart.
 
These people long after the war, found coping mechanisms and habits we take for granted but you would find odd and strange. These people gave us a sense of humour and irony that you just don't get. These people have taught us that nothing is ever as bad as it seems if you're still breathing the next day. These people taught us to not waste the time we have on Earth as it may end tomorrow and we should not be an afterthought but something that stands out as special , important and relevant. To never forget that it's a fucking miracle some of us were even born at all. 

Of course that makes us a bit fucked up too, and that is the point, we are not like you, we will never be. That's why when you go to the ceremonies today and in the next few days you'll see the survivors, the children and the grand children up front. Not because they are somehow more important than the dignitaries or the rabbi or the priest or the organizer, but because they will react in ways that are nothing like the rest of the room. Where you think we're covering our faces in sorrow, we're actually hiding the fact we've heard these stories before, we're sometimes smirking, laughing, we are immune to the emotional button pushing of the words and take comfort in the company of others like ourselves. It makes us feel 8 years old again and we're being scolded for wanting to skip on our veg or something. And the fact is that what you will hear is nothing compared to what we heard at home or read in the books readily available on the shelves of the house library. Through books and testimony we see the Europe that was erased, we understand why we were scattered all over the planet and Poland emptied of it's jews, aristocrats, intellectuals, scientists, merchants, it's political and mercantile classes. In fact , some of us even create the lie that our families were humble farmers back in Poland  when in fact we were all of those things and the loss is too much to bear or think about and maybe also the knowledge that we are here and not others is down to some survivors having had to sell their souls or bribe others to live another day. Country by country, you can do this if  you make the effort, or you can just pretend that no lasting effect aside from a few million dead ever happened. You'll never know of the courageous gentiles ( priests, policemen, teachers, neighbours) who saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives and paid for it with their own, you'll forget that being one of those unwanted people worthy of being exterminated was good enough for Hitler. It didn't matter what you thought you were, in fact that holds true today even, of all intolerant racist xenophobic fascist scum.


There is a further poisonous legacy that I have seen with my own eyes and saddens me deeply. There are some small but vocal parts of the Orthodox Jewish communities that have decided they and they alone can determine who and and what is a Jew. There was a boy, raised catholic at a thing we attended last week. He had Pearlmans and Bergs and others as relatives who'd died in the camps. Why was this boy who in the US or Canada would have been proudly Jewish and incredibly modern, a Catholic?  Because his parents drifted away from a faith structure that was too specific in it's definitions and was not open to the massive wave of reform that still defines 90% of Jews in North America.  Where the Catholic Church seeks to bring people home from wandering away through pope Francis, and Chabad and other brands of Judaism welcome home and educate lost Jews, here the leadership has closed the doors. My friend the Catholic, who's parents are Jewish, who is married to a Jewish woman , A Cohen no less, and wants to become educated in the ways of his lost faith is forced to  wander in ignorance and joins millions of Jews in the UK who are not counted as such and so are allowed to drift away from a culture and faith that gave humanity so much.   The survivor at our event is not an orthodox Jew and so by some, not a Jew.  Both that boy and my friend are the children of survivors, they know where the still missing mass graves are, but are not good enough Jews for some. In this small sad way, Hitler has won. 

Eugene Black - Survivor

When the last survivor dies in the next ten years or fifteen years, there will only be us left to carry on the message. And if you are smart, you'll listen to us, we are them, we speak for them, they speak through us, the 15 to 20 million dead speak through us. And wherever we are in the world, events like those of today will not be complete or true if they ignore the reasons why the Holocaust happened or what it did to us as people and to the shape of humanity today.

Funny Britannia, the state of the Jester

The other day on one of the forums I live in, I posted an anecdote. It really did happen and every Polish family, Jewish family and family of anybody who ever lived through the camps and Siberia found this joke not only funny , but they laughed with abandon and total honesty. But when I told it to a group of highly intelligent people with a strongly developed sense of humour and irony, people who habitually tell the most elaborate and often beyond the pale bad taste stories, there was the kind of silence you get when you've just informed somebody they've got months to live and will die of cancer.  Clearly some subjects are too sensitive outside of the community of those who suffered, to be considered funny or to take the piss out of. But that's the point isn't it? To survive you need to take the piss out of things or they will get you.

Let me step back a bit and explain why  this post today. My wife and I are writers, we have over the last two years been writing a series of scripts for an adult comedy to be broadcast at some point when the stars align and BBC3 or ITV throw some money at us and make us as big as French and Saunders or Armstrong and Miller. We have drawn from a rich well of Slavic and Jewish humour that runs so vast and so thick in our respective families we barely know sometimes when we're being funny or just saying perfectly normal things any body else  would say.  I mention this only because we tend to say things as they are and try to find the joy in most situations even if they may sometimes appear on the surface not to be the most comfortable situations. It's when we're among the customers and staff of a little shop we like, our stories get the kind of reaction we least expected, we make them laugh, they don't want us to leave and they look forward to our next visit. Any comedian's definition of paradise wouldn't you say? And yet there is problem, while we have spoken to some industry types who have liked our style, we have been asked time and again "will this sell in the US?" " Won't THAT be offensive?" . You have characters who smoke???!!! And the short answers are.... No it won't sell outside of NYC and Seattle, yes it's offensive and why the hell not smoke , it's vile and dangerous , but go to an asian newsagent and ask him or his family  just how much of their life has been paid for by smokers. Just becuase the PC police and the Ministry of don't do that it's bad for you would like us to excise certain human activities from any representation of reality, doesn't mean they don't happen or we don't think of them.

A case in point is the programme on BBC last night. "Are you having a laugh" examined the treatment of disability in language and humour. It demonstrated clearly that the group about whom off colour jokes are being told aren't offended as they are telling them themselves. It's ok to laugh people, take a chill pill for Christ sake. The feminazis and politically correct brigade of the 70's and 80's sucked all the life out of us. We can't say merry Christmas to another Christian for fear of supposedly offending some Jew or Muslim or Hindu. Well don't believe a word of it, my wife wished me a happy Easter and I wished her a good Passover and nobody died of embarrassment. When asked where is he in a crowded room, I pointed out for ease of identification , "next to the black kid"Was fast simple and allowed the worry friend to spot their child right away. Was I trying to offend? no. I was trying to communicate in concise honest language a picture of reality . When we stop auto censoring, maybe we will be as a society be more tolerant and accepting of others. As a Pole surrounded by a sea of other ethnics  living in a white anglo saxon society, I had to adapt and be open to a lot things or I would have been lost ages ago. But my anglo saxon mates aren't that lucky, they tend to be ignorant of the ways of others or so sensitive they need to consult a book to see if it's ok to react one way or another.

While irony is well known in English humour and is nothing new, ( watch Rude Britannia on the BBC ), the art of fatalism is less so.  Oh yes the we bang on about how we know we're going out on pens to the Germans, but when you compare that to jokes about starvation and death at the hands of organized genocide, the English tend to get all preachy and sensitive. Let me tell you something. . My family, both sides, have lost everything so often and been kicked out of our lands so often by one power or another, we've lost count . If it weren't for fatalism and irony  working in close tandem, most of my relatives would have gone barking mad ages ago. The fact some think we have, is testament to the fact we can laugh at most anything life throws at us. We draw the line at some things , but that has more to do more with the rawness of any given situation. The reason we do laugh at some of the most horrific things humans have done to each other is simple .....So we will not repeat it again, so we will never forget and be wary of it. Fatalistic humour is our survival instinct telling us to be careful and never take our liberties and freedoms for granted. It's why you find Jews and assorted Slavs for example the first ones to sound the alarm bells of totalitarianism. Those of us who forget this are ourselves doomed to repeat the same crimes on others.

This of course begs the question, WHY LAUGH AT ALL? Humour is the sword that slays despots, bullies and pedants. Humour is the instrument with which we surgically remove offensive people and laws from the public place. Regimes with guns and soldiers have shrunk back in fear at the awesome power of humour time and again... Social injustice and rank stupidity have also come under the sharp eye of the satirist. Georgian England saw the rise of ribald but politically sharp commentary on the Royals, politicians merchants and landed gentry that had forgotten the tenets of noblesse oblige and had given in to base greed and personal excess. This tradition is alive and well on programmes like Mock the Week and the Tory version , Have I got news for you.  Somebody has to pierce the pomposity of the ruling classes or else we end up with untouchables we never ever question.

Is that it ? Humour for defence? Of course not, it's also to deflate the silly little loops of habit and ritual we all get into that become so great in our lives we no longer question them. It's there to serve to remind us to get off our high horses and see the bald unadulterated truth that only small children see . While duty honour and obligation are what made our way of life so much more stable and civilized, it was the sense of humour that poked fun at ourselves that kept us in check. Humour teaches a child what is acceptable and what is not, what is silly and what is deadly serious. Humour teaches each and every one of us to look at ourselves a bit more critically and see our own flaws. As the Bible says, let he who is without sin tell the first joke. Well if we had to wait for that , there wouldn't be any comedians. It's all about intent. If you choose to do something "funny" to insult and humiliate with extreme prejudice to seek trouble where none exists, like racists do, then you are scum and not in the least bit funny. But if you choose to be funny to make a point, highlight something unfair, to lighten a tense situation, to unload the stress of a long day or even longer week, then by all means, please laugh. If you don't you'll die of an ulcer at 30. look at all those emo saddos who committed suicide or shot up a school in the USA, they would still be alive and lot more level headed if they had just laughed....How many racists do you need to screw in a light bulb? None they enjoy being in the dark.  Sarcasm. Hindsight and brutal honesty can be found in that joke. A joke told during the later part of 40 years of Communism in Poland; What do you call a group of people under a bridge sniffing an empty spam tin? Drug addicts. Fatalism and irony at it's best.

While modern comics and comediennes have embraced the the full lexicon of four letter words, some slipped away from the subtly of sarcasm, irony and fatalism in favour of shock. Shock for the sake of shock is only funny for a second and grows tired very fast.  Comediennes in particular for the longest time in the 80's and 90's were about as funny as a root canal.  Being preachy and angry at men just didn't go over well, it's when comediennes joined comedians in laughing at the world from their own personal political and cultural stand point, that they became funny. Handicapped people have learned this lesson as well, they sit in that comedy frontier were we as a society are just now learning to laugh with people who are crippled ( YES CRIPPLED) by debilitating conditions that make life less than ideal. One comic last night put it best, children ask you  does it hurt, once you tell them it doesn't , they want to know how you do things differently. It's called curiosity, the opposite of fear. They themselves will tell you they aren't differently abled or challenged, they are in fact crippled and have accepted the life given them by circumstances.  They are also fatalists in their humour now having crossed over from simply being unfunny advocates for change. The basic problem is that between the illness known as political correctness and the cultural invasion of all things American, much that made other peoples unique and interesting has been washed away over the last 30 years, including the ability to laugh at many things, that is only now beginning to return. Ask a person who lived through the blitz what is funny and you'll be shocked by the answers. Not so much for the answer itself, but how much what is funny and how you react to hardship has changed.

Where I find the greatest offence on telly today, is the freak show called Big Brother, some choose to be humiliated on there for money, fair dues. But others are mentally ill, in fact I'd say a good half of them have had some kind of psychotic condition that needs care not ridicule .  Producers have found it easier to eschew actors an writers and replace them with sad delusionals, mentally ill persons and other assorted non entities. That some of us watch such train wrecks speaks to our desire to seem smarter and better than others. A perfectly normal thing, that fact we need to laugh at bad trannies  the dim witted and the mentally ill, speaks to how little we think of ourselves.

My wife and I were shaped by  a lot comic inspirations, The Marx Brothers, Python, The Goons, Air Farce, 2nd City, Mad Magazine, Gilbert & Sullivan,  19th century Russian writers, Mel Brooks and  Polish / Yiddish comedians and comediennes you would never have heard of like Boris Tomashevsky, Sholom Aleichem or Gertrude Berg, but who influence the very comedies you watch today. These past practitioners of the great art of satire blended music, wit, irony, fatalism, sarcasm along with a sharp blade to get their points across. 

After a lot of thought, we came up with some laws , while not yet as famous as Asimov's laws of robotics, they should explain at east in part what makes us laugh.

Laws of Comedy

1. Yellow is the funny colour. Anything yellow is instantly funny, and a person dressed in yellow instantly has funnier actions or dialogue.
2. If your characters are in an easily escapable situation, they cannot escape until it has reached the maximum impact of funny.
3. If you feel the urge to say something at inappropriate times, say it.
4. If you believe you have gone too far... keep going.
5. If you can't say it, sing it.
6. The hard K sound is funny.
7. When in doubt put a man in a frock.
And finally ...The Zeroth Law of comedy - All things no matter how inappropriate or serious can be made to be funny.
*the Zeroth law of course supersedes all other laws as long as it does not go against them.

Remember people, it's all about intent. As long as you aren't just having a go at some innocent person or group to wind up out of ignorance, it's funny. And another thing, if you go see a comic who advertises him or herself as rude and the show is called "I'd like to kick you all in the balls", please don't be surprised if they are in fact rude and offensive.

So maybe now I tell a story already? My wife's Bubbie  who had survived the camps, had finally after much badgering from her own family accepted a long standing and very gracious offer by the German government to stay at a health spa.  This was to care for her leg injury she had suffered during the death march from one camp to another, staying just ahead of advancing Russian troops. Upon her return to New York  they asked her what it was like. She replied with a smile "You know I think I've had had enough of German showers".

Then there's the one where my wife was sitting in the office of a Jewish travel agents office, who was offering her a trip to Auschwitz. She decided to think about it and called her Aunt who had spent time under the care of Dr. Mengele . When my wife returned for the next meeting, and the travel agent  asked her what her decision was she said.  "I spoke to my Aunt about Auschwitz as a holiday destination and she said ,the food was awful and the hospitality left a lot to be desired"

I hope you laughed, the rest of us did.