Memories that never fade

She harbors an infinite reserve of people in her memory, people who have long been gone from this world, the majority of whom she never mentions. Occasionally I manage to coax something out of her, and this happens when I pressure her, on Saturday mornings when I come to visit her.

Believe me she has quite a collection of memories that never fade, because she was there in Auschwitz after all.

And believe me I can't really relate the events, not even an iota of what she told me and what she permits me to tell. Because the truth is, she doesn't allow me to tell a thing.

Our home was just like any other Holocaust survivor home. A house of silence, and father would just occasionally sing me the partisan song, perhaps to prove to me that there was Jewish resistance to the Nazis' planned process of extermination.

I obsessively read every Hitler biography and since having a mind of my own I have tried to comprehend how such a hideous creature could have been created, yet the more I read about him I am still unable to comprehend.

Occasionally on a summer day I pause for a moment to recall our quiet house with its frequent paralyzing silence that stemmed from the silence of memory and from hardly telling us a thing. And I muse, thinking that without noticing my sister and I told each other stories we were never told and from "their" world we actually created our own. That's how we became silent partners to a generation that passed the horrors onto the second generation like the baton in a relay race, in silence and not in words.

Angel of death 

And sometimes in winter when darkness falls, I think of her and how she is alone there with her memories. And then I call and ask her "how are you?" and I don't tell her why I called and when she says everything is fine, I relax, because I have always thought that since the Holocaust she has been carrying a sack of traumas and memories and it is so hard to fathom how a person can bear them alone.

When the weather becomes cooler, I ask her how they withstood the harsh winters in the frozen barracks that were rife with disease and corpses, and whether they spoke to each other. Did they treat each other humanely? Did they ever tell each other jokes? Did they laugh amid the scenes of horror?

And I ask her whether she smelled the smell of burning corpses from the smoldering smoke coming out of the crematoria. And she said she did and that there were rumors that human bodies were being cremated there, but no one really knew whether it was true or not. And she adds in a slight whisper that she saw the white of Mengele's - the Angel of Death - eyeballs, and then I ask her whether he appears in her dreams, and had he appeared in real life would she even recognize him?

Sometimes I dare ask her whether she remembers what she went through during the three round ups of Jews she experienced. And how in the third, when Mengele sent her to the crematoria, how she actually managed to escape through a small window, to jump out and walk briskly, despite her slight body, a few meters towards the barracks full of women and emaciated souls, and except for their breath nothing but skin and bone remained of them.

"Where did you get the courage from? And where did the power for survival come from?" And she says that she doesn’t know. And I don't dare tell her, that we too, the second generation, born a moment after the war, somehow bear their scars, because how can I compare myself to her? What have I been through compared to her? What do I know about it all? And how dare I take part in her suffering and pass it on to me?

I glance at my sister; she is the closest member of my family. She is the one who lived with me in the same room and who shared our parents' voyage. I see how she obsessively writes about the Holocaust, passes on what she has heard and even what she has created in her wild imagination, and how she runs from one lecture to another and talks to people about our parents' Holocaust as the sons and daughters of our parents, and how she doesn't let up, because she – perhaps subconsciously – has become the person responsible for passing the memorial candle from the first generation to the third and the forth.

Mask of silence 

Occasionally at night I dream of black holes, and I begin to realize that I take them with me everywhere I go and I know that even a psychologist, as smart as he may be, will never be able to fill them. And who will fill my mother's black holes and the holes of all those who were there and perished?

Not only were "they" never sent to psychologists, they were sprayed with DDT to disinfect them, and all they were told as new immigrants was "to become Israelis," and sent to their destinies.

And indeed, they did turn into a type of an Israeli, a hybrid between the old and the new, but none lost their foreign accents, and none lost the memory of the town they came from or the memory of relatives who perished.

Over the years I have began to understand that my mother and all the others only shielded themselves with a mask of silence; that in order to shatter it, we, their children, would have needed explosives we didn't possess, and sometimes conversation full of compassion we were not always able to provide.

And so the years passed by and on every Holocaust Memorial Day mother once again becomes introverted, prepares herself for the siren, and I wonder who will remember the memory? Who will take responsibility from now on? And who are we today compared to what they were then?