HFA Creativity Contest: Stories that Matter
2nd Place Winner (Prose)
When There Are None
By Leona Quigley
In October 1945, a bedraggled figure entered the Italian city of Turin, wasted and malnourished, appearing to all who encountered him as a stranger. He had been born there, had lived there all his life and would die there, but in the brief two years of his absence he had changed utterly, as had the home he had left behind. This man, Primo Levi, returned from a place the name of which did not yet hold the haunting power it does today: Auschwitz. To the Turinese the word had no meaning, and for Levi’s story, they had no time.
Having returned like Dante from an underworld of man’s making, Levi encountered a world that had had enough of tragedy and destruction. His words fell upon deaf ears and his book Se questo e un uomo (If This Is a Man), now one of the most widely read Italian books in the world, could not even find a publisher.
Across Europe, from the Nordic fjords to the banks of the Mediterranean, from Bordeaux to the Black Sea, similarly haggard figures were returning in rivulets. Everywhere they received a similar reception. The wanderers returned to a home that had changed, a Europe that had seen and suffered too much already, and that had no patience for the tragedy that had befallen European Jewry.
Few wished to hear what they had to say, fewer still wished to acknowledge the part that they, their neighbors, or their nation had played in their demise. Even where no one voiced the news, its presence was felt in absences, in the families, communities and neighbors missing, in hollow synagogues and in half-filled Jewish cemeteries where the dates stopped somewhere around the year 1940.
For years after the war’s end, Europe would have rather have forgotten the tragedy that had befallen the Jews. Now too, it is often remarked that we are again entering into an age of amnesia. Seventy-five years after liberation, the number of survivors is in steep decline. They have served for decades as guardians for the memory of the Shoah, spreading their stories, teaching its lessons and writing its history.
Luggage of Jewish victims at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland.
Now we enter what scholars dub the “acceleration of postmemory.” In the rapid approach of a world without direct Holocaust testimony, we must consider what this entails. When many lessons of the Holocaust have yet to be learned, the breaking of our most direct tie to this past will bring a new and uncertain phase in the evolution of Holocaust remembrance.
One cannot underestimate the impact Holocaust survivors have had over the past seventy-five years. Their achievements in promoting human rights, campaigning against oppression and discrimination, and building from their own experiences to prevent the recurrence of such mass atrocities that befell them are crucial labors of remembrance and forewarning. Even when few were ready to listen, the survivors never remained silent.
The first Holocaust memorials were built by survivors, and many, such as the late Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, wrote furiously to document the destruction of their families and communities. It was not until the 1960s, when a younger generation began to interrogate the public silence in regard to the decimation of Europe’s Jews, did widespread recognition of the significance of the Nazi program of extermination as distinct from other atrocities committed in the war come to the fore. Ethicist John Roth noted this shift in public memory when he cited the Polish survivor Jacob Celemenski, who declared: “For twenty years I have constantly heard within my mind the very cry of the murdered: Tell it to the world!”
The 1960’s marked only the beginning; the real progress towards public acknowledgement and understanding of the crimes of the Third Reich was achieved during the following decades. The driving force behind the demand to come to terms with the past that consumed the minds of Celemenski, Levi and the other survivors, was the obligation to tell and to warn. We must now consider if their passing will herald a future in which Holocaust memory can be more easily distorted, diminished, denied or steadily forgotten.
Contesting distortions of Holocaust history in popular memory are challenging, given the sheer representational hurdle the catastrophe represents. Any attempt to capture the scale, the geographic scope, the range of different Holocaust experiences and the diversity of the victims in a comprehensible manner consistently runs up against the limits of the medium.
Survivors often expressed despair at the impossibility of conveying what they had gone through to anyone who had not undergone a similar experience because the evil they saw and endured could not be circumscribed in words; some things could only be learned from direct experience. This leads to the conclusion that Holocaust memory is and will necessarily be only partial.
The Jews of Eastern Europe, whose under-representation in popular history and iconography is corroborative of both the qualified nature of public Holocaust memory and the importance of direct testimony for its development, wrote Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books. Between the Jews of the East and the Jews of the West there is a clear hierarchy of both suffering and memory.
The popular iconography of the Holocaust is dominated by the images of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. Although the number killed in the vast complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau exceeds one million and no fewer than 50,000 perished in Bergen-Belsen, their domination of attention presents a sanitized public picture of the Holocaust. The survivors of Auschwitz were almost entirely Western Jews or political prisoners, most of whom had been sent there after 1942, by which time two thirds of Holocaust victims were already dead.
Although most people have seen the haunting pictures taken at Auschwitz and Belsen, of skeletal bodies, piled namelessly in mass graves, even greater anonymity has befallen those who perished in incomprehensible numbers in the camps at Treblinka, Bełzec, Chełmno and Sobibór, and in equally unimaginable numbers with the simple barbarity of the bullet. Extermination in the East was completed far more thoroughly than in the West, and the evidence was much more effectively destroyed.
It is even harder to conceptualize the fate of those who were simply lined in front of pits and shot in the back of the neck. Concentration camp survival became almost a genre of its own, but who can give testimony to this equally common experience of mass extermination? This was as much a typical Holocaust experience as the camps, but when there are no survivors, there can be no memoirs.
Auschwitz is the epitome of the Holocaust in popular imagination because of its survivors, because it was also a work camp, and because many of these survivors were from the West. Although their accounts may have been slow to leak into the public consciousness, in the West they had the freedom to publish and speak of their experience. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, this was not the case. To the extent that the mass executions and extermination camps made it into the history books, it was largely under the mantle of national suffering, as opposed to specifically Jewish suffering. Without survivors with a means to make their voices heard, the suffering of the Ostjuden, or Eastern Jews, has long been overlooked.
The Eastern Jews represent the majority of the one million victims who still remain unnamed. Of those who have been identified, the only traces left of them were in the memories of their loved ones, or maybe in a scattering of pictures or perhaps a few final letters:
“My beloved Yosef and Rachelku… You should be consoled by the thought that this has to end sometime, and that then we will once again be happy together. Our yearning for each other knows no bounds,” wrote Perla Tytelman in 1941 from Warsaw Ghetto, as documented by the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem.
“I hoped that we would see each other again, but now I have lost all hope. Once, only once to have the chance to see you again, and then – may the worst happen,” wrote Ida Goldiş from the Kishinev Ghetto in Romania that same year.
“Dear Mummy and Daddy,.. I kiss and hug both of you very tight. Yours, Edik.”
The last extract is from a letter written in 1941 by seven-year-old Edik Tonkonogi from his home of Satanov. Nestled amongst the hills of eastern Ukraine, Satanov lies on the river Zbruch, which once served as a border between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Above it stands one of the oldest synagogues in Europe, which served as a safehold for the town's Jews for hundreds of years, through the raids of Tatars and Turks, the clashes of empires and the pogroms of their neighbors.
Edik’s parents, Klara and Lazer Tonkonogi, had left him there in the care of his grandparents whilst they toured with a theatre troupe. They were far away in Russia when the town was overtaken by the advancing Germans. When the town was liberated in 1944, only six members of Satanov’s historic Jewish community remained alive. Klara and Lazer found neither Edik nor any other member of their family among them.
Although nothing remains of the child whose charming innocence is so clear in his letters, his memory will not be lost in time. His sister Rivka, who was born after the war and never knew her brother, donated her family’s small collection of letters and photographs to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in 2013.
A detail from “Fallen Leaves” an installation by Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, at the Jewish Museum Berlin, .
This steadily mounting collection of documentary evidence and testimony represents the recovery of millions of individuals from anonymity; a victory against oblivion. The Nazis turned millions of individuals into death quotas, history books leave them as statistics; 3 million in Poland, 1 million in the Soviet Union, 400,000 in Warsaw, 1500 in Satanov…The Third Reich’s genocidal program represented not just an effort to eliminate the Jewish people, but also to strip them of their identity and wipe them from the pages of history.
Thus, each individual identity recovered represents a victory against Nazism, an eternal condemnation of their crime and a bulwark against its repetition. A million remain unnamed, but not necessarily lost. They are still waiting to be found, if the effort is made to seek them out in the scraps of history, and in the corners of the minds of an ever-shrinking group of individuals.
Primo Levi once described the act of Holocaust testimony as an obligation to speak as proxy for the dead. As we approach this historic crossroads, Levi's voice still rings loud even now, more than thirty years after his death. A new generation must choose whether or not to take up the mantle, to become themselves proxies, albeit imperfect ones, for the victims of the Third Reich.
The fate of Europe throughout the 1930s and 1940s continues to provide its people with a historic touchstone from which they draw a supposedly common ethics. The shadow cast by our totalitarian past lingers with us as an injunction to do better. Testimony of the Holocaust, the nadir of man’s inhumanity to man, represents the most potent firewall against any ideology that seeks to advance the security and prosperity of the many through mortality of the few.
As the end of direct testimony looms nearer, one might consider the words of the survivor Elie Wiesel, who, when asked by his students in Boston what would happen when the last of the survivors were gone, replied quite simply: “Just think, perhaps you are the only hope I have. Fulfill it.”
Whether the age of postmemory will become an age of amnesia is a matter of uncertainty, but it is certainly a matter of consequence. It will be a better world if we can take it upon ourselves to remember to think and speak of small boys in Ukraine who would never grow up, of the people who once lived on our streets or even in our homes and of the millions whose unique stories were cut short. As the survivors pass on, they leave a legacy of testimony that need not be lost with them, a legacy that reminds us never to take the good for granted, and to be forever vigilant against the darkness encroaching.
Leona Quigley is a third year exchange student from Ireland majoring in political science. She wrote this for her Writing Program course Creative Nonfiction. The fully-footnoted essay has been adapted for web publication.