Marianne: The
city where I grew up during the 1950’s, Bucharest, in Romania, was shadowed by
another place, Czernowitz -- my
parents’ native city that they had fled just a few years earlier. For my friends, and me all children of
exiled Czernowitzers, this was our origin and, dare I say, our “home.” Although none of us had ever been
there, its tastes, attitudes, and behaviors shaped us profoundly. And, strangely, the streets, buildings
and natural surroundings of Czernowitz—its theaters, restaurants, parks, rivers
and domestic settings, none of which I had ever myself seen, heard, or
smelled—figure more strongly in my early memories and imagination than the
sites and scenes of my own childhood in Bucharest. Some of these same places, however, were also the sites of
my childhood nightmares of persecution, deportation, fear and terror. “I come from the war,” Eva Hoffman
writes in Lost in Translation,” it is
my true origin. But as with all
our origins, I cannot grasp it.”
I felt like that too, but I thought I could grasp it – too
much, even. Can you ever know too
much about your parents’ lives before you were born? Czernowitz and the war
were topics of daily conversation during my entire life with my parents. So much so that I felt saturated,
inundated, squeezed out. The
memories were contradictory.
Nostalgic stories of a close-knit community of German-speaking Jews
whose allegiance to Austro-German culture persisted stubbornly throughout
Romanian rule in the interwar period – youth groups, hikes in the
Carpathians, swimming in the Pruth river, political education, on my father’s
side; school, theater, strolls
through the city, cultural events, dancing, ice skating, on my mother’s. Traumatic stories of Soviet
occupation, a Nazi ghetto, their evasion of deportation due to the intervention
of a Romanian mayor who saved a third of the city’s Jews deemed “necessary for
the city’s functioning.” The yellow star, curfews, further deportations, all
evaded, another year of Soviet occupation, eventually their flight into Romania
in 1945. The close calls, the
split second decisions, I knew them all. Uninvited, my father would often ask
over breakfast: “Do you know what happened 25 years ago today?” (Or 20, or 30,
or 36). A long story would follow:
The Russians came in, the Hitler Stalin pact was signed, the ghetto was formed,
he was taken to forced labor, my mother’s sister was arrested, then released. I
listened to these stories with half an ear, uncurious to know more, eager to
move on to more pressing present concerns. The last thing I was ever planned to
do is to work on Czernowitz.
What changed?
The eighties, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah
and the attention now played to survivors and their testimonies. And the political story – 1989, the
fall of the wall, the possibilities of travel to the former USSR. Also, the personal story. My parents’
aging, realizing we could still travel there together and that if we are to go,
we’d better go sooner rather than later. And then the trip in 1998. Arriving in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, eager
to see the places I had heard so much about, and realizing, with shock and
dismay how little I actually knew. Highlights, certainly, but how did they fit
together? I had absolutely no idea of how to get from here to there. My newfound engagement, and our
collaborative book -- eight years
of work and eight years of my life and Leo’s -emerged from this trip, and I
would say from three essential aspects of it.
First, that startling revelation — that all those years, I
had not really listened and that now, when I was ready to listen, the available
witnesses were aging and fast disappearing. The realization of how passive my knowledge and how multifaceted
and indeed hard to grasp the story actually is.
Second, I realized, that the power of my parents’ past to
overshadow my own memories derived precisely from the layers—both positive and
negative—that had been passed down to me, un-integrated, conflicting,
fragmented, dispersed. How could
nostalgia for the past and negative memories of anti-Semitic discrimination and
persecution co-exist and be passed down over generations? The particular circumstances of
Czernowitz, its Austro-Habsburg promise of emancipation and assimilation, and its
Romanian, not German, rule during the Second World War provided an opportunity
to study the coexistence of such radically contradictory memories. They needed to be untangled.
Leo:
What also emerged, and this third point (perhaps more
visible to me as a historian and the son-in-law accompanying Marianne and her
parents) was the realization, on site, that the accounts we were hearing
had numerous layers. It became clear to us that Carl and Lotte Hirsch’s story was
only one of many that could and needed to be told about Jewish Czernowitz and
the fate of Jewish Czernowitzers, during the war. Their narrative needed to be contextualized within a larger
history. It was on site, moreover,
that we became especially aware of how profoundly
accounts of the past are shaped by the present – by the interaction between speaker and
listener, and by the place and scene of
narration.
Indeed, in working on Ghosts
of Home, the book that was conceived during that first journey we made to
Chernivtsi (Czernowitz) with Marianne’s parents in 1998, we realized that there
is a tension between what “educated listeners” bring to the scene of oral
narration (where the story is being narrated) – between what the listeners would like to hear, on the basis of their general historical knowledge of
what supposedly occurred, and what they are, in fact, being told. The challenge for us was to become better listeners and co-witnesses:
to modulate our own preconceptions and expectations with what we were being
told and with what, on site, we were observing. A constant negotiation
had to be allowed to take place between what our witnesses were telling us, and
what we wanted (or, perhaps more accurately, had expected) to hear.
Let me try to illustrate this for you:
Both Marianne
and I had long felt that there was something about the tone and character of Carl and Lotte’s Hirsch’s accounts of the war
years in Czernwowitz that seemed to complicate, if not contradict, our previous
knowledge and understanding about the brutality of the Romanian Holocaust. “It was not so bad, others went through
so much more” Carl would often repeat. “We were young, it was not such a bad
time,” Lotte would say. “Those of us who were not deported stuck closely
together. We went over to each
other’s houses, and we played cards.
We had to sleep over, on the floor, so as not to break curfew. One can of sardines often fed a whole
crowd.”
True, they were saved from deportation; they survived the
war in their own homes. Carl was
able to work as an engineer. He
even received a token salary.
Still, after working on the Holocaust, teaching about it, and
reading and hearing many other testimonial accounts, we found these
characterizations troubling and somewhat hard to believe. We wanted affective and factual
confirmation of trauma but, instead, heard Carl and Lotte’s stories of relative
normalcy. What they were telling
us seemed off – somehow, not right.
But, there in Chernivtsi, on site with them, what emerged when they
again made their seemingly more positive assessments was something else: the irony, the absurdity of “the normal” in times of life-threatening extremity.
So here is a concrete example:
When we were standing in front of the train station where Carl
had worked every day, he told us for the first time that during these war years
under Romanian fascism Jews were
forbidden to walk into the station through the main entrance. As a Jewish employee – as an “essential
engineer” working in the railroad station building – Carl had two options, he
explained to us: for the two year period
he was compelled to work there, he could either climb over a fence several long blocks away and walk to his work
quarters the back way, or he could take
off the yellow star and walk in through the main entrance, trying to pass as a non-Jew. “One day a German officer looked me
right in the eye and said: ‘If I see you without that star one more time, you
go straight to Moghilev [Transnistria],’” Carl told us. In front of that station, on site,
it came clear to us that he had to make that decision, every single day for two
years.
We realized then, and in many other such instances, that
one of our challenges in writing about our parents and others during the war
was this: How to take hold and incorporate
into our previous understanding instances of everyday life (such as the one
in front of the railroad station) that are not usually recorded, and how to do
justice to their revelatory texture and quality. We realized on the spot that as significant as that
narrative about the train station seemed to us, to Carl it seemed normal, hardly worth telling.
How many other such stories were there? How many were now forever
inaccessible? And – how could we succeed in evoking and
transmitting to readers the quality of danger, as well as the sense of normality, that Carl and Lotte and
their contemporaries needed to hold on to throughout the war years, and,
subsequently, in their recollections?
How could we access and convey their fuller, more complex, stories of
survival within the horrors of wartime – the indignities, threats, violence,
but also the ironies and, at times, even the humor of trying to cope? How could we preserve the knotted
emotional fabric of daily existence under extreme circumstances as well as its
afterlife in the process of recollection and witness? This was a central concern when we decided to write Ghosts of Home.
