What else is there to say?

content advisory for genocide and its ugliness, despite what that one Tennessee school board seems to think

Here is a story:

In 1943, a 13-year-old boy flees Stryj, Poland. His father, now dead two years after being shot in a ditch, is followed by his mother and the younger of his two sisters. The boy travels to Warsaw, where he takes refuge as an altar boy until his voice grows too deep and his cover too weak. He labors as a yard hand for a time, before a suspicious neighbor challenges the woman for whom he works, forcing her to confront him and reveal, shamefully, humiliatingly, his circumcision. The neighbor calls the Gestapo, who jail him. He escapes.

He survives the war in hiding, escaping jail twice. He travels to Munich, where he somehow, miraculously, reunites with his eldest sister. She survived. A Jewish organization advertises travel to Montreal for survivors younger than 18 years old. His sister—already 26, married, with a child born in the displaced persons camp—cannot join him; he conceals his age and arrives in Montreal in 1947. He survived.

Here is a story, again: 

A boy, the youngest sibling to two sisters, is born in 1929 to a delighted father, an established jeweler in Stryj, Poland. In a large Orthodox family that lived in the same large apartment house, he counted 45 cousins as his elders and playmates.

Though his family felt the growing antisemitism in Poland, and his eldest sister begged his father to leave the country to join family in the United States, they stayed. Their father cared for his elderly parents and performed the honor of tending to the family gravesites. They would not leave their home.

The next part is the same. On September 14, 1941, 300 men of Stryj were rounded up and shot, buried in the woods. The rest of the 11,000 Jews were herded into the ghetto, proportioned only rotten potatoes to eat. In the next two years, his eldest sister left to work in a factory; her dreams of becoming an architect long since curtailed by the ban on Jewish children from attending local schools. In 1943, when the Nazis purged the ghetto and placed the remaining Jews on trains to concentration camps, the boy’s mother bid her children to flee. But his remaining sister refused to leave their mother, and only the boy obeyed.

Here, the story changes: as the trains departed, the boy hid behind a pile of wood, only to be discovered by Polish soldiers, who imprisoned him. The boy, so skinny from his meals of rotten potatoes, jiggled the loose bars on the jail cell window and escaped by climbing out, then sliding down a drain pipe. The soldiers found him again and, in their infinite wisdom, imprisoned him in the same jail cell. He escaped a second time, fleeing to the factory where his eldest sister worked. Taking the little money she had to offer, he hitched on a freight train and traveled to Warsaw.

Now, a city. Now, the story continues: the house work the same. The neighbor as well. This time, though, the woman bribes the Nazi—with what, who knows? And the boy escapes imprisonment, encampment, or something worse. But he could not stay. Here, again, the same story, in a different order: false papers, a new name, now Janek, now a Catholic, and refuge in the same Catholic orphanage. Then, again, a voice change, a cover withered, and into the world.

Here, the story changes, again. A job walking a dog. A friend of his sister’s passed on the street who recognizes a boy—now transformed considerably, but still a boy she once knew. She informs his sister who, unbeknownst to him, has since relocated to Warsaw. They meet surreptitiously, a miracle.

Here, the story changes, again. The boy meets a girl in the Polish resistance whose parents offer him refuge. Now fifteen, he learns to shoot. Here, portions are missing. His sister: captured, encamped, about which she never spoke. She survives to liberation and returns to the resistance house in Warsaw where the boy found shelter. Now bombed, the city gutted, only the doorframe remained. She tacks a note to the splintered wood, hoping he would return. They meet, again, another miracle. Of 45 cousins, these two remain.

Together, they travel to Munich, to await a new life. Here, the story is the same: a concealed age—who could know a boy that skinny is truly 18?—and a boat to Montreal, chartered by the Canadian Jewish Congress. Taken in by a couple who lost their son to the war, the story continues: a high school equivalency. A scholarship to McGill University, graduating top of his class. To the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a PhD, where in his first year at a dance with the girls of Simmons College, he meets the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants whose ancestors blessedly arrived in America before the wars. In July 1955, they marry, though she insists on finishing school. They have three children. He lives to see three grandchildren of an eventual six. Cousins, close, who spend summers together on a wide, low bay, playing in the sand.

The story becomes jumbled over time. Imprisonments and escapes, separations and reunions mix together as we recite them from our patchwork sources, though they seem linear and complete compared to most.

Here is a story, again:

I am sitting at the dining room table of my Grandma Phyllis’s apartment. We are sifting through her archive. Boxes upon boxes of memories documenting many lives, including the boy’s. In a plastic accordion folder labeled, “Sol,” I pull out a browned document with a chunk missing from the side entitled

FOR NEW MEMBERS OF DIVISION OF INDUSTRIAL COOPERATION STAFF

WHO ARE NOT U.S. CITIZENS

Here, in his handwriting, a list of places:

“Grandma,” I say, “I didn’t know Grandpa Sol lived in Lodz. Or—” in my ignorance, I point to the name that I cannot pronounce.¹ 

Here, a story, again, but mismatched from human memory. An archival clue to gaps unspoken in this recital of the past, portions of time that did not exist in this telling or that one, waved away in his own words: “I am not going to dwell at length about events which I might prefer not to remember. I don’t think there is much value in doing that.” Was Sochaczew the orphanage? Lodz, the resistance? Or another turn, another tale of survival that we cannot fathom?

A recitation missing notes, a dance without steps, a book lacking pages—metaphors insufficient to describe the absence of human memory against that archival.

From Stryj to Munich via Warsaw, Sochaczew, Lodz, and elsewhere. There are two Stryjs on either side of the Polish-Ukrainian border. The Stryj of this story is located in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine.

“Spiegelman” is German for “mirror man.” In Maus, Art Spiegelman holds a mirror to villainy and spares no one from scrutiny. Many weeks ago, as I thought about how to write this story, I scrolled through the third printed catalogue from Type Punch Matrix, which featured photos from the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. I understood why Spiegelmen depicted Jews as mice: zooming in on the photos of these men, all I could see were their ears.

Maus tells a story of Spiegelman’s father, his survival, his family’s murder, his wife’s suicide; it tells a story of destruction internal and external, of utter silence and betrayal. It’s not worth attempting to summarize, I’ll jumble it. The important bits are mirrored in the story I’ve just told you: refusal, humiliation, abandonment, death, loss, impossible choices, unthinkable survival. At its core, though, a tension between memory human and archival. A yearning to forget versus a desperation to remember.

In the second version of Maus, stunned and struck with writer’s block from the success of the first book, Spiegelman depicts a scene with his psychotherapist, himself a survivor, who offers that perhaps because those exterminated in the camps by the Nazis can never tell their stories, “Maybe it's better not to have any more stories.”  

Spiegelman replies by quoting Samuel Beckett: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” As if the silence and nothingness of forgetting might cover the remains of the camps in grass and fallen snow, tranquility blanketing graveyards of atrocity. Then, Spiegelman continues: “On the other hand, he said it.” I have never known what to make of that response. Is the “he” Beckett? The psychotherapist? Spiegelman’s father? Spiegelman himself? Who said it?

Many weeks ago, as I began to write this, one of my instructors for my Modern Literary Archives course shared an experience visiting one of the concentration camps in Germany. He noted that there was a wall of stories about victims of the Holocaust, recovered memory pieced together from archival fragments. The librarians and archivists who conducted that research were likely volunteers. They scoured records for months and years to find anything—a photo of a person smiling in a kitchen, a news clipping of an award won—that might speak life into those anonymized in death.

To that, our other instructor added, “The archive doesn’t owe us revelation. But maybe we owe it our time and patience to string together a little more meaning from people who have been forgotten.”

I have had this list saved in my Google Drive for nearly a year now. The archive doesn’t owe us revelation, I think, and this list reveals so much and nothing at all. Stryj. Warsaw. Sochaczew. Lodz. Munich. Montreal. Stryj. Warsaw. Sochaczew. Lodz. Munich. Montreal. Stryj. Warsaw. Sochaczew. Lodz. Munich. Montreal. Missing time and stories that will not be revealed: “events I might prefer not to remember.” On the other hand, he wrote it.

What else is there to say? Except to tell the story again. Who was the woman who bribed the Nazi? The soldier—dumb, or pitying—who placed a skinny boy in the same broken jail cell twice? The girl in the Polish resistance? The Catholic nuns? Small kindnesses that meant surviving another day. An endless list of things gone right boiled down to six shtetls and cities on a document tucked into a plastic folder in my Grandma’s laundry room.

What else is there to say but that this should enrage us. In February, when the Tennessee school board banned Maus, they cited its inappropriateness for eighth graders. As Eli Valley wrote in his comic strip on the decision: “Some argued the ban was not about Jewishness but tastefulness. But the Board wanted the Holocaust without violence, nudity, brutality, curses, malice, spite, fallibility, and lingering horrors.”

I do not know such a story. We know only so much about who we are before our family history is lobbed off, a lost branch outstretched into the past; I hope it was filled with joy amidst hardship, but it certainly didn’t conclude unmarred and whole, as this school board envisioned. Here is the story I have, and now you have it too: shot dead in a ditch, jailed, humiliated, betrayed, bombed. Miracles of happenstance, of the right place at the right time, of passing faces familiar but faraway on the street, of notes tacked to splintered wood. Of leaving your sister—again, again, again. Of surviving another day.

I keep thinking about the mirror man. Hold Maus up to these bans, and what do we see? In these reactionary school boards, these extremist, undemocratic fanatics whose logistical prowess overwhelms popular but scattered resistance, I see a clear reflection of the past made violently present. If not Maus, they would come for something else, and they already have. Not telling any more stories will not put them to rest.

Rostenberg and Stern’s observation, which I shared many weeks ago, resonates again: “It is one of the [reassurances] of life to understand fully that…hints of the present have been given in the past, and that over all seeming chasms there are bridges.” I wrote then that there is a bone-deep banality to the repetitiveness of evil, the entirely unimaginative means by which cruelty slams it fist against social difference. And now, I add, such inexpressible embodiment in the endeavor of survival, the entirely unimaginable ways in which humans persist towards the promise of life.

That is to say, in his own words:

In the fall of 1946, I found myself in Munich, among Jews once again, and I decided for the first time since my father’s presumed death some five years earlier to say Kaddish…And so I went to this make-shift Shul on Yom Kippur Day to participate in the Yizkor Service. The Shul was fairly small, but very hot and very crowded.  That was not so unusual. But there was something strange, something peculiar about the people in the Shul. For one thing, there was almost an eerie silence prior to the beginning of the Service. Can you imagine a Jewish crowd not talking? They just stood and waited, I among them. I later realized why. They were strangers to each other. They came from all parts of Europe—Poland, Hungary, Romania, some from Germany. But nobody belonged in Munich. We were not a congregation ready to pray as a congregation. Yet, just as the Chazzin intoned the Yizkor Service, a true transformation took place. Suddenly, we all knew each other—we all knew why we were there—we all remembered. We became a congregation, a tightly knit congregation.

This is what I have to say about the gaps that we settle with between what we remember and what he recorded: My grandfather spoke publicly of his survival only once to his congregation in New Jersey after the war—the synagogue my Grandma Phyllis still attends today. His written account, which omits these “events which I might prefer not to remember,” audio tapes in very poor quality, my Grandma Phyllis’s recollections, our family members’ memories, and this list of cities jotted down for the “Division of Industrial Cooperation” document his story. Human and archival memory weaving together, speaking with one another across toil and trial and time. Thin-railed but sturdy, over all chasms are bridges.

From Solomon Jan Buchsbaum’s naturalization papers to become a citizen of the United States of America. He kept Jan to honor the name and people who protected him for a time during the war.

housekeeping and birdseeking

house

• I initially wrote this essay in anticipation of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was observed last week (April 27-28). I was busy finishing a bunch of finals, which I’ll write about another time

• What I’m currently reading: It’s been a long month that left little time for leisure. I did see Everything Everywhere All At Once in theatres and holy smokes, what a film.

• Send this to a friend who wants to hear a story in a few different ways.

bird

• Look at this bird.

More later.

1. Soh-cha (the gutteral “ch” as in “chaf” in Hebrew)-chev (the hard “ch” as in “chew”)