“They’re coming back. Make no mistake about it. Doesn’t matter what you think you are, they are coming back for you. You are a Jew,” my mother often told me.
I’m not. I’m an atheist. At 5, I told her so, thus creating a chasm between us that went unresolved, even with our last goodbye, when she died of lymphoma nearly 20 years ago.
My mother displayed her fears, though always quietly, through the years I was growing up with her continual barrage of warnings. As children, she insisted my sister and I go to Hebrew school, regardless of my protests as an atheist. In my teens, she insisted we join her in watching The Holocaust mini-series. She sat riveted through each episode, hand to mouth to stifle gasping in horror.
Regardless of her indoctrination, I didn’t feel afraid the Nazis would return because in my family then, and my own family now, the Nazis never left.
I will not deny my mother’s fears were warranted. She’d lived through WWII, saw the rise of fascism allow the murders of six million of her family and faith. She was old enough to witness Hitler’s speeches ignite the German underclass to hate, and blame everyone but themselves for their strife. She saw the world forever changed by our ability to destroy it, with the advent of the atomic bomb.
I tried often to dissuade my mother’s fears. I argued, “We’ve learned, Mom. That’s the best thing about us. When we’re standing on the precipice of disaster, we DO change!”
I was so confident in our uniquely human ability to ‘rise above’ our misfortunes, I married the son of a Holocaust survivor. My father-in-law was 13 when his family was forcibly removed from their suburban home in Łódź, Poland, and imprisoned in the ghetto northeast of the city. He was there for eight months when his father, mother, and two younger sisters were murdered in front of him, and he was put on a train to Flossenburg concentration camp in Bavaria, and eventually to Auschwitz. A prisoner for five years, his teens were spent as a slave, laboring in an Audi factory, watching people murdered and committing suicide daily, until Auschwitz was ‘liberated’ by the Russians in 1945.
My father-in-law came to the States as an immigrant several years later. He settled in New Jersey, started his own business, and then married. My husband was born a year later, and his sister — my sister-in-law — 3 years after that.
Growing up, the kids knew vaguely of their father’s plight. They’d awake, frightened by the “horrific screams” of their dad’s nightmares. As my husband described it: “My dad told us he was ‘in camp,’ and I had a problem with that. I’d gone to summer camp, and I knew this wasn’t the same thing, but it wasn’t clear to me why he’d had such a bad time.”
The Holocaust was not discussed in my husband’s household. He didn’t dare ask his dad for any details, though his father’s nightmares woke him often during his formative years. His father’s screaming frightened him as a child, but even more as he grew up and studied the Holocaust in school, and learned, even in the abstract, what may have happened to his dad. His parents had made it clear by their silence — in almost all things of intimate relevance — they were not open to discussing virtually anything beyond the day-to-day logistics of living.
My husband was in his last year of college when his sister gathered the family and recorded their father’s experience before, during, and after WWII for a history assignment. The ‘kids’ were young adults when they discovered the details of their father’s past during this singular interview. No one in the family ever spoke of it again.
My father-in-law learned young that the only way to survive was to avoid conflict at all costs. His wife, my mother-in-law, having experienced her own traumatic youth, had adopted the same position on the emotional safety of stoic silence, likely long before they met and married. My husband’s parents were married 50 years before my father-in-law passed. They did not discuss their life experiences with their children, or even with each other beyond the surface of these painful events. Neither went to counseling, ever. They ran a small business and raised their kids in their loving, yet separate way, never really letting anyone in, too afraid to get intimate.
Understandable, with where they came from. But, oh, so very costly.
Feelings don’t just GO AWAY when we don’t talk about them. More often than not, when buried , feelings of hurt, frustration, sadness, fear will resurface, and manifest as unwarranted aggression, especially towards the people we love, since it’s likely they’ll still love us, regardless of the slights.
These powerful feelings of anger and fear, buried deep in my husband’s parents, prevented them from validating their children’s feelings, forcing their kids to bury their own feelings under the suffocating weight of shame associated with having any. The 27 years I’ve known my sister-in-law, she won’t watch a sad movie, read a sad book, and has never admitted to feeling sad, even through her son’s ADHD hardships, or during her very contentious divorce. She never talks about feelings, hers or anyone’s, and refuses to even acknowledge emotional questions I ask her by ignoring that I’ve spoken to her at all. My husband’s sister has played the role of ‘good girl’ to avoid conflict, well known in the ‘survivor’ community, suppressing all negative feelings, never getting honest, and therefore intimate with anyone, even herself.
My husband has Asperger’s syndrome, commonly understood to be a mild form of Autism. Though never formally diagnosed, we’ve seen enough therapists together and most have identified specific autistic behaviors that fall within the Aspergers spectrum. Higher rates of Aspergers is well documented among Holocaust survivors’ offspring. He ‘floods’ with intense emotion, his or anyone’s directed at him. He shuts down completely, becomes calmly and coolly irrational, contentious and attacking when pushed to engage in dialog in this flooded state. He’s the victim in most of his narratives and refuses to be held accountable for the conflicts he creates when he’s flooding. And with any conflict, flooding can last anywhere from a few hours to months.
When my husband is with me, is present and open and unafraid, he is the love of my life — kind, smart, respectful, responsible, fun. He is my best friend in every measure when he’s all there and we’re connecting, but married 27 years, and I know not to trust this behavior will last. Conflict is a part of life. And whether I say something he doesn’t like, or a boss has, my husband begins the flooding process and cannot hear and does not remember what is said in the exchange. Since I’ve known him, he’s been fired or forced to quit 15+ full-time positions after pissing off his supervisors enough that my brilliant software developer husband held most jobs for less than 2 yrs.
The effects of the Holocaust are still powerful, present, and residing in our house. The hate Hitler ignited still reverberates almost a century — three generations later — embodied in my husband every time he shuts down to avoid conflict, dismisses or ignores his feelings, or mine, or our kids, or his bosses, as his parents taught him to do. The fear the Nazis instilled in so many has been passed through the generations like a genetic disease.
My mother carried this fear with her to her grave. As a matter of course, she made me afraid, of all people — our ability to abandon our humanity and turn our backs on neighbors we once held dear, in response to fear. I got lucky, though. My mom felt passionate about so much, and shamelessly displayed feelings of joy, anger, fear, and sadness at times, gifting me the opportunity to acknowledge and express my own.
My husband understands that he floods, and how destructive this is to establishing and maintaining trust in him, his parenting, and our partnership. During peaceful times free of conflict, he works to connect with me, and our kids, and open up his awareness to the effect he has on the world outside his own head. In moments, when he wins the war with himself, and he can see his own behavior clearly, share his vulnerability and acknowledge his culpability, we touch intimacy. And in those moments, we stop Hitler’s legacy at our doorstep.
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