holocaust – W. M. Tag Writes

I watched a movie today from 1999 that I’d heard about. Starring Kirsten Dunst before her Spiderman fame. She was a young Jewish woman who didn’t understand the traditions nor the reasons why she had to attend the ceremonial gatherings until she’s magically transported back to 1941 where she faces the Nazis and dies in a gas chamber only to wake up back in modern times. I thought it was well done. I’ll definitely say that much of the Nazi depictions were glossed over for the sake of audiences.

Someone who didn’t gloss anything over was Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. She’s the author of Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land. She doesn’t gloss anything over. She’s real, genuine, and lets the horror speak for itself. It’s very bold, just like the author, and states truly what living in Auschwitz was like and what dying in Auschwitz was like.

She was arrested first because she was a member of the Nazi resistance and sent to jail. From jail, she was sent to Auschwitz but not until late in 1943-44. So she caught the last push of the Nazis to kill as many Jews as possible, overwhelming the crematoriums so much so that they resorted to just burning people alive in the trenches.

This class I took in the first semester of my Junior year transformed me. I had hoped to get pointers on how to do a really great memoir or diary. I’m not sure I realized what studying Holocaust memoirs would be like.

Another example of a chilling retelling of Holocaust survival is Elie Wiesel’s Night. I believe this one is just as horrific as Sara Nomberg’s but while Sara was in the women’s prison, closer to the trenches and the crematoriums, Elie Wiesel and his father were in the men’s area from 1944 – 45.

Both memoirs read like a collection of essays set in chronological order. They are honest and I could only imagine what writing them must have been like for both survivors. Because both Nomberg and Wiesel survived the Holocaust. I wondered if writing it down was like getting the dirty, gritty trauma out or if it was more like reliving a nightmare and putting it all on paper so others can live it too. However the authorship affected them, the testimony of what they went through is harrowing and each of them focuses on certain topics. Sara Nomberg focuses on mothers and children while Elie Wiesel focuses on the relationship to fathers and sons as well as how he was forced to literally told again and again to turn his back on his father so he could survive.

There are many, many memoirs and I’ve ready only a few but these are three, including one I mentioned in the previous post, that really stood out to me. I’m still trying to catch up on all I ignored to finish up my last semester and once I can catch up, I hope to start pursuing certificates and perhaps even playing around with another nation’s version of Adobe where I can afford to publish my next book in the Dorian series. It just feels like adulthood is a series of choices to delay enjoyment and gratification until I get all my work done. Nothing at all like I was promised when people would tell me I’d be so happy to be an adult.

I fell when I was 13. When I tried to save myself, I landed on the ball of my right foot. Weak ankles should have been my middle name. The ball of my ankle actually popped out of the socket and then went back in. Yeah. That was the first week of summer break between sixth and seventh grade. I spent the whole summer laid up and barely able to move. So I finally got desperate enough at age 13 to read a book. My mom brought home a stack of books a few days after my accident and in desperation I picked one out.

It was 1983. There was no internet. We didn’t have cable. The 7 or 8 free tv channels we had didn’t have anything interesting on. There was no VCR or VHS tapes yet. I couldn’t walk on that leg for weeks! Never got an x-ray or anything. My parents wouldn’t pay for that. So I sat around and read this book I’d picked from my mother’s stack of books and loved it so much I realized that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: write stories!

The book was Daughter of Witches by Patricia C. Wrede.

I worked for 36 years as a caregiver because that just happened and it didn’t require much from me – just my soul and all my time and whatever was left over at the end of the day, assuming my day didn’t just melt to the next day in a triple shift of caring for someone with mental illness or alzheimers.

My father was my last patient. I retired after him. I sat around for a while and rested. I really needed that rest. Then I decided after my contemplation to go back to college then to university and pursue that degree that would allow me to write which is all I ever wanted to do.

So this, my second semester at UTD, my first as a Junior, I had a class called Contexts. This class focuses on a type of literature. The Professor, Dr. Patterson, focuses on memoirs and diaries, specifically one type of memoir and diary: the Holocaust.

One thing I learned is that there are 4000 memoirs and diaries to come out of the Holocaust. People who were already threatened by death went on to document the crimes happening to them and around them even though if they got caught it would mean being shot. I got to read two diaries and three memoirs over the Spring Semester. To say they are depressing is a huge understatement.

One of those the professor mentioned but that I’ll never read is this one.

The Nazis had the Jews do all the hard work. This means that the gas chambers and to some extent burning the dead were all jobs which Jews themselves had to do to their own people, a method of completely dehumanizing someone. Those who were working in the crematoria were called Sonderkommandos. This person accepted the job not knowing what it was and spent months pulling his own countrymen out of the gas chambers. If you’re in any way into horror, this is it right here. Real. Horror.

We’re approaching 90 years since the Holocaust happened. There are people who completely deny that the Holocaust ever occurred. The fact there are 4000 diaries and memoirs suggest that it did.

I’m considering highlighting portions of the books I’ve read. I thought about doing it on Facebook but I’m not sure they’d be cool with the subject matter. WordPress might allow me the freedom to post some excerpts with the understanding that these excerpts aren’t about happy things. There’s not a happy thing that happened in regard to the Holocaust. Most of those who were rescued after Hitler was defeated didn’t believe being rescued was a happy thing. By the time they were rescued, their ability to feel happiness had been forever altered.

The author of the above memoir did not survive.