Storytellersunplugged

by Janet Berliner

A few months ago, I promised to write about the story behind the story of CRICHTON-ON-CRICHTON. Since then, after a decade of work and promises, I have received a message via the doctor’s agent: “Michael says he no longer has any interest in the book.” Before writing anything further about it, I have to find out my legal standing on the contracts and collaboration agreement which we both signed. Thus, once again, the topic will have to wait.

I have finally completed STONES. Since many people have asked that I continue to post chapters here—and because it’s a topic I feel needs to be aired—I give you

Chapter 15: Who Will Tell the Children.

When the Wall came down and I returned from Israel and Berlin, I tried to write about my experiences. I thought about my children and my grandchildren, and about how we, my generation, could pass on to them what was likely to be but a few lines in their history books. The words that kept running around in my head were Thomas Jefferson’s: “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”

The opportunity to explore my feelings did not come along until years later, after my next trip to Israel and visits to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, and to the Children’s Memorial.

The Children’s Memorial is a circular underground structure built by Abraham and Edita Spiegel of Beverly Hills in memory of Uziel, their son who perished in Auschwitz. It commemorates the one and a half million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust.

One and a half million…1,500,000…children.

The memorial hall itself stands in darkness. It is built in much the same way as a Disneyland ride. You walk into the darkness through a small anteroom in which three-dimensional photos of children are exhibited. A railing separates you from a circular floor. The walls and ceiling are a series of convoluted mirrors. Five burning memorial candles are multiplied into tens of millions of pinpricks of light, symbolizing the souls of children who perished. Softly the chant begins…a litany of their names forcing the weight of your body in a circle through the darkness and back out into the stark sunlight.

I knew that if I lived to be a thousand, I could not remove that experience from my consciousness. Would that I could take each person in the world by the hand and lead them into that hall of lights.

As luck would have it, shortly after my return our very own Richard Dansky invited me to write the introduction to a daring experiment, a controversial game supplement called Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah. Who would have thought that a game could teach history? The Anti-Defamation League threw their arms up in horror, until they saw for themselves what Richard and White Wolf, his publisher, had achieved.

What I wrote was the prologue to the game book; I called it, Mi Yagid Labanim: Who Will Tell the Children?

With your indulgence, here is an excerpt:

My daughter, a contemporary Jewish American teenager, when first forced to face her heritage, felt put upon. She had nothing to do with the past. She was not involved.

It’s not my problem.

All of that stuff happened ages ago.

Why rehash ancient history?

Forget it already.

Forget it? Forget prejudice, violence, ethnic strife, genocide?

I don’t think so.

So what do we do to ensure that our children and their children and their children remember? For if they do not remember, the attempt to make it happen again will be repeated.

Which group will be singled out the next time around? Redheads, perhaps, or blue-eyed blondes?

It’s not the N word or the J word, or what’s PC and what’s not that matters. It’s learning that we are setting each other apart without regard for human dignity and making it possible for genocide to reoccur when we say things like, “There’s a black man at the door” instead of “There’s a man at the door”, or “I bought the car at a great price. Boy, did I Jew him down.”

Again I ask, what do we do about it? What can we do?

The answer is that we must do what we can, each in our own way…in short stories, in essays, in poetry and novels, often using magic realism to define truths too painful and ugly to be faced in any other form.

Each time I complete a piece of work, I think…I hope…that I have done with it. That I have paid my dues.

But for some things the dues can never fully be paid.

In a sense, it is like the bodily functions that most of us perform daily. Each day, having performed them, we feel relief. We feel clean. And then the offal begins to gather once more and as surely as night follows day, the pressing need for elimination returns.

So it is with my creative bowels. When I think that I have written enough, I discover that I must write more. And while I do, I question if that is in fact the answer to educating our children’s children. The survivors are old. Their children are growing old. Their grandchildren say it is not their problem. Many of them do not know about their roots, still more do not care. What, I ask myself, will work to educate and inform the children of the new millennium? Will they read William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, will they watch Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, or do we have to feed them horrors in some form that makes it palatable for them?

If we give them a Holocaust website, will it serve as a tool of awareness, or will it turn evil into a game?

Before Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List, I was repeatedly told that no one wanted to hear about the Holocaust. That wasn’t true, was it? His film was a box office smash, even in Germany.

Why does that not surprise me?

Because I was in Berlin in the seventies when the government insisted that all schoolchildren watch a documentary on Hitler; the children stomped and sang along and complained, asking why they too could not march and sing and have “…that kind of fun.” I was there in the eighties when groups of German children were taken to visit the sites of concentration camps and complained because they were not able to see the machinery in action. I was there in the nineties when a game was developed that invited the participants to devise better ways of ridding the world of Jews.

On the day Richard called to ask me to write this essay, I had written the last scene of the third book in a trilogy of Holocaust novels. I was going through my research materials, packing them away with a sense of relief, when the telephone rang. As I lifted the receiver, I held in one hand a precious sepia photograph of my grandmother with her older brother and three sisters, taken somewhere around 1929. The glass had cracked, so I was removing the photograph in order to put it into a new frame.

“Hello,” I said, idly turning over the photograph.

The script on the back was tiny, fine and faded. I used a magnifying glass to read it:

Siegfried Lichtenstein. Born 1880. An officer in the Kaiser’s Army. Mostly invalided after the war. Applied to go to Johannesburg, but stayed in Regensburg, Bavaria, when his wife was refused a visa. He thought that he was safe, what with half the bones missing in his face. He was one of the first to be deported.

My darling wife, Recha Lichtenstein. Born 1887. Married James Abraham. Arrived safely Cape Town, South Africa, 13th June, 1936.

Recha Lichtenstein Abraham.

My adored grandmother. The story-teller of the family, saved and brought to South Africa through the ingenuity of my mother—her youngest daughter…

I heard what Richard said on the phone that day through the keening voices of the collective unconscious of the dead—my own family, and the family of Man.

Earnestly, he explained what it was he was trying to do.

I started to argue, to say that the Holocaust was not a game, but a voice inside my head stopped me. “We must teach them through the tools with which they are comfortable,” it said. “Insanity and entertainment have become interchangeable.”

We can look at program guides and choose to: Watch the Disney Channel; Watch Discovery; Watch a murder trial; Hear David Duke address his hooded comrades about an all-White Christian America; See Farrakahn, surrounded by his uniformed guards, use rhetoric and mannerisms almost identical to Hitler’s. Once upon a time, I thought, there were bards and storytellers who passed on the words of the elders and the history of their peoples. Then came the era when the pen was mightier than the sword.

But there are few bards now, and as we approach the millennium, the pen diminishes in power. Someone, somewhere, somehow, must tell the children.

While Richard waited patiently for my answer, I recalled a day I spent in Nice, in an old stone building overlooking the Mediterranean. As if it were happening again, I saw myself being handed a trust by my great uncle, a Holocaust survivor who had nary an organ fully intact. Our conversation switched back and forth between six languages, only five of which I fully understood—something he did out of old habit from his concentration camp days when such devices were some protection from eavesdroppers. He gave me a copy of La Deportation. The book was a compilation of black and white photographs, which had recently been released from the French government’s archives. They were stark and unembellished by text. Snapshots taken by German guards and “technicians” in the camps and sent to their families to show them what their sons and brothers and fathers were doing during their workday.

“Take this to America,” my great uncle said. “Make them publish it.”

I hand carried eight copies of that heavy book to the States. For a year, I devoted myself to trying to get it reprinted here.

Every copy of the book was stolen from the publishers to whom I sent it.

The book was never reprinted here, nor do I have a copy today. My great uncle is dead. But in my own mind’s eye those black and white photographs, taken with box cameras—the toys of that time—teach the full lesson of the inhumanities of which man is capable.

Remembering, I asked Richard to whom he wished me to address the essay.

“That’s up to you,” he said. “By whom do you wish most to be heard?”

“By the children,” I said, picturing the Children’s Memorial Garden at Yad Vashem. It was there, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, that I had the most profoundly moving experience of my life. “That is my greatest fear…that when my generation is gone, there will be no one left who will tell them the true history of mankind’s darkest moment.”

No one to remind them that “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”

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