All Holocausted Out: What I Think of Non-Jews Using the Word Holocaust

I got an email in the comments section of this blog from the scholar Danusha Goska about something that I said in my posting about how I came to write my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues.  I had mentioned that a friend said to me that I must be “all holocausted out” after writing my first book about my parents.

Dr. Goska wanted to know what I thought about using the word “Holocaust” to describe the experiences of non-Jews like my parents in World War II.

The following is my answer to her question:

My mother wasn't an educated woman. She had no college, no high school even. She couldn't read the books that argue about who was and who was not in the Holocaust.

When I was growing up, she never said she was in the Holocaust. She wasn’t a talker, but she talked little about what happened to her family. Her mother and sister and the sister's baby were killed by German Soldiers and Ukrainian neighbors. She had two aunts who died in Auschwitz with their Jewish husbands. My mother spent a couple years in a slave labor camp in Germany. There were Jews and non-Jews in her camp; people suffered and died there. She didn’t talk about any of this much, and when she did she didn’t use the word “Holocaust.”

This changed as she got older. Toward the end of the 1990s, she started talking about how she was in the Holocaust. I think part of this might have come from the fact that people in general, not historians or academics but “just plain folks,” were using the term more often. They had seen Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful and Holocaust and other films about the Holocaust. I heard her using this word and saying that she was in the Holocaust. She said this to Christians (she was Catholic) and Jews alike. Maybe it was a sort of short hand for her. She was getting older and it was harder for her, I think, to try to explain to people that Polish Catholics also were in death camps and slave labor camps like their Jewish neighbors.

Was my mother right to use this word “Holocaust”? Did she have a right to use this word?

I think she had a right. When my father tried to talk about what happened to my mother during the war, he couldn’t say much. Sometimes, he would start crying, and all he could say then was, “She suffered so much.”

I have an education, and I’ve read about the debate concerning the word “Holocaust.” I think I can lay out some of the arguments from each side in a rudimentary sort of way given the complexity of everything that happened in World War II. One side feels that the Holocaust is what happened to the Jews alone. This side feels that the Nazis and their anti-Semitic allies in all countries worked to eliminate the Jews, and that what happened to the Jews was unique. The other side of the argument has it that Non-Jews by the millions from all of Europe suffered and died alongside the Jews, and that the term Holocaust should apply to all of those who suffered and died in the camps.

So, you ask, what do I think about using the word “Holocaust.” First, I’d have to say that I would never have told my mother that she wasn’t in the Holocaust. I think she had a right to describe her experiences in any way that she saw fit. She was there, she suffered. If she felt she was in the Holocaust, I wouldn’t argue with her.

Second, let me say, that I believe that what happened to Jews was different from what happened to non-Jews. Jews were singled out for immediate destruction. They suffered, they starved, they waited, they died, they waited, they died. Non-Jews who were considered non-Aryan (the Poles, the Italians, the Russians, the Rumanians, the Czechs, and others) were not singled out for immediate destruction. They suffered, they lingered, they starved, they waited, they died, they waited. My father used to talk about the difference between the death camps that the Jews were in and the slave labor camps he was in this way: The Jews, he would say, were in the death camps; he was in the slow-death camps.

To me, it doesn’t seem necessary to spend time discussing the word “Holocaust” and whether it’s applicable to what happened to my parents and other non-Jews.

I think about the Jewish dead and I think about the non-Jewish dead. They are dead.

What I know of hell comes to me primarily from my reading of Dante’s Inferno. In his hell, no one is untouched by pain. Everyone suffers. Some suffer more. Some suffer most. What I know of pain and suffering teaches me that I cannot judge the suffering and pain another feels. I can try to ease that pain and suffering. That is pretty much all I can do.

Let me also say this, I think that all of us who talk about what happened in those dark years of Hitler’s ascendancy and power and the Holocaust and suffering he helped to bring about finally cannot fully understand what happened or what it felt like or what it was like. In this respect, all of us, despite our very best efforts, cannot know what the Holocaust was. We are finally tourists in the kingdom of the Holocaust. We look, we wonder, we cry, we look, we turn away, we look again.

How I Came to Write Lightning and Ashes

I started working on the poems for Lightning and Ashes after my father died in 1997.

Before he died, I thought I was finished with writing about him and my mom. I had started writing about them in 1979, and I felt I had written about all the poems I thought I was going to write about them and their experiences in the Nazi slave labor camps. I had written about how he and my mother were taken separately from their homes in Poland, about what their experiences in Germany were like, and about what life was like when my parents and my sister and I came to America. I felt I had said all I had to say about that part of my parents' life and what it meant to me.

After he died, I gathered all of these poems together and started thinking about publishing them in a chapbook, Language of Mules.

When a friend saw the chapbook, he said, "Now, you're done with the past, you can work on something else." Well, he really didn't say that. He said, "Now that you've published this, you must be all holocausted out. You can write about something else."

All holocausted out?

If he had heard this, my dad would have shrugged and said, what a world, what a world.

But I wasn't done writing about my parents. It didn't work out like that.

After my dad died, my mom started talking about her experiences in the war. She had never done that before except in the most general terms. I remember her saying how hard the war was. When I was a kid and would ask her about the war, she would say, "If they beat you, you run. If they give you bread, you eat it." And then she'd wave me away, tell me to do something, leave her alone. I wrote about this in my poem "Here's What My Mother Won't Talk About."

However, after my father's death, she wanted to talk about her experiences. It's as if when my dad was alive, it was his responsibility to talk about the war, and he would--at every opportunity, obsessively and deeply. He was like the man who wakes up from a terrible dream and can't stop talking about it because he needs to convince himself that the dream is over. He would talk and talk, and my mother would leave the room or tell him to shut up and get to work on some chore he started and hadn't finished. It was like that. And then my dad died, and there was nobody to tell the stories about the war.

And that's when my mother started talking to me. I remember it was the autumn after my dad died and I was visiting her in Sun City, Arizona. We were sitting around in the evening after dinner, watching TV, Schindler's List, and we got to the end of the film, and I asked her what it was like after the war in the slave labor camps. She started talking. She told me stories that night and the next night and the night after that. These were the stories that I used in my poem "My Mother Talks about the Slave Labor Camps." It was one of the last poems I wrote for Language of Mules.

After that, we would talk a lot about the war and her life before it. When I would visit her, I would have my yellow legal pad ready, to write down what she would say. Sometimes, when I didn't have it out, she would ask, "Where's you yellow paper?" And I would to take it out, and she would sit there and wait for me to ask her a question, and I would ask her things like what was the ocean like when we came over, or how did your father die, or what made you happy when you were a little girl? She would start talking then, and I would write.

The stories she told became a lot of the poems that I put in Lightning and Ashes.

Some of them came from her, and some of them came from my dad. In his last great illness, the one that he never recovered from, he didn't talk much, mainly what I heard from him were short cries for help or for his mother or my mother. He was in a lot of pain. Sometimes, he would lift himself out of his death bed and try to pull the IVs and the wires out. And sometimes, he tried to throw himself on the floor so he could escape the bed, crawl away. What I saw there was a man struggling to live, and struggling to live the way he felt he had to live. His dying taught me a lot about his living and what he must have been like when he was working and living in the camps. A lot of this went into the poems in Lightning and Ashes. What also went into the poems were the stories he told me in the years before his dying.

When I was a child, he would tell me about his life in the camps, the work he did, the way the Germans treated him, the friends he had and lost, the things he saw, the pain and joy and hunger he felt. Some of these things got into Language of Mules, but some of them I didn't remember until later, until after his death, and after my mother's death.

After my mother died and we came back from her funeral in Chicago, I spent a lot of time alone. My daughter was off teaching in Virginia, my wife was at work. I would sit upstairs in my study and think and write. These thoughts and writings became the poems in Lightning and Ashes, a book with as much of my mother and father's pain and anger and hunger and longing and dreams as I could remember.

When I finished the writing, I wanted to call the book Worthless because of something my mother would ask over and over about her life, "What was it worth?" But I couldn't bring myself to call it that.