Last night I attended a Yom HaShoah commemoration cosponsored by a number of Brooklyn Synagogues. It started with a short service, and following that, volunteers read names of people who died in the Holocaust. The reading of names continued until Shacharit this morning.
The names came from the Yad Vashem Names Project, from which they can be downloaded in categories. We started with adults, then read a long list of children (with their ages, which was very difficult to hear, especially with my own kids being 7 and 3). Of course, it's just inconceivable when you remember that even if you read names all night long, that's not even a drop in the bucket of the total number of names of those who were killed.
I asked at one point if there was a list of names of people from Germany who were murdered in the Holocaust. Yes, there is. I asked to read from that list when my turn came, and was permitted to do so. From 1 to 1:30 am, I read the names of people from Berlin, Frankfurt, Hannover, Bielefeld, and other places in Germany. Places I have visited. Places where I have family.
I wanted to read from the Germany list because that is where my mother came from, but this is where it gets complicated. My mom wasn't Jewish. Neither was, or is, her family, most of whom still live in Germany. My grandfather and great-uncles were in the German army in WWII. I am thankful that none in my family were members of the Nazi Party (that I know of), but neither did they qualify as righteous gentiles. And I am a Jew (I converted in 1999).
So how should I relate to the Holocaust? Do I think of myself as a descendant of the Germans who perpetrated it, or at least stood by and allowed it to happen? Or as a member of the Jewish people, of whom six million were killed? Both? How does that work?
I think this goes to core questions of identity. When you convert to Judaism, you are adopting a history and a people to which you are not blood-related (this is also often true when a child is adopted). I wonder how that works, and what it means to do that. Is it truly possible? Can a history that you were not born with become your history?
This is what happened with me:
My mom was born in Germany in 1939, and grew up there, emigrating to the US in 1968. I developed a feeling of guilt and shame about the Holocaust sometime in my teenage years—my identification with Germany was strong because of my mom. She and I were very close, and I had the sense that she carried around with her a lot of shame and guilt because of the Holocaust. Probably I partly inherited the feelings from her, even though it happened well before I was born, and when she was too young to have been involved.
I think I felt guilty in part because the Holocaust is still so present for many American Jews—as a young adult I heard people my age talk about how they would never buy a German product, or casually say, "I hate Germans." If they are still hating Germans of my generation, well, they must consider them in some way responsible or guilty—at the very least tainted by the past. I am an American, but my strong ties to my mom and her country of origin led me to feel like I was included in these sentiments, and that I deserved to be.
As I became deeply involved in Judaism in my mid- to late-twenties, this became an acute issue. I visited Auschwitz with a Jewish group from my synagogue, and we engaged in what I think of as Jewish remembering. The way that Jews remember our past is by putting ourselves in it. During the Passover seder, we are told not to say, "We were slaves in Egypt," but "We are slaves in Egypt." We are supposed to remember as if we are experiencing it now. I think this translates to the way we think of the Holocaust.
When we saw the relics of Auschwitz and tried to imagine the horrors that took place there, the Jews on the trip said, "I tried to put myself there." I did too, but when I did, I was on the other side, the side of the perpetrators, and could only wonder what I would have done. How brave would I have been? It's not a question I can answer, and I was left feeling, again, guilty and helpless. It was a different kind of pain than that experienced by my Jewish friends. Part of my experience was that I felt my pain was deserved because of my family history, and theirs wasn't. Though I couldn't change it, I felt like I had something to do with causing their pain.
I was in love with a Jewish man (to whom I am now married) whose mother's family also came from Germany, his grandparents arriving shortly before the war. But not all of his family got out. I struggled with what it meant to bring our two histories together.
Then I converted to Judaism. Jewish tradition says that when someone converts to Judaism, her past is wiped clean, as if it never happened. You are "born" when you convert, so your previous life is gone. You take the name ____bat (daughter of) or ben (son of) Avraham and Sarah, the first Jews. I reject this. My family and my past are part of who I am, and there is no way I would want to wipe it away, even if I could. I am Ruth bat Avraham v'Sarah and bat Elisabeth v'Penrose.
This meant that for me, the identity question became more complicated. Now the two histories were both mine. In the years since, when asked my ethnicity, I've often said, "I'm Jewish, and I'm German, but I'm not a German Jew."
And so there I was last night, finding myself eagerly asking to read German names, with their familiar spellings and sounds, and the names of familiar places where they lived. When I asked myself why I wanted that, there was a small part of me that wanted to recognize that these people shared a homeland with my family, and they were betrayed in part by my family, so there was maybe some kind of penance in reading those names.
My predominant thought and feeling, though, was different. It was this: If I had been alive back then, I would have been a German Jew (as opposed to Polish, Russian, French, etc.). I wanted to read the names of the Jews who would have been my fellow German Jews. Somehow, when I now try to imagine myself in that time and place, there is no question that that self is Jewish.
I'm left with the thought that your identity is what you feel it is. It is who you know that you are. Your history is the history you claim. There are times in life when identity is challenged or changed—if you convert, or if you become a parent, for example—and it takes time for that new identity to settle and feel true. That's not an easy time, because there is insecurity in not being sure of who you are. After a while, though, it does settle and you can feel whole again—at least until the next identity shift. And the parts of your identity don't have to fit neatly together.
The Holocaust is as much my tragedy as it is that of any other American Jew who did not lose family members to it. At the same time, there is my non-Jewish family history. That's part of me too. When I was in Germany last year, I heard a representative of the Israeli embassy in Berlin say that after WWII, both the Germans and the Jews said, "Never Again." The Jews said, "Never Again will we allow ourselves to be slaughtered without defending ourselves." The Germans said, "Never Again will we stand by while innocent people are slaughtered." I say Never Again from both perspectives.
My identity has some pieces that aren't often thrown together, but I'm not unusual in that. Some of my pieces seem like they wouldn't fit together, but I'm not unusual in that either. Maybe the key is to recognize that our identities are in some way always shifting, whether the changes are seismic or subtle. My identity is messy and it's hard figure out, but I'll take the trouble. It's worth it.
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