ACCIDENTAL FICTION

I wrote my novel by accident.

My goal was to address a gap in Holocaust education and encourage educators to consider two rarely asked questions:

When we teach about Holocaust history, what's the best way to include—alongside Jewish Holocaust narratives—the Roma, disabled, homosexual, political, and many other victims of Nazism? And why are these victim groups so often forgotten?

To address that gap, I started to create educational materials and easy-to-implement lesson plans for teachers and school districts interested in these hidden histories. But putting together an educational unit around historical data that relied on encyclopedic reports full of dry facts and figures wasn't cutting it.

After all, much of Holocaust education is taught through compelling film (Schindler's List, The Pianist, The Diary of Anne Frank, Fateless, and so on) and fiction (Number The Stars, The Book Thief, The Devil's Arithmetic, The Reader, and others), all of which humanize history through individual stories. These books and movies go beyond dates and events to underscore key concepts of human behavior in the lead up and response to genocide.

And so I began to write a series of vignettes to make the narratives of Roma, homosexual, disabled, political, and other victims of Nazism engaging and relevant to middle school and high school students. Based on historical truth, I created a handful of fictional characters—all teenagers—each of whom, through a compelling short story, would represent the central narrative of a distinct victim community.

To tie the stories together, I set the stories in Nazi-era Berlin. And I found a way to place them all in early 1943. To stress the immediacy of each narrative, I wrote each story in present tense, first person so that events were unfolding in the moment.

For example, here, nineteen-year-old Tsura, a young Romani woman, is plotting to free her family from Marzahn, a Nazi encampment for 'Gypsies' at the edge of Berlin:

     Biting the skin on my chapped lips, I walk almost as fast as
     the chilling wind slipping between my neck and turned-up collar.
     The woolen overcoat hides the curves of my breasts and my
     dark hair is tucked tight into a flat cap. I look like a man—
     intentionally so—and feel stronger for it.

Surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly), as those single stories developed, they became entwined with one another.

Ruth and Alex, I discovered, are step-siblings. And Elise saves the life of street-smart Marko after they run into each other in Berlin's Hakescher Market. Elise, I realized, is a member of the Nazi Girls' League, but rarely talks about it to her best friend, Ruth. Meanwhile, Marko's sister Tsura, a member of an anti-Nazi resistance group, is over-protective of her younger cousin Kizzy who hates being treated like a kid. I also discovered that two of the characters are in love (take a guess which two!).

I was suddenly writing my first novel and it was turning into a bit of a page-turner!

I shared my first draft of TRAIN with some friends, colleagues, and members of my family who were as excited to read my book as I loved writing it. Their feedback led to a few more drafts and submissions to literary agents and a couple of publishers.

While I received flurries of rejections, a number of scholars and educators in the Holocaust education field were getting excited about the book and its accompanying curriculum.

A series of introductions and exciting moments led me to author and editor Christa Desir. Christa became my editor and, as soon as she took a look at my opening chapters, she pointed out a problem (echoed in the feedback I'd already received):

With multiple voices narrating interweaving accounts in present tense, first person, TRAIN wasn't working. The style was too jarring. And the individual voices sounded too similar. It all had to become one story.

I rewrote the first chapters of TRAIN in past tense, third person close point-of-view. The new style seemed to work. I was able to tell the story and still retain the important thoughts spinning inside the head of each central character. Here's the same scene as above, now re-written, plus a little more:

     They'll never know we were here.
         No sound. No impression in the dirt. Tsura had learned to keep
     her head below the brick walls of the city. To become the shadows
     and sidestep the light. She could recite each route by heart. Over
     railway lines and through private gardens, across main roads and
     public parks. But some checkpoints were impossible to avoid.
          A crowd had gathered close to the U-Bahn station. Two young
     soldiers blocked the entrance.
          "What's going on?" Tsura asked them.
          "The train station is closed," one of the soldiers said. He held
     out his gloved hand. "Papers?"
          Tsura handed over her identity documents for inspection. "What
     happened?"
          "Someone fell on the tracks."
          "Why are you dressed like a man?" the second soldier asked,
     rifle at his side.
          Tsura pointed at the sleeves of his jacket which didn't even
     reach his wrists. "Why are you dressed like a schoolboy?"
          The other soldier laughed. As he unfolded and checked her
     papers, his grin widened. "Nice to meet you, Greta. We share a
     birthday."
          "Lucky me," Tsura said. Her fake smile matched her false
     identity.

Today, I reached an exciting milestone. I've re-written all of TRAIN in the past tense, third person close. And I just sent the manuscript to Christa for comments.

Although anything could happen on this exciting journey toward publication, there's a chance TRAIN (and its accompanying curriculum) will be in print and online in early 2015. Stay tuned.


(Post updated in December 2014 to reflect recent manuscript edits.)

CRYING TO BE HUMAN

As far as I can remember, learning about the Holocaust has never made me cry. How would I respond in Auschwitz?

I cried when I said goodbye to my friends and family before moving from London to Chicago. I’ve been known to cry when I've had a few too many drinks! I cried when my grandmothers died.

I teach about Nazi eugenics and the development of gas vans and Nazi experiments on pregnant women. And rail cars and Jewish and Roma and homosexual survivors and post-war suicide and inherited trauma. I’m an avid reader of Holocaust literature, particularly for young adults, and I watch and teach Holocaust films. I’ve listened to many Holocaust survivor testimonies—both recorded and live—and I’ve explored Holocaust museums around the world. I’ve tried to wrap my head around the fact that the Nazis murdered so many children who were disabled or Jewish or Roma or Sinti. I learned about the Holocaust in primary school and at home. But the horrific content of Holocaust history, testimony, film, and fiction has never made me cry.

Today, as we stood by the ruins of a gas chamber in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I talked about my personal connection to the Holocaust. My grandfather escaped Nazi-occupied Holland, I explained. But, as far as I know, he didn’t talk about his family’s story. We don’t know the details, but we’re pretty sure that many members of his extended family were murdered in the Nazi camps.

As a teenager, during an organized trip to Yad Vashem, I took myself up to the museum’s archives. The woman behind the desk warned me that finding information about my murdered family would be unlikely; unless, she said, they were Dutch and had an unusual name. “They were from the Netherlands,” I replied, “and the name is Ziekenoppasser.” She led me to the books of the dead. In the final book, on the final pages, I found a list of men and women with the last name Ziekenoppasser, deported from Amsterdam and other Dutch cities and towns, murdered at Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, the Yad Vashem online database lists 33 entries for Ziekenoppasser. I suspect some of these people are our relatives, but we might never know.

This morning, in the Birkenau prisoner processing center, I found myself searching the anonymous family photographs for people who resembled my Mum’s side of the family. I felt sick as I looked at each image—children playing, weddings, family portraits. But I didn’t cry.

A little while later, standing at the ruins of Gas Chamber III, I recited to my group the little I know of my family’s story. As I did, I wondered if this was exactly where they were murdered and I felt—suddenly, unexpectedly—as if I was honoring their memory. But I didn’t cry. Instead—and this now seems absurd—I realized that I might want to return to Auschwitz, one day.

Yesterday, at Auschwitz I, we stood inside the still-standing gas chamber and walked through the reconstructed crematorium. We wandered into rooms displaying piles of adult shoes, stolen before their owners were gassed. The shoes of murdered children were displayed separately. When I saw the mounds of human hair, I felt a pain in my chest—like a punch. I found myself asking our guide a question about the exhibit, perhaps to prevent myself from crying.

In the Auschwitz prison block (a prison within a prison), we looked at the original bunks, we walked past standing-cells, and we stared at walls covered in official photographs of camp prisoners in their striped uniforms, emaciated men, androgynous women, all soon to be dead. I didn’t cry.

I followed our tour guide, as if in a trance, staring at a pile of hairbrushes and toothbrushes and shaving brushes. My mind took me to the perpetrators. How did the Nazi guards allow themselves to participate in these horrific crimes? How could human beings treat other human beings in these horrific ways? It’s unfathomable.

As I walked through Auschwitz, I thought about my family, murdered here. But I didn’t cry. And I thought about the Nazi guards who led them to their deaths. The Nazis must have been in some kind of trance, I found myself thinking. These murderers had hypnotized themselves. They weren’t thinking things through. They were confused, intoxicated by the mist that moved through the system of violence and murder that they had designed. If the Nazi guards and their leaders had stopped for just one second, surely they would have realized what they, as humans, were doing to other humans.

Last night, I shared this notion—of Nazi guards in a trance—with the rest of my group. “The Nazis knew what they were doing,” people in my group reminded me, “they knew what they believed.” I was listening carefully to what they were saying, but it didn’t make any sense.

When I teach about Holocaust history, I not only strive to humanize the Nazis’ victims; I also strive to humanize the Nazis themselves. Too often, through Holocaust films and museum exhibitions and fiction and the sensationalist media, we portray the Nazi leadership and lower-level camp guards as monsters. We display photographs of Nazi officers in their pressed uniforms, smiling with their fingers on the triggers of their guns, watching with cold eyes as children are marched to their suffocation. We call them evil. Monsters. As if their actions were inevitable, uncontrollable. By doing so, we excuse them; we ignore the decisions they made. The frightening truth is that the Nazis were just as human as their victims. Years before they became Nazis, as children, they played games and did their homework. They had life dreams and ambitions. They fell in love. They had children of their own. But if we paint these men and women as monsters, we keep the perpetrators at a distance. Look what they did, we say. This is what evil looks like! By painting the Nazis as inherently inhumane, we are saying that “real” human beings could never perpetrate or become complicit in genocide; we could never be capable of committing such atrocities, we tell ourselves.

The image of Nazi guards, walking in a trance, following murderous orders, replayed again and again in my head. How can it be possible to see others as anything but human? “It’s impossible,” I said to my colleague. “No. It’s possible,” he said to me, “—it’s just impossible for you.” I understood what he was saying and, for a moment, I choked on my tears.

FROM MY HOTEL ROOM IN AUSCHWITZ

We just arrived in the town of Oświęcim (pronounced Oshvienshim; renamed Auschwitz by the Nazis). We’ll be here for one week. But I’m ready to return home.

It’s as if everything we’ve seen and talked about so far has been leading to this.

I arrived in Poland with a number of misunderstandings. I didn’t expect its towns and cities and buildings to be so beautiful. I didn’t expect to be eating at sushi restaurants while listening to Adele and Justin Timberlake. I didn’t expect to meet people dedicated to rebuilding the Polish Jewish community. The Poland I’m experiencing is modern and vibrant and, at the same time—like every country in the world—struggles with its past.

Last year, when President Obama referred to a “Polish death camp”—rather than a Nazi death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland—his comment enraged Poles and others around the world. The Nazis murdered approximately six million Polish people, around half of them Jews. From 1939, the Nazis kidnapped tens of thousands of Christian Polish children who looked “Aryan” and raised them as Germans. I understand why it’s so offensive to think of these sites of atrocity as Polish sites. The so-called “Hitlerites” are hated here.

After our arrival in Kraków, we visited the Gestapo headquarters and prison where we learned about the Nazi brutality against Polish intellectuals and clergy. We entered the cells that had witnessed obscene violence and murder. Just as we were leaving, an old man arrived—he was a former prisoner of the Nazis, our guide told us. We toured the old city. We talked to survivors of Nazi camps. We met with modern-day Jewish leaders. We explored the areas that were once the Jewish ghettos of Kraków, Warsaw, and Łódź. We stood inside synagogues, some restored, some in ruins. We met with a woman who risked herself to save Jewish lives. We explored sites of Jewish, Roma, and Sinti deportation. We walked into Jewish cemeteries. We met with a man whose grandfather was a high ranking Nazi officer. We stood at the mass grave at Płaszów. And we walked through the killing field at Treblinka. I came to Poland and to these sites of Nazi atrocity for a purpose. To see for myself. To become a better educator. To be a witness of memory.

But I’ve seen enough. I want to go home. I miss my family.

It’s after midnight now. Here in my hotel room. Here in Oświęcim. Peaceful, pretty Oświęcim where I ate pizza for dinner. The Auschwitz camp complex is just a short walk away. We’re scheduled to head over to Auschwitz tomorrow afternoon. The next day, we’ll tour Auschwitz-Birkenau. We’ll see the brick buildings and barbed wire. The barracks. The gas chamber of Auschwitz I. The mounds of shoes and the piles of disintegrating human hair. We’ll be here in Oświęcim for one week.

I’m trying to push away any expectations. I’m trying to swallow my fear. I’m trying to pretend that being here is normal. People live here in Oświęcim. Thousands of tourists and teenagers walk through Auschwitz every summer. I’ve seen Treblinka. How much worse can it get? Every day, I read news reports about ongoing genocide. I walk past people starving on the streets of Chicago, all the time. I watch news clips of mass shootings in American schools. And gang rapes in India. And fire-bombings of Roma homes in Hungary. And petrol burnings of gay men and transgender women in Iraq. Seeing Auschwitz shouldn’t be any different. Human suffering is human suffering. Mass-murder is mass-murder. Right?

SOMETHING MISSING AT TREBLINKA

I’m standing close to where they burned the bodies. This is Treblinka. The bus departs soon, but I’m not ready to leave.

At Passover every year, we read aloud the Seder instruction to think of ourselves as slaves being freed from ancient Egypt. And there is the Jewish mystical idea that, when the Hebrews received the Torah at Mount Sinai, all Jewish souls—throughout time—were in attendance. We are connected. We have an obligation to remember because we were—and will always be—a part of the same story. A true collective memory.

“I would have never survived,” my Mum said once, while we were watching a film about Auschwitz. And when I thumbed through books about the Holocaust, I couldn’t help but imagine myself in a Nazi ghetto or a camp or on a suffocating train, surrounded by people I knew. As a Holocaust educator, I now know that we must never ask students to imagine themselves in the shoes of Holocaust victims or perpetrators or bystanders (for the reasons why, see my previous post.) But if, without prompt, we imagine ourselves in the circumstances of history, that is normal; empathy is natural, healthy.

I’m walking through the simple museum between Treblinka I (the Nazi labor camp) and Treblinka II (the extermination camp). Our group educator calls me over to look at a facsimile of a Nazi document—in both German and Polish—that lists specific regional guidelines on the treatment of the Roma and Sinti, the so-called “Zigeuner” (“Gypsies”). The poster states that Zigeuner are to be brought to the Jewish ghetto. Zigeuner must wear white armbands with the letter “Z.” Those who try to help Zigeuner will be shot.

I first heard of the name Treblinka in primary school. I remember reading a poem about a packed train headed to the camp. “Treblinka, Treblinka.” The name sounded frightening to me—a place of horror. Treblinka II was one of the six Nazi camps designed for mass-murder. The site contains the grave of around 925,000 people of Jewish descent and approximately 2,000 people of Roma or Sinti descent, mostly murdered in gas chambers. After a revolt in 1943 during which some 300 prisoners escaped the camp, the Nazi leadership ordered the complete destruction of the Treblinka complex and turned the site into farmland (a reminder that the Nazis themselves were the first Holocaust deniers).

In the museum, still examining the Nazi rules for Roma and Sinti, I realize I’m the only person left in the exhibition. I must now walk alone to the site of Treblinka II. My stomach hurts. I let out a heavy sigh and begin to follow the signs. The pathway is made up of rounded stones, making it difficult to keep the rhythm of a steady pace. The weather is cool, the trees green. This place is beautiful. I walk over the area that once held the camp’s gate. Blocks set into the ground like a ladder indicate rail tracks. Turning left, I face a sea of stones of different sizes and shapes, an abstract graveyard, each stone representing a place. Some stones bear specific names of Polish cities, towns, villages—Warszawa, Chmielnik. Some stones are draped or marked with the flag of Israel. The massive stone monument in the center—standing on the site of one of Treblinka’s gas chambers—is adorned with a menorah, its central branch broken to indicate Jewish lives cut short.

I walk into the open field of short wild grass, tall flowers. In the sunshine, flies buzz around me. I remove my jacket. It is here that their bodies were burned, their ashes compounded. My head spins with moments of my childhood mixed with the events of the last few days.

In Kraków, just days ago, after a lecture on the history of Polish Jews, I asked the professor about the current relationship between the Jewish and Roma communities of Poland. “We cannot ignore the Roma victims,” she told us, even though she hadn’t mentioned them until I asked my question.

Standing here in Treblinka, another question comes to me and my eyes find our educator. I walk quickly to him, across the field. “Is there a monument here to the Roma and Sinti?” I ask. He shakes his head. There is not.

In a few minutes, the bus will depart Treblinka and return us to the restored cityscape of Warsaw. But I don’t want to leave this place. I want to stay here. As if I owe it to myself. As if I owe it to the nameless.

My head is filled with clichés and more questions and some answers. Is this a holy place? No, God does not exist. Do ghosts scream? Are the remains of the people within this soil calling to us to be remembered? Are theses ghosts soothed by the prayers and the monuments and the tears? The Jewish souls call to us through the wild flowers above their single grave. Their cries are answered by the Jewish monuments in Treblinka. In Warsaw. In Berlin. In Jerusalem. In New York. And I stand here, trying to listen to the cries of the Roma and Sinti whose ashes and bones mingle with those of the Jews. We are connected, yet these adults and children are so often ignored and forgotten.

I can hear them and I will never leave.

“We reduced the problem to one between Nazis and Jews. Because of this we lost many friends who suffered with us, whose families share common graves.”—Simon Wiesenthal, 1979