German commemorative stamps of some of the Berlin synagogues destroyed on Krystallnacht.
On November 9, 1963, East Germany issued this stamp of a burning synagogue and the yellow star all Jews were required to wear under Nazi rule to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Krstallnacht.
A Jewish community was established in 1738 in Gross-Gerau, a town south of Frankfurt, and the synagogue was built in 1892. The number of Jews in 1885 was 141 (4% of the total population) and 161 in 1925 (3% of the total population). Nearly all the Jews left after 1933, and on November 4, 1940, the town was declared Judenrein (free of Jews). The synagogue was destroyed during Kristallnacht.
This memorial, installed in the 1990s at the site of the synagogue, reads: “Here stood in 1892 the Jewish Synagogue which was destroyed on November 9, 1938 by an inhumane regime. A warning to the living!”
"A warning to the living!" Memorial in parking lot where Gross-Gerau synagogue once stood
The Gross-Gerau synagogue (behind plaza)
Living with trauma is like living with a smoker. You don’t have to be the smoker to get sick.
How can that be?
Dr. Paul Valent, a psychotherapist for 35 years who founded the Child Survivors of the Holocaust group in Melbourne, Australia offers this explanation:
“Children of traumatized parents especially young ones, experience their parent-gods as not recognizing them as the children that they are and only inconstantly tending to their needs. Rather, they experience them either screaming silently, untellably incoherently, mysteriously, from their black holes, or exploding like gods of thunder and lightning in audible screams and irrational symptoms…
Dr. Paul Valent
“They (children) experience double trouble: not only are they required to adjust to their parents’ alternating physiological circuits, emotions, behaviors and attitudes, but they must copy with their own automatic survival responses to their parents. They may not understand either. Their own stories may be untellable fragments…
“What do untellable non-stories look like?
“A mother is frozen in non-mourning for her dead family. She looks at her child with unshed tears and does not see her child. This induces a sense of non-existence and depression in the child. The child wants to rescue, reassure or enliven the parent and gain life for itself; it feels guilty and worthless when it fails. This is an example of how trauma can continue unwittingly across generations.”
Haitian children
I worry about the Haitian child immigrants.
In addition to adjusting to terrible losses and a new life in a new land, they run great risks of psychological disturbances.
I wrote in Is It Night or Day?: “Stories of other immigrant children often aren’t featured in history books either. For many reasons — war, famine, political persecution, economic hardship, natural disasters — children have been painfully separated from their parents and forced to find a new life. These drastic uprootings cast these young people adrift, even as they are rescued.”
Child immigrants are at great risk of developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — roughly 40 percent, according to some studies. Other children who develop PTSD include:
Child immigrants can be remarkably resilient, depending upon their experiences before they left their homeland and after they arrive in their new country. Studies show that children most at risk of developing PTSD lived without their parents or with parents who had poor coping skills in their homeland. Then, they were placed in new stressful family situations, further contributing to their problems.
A child’s temperament determined his or her adaptability. How well a child coped also depended upon the new family’s cohesion, support and psychological health, as well as peer and community support.
Haitian orphans arrive at Pittsburgh airport on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010.
Once again, we are witnessing the painful realities of child immigration. The Haitian earthquake has torn apart families and threatened children.
Throughout history, war, natural disasters, political situations, and poverty have forced children to relocate by themselves without the protection of their parents. No matter what the reason, child immigration reminds us of the daunting task necessary to rebuild a life in a new land in the face of unspeakable loss.
It was heartwarming to watch the 54 Haitian children arrive at the Pittsburgh airport to a crowd of people awaiting them with open arms.
“We’re going to save the 54 kids and lead them to great lives,” Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell told Fox News in Haiti. “They’re happy, good kids despite all the things that have happened to them, despite being orphaned, despite being in a hurricane (sic-earthquake). I’m amazed at how happy these kids are. I think everyone of us in Pennsylvania has a wonderful feeling.”
Our communities and our schools must nurture and sustain that “wonderful feeling.”
In a Frankfurt, Germany high school, my mother gave a very brief, poignant speech in 2008. Remembering how she was treated seventy years earlier when she first came to America – classmates called her “Kraut” and “Dirty Jew” — she looked out at a group of students and said these words:
“I see faces in this room from all over the world. What do you do to make those students who you call “foreign” feel they are a part of your community?”
What will we do?
 The Junior Library Guild (JLG), a literary review and selection service for children’s and young-adult books serving more than 17,000 school and public librarians nationwide, has selected Is It Night or Day? as a featured title for the spring 2010 season.
From the Junior Library Guild’s website: “Twice each year, our editors engage in this often-grueling process of reading, re-reading, discussing, and sometimes arguing, over the thousands of books submitted to narrow them down to the final list of just 180 selections for inclusion in our 30 reading levels.” “Junior Library Guild picks the best books before they are published. Once published, those books often go on to win other literary awards and honors, as well as being named to state award lists.” For more information, please visit http://www.juniorlibraryguild.com/about/ |
Confusion surrounds my mother’s identity — not only as an immigrant, but also as a survivor.
Ruth Gruber
My mother and I attended a speech by the rescuer Ruth Gruber, who in 1944 was assigned a secret mission to Europe to escort one thousand Jewish refugees and wounded American soldiers from Italy to the US. Scanning the audience of several hundred people, Gruber began her speech by asking the group, “How many of you are survivors? If you are a survivor, please stand up.”
My mother looked at me, panicked. She tightly held the arms of her chair and slowly shifted herself to the edge of her seat. Just as she was about to rise, she stopped. Unsure, she froze.
“Stand up, Mom,” I told her. “Stand up.”
Looking around at all the survivors, she lifted herself off the chair and stood for a few seconds. Then, as the audience warmly applauded the standing survivors, she sat down.
My mother doesn’t know if she is a survivor.
Even Steven Spielberg doesn’t know what to call her or her group. He wanted to include them in his Shoah project since their lives had been defined by the same losses as the survivors — family and homeland. But since they hadn’t experienced the death camps, he didn’t know how to refer to them. Eventually, for lack of a better label, Spielberg included refugees, hidden children and children in the camps in one category, “child survivors.” But survivors of the camps reject this label for anyone who didn’t endure the death camps.
Consequently, my mother doesn’t know what to call herself — except “lucky”.
German flag
American flag
When my son was six years old, he pointed out a black, red and yellow flag on a plastic place mat that featured the flags from around the world.
“Look, Oma,” he said. “Your flag!”
“That’s not my flag,” she told him.
“But you’re German.”
“I was German. Now I’m American.”
“But you’re still German, Oma.”
She didn’t see the irony; he had called her by the German nickname for grandmother she had selected.
“Sort of,” she replied.
Like many immigrants, she has a foot in each world. For those who fled their homelands, one foot remains uncomfortably planted in the old world.
Once, when I asked her how she identifies her nationality, my mother said, “I’m American, but I’m different.” A friend’s Japanese-American father told me the same thing. “I’m an American, but I don’t talk like one and I don’t look like one. So I never fully feel American.”
But my mother doesn’t feel German either. When we return to Stockstadt am Rhein, she speaks an old dialect that no one uses anymore. Few Germans understand her. In addition, since she left when she was 12 years old, she addresses everyone with the formal construction, as if she were a child speaking to adults.
Please visit my other blog: http://shadowsoftheholocaust.com/
The late Iris Chang wrote in The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, 
“First they kill. Then they kill the memory of killing.” Her book documents the Sino-Japanese War atrocities perpetrated by the invading Japanese army in Nanking in December 1937.
Many involved in horrifying crimes — victims, perpetrators, bystanders — often become unknowingly complicit in “killing the memory.”
They don’t talk for decades.
At a senior center in Chicago, a man in his 80s came up to me after a speech recently and whispered, “I want to tell you something. I’ve never told anyone this before.” Tears streaked his face. I wondered, what terrible act would he keep to himself for 50 years? What crime did he commit?
“I…I…” He held a handkerchief in his large, age-speckled hand. He was shaking. “I was a liberator.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“What I saw…it was too horrible. I just couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t say anything.”
“Then why did you tell me?” I asked. “Someone you only just met?”
“I had to tell someone before I die.”
His emotional confession came decades after the event. My mother opened up on our first trip to Germany in 1990, 52 years after the trauma of leaving her parents in 1938. Those who have kept silent their entire lives sometimes begin to talk as they gain a sense of their mortality. Often, they don’t tell their own children; they tell their grandchildren. They don’t want to take their untold stories to their graves.
