Who Will Write Our History?

I saw a documentary a few weeks ago at The Museum Of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial To The Holocaust. When the screening was over, I left the museum and looked around me carefully to see who was nearby. Were there crowds of people of any kind, Free Palestine graffiti or t-shirts or anything else I would need to be careful navigating on my way to the garage. Then I checked myself... could anyone immediately tell I was Jewish? Could they tell by my clothes or jewelry or by anything I might be carrying? I had a lot of thoughts about this very post and I started recording them into my phone, but never within earshot of anyone else. 

I was shaken, particularly from watching footage of children's emaciated corpses being loaded (then dropped and reloaded again) onto wheelbarrows. I wanted to say, "Look at this. This is what we went through. This is history that I'm afraid is being forgotten." And all I could imagine was responses I might receive:

You're using the Holocaust to justify aggression in Gaza.

If you care about children dying why do you allow it to happen to others?

You're safe, healthy and successful now. Why are you playing the victim card?

And the irony of all this is not only that I don't want to talk about these things, but also that the movie wasn't even about the bodies, the starvation or the people shot in the street. It was about how against all odds, a doomed group of people insisted on telling their own story rather than having it told by the aggressors. 

They couldn't talk or write or reason their way out of their predicament. They knew they were being slaughtered because propaganda had turned against them. Nazis didn't just murder. They humiliated and documented the humiliation in order to sway the public to their side. They said Jews were vermin, backwards, a people who stood in the way of everything they believed in. 

The Jews themselves said no. This was not who they were. But they couldn't say it to the Nazis or even the public. They wrote journals, collected tickets and drawings and anything else that could tell the story of who they were and hid it away in what would later be referred to as the Ringelblum Archive.  Maybe when this was all over, someone would dig it up and tell the story of their lives. Maybe then they'd see who they'd so mistakenly demonized. 

Take a look at the trailer to see what I mean. 

I find my own story to be an extension of this. I write this blog in order to tell my story, one little slice of the Jewish story. And I tell it at a time when Jews are demonized. 

One difference is that I don't have to sneak around Nazis in order to hide my writing.

But instead, I feel I have to watch my every word with people whom I think might still be my friends but I'm not sure. 

Instead of archiving the truth of who I am and having it dug up in a new generation, I am trying to tell it now. But every word I choose seems risky. Like looking around me to check my safety on the streets near Battery Park, I check my sentences again and again to see if something I say will be twisted against me. 

I've learned a great deal about the Warsaw Ghetto in recent years. In a previous draft of this post I wrote about a whole list of books, but here I'll just focus on The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto. I learned here what it was like for the women who smuggled food and weapons into the ghetto. When the ghetto was on fire, they watched from outside as everyone and everything left to them burned to the ground. They stood on the side of the walls where people acted like everything was normal. Children still played in the park. Men and women still did business, went shopping, went about their day as Jews were screaming behind the ghetto walls. The women smugglers had to ignore what was happening behind those walls. Even a sad facial expression could get them killed.

It feels sometimes like these groups are here now. People (Jews) are being demonized. People are doing the demonizing. Other people are letting it happen or even joining in. Sometimes I feel like if I say just the right thing I can save us from what's happening. Other times I'm afraid that doing so will be the end of anyone hearing my story.