Holocaust: Inner and Outer Conversations

On a cold winter day, a woman stands on a train platform waiting for the train. The train is late and she watches the others waiting. “Traveling is not an easy thing,” she thinks, “everyone tries to take their world with them, to preserve their life and their identity, to surround themselves with invisible protection… in order to survive all hardships unscathed and to arrive exactly as they left is to deny the essence of travel.”

A realization that is connected to the place to which the narrator of Cécile Wajsbrot’s novel “Mémorial” travels. She travels to Poland, to Kielce, where her Jewish family comes from before her grandparents and their parents left the country in the 1930s and emigrated to France. She goes to the small town between Warsaw and Krakow for the first time; none of the family ever went there again. Just as the narrator can no longer ask anyone about her family’s origins. Her mother is no longer alive and her father and his sister suffer from Alzheimer’s and cannot remember anything.

But her parents didn’t say much about their life in Poland anyway. There were stories that were often repeated, such as the one about the older brother, who was the whole hope of the family, and who was pulled dead from the river that flows through Kielce. And about the pogrom of 1946, in which 42 of the city’s Jews who had just returned from the concentration camps were murdered. “Never did they talk so much about this story, as if it were the only one they had really experienced, but they weren’t even there, it just happened in their city, the city they had to leave, and justified it hence her decision to leave.”

Cécile Wajsbrot’s narrator fills the silence that defined her childhood with inner conversations. They are conversations that only exist in her head and on the paper of the book, marked with dashes. On the one hand, the chorus of survivors trying to justify themselves to her; on the other, the younger generation who, a generation later, still suffers from the catastrophe in which only the part of the family that emigrated to France survived: “I carried the burden of a past that I had not experienced myself, as an involuntary one Witness to abysses that separated generations.«

These are abysses that not only the children of Holocaust survivors understand, but also the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators. As is often the case here, silence determined childhood. The three other passengers in the train’s compartment are Polish. The narrator doesn’t know Polish, but a woman among them is a French teacher. The narrator asks her where she is going. The answer comes as a shock. The conversations of the other two fellow travelers also fall silent. “To Oswiciem,” she says, “Oswiciem,” the Polish name for Auschwitz. The woman talks about what it’s like to have grown up in a place that is considered a place of evil. How she tried to ignore the fact of the death camp and failed. Then she thought she had to leave Oswiciem, but that didn’t work either. She had returned and would discuss the city’s problem in front of every new class at school.

The power of origin, origin. Trying to find it and freeing yourself from it at the same time; to free ourselves from the traumas of the past that have been passed down through generations. About the ambivalence of feelings that threatens to tear so many refugees apart. Their origins, like that of Cécile Wajsbrot’s narrator, often consist only of silence: “Mémorial” tells of this in an impressive way.

Cécile Wajsbrot: Memorial. A. d. Francis. v. Holger Fock/Sabine Müller. Wallstein, 171 pp., 22 €.