Where’s Waldo, The Hitler Version

Notice the bakers' Hitlerstaches.

If Maurice Sendak hadn’t drawn the bakers three in his book, In the Night Kitchen, as  Oliver Hardy-esque characters with bulbous noses and rotund bellies, I might not have missed his Holocaust reference in the Hitlerstaches they’re sporting. But I did.

Instead, I found out while reading an essay in The New York Times Book Review this weekend that said the “dream world Sendak concocted in ‘In the Night Kitchen’ (1970) was inspired by the Holocaust of all ghoulish things. Its cheery bakers wear Hitleresque mustaches and try to stuff a young boy named Mickey into an oven.”

Oh yeah, I missed the oven reference too.

Born in Brooklyn in 1928 to Polish Jewish immigrant parents, Sendak describes his American childhood as one very much shaped by the Holocaust. He also admits that much of his work is autobiographical.

Perhaps best known for his book, Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak was one of the first to tackle many long-held taboos of children’s literature, in this case, the dark side of kids’ emotions. Personally, I prefer Night Kitchen to Wild Things because it’s a sweeter book and when read aloud, is more playful and lyrical to the ear. Of course, I’m going to read it a bit differently now, but this new interpretation won’t change my love for the book. No way. No how.

In a recent phone interview with the Times, Sendak explained the origins of his penchant for the scary stuff: “The Holocaust demolished my family, my parents. I saw that, I was there, I was a child. I had to bear it even though I didn’t have any idea what it meant. What language was there to tell a child? None. That has stayed with me all my life. I was very much afraid when I was a child.”

But he’s quick to note, “All my books end safely. I needed the security in my soul of bringing these children back,” which he does in Wild Things, when Max finds his meal waiting for him.

“It means his mother loves him,” says Sendak. “The rough patches between them are solved.”

Similarly, in Night Kitchen, Mickey lands safe and sound in his own bed to which Sendak explains, “We want them to end up O.K., and they do end up O.K. Unlike grownup books.”

Sendak cites Alice in Wonderland as coming “as close to the world of childhood as great books do. It’s a terrifying book; it’s a nightmare . . . Carroll was allowing for nightmare, murderous impulses. I don’t know why he got away from it. He told the truth about childhood, about how unsafe it was.”

But this is my favorite part of the interview: “I have never had a letter from a child that said, ‘Go to hell,’” says Sendak. “They are always thanking me for opening the door, even if it was only peeking through to show how difficult life could be.”

The Holocaust’s Underground Railroad

Jewish children refugees aboard the S.S. St. Louis, May 1939

Many of us know about the Kindertransport in which 10.000 children were sent to Great Britain, but not many know about the One Thousand Children project, and for good reason. It was kept secret in order for it to work.

“An operation, quietly carried out because of fear that a backlash from isolationist and anti-Semitic forces could cause its demise, the “underground railroad” these children traveled to safety spanned three continents and two oceans, was fueled by donations of ordinary people and the work of hundreds of volunteers and ran for almost eleven years.

“Yet, mention of it will not be found in American history books. Museums and memorials do not celebrate the lives of these children and the individuals and organizations who rescued them. There are no movies about it. Its heroes are not heralded and its villains not reproved. Few Americans know of it and only one scholar has studied and written about the subject.

“Most of the 1,000 children themselves are unaware they were part of the organized efforts of a network of cooperation of private American citizens and organizations between 1934 and 1945 to bring to America as many endangered children as possible, nor, that this was accomplished in the face of powerful economic, social, political, religious and governmental constraints that had such a devastating outcome for the eleven million people who perished in the Holocaust.”

To avoid detection, only 10 children were placed on a ship at a time. They traveled as unaccompanied minors and were then sent to live with distant relatives or in foster homes throughout the United States.

Fast forward to 2010. Fern Schumer Chapman wrote a young adult novel, Is it Night or Day?, based on her mother’s journey as part of the One Thousand Children project. While on the ship, her mother Edith befriended another refugee, Gertie. The two grew close during the voyage but once separated upon arrival in New York, they never saw each other again.

Teacher Catie O’Boyle assigned the book to her eighth grade class at Madison Junior High School in Naperville, Ill. Her students enjoyed the book but were  frustrated that the author’s attempt to reunite her mother and Gertie proved futile. But they were also inspired, so much so that they harnessed the power of the Web and found Gertie in two weeks’ time. Seventy-three years after the fact, Edith and Gertie saw each other again.

This goes right to the heart of my book, Googling the Holocaust. If we act fast enough we can still find happy endings for the Holocaust survivors still alive today. It’s an amazing feeling to watch it unfold, like I did with my mother-in-law, Hana Berger Moran. Born in a concentration camp, she found the American soldier who saved her life. Via Google. Sixty years later. It’s a beautiful story. Stay tuned for the book.

Holo-kitsch and Holocaust Fatigue

A spread from Art Spiegelman's Maus.

 

Are you familiar with the term, Holo-kitsch? It was dubbed by Art Spiegelman of Maus fame. I just learned that he planned to publish Maus as a single volume rather than two (volume I: 1986; volume II: 1991). Apparently he had been publishing installments of Maus, his comic-strip Holocaust memoir, in his magazine Raw, and found out one day that Steven Spielberg was set to release an animated film, An American Tail, based on the same concept — a family of Jewish mice in Russia escaping to the new world.

To beat Spielberg to the punch — Spiegelman suspected plagiarism — he published the first half of the book right away and volume II five years later.

Anyway, back to my original point. Spiegelman thinks the Holocaust is written about and talked about and performed about in excess, and he coined the phrase Holo-kitsch to reflect that belief. In an article in the Sunday Times of London, he says, “By the time Maus came out, there was a literature, and it’s grown ever since, that I dubbed Holo -kitsch. There’s a really strong sentimental streak that runs through a lot of this stuff and it makes me shudder.”

I’ve also heard it referred to as Holocaust Fatigue. And I get it. Sometimes it’s just too much, especially when it’s all coming at you at once. To me, there’s only fatigue if the book, film, art (fill-in-the-blank) is cliche or uninspired. But there’s a lot out there that’s new and distinct (like my book-to-be, of course!) that will bring fresh voices and shed new ideas about the Holocaust and its aftermath more than 60 years later. Holocaust Fatigue may be stemming from the fact that it’s the first and second generations who have done the bulk of the creating, writing, performing. Perhaps it’s the third generation of survivors (sometimes referred to as 3G) that needs to break the staleness. That’s what I think. What about you?

6 Million Cookbooks

Joanne Caras has a plan: To sell six million copies of her Holocaust Survivor Cookbook as a tribute to the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. So far she’s sold 34,000  and has raised more than $600,000 for Jewish charities (her goal is $6 million). Volume 2 is already in production.

One of the coping strategies Holocaust prisoners used to avert starvation was to fantasize about lavish meals. Here’s an excerpt from Lillian Berliner, a Hungarian survivor:

 ”We were starved in Auschwitz and to alleviate our numerous hunger pangs, we invented frequent ‘dream meals’. We planned our menus carefully for hours and in great detail. Our favorite dishes and desserts took priority and were frequently repeated. The table settings, the color of dishes, tablecloths, napkins, flowers for each occasion and the seating arrangements were also discussed… This may sound delusional I know, but during these meal planning sessions, we were briefly transported to a normal world, a world that was so far from our miserable reality. We actually tasted the dishes we prepared and our hunger pangs disappeared during the hours of planning.”

Note, it’s more than a cookbook. In addition to 250 recipes from survivors around the world, it also contains their stories of survival. Buy one for yourself and all your favorite homegrown chefs. It’s the ultimate mitzvah: urging your friends and family to eat Eastern European comfort food and helping out Jewish causes.

Grandson of Holocaust Survivor Gets Tattoo: 139829

Caleb Lush flexes for his grandfather

Caleb Lush, grandson of Holocaust survivor Max Rodrigues Garcia, has his grandfather’s prisoner number tattooed on his right bicep.

“I decided to get my tattoo for two reasons,” he writes in a back-of-the-book essay in his grandfather’s memoir, Auschwitz, Auschwitz…I Cannot Forget You. “To constantly remind myself that I can overcome anything that lies in my path; and, to show respect for my grandfather, and his unbelievable story.”

I know to some it may seem like sacrilege, but I think his homage to his grandfather is fantastic. Beautiful even.

When I was just out of college I wrote a short story about a young woman who got her grandmother’s concentration camp number tattooed on her forearm. She went straight to a tattoo parlor after her grandmother’s funeral. I remember feeling a bit uncomfortable about it, but felt it was honest and that if I had a grandparent who survived the Holocaust, I too might have done that. I had never heard of anyone actually doing it, so when I saw Caleb’s tattoo in his grandfather’s book, I was instantly smitten. The book, too, is well worth a read. Fascinating stuff.

Deaf in the Holocaust

Many deaf Jews were tortured and killed during the Holocaust. Some were forcibly sterilized. Fortunately, Charlotte Friedman was not one of them. Using sign language, she tells her story of survival on Jewish Deaf Multimedia.

We often think of the horror of the Holocaust in pictures and words. But what about sounds? Low-flying planes. Bombs, gunshots, artillery, tanks. Nazis barking orders. This is what I think of from stories I’ve heard, books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched. But what about a deaf person’s experience in the Holocaust. The sound of silence? Probably not.

Other senses are heightened when a person is missing one. People who are deaf often have a keener sense of sight and smell. What the smells must have been like in the camps and ghettos. And what about blind people? Did they hear things others didn’t? Perhaps they heard the Nazis before people with sight did? In some ways being deaf or blind must have sheltered them from the full force of the Nazi assault, but if it heightened other senses, then maybe it was just atrocious in a different way.

Here’s another video of a blind-deaf Holocaust survivor. Her name is Doris Fedrid and she’s quite animated in her story. In addition to subtitles there’s also an audio track, which I found made it much easier to watch.

And finally, this incredible story. In 1975, Horst Biesold, a teacher of deaf students in West Germany, wondered why none of his deaf friends had children. When he asked one of them he was told that the Nazis sterilized deaf people in the 1930s. By 1940, sterilization was replaced by murder, which the Nazis dubbed, “mercy killings.” Under Hitler’s regime, approximately 17,000 deaf people were sterilized and 1,600 were murdered. Biesold’s book, Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany, was published in 2004.

Good Jewish Boy, Also Loves Swastikas

Credit: Rick Meyerowitz

Talk about Jewish guilt. Steven Heller, former art director for the New York Times for more than 33 years, is obsessed with swastikas. The irony is not lost on him. His grandmother’s family perished in Auschwitz.

As a child of the 1960s, “I developed a healthy hatred for Nazis,” he wrote recently on Salon.com. “Yet I continued to be engrossed (perhaps even awestruck) by their regalia, especially the swastika.”

His fascination with the swastika as design is so strong, he researched it endlessly in an attempt to work through this personal paradox.

“As a designer I have long been fascinated by the unmitigated power of the swastika. Yet as a Jew I am embarrassed by my fascination. This paradox is one reason why I wrote the book “The Swastika: A Symbol Beyond Redemption?” Though working on it did not resolve my conflict. Indeed I have become even more obsessed with the symbol — more drawn to yet repulsed by it.”

Yes it was co-opted by the Nazis and turned into a symbol of hatred when its origins are more benign and spiritual.

As one commenter wrote, “It is ironic that how a symbol has come to represent evil yet the word itself means the opposite: su + asti + a means good + being +(intensifier) in Sanskrit.” [ed. note: this comment is from the same article but posted on his Daily Heller blog on Imprint.]

For me, personally, it will always be a “portal of evil,” as Heller so perfectly describes. But I can’t begrudge him his guilty obsession. We all have our own white whales to chase.

The Norwegian Anne Frank

Ruth Maier

My friend Liv tipped me off to this wonderful writer, Ruth Maier, who kept a diary as a teenager  living in Nazi-occupied Austria. She later fled to Norway, which turned out to be a bad move. In the fall of 1942, she and 500 other Jews in Oslo were sent to Aushwitz, where she was later killed. She was all of 22.

The diaries were turned into a book and there is an English translation that I plan to purchase. Her writing is lyrical. Even though she is writing under and about such horrible circumstances, I find I can’t stop reading her words. They’re beautiful. Mesmerizing. Here’s a snippet from the article my friend Liv sent me that was in today’s Haaretz Daily:

“How lovely to walk the streets, just to look and walk. To wander around, hands in pockets, and enjoy life. People playing a hand organ. A grandmother babysitting her grandson and waiting for his mother … At that moment I thought: This boy, with the smooth, happy, innocent face, was born to shoot other people to death … This boy, with the soft wrinkle-free face, they will incite to murder and blood. And this boy will be killed by a shell, and at the time of his death will cry out for his mother. It was so clear. All of a sudden.”

Chilling.

Fiction and Laughter: What Do They Have to Do With the Holocaust?

When I first set out to write my book (which I’m still writing, by the way) I thought it was going to be fiction. My mother-in-law, who was born in a concentration camp three weeks before it was liberated by U.S. troops, gave me permission to write her incredible life story. But I got scared and decided to fictionalize. First I was going to do it from a teenager’s point of view, growing up in Communist Czechoslovakia, using my mother-in-law as the basis for the character. I abandoned that idea when I wised up and realized her story is so amazing it almost reads like fiction. There’s no reason to make things up when the truth is beyond normal comprehension. And, for once, it’s a Holocaust story with a happy(ish) ending.

So, when I read this review on NYT.com about a new movie  based on the bestselling book, Sarah’s Key, it got me thinking about fictionalizing Holocaust stories. That and the fact that Rubino Romeo Salmoni, the man whose Holocaust survival story inspired award-winning film Life Is Beautiful, died recently at age 91. I remember how much I enjoyed that film when it came out (1997) and also how guilty I felt for enjoying it since it was a movie about the Holocaust. Which reminds me of how hard I laughed at Europa! Europa! (1990), especially the scene on the train where the main character loses his virginity.

Laughing at stories about the Holocaust seems so incongruous, and yet, it happens. And why not? Wry humor. Black humor. Gallows humor. That’s what got many people through the camps and gets many people through trying times everywhere. It certainly got me through difficult moments in my own childhood.

Brilliant idea! Pre-War European Jewish Recipes

Avid cook and first-time author, June Feiss Hersh, compiled a book of Holocaust survivors who share their cherished family recipes. Stories and dishes come from all over Europe — Poland, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and Greece. The survivors she interviewed offered such measurements as a “bisel” of sugar and an “eggshell” of matzoh meal. Suffice it to say, there was a lot of trial and error before the book went to press. And yes, all the recipes are kosher.