For many survivors the past was too painful to talk about. Jacob Rosenberg, a Melbourne Jewish survivor of the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and other concentration camps and an award-winning writer and poet, expressed this anguish in one of his poems, titled ‘No Exit’:
How do you describe it?
What alphabet do you employ?
What words?
What language?
What silence, what scream?
Recently, however, there has been significant historical debate about the issue of ‘the silence’. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, survivors did relate their stories, many of which were recorded and published. Already in 1943 Isaac Schneersohn had established the Contemporary Jewish Docu-mentation Centre (Centre de DocuDocu-mentation Juive Contemporaine, CDJC) in Grenoble as a clandestine organisation with the aim of documenting the Holocaust by pooling the information of Jewish organisations and scholars and by collecting documentary evidence. After the liberation of France in 1944, Schneersohn, with Léon Poliakov, moved the CDJC to Paris.5 Similarly, in 1944 Philip Friedman and others in Poland established the Jewish Historical Commission in Lublin. Like Schneersohn he realised the importance of documenting the Holocaust. He sought to cooperate with state authorities in this enterprise and in February 1945 he became a member of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland and networked with other cities.
In all, 25 branches were established, manned by a staff of around a hundred people. Numerous questionnaires were sent out in Poland alone and 5,000 interviews were conducted. There were similar developments in the displaced persons camps, beginning in Bergen-Belsen and then Munich. A total of 47 historical commissions were set up in both the British and American zones with about 67 people working on this, providing 2,250 testimonies. Some of these materials were published in Yiddish and circulated throughout the Yiddish-speaking world and then later translated.6
5 Archival Records: Contemporary Jewish Documentation Centre (CDJC), http://www.lootedart.com/MFEU4B37218_print accessed 18 July 2011.
6 David Cesarani, ‘Challenging the “myth of silence”: Postwar responses to the destruction of European Jewry’, in David Cesarani, ed., After the Holocaust:
Challenging the Myth of Silence (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 16–17.
In July 1947 a conference was held with this founding group at Yad Vashem in order to promote collaboration between the various projects for recording testimony that were underway. Inspired by this, later in 1947 Isaac Schneersohn decided to convene a conference in Paris of all the researchers in the field. This gathering was a crucial moment in the postwar research effort.
The gathering was unanimous that resistance should be the focus, but they could not find other common ground, including the issue of which language to speak, and these efforts proved to be transitory. Following the efforts to resettle the Displaced Persons (DPs) and the establishment of the state of Israel, many of the survivor historians emigrated to Israel and America, and many archives that had been collected were sent to Jerusalem to the nascent Yad Vashem, whilst others moved to the United States.7 Thus, the Paris conference could be seen as both the high point of the gathering of testimonies and the document-ation of the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, and also its denouement. Those survivors who raised their voices after liberation felt that their words fell on deaf ears, on a ‘wall’ of silence by society, so that they ceased to pursue the collection of testimonies. It was to be over 30 years before similar activities began in the 1980s.
In Australia, the early postwar years were marked by the code of silence.
Mark Baker, author of the Fiftieth Gate (1997), described the ‘code of silence’
as follows:
I grew up in a household where there was silence – silence about my parents’ stories. I didn’t ask, so my parents never answered me. We didn’t talk ‘about that’. My parents never spoke, but their dreams – their nightmares – are my dreams. These dreams were inarticulate, they were communicated in silence. I carried their dreams, their pain … With my book I wanted to know. I wanted us to talk about those dreams. I wanted to break the silence.8
Most survivors did not talk of their traumatic experiences of suffering and survival. Many believed that the best way to secure continuity of Jewish life was by having children to replace those who had died.9 They wished to shelter their children from the horrors they had experienced.
7 Cesarani, Challenging the Myth of Silence, 18.
8 Address by Dr Mark Baker to the descendants’ group. Sydney Jewish Museum, following the publication of his book, The Fiftieth Gate, as quoted in Suzanne D Rutland and Sophie S Caplan, With One Voice: The History of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (Sydney: Australian Jewish Historical Society, 1998), 318.
9 ibid.
In her book The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk Ruth Wajnryb described her experience of growing up in Campbelltown, a Sydney suburb distant from the Jewish centre in the eastern suburbs:
It was as if we’d arrived from another planet, with no records or re-collections, no memory. We lived in the present and for the future.
We were busy. We had plans. We had ambitions. We had this space in time that was now. And we were working hard toward what we could imagine ahead of us. But there was no past. The past was cordoned off, sealed out. There was a complete severance with what went before.10
She went on to describe the reluctance of her parents to talk about their experiences:
The temptation to seal off the past so as not to allow its horrors to intrude into the present must have been overwhelming. I don’t know if they made a pact not to talk about where they came from, what they’d seen and experienced, what they’d lost. But it was as if they had. I am aware now of the enormous energy invested daily, yearly and across decades, in keeping the past to the past, preventing it from engulfing us.11
Baker highlighted this sense of disconnection with the past to trace his parents’ stories during the Holocaust, contrasting it with his experiences of growing up in Melbourne and attending Mount Scopus College, the largest Jewish day school there. Whilst he was not permitted to speak about the Holocaust at home, his father’s regular nightmares were a constant reminder of a secret but threatening past.12 He wrote: ‘[L]ooking back over those days now, I am more aware of how Auschwitz cast its shadow on day-to-day life.
Who can dissect why this one was depressed, or how deep was the lament that ran through a thousand sighs.’13 He referred to the way his mother fed him as though this was ‘the last morsel’, became worried that a common cold would prove to be tuberculosis, and ‘in the way they dreamed through you and devoured the dividends of every achievement’.14
10 Ruth Wajnryb, The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001), 6.
11 ibid., 13.
12 Mark Raphael Baker, A Journey Through Memory: The Fiftieth Gate (Sydney:
HarperCollins, 1997).
13 Mark Baker, ‘As If: Born Under the Sign of the Holocaust’, in Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau and Nathan Wolski, eds, New Under the Sun: Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics and Culture (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2006), 250.
14 Baker, ‘As if’, New Under the Sun, 250.
In analysing Wajnryb’s book, Sophie Gelski and Jenny Wajsenberg discussed three factors that account for survivors’ inability to discuss their trauma with their children: linguistic, due to inadequate English skills to explain their trauma; the internal psychological problems, inhibiting ‘the survivors’ ability to communicate their personal versions of hell – the pain, deprivation, abuse, humiliation, loss, and guilt of having survived – to … the outsider, the one who was not there’;15 and the external factors, because many members of the outside community were not interested in listening to survivors tell their stories.16 The reluctance of survivors to speak of their experiences to outsiders in general and often to their children in particular was by no means unique to Australia. Many found it difficult to find the language to ‘express a trauma of such magnitude’.17
The code of silence about the Holocaust was seen in every aspect of Jewish life in Australia. In 1988, Jenny Wajsenberg, one of the founding figures in Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre, noted that:
The Holocaust is still a troubling subject for many of us, difficult to accept, hard to confront and easily relegated to the recess of the sub-conscience, nevertheless has a unique place in the Melbourne Jewish community due to the high proportion of Holocaust survivors … The postwar Australian born generation has by and large attempted to sweep under the carpet any links to this seminal topic, an overwhelming Jewish experience. In our quest for stability, we have tended to ignore our past.18