Planes

My mother doesn’t want to visit Auschwitz. “What good would it do?” she asks me. “I already have too much pain.” When my mother was 13, she interviewed her grandfather for a school project. She was the first, and, for a very long time, the only person he ever told about living through the Holocaust. Diligently, she sat with him for hours at a time, writing down his full story over the course of six months.

When I was 12 years old, my mom asked me if I wanted to hear the final product. Engrossed in a book of my own, I said “no” without thinking. She looked at me, awash with disappointment, and started reading it aloud despite my stupid, clueless protests. Before she’d finished the introduction, she was crying. I didn’t know what to do, so I left. My mom has never agreed to let me hear his words again.

There is something scornful in my mother’s eyes when I ask her about these trips, to Poland, to Germany. “This is a way of making sure my ancestors are remembered,” I try to explain, sweaty and nervous. “I hope to better understand what they went through.”  But my mom’s keen, scorching, scorning eyes see the selfishness behind my stutters. I want more than  understanding for its own sake, I want to assuage my guilt, for not having the same broken, twisted bits in me that she does. I want to better comprehend the film of hurt in the shrill of her yell. I want to be connected, another link in a domino chain of generational trauma. I want to cry, and hold hands with other Jews, preferably Israelis, and then years later say at some fancy dinner party, my trip to Auschwitz was life-changing; my pain a mysterious burden that they, my pompous dinner guests, could of course never understand. It’s a wish that could only be borne of the privilege of being such a sideliner, my entire life hosted by my mother, myself the temporary tourist to the stories she unpredictably shares, of the Holocaust, and of the trauma that I won’t ever feel.

When I was four years old, in New York City, I saw a sukkah and asked my mom what it was. 

“It’s a sukkah,” she said. “Jews make it for a holiday called Sukkot.”

“What’s Jews?”

“The world is split up into lots of different groups of people, and each one has their own special holidays. Jews are just one of those groups.”

“Which group is the biggest?” I asked, because even then I was competitive.

“Christians.”

“Are we Christians?”

“No,” my mom told me. “We’re Jews.”

In the retellings, she always laughs at how I couldn’t stop crying, how I threw a tantrum in the middle of the New York City streets, how I begged to be let into the “big group.” My mom never got the chance to discover that she was Jewish, because it was a fact that, along with the Holocaust, was drilled into her as soon as she could talk. My childhood stories are full of skinned knees I plastered with rainbow band-aids. My mother’s childhood is a scab in and of itself, a bloody gouge that oozes out new pieces of terrible when you least expect it.

When my uncle was four years old, my mom, his older sister, spotted him with a knife in his hand. “That’s not allowed,” she told him, and grabbing the knife’s handle, yanked it away. She accidentally sliced his finger so deep that blood wouldn’t stop gushing, the blade touching bone. Instead of helping him, she hid, so that her parents wouldn’t beat her. 

When my mother was six years old, she tried to bleach herself, because her teacher told her that the chemicals would make her white. My mom’s skin is a beautiful hazelnut cream brown that stems from her half-Yemeni genes. I wish she could see how pretty she is.

My mother has always been obsessed with the idea of trauma, with the way it can change a people. “There’s a reason that Israelis are so loud, always yelling at each other and always violent,” she tells me. “A thing like the Holocaust doesn’t go away, it gets passed on. There’s a reason my family is so messed up.” 

My mom grew up with the children of World War Two survivors. One grandfather, Saba Yuda from Arad, lived through concentration camps, and the other, Saba Yuda from Petah Tikva, was part of a special Jewish military brigade that ended up in German captivity. Her story wasn’t unique—she lived in a country full of children who knew the Holocaust in the same way she did, in a way that was ever-present and as real as the blood coursing through their veins. My mom saw the Holocaust every day, when she visited Saba Yuda from Arad, who would only call her Rivka, a middle name that nobody but him used for her. Rivka was the name of his sister, who died in Auschwitz. And when my mom would visit Saba Yuda from Petah Tikva, once a month, she’d see the impact of the Nazis in his wild drinking and the screaming fights that would ensue.

I don’t know the Holocaust in the same way my mother does. I know it from her cautionary tales, mentioned every so often—“Don’t eat so fast, Alma,” she might say. “When Saba Yuda was in the camp, the Red Cross brought them food once, and they ate like insane men. Only Saba Yuda knew that it would be deadly to eat so much on a stomach so empty. Everyone who was there, except for him, died that day.” And then there’s the obligatory gulp and change of pace, but the glassiness on my mother’s face is unreachable, as if she exists in another world, another plane of sadness. I’ve barely met Saba Yuda from Arad, only a few times when I was still young enough to be picked up by adults. I remember his small apartment, his musty sofa, and the way he was engulfed in it, a man who even then looked to me little and frail, with sunken cheeks that smelled of cigarette smoke. I don’t remember when he died, but knowing my mother, she cried in some hidden corner, tucked away from me. Sometimes, I’m glad that she keeps her secrecy, her interrogations of why, and for whom, whenever I start to ask questions about the Yudas, about the stories of my family, about Poland and Germany. I’m the tourist, a momentary onlooker on a life that I will never know. And I don’t deserve her tears.