Mothers, Daughters and the Holocaust, by Erica Jong

Mothers, Daughters and the Holocaust
BY ERICA JONG

The first time I went to Europe I was thirteen, a girl on the brink of womanhood. My mother, who was born in London to Russian-Jewish parents, thought it was important to bring her three New York daughters to the old abattoir of Europe as soon as possible. I was just thirteen, my older sister about to turn eighteen, and my younger sister only eight. We started with a month in London, which struck me as the bloodiest place I'd ever been. Everywhere we went there were axes, blocks for resting people's about-to-be severed necks, torture devises like iron maidens and fingernail extractors. The tower of London may have had the Crown Jewels of England, but what I remembered were the axes and blocks. Anne Boleyn was said to roam the Tower with her head tucked under her arm. The National Gallery was full of pictures of the tortured and their torturers. Madame Tussaud's was a horror show of British history narrated in wax. London Bridge, we learned, used to sport the heads of traitors on pikes. Tyburn Tree was where they executed prisoners while the crowd ate meat pies and oranges and cheered. Europe to me seemed a blood bath compared to my home sweet home New York City. (In those halcyon days of my girlhood, nobody ever told us how the Dutch, French and British settlers to America exterminated the Indians). And what was this dark rumor I'd heard of millions and millions of Jews being killed in Germany and Poland just a few short years ago?

"Did people really do these things?" I asked my mother.

"Only in the olden days," she replied. "Now we are much kinder and more civilized."

The summer was the summer of 1955. The Holocaust was only a decade behind us and my mother knew it. Her placid answer was an attempt to be comforting to a sensitive teenager with recurrent nightmares. The whole time we were in London, I couldn't sleep. The nightmare of European history kept me awake. I desperately wanted to go back to New York where things like this didn't happen.

Fast forward to 1994. My daughter Molly is sixteen and we are travelling in Germany together for the first time. I am going to do a TV documentary in Heidelberg where I once lived for three years when I was in my early twenties. Molly doesn't ask if the Germans killed the Jews. She knows. She is a much more sophisticated teenager than I ever was. She has read the diary of Anne Frank and many books about Hitler, genocide and anti-Semitism through the ages. She has spoken to many Holocaust survivors and heard their stories. She has seen Schindler's List and Sophie's Choice on television. The history of the Holocaust has been a part of her life ever since she could remember. But that doesn't mean she takes it for granted. Every few years, the horror of it hits her again.

On that occasion in Heidelberg, I took her to a Nazi amphitheater called the Thingstette, high in the green hills of the Neckar valley, above the lovely tributary to the Rhine on which the charming city of Heidelberg is perched. Built by Hitler youth in 1934, this amphitheater surrounded by towering pines blasted my consciousness when I first saw it in the sixties.

"What did they do here, Mom?" Molly asked.

"Screamed HEIL HITLER! And got revved up to kill as many Jews as possible!"

"Why do they hate us?" Molly asked.

"Because we're smart and funny and stubborn and won't give in," I said.

"Oh," said Molly, then in high school, "Just like the kids in my class. The smart kids get the most shit." Molly knew. She was at the age where popularity with her peers was the most important thing in life. And she was an outsider. She was quirky and funny and ironic, with a Woody Allen sense of humor and the world. A lot of her classmates were intimidated by her wisecracks. A year or two later, they would admire and adore her, but at sixteen, she had a very tough time.

She understood immediately that anti-Semitism was just like high school kids ganging up on each other for no reason.

So here we are on Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's 2002, only six decades since the biggest pogrom against the Jews in history, but now our perspective is different. We have seen Vietnam bleed, Beirut bleed, Jerusalem bleed. Rwanda bleed, Bosnia bleed, Afghanistan bleed, New York and Washington bleed. We know the human animal is bloody. We also know that we are capable of great kindness and empathy, but that these qualities are rarer than murderousness. We know that you don't have to be German to kill Jews. You can be Palestinian or Swiss or a hundred other nationalities. We know that cruelty is not a German characteristic but a human one. We know that fundamentalists come in every color, every ethnic group. We know that killing your neighbor because you do not like his or her gods is the most enduring curse of our species.

We are more sophisticated now. And so are our children. We know that genocide exists all over the globe. We know that we will probably bring genocide to outer space when, having despoiled our beautiful planet, we are forced to settle on Mars or Venus, wearing oxygen tanks so we can breathe. But we still don't know how to prevent genocide. And we still don't know how to explain to our children that we brought them into a world where people kill and torture their own kind for the sheer animal joy of carnage. We still don't know how to explain to our children that we are more animal than human, that we are actually much worse than animals since animals usually kill to eat and rarely eat their own species. Yes, lions kill cubs sired by other lions, but at least there is a Darwinian explanian for this behavior. Human murderousness frequently has no explanation other than bloodlust. We still don't know how to explain to our children that all our darkest mysteries are in the human heart and that reason seldom rules there. We still don't know how to explain to our children that we will die and abandon them in this jungle. Perhaps even then we will not understand why human beings are so unremittingly bloody. And perhaps, sadly, neither will they.

Erica Jong, author of
Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life