YOMA SHOAH

 

Monik Yanover 1922-2004

Holocaust Day always catches me by surprise. First, because it’s hardly mentioned here, in America, but when you turn to an Israeli news source, you get such a high-strung coverage of the day by all media sources, that you’re immediately taken aback with a mix of surprise and guilt. It’s a little like forgetting your anniversary and rushing off at the last minute to pick up something nice for the wife.

 

This Yom Ha’Shoah is special for me, because it’s the first one I’m experiencing without my father, who passed away last December. My father was my permanent witness to the Holocaust and I relied on him for a lot of my sense-information regarding the years 1939-45. It’s not that he was any less biased or self-preserving than any other source, but he was familiar and I could compare and contrast his stories with a wealth of sense information I had acquired from my years as his child.

 

He was eager to preserve his sanity and well-being, at the expense of forthrightness and veracity. I can’t say that I blame him. I’ve lied to myself and others, but especially to myself, about many less traumatic events in my own life. Why should I begrudge him his insistence on not re-experiencing the pain of losing absolutely everything in a few short months?

 

He refused, for instance, to accept my offer of going back with him to Poland, so he could show me his little home town and all the marvelous places of his privileged childhood. He said it would be so painful, he feared he’d get a heart attack and die. He didn’t want the pain to come back, after so many years of leaning frantically against the door, trying to keep it out.

 

Pain pain, go away / Come again some other day…

 

Now my sole connection to the past is dead and buried and here I am, the only living thing who still remembers, second-hand, my dad’s anecdotes from 1939-45. Already it’s difficult to decide which of them are truly my memories of stories told by my father and my own embellishments. Some of them I myself have told others. Friends. Children. Unclad women under the covers at four in the morning. Who knows how much of all that is about history and how much my own psychology. Still, that’s all there is.

 

That, and an admittedly pathological hatred of all things German, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, etc.

 

Here’s an anecdote from my father I cherish, and may it mark the spirit of this Holocaust Day:

 

Back in the summer of 1978, when the big strikes at the Gdansk shipyards were in full force and Lech Walesa was becoming known to the West, I asked my father what he thought about the emerging democratic notes from his birthplace. His answer was clipped:

 

“May they all burn.”

 

Amen.

 

Yori Yanover

New York City

Thursday, May 05, 2005