A Survivor Named Trauma

Myra Sklarew

Description

A Survivor Named Trauma examines the nature of trauma and memory as they relate to the Holocaust in Lithuania. How do we behave under threat? How do we remember extreme danger? How do subsequent generations deal with their histories—whether as descendants of perpetrators or victims, of those who rescued others or were witnesses to genocide? Or those who were separated from their families in early childhood and do not know their origins? Myra Sklarew's study draws on interviews with survivors, witnesses, rescuers, and collaborators, as well as descendants and family members, gathered over a twenty-five-year period in Lithuania. Returning to the land of her ancestors, Sklarew found a country still deeply affected by the Nazi Holocaust and decades of Soviet domination. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book will appeal to readers interested in neuroscience and neuropsychology, Holocaust studies, Jewish history, and personal memoir.
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part I. Beginnings

Beginnings

1. In the Ponar Forest

2. Versions

3. Out of Sight

4. Leiser's Song

5. Lietūkis Garage Massacre

Part II.

6. Return: Witness, Survivor, Next Generation

7. Trauma Made Manifest: Its Persistent Forms

8. Rescue

9. Who Are Our Teachers?

10. And So I Lived On

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• History of Europe
• History of religions
• Judaism
• Eastern Europe
• The Holocaust

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438477220
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

a survivor named trauma
Meyer Aaron Wolpe (author’s grandfather) and Anne Wolpe (author’s mother) in front of his store on 4½ Street, S.W., Washington, D.C., circa 1913. Unknown street photographer.
a survivor named trauma
Holocaust Memory in Lithuania
Myra Sklarew
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sklarew, Myra, author.
Title: A survivor named trauma : Holocaust memory in Lithuania / Myra Sklarew.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019036259 | ISBN 9781438477213 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438477220 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Lithuania. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Psychological aspects. | Psychic trauma—Lithuania. | Collective memory—Lithuania.
Classification: LCC D804.3 .S594 2020 | DDC 940.53/18094793—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036259
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part One
Beginnings
Chapter I In the Ponar Forest
Chapter II Versions
Chapter III Out of Sight
Chapter IV Leiser’s Song
Chapter V Lietūkis Garage Massacre
Part Two
Chapter VI Return: Witness, Survivor, Next Generation
Chapter VII Trauma Made Manifest: Its Persistent Forms
Chapter VIII Rescue
Chapter IX Who Are Our Teachers?
Chapter X And So I Lived On
Notes
Bibliography
Index
preface
A Survivor Named Trauma explores the nature of memory. How do we behave under threat? How do we remember extreme danger? How do subsequent generations deal with their histories—whether as descendants of perpetrators or victims, as those who rescued others or were witnesses to extremity? Or those who separated from their families in early childhood and do not know their origins?
Does it make a difference if the witness is a child or an adult? Or has been previously traumatized and therefore is more vigilant than others? Do we negate the testimony of a survivor if their words are inconsistent with known facts? And what in our own experience here in America turns us toward the events of the Holocaust; what remnants from childhood break open in the present? What do we make of competing versions of history?
A Survivor Named Trauma is told through personal memory via the voices of witnesses and trials after the war, through the experiences of a sewer worker in Lodz, Poland, who rescued a family, and a man from Keidan, Lithuania, who made it his business to document rescuers and murderers after the war.
What is the relationship between those who experienced the Holocaust, with persistent traumatic arousal long after the need for it is present, and our soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, unable to adapt to life here at home? What is the cost for a child having to hide her identity in order to survive, to vanquish her language, to reconcile the fact that she once had parents and a family?
Why do some people turn to documenting these events and occupation? Why does one man create a museum to preserve the legacy of a people, while his own family was exiled to Siberia for sixteen years? Why do others experience the complete absence of a particular language when we undergo trauma?
Is overwhelming experience processed differently than normal experience? And not only is that experience encoded differently but also differs in its retrieval? Does the greatly increased affective energy at the time of the trauma alter the normal experience of memory?
When two walls collapse, as they are falling they form a bridge. We are now able to bring insights from many disciplines to the study of trauma and memory, and to learn, most importantly, from testimony and reflections of those who have spoken in these pages.
A Survivor Named Trauma is essentially a qualitative study involving interviews with survivors, witnesses, rescuers, and collaborators, as well as descendants and family members, gathered over a twenty-five-year period in Lithuania. This is a country powerfully affected by the Soviet occupation from 1940–41, by the German occupation from 1941–44, and again by the Soviets for forty-five years, ending in 1991.
The work is interdisciplinary, using the tools of neuroscience and neuropsychology, alongside Holocaust studies, Jewish history, and personal memoir. It is an attempt to follow out traumatic experience in a given setting over a period of many years and to learn something about the persistence of trauma and the forms it can take. Given that we live in a time with the largest number of refugees ever recorded in the world, more than 70 million, who have been forced to flee their countries or to hide in place, the subject of trauma and its aftermath takes on especial importance. Our own members of the military, returning from duty, struggle to reconcile their particular traumatic experiences with any sort of a normal life. Current technology has opened the way to verifying specific events and to shed light on experiences not generally known.
A Survivor Named Trauma is divided into two main parts. The opening chapters have to do with points of entry—how this work took hold of my attention and sustained it over a quarter of a century, with multiple versions and perceptions of the same events and the evolution of these perceptions over time. They also address my need to physically engage in the process, to walk the villages and towns of this country, to learn history not only through the texts.
Chapter III deals with the necessity of hiding for the sake of survival, the aftereffects of hiding at the crucial period of identity. A child, suddenly removed from her family, her known language, even her name, is placed into the hands of a rescuer and into a place where she must remain anonymous. Some people must hide in the earth or in a sewer, or crowded together in a barn until the next hiding place can be found. For those who survived, they are left to piece together who they actually are, as well as their parents, their siblings, their rescuers, if possible.
Chapter IV introduces a family member who survived the Kovno Ghetto, Dachau Concentration Camp, forced marches, and the loss of his entire family. Over nine years, in his words, “ Leiser’s Song ” tells this man’s perceptions and memories of his experiences, as he circles closer and closer to the center of trauma. In chapter V, “ Lietūkis Garage Massacre ,” various witnesses tell of Jewish men, taken off the street in broad daylight, brought to an automotive garage, and beaten to death. These acts have been witnessed by many, some holding up small children to see. The internalization of memories of this event differs among perpetrators and witnesses, between parent and child who observed this event.
Part Two begins with a circling back, an attempt to locate once more how this twenty-five-year journey began and the curious series of accidental occurrences that were to prove of such significance and become the frame and human map. In chapter VI , I meet the person who was to serve as my guide and friend and, quite by accident, a witness who, by a rare circumstance, lived in the same village as many of my family. Through her assistance, I begin to fill in the details of a survivor relative’s experiences. In addition, I learn how a young person views the experience of contemporary Lithuania and is urged by Holocaust survivors to search beneath the surface. She struggles with her expectations of what she would find, which prove to be so dissonant with what she actually witnessed.
Chapter VII deals with persistent forms of trauma, including the erasure of language, the alteration of a familiar landscape, and symbolic condensation, where a single diagonal line can elicit without warning the memory of more than nine thousand inhabitants of the Kovno ghetto being made to walk up a diagonal hill to the Ninth Fort, where they will be killed. Here we look at the neuropsychological view of the formation of trauma and issues of hyperarousal and dissociation, as well as the roles of the amygdala and hippocampus in emotional memory.
Why are some able to take on the role of rescuer in extreme situations? Why does a physician who heads up an orphanage put himself in grave danger by rescuing Jewish children? In chapter VIII , this issue is explored through the experiences not only of one who was rescued by numerous people but also of those who rescued. Who are our best teachers? We look at a man whose own family was deported to Siberia, but who chooses to honor the memory of those in his town by establishing a regional museum “for our lost co-citizens in the Old Market Square near the complex of synagogues.” In our interview, he tells why he elected not only commemoration but also to teach about this community’s presence for centuries in this town.
Chapter IX continues this exploration through an interview with a major filmmaker who has devoted his cinematic career to documenting Jewish and Roma historical and cultural heritage in Eastern and Central Europe. His film company provides materi