We the living may be haunted by the past, but we are also its afterlife. We carry our ancestors in our DNA. We are the material result, and the ghost of their every decision. Now the decision is ours: How to use this inheritance?
In 1898, my grandfather was born in the “promised land.” Workers like his father had flocked to Lodz, Poland––an industrial melting pot, where Jews comprised a third of the population. Upon Hitler’s invasion in 1939, the promise became a curse.
Three years later my grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz. My father became a fugitive from the Nazis at age sixteen. Decades later, he’d jump when the phone rang, hearing the air raid sirens of his youth. He kept a suitcase packed, ready to flee at a moment’s notice.
While my own childhood was materially secure, as an adult I wrestle with paralyzing anxiety. I find myself re-enacting his wartime fugitivism; leading a rich yet rootless nomadic life that both expands and precludes a conventional experience of “home.” Studies have shown that many descendants of Holocaust survivors manifest similar somatic echoes of ancestral traumas.
In 1988 our family returned to Lodz, but we found only a void. Less than one percent of its Jewish population had survived the war. Thirty years later, my father gone, I felt compelled to retrace our steps with my camera. I ate and slept in the building where my great-grandfather starved in the ghetto.
Today, as Lodz is rebranded a promised land for the IT industry, the former ghetto district has been spared the mixed blessing of gentrification. Its scarred facades reveal decades of neglect, as do the faces of the people I meet. I feel at home with these walking wounded: in a sense, I am one of them, though I may not walk in their shoes. Trauma by nature defies comprehension. It must be re-imagined and reintegrated, if it is to be resolved.
As the few remaining Holocaust survivors pass on, we all inherit this tremendous task of resolution. With neofascism on the rise, repetition compulsion abounds on all levels, from the personal to the geopolitical. (Witness the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Palestine as just one bitterly ironic example.) Like Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, we are blown back to the future, unable to redeem the wreckage of the past. Still, I believe the practice of empathic witnessing can open a space for healing.
We return to the sites of trauma again and again –– to remember, and finally to forget.