A vanished world
The title of this post is taken from the title of a book of photographs by Roman Vishniac, of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Here is the story of how the photos were taken:
…[B]etween 1934 and 1939. Vishniac walked across Poland, the Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania with his camera, preserving for posterity images of a Jewish way of life fated soon to be destroyed. Of the 16,000 photographs he managed to take — secretly and under dangerous circumstances — he was able to rescue only about 2,000. Some he sewed into his clothing when he came to the United States in 1940, most he left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. A Vanished World brings together nearly 200 of these images…
There is something almost unbearably poignant about the photos and the situation. This is indeed a world that will soon vanish – not just vanish but be violently, cruelly, and purposely obliterated, with great suffering to its inhabitants.
And yet they’ve not all vanished. In fact, some of the former inhabitants of that vanished world are still around, although they are very elderly and won’t be here for much longer. This is an article about a recent get-together of 56 of them, and some of their reminiscences:
“You come home from Auschwitz like you fell from the sky,” [Auschwitz survivor Einhorn] recalled. He had “no parents, no siblings, no nothing.” He worked in the Tel Aviv port, but there was a time when he had to sleep in a public park. He had no living connections to the rest of the world and no one to guide him, just people who seemed eager to evade what he’d been through and what it might represent. For decades, no one asked Einhorn about the numbers on his arm, or seemed to care very much about them.
In New York, Einhorn worked at a kosher butcher shop on the Lower East side and raised a family. Most of a century later, the horrors of the Holocaust are still recent enough to be able to cause nightmares in the people who experienced them, Einhorn included. “You know, I still dream of Auschwitz,” he said. “My mind is still in Auschwitz … I’m still crying. I cry in the night, I cry in the day. I’m still not finished from there.”
It is indecent, not to mention inaccurate, to imply any neat ending to the survivors’ stories, as if living through the Holocaust were a fair price to pay for getting to spend the rest of one’s life in the United States making womens’ belts or selling kosher meat. If one insists on extracting any hope from the experience of the war and the subsequent decades, it shouldn’t come from the inevitable need to salvage meaning from evil, or from the psychological impulse to vulgarize tragedy in order to make it comprehensible, but from forces beyond the merely human, far outside our meager range of understanding.
If you’ve never read Primo Levi’s book Survival in Auschwitz, or its less-well-known sequel The Reawakening, about Levi’s return to the post-Holocaust world, I highly recommend both. In my opinion they are the most brilliant things ever written on the subject.
I wrote a lengthy previous post discussing Levi – and his probable suicide. It contained this quote from Survival in Auschwitz, which gives you a flavor of his work:
Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening, it is your turn for the supplement of soup so that even today, you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.
One of the part-time jobs I had after finishing grad school was working as a copy editor for Dori Laub, MD, one of the founders of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project that eventually became the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Dr. Laub was personally very kind to me– he had me to his home for dinner on occasion, and helped me understand on a deeper level why my dad had been so traumatized by his experience in rescuing the inmates of the concentration camp at Wöbbelin in May 1945 (info. about Wöbbelin and its liberation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6bbelin_concentration_camp).
It turned out that Frank Logue, the former mayor of New Haven, had had similar traumatic experiences as an infantryman during the liberation of another camp, and Dr. Laub said that he was recording testimonies from American veterans who had seen the camps as well as testimonies from the camps’ survivors.
I consider it an honor that I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Laub, to attend the lecture series that he sponsored at the medical school, and to read the books he eventually published. More about him here:
https://fortunoff.library.yale.edu/about-us/founders/
More about the Fortunoff Archive plus sample videos here:
https://fortunoff.library.yale.edu/
PA Cat,
Thanks very much for that comment.
Had never heard of the Wobbelin camp nor the main camp of the group—the Neuengamme camp (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuengamme_concentration_camp )
Horrific.
– – – – – – – –
Levi’s short story, “Iron”, in “The Periodic Table”, made a particularly strong impression on me when I read it only several years ago. A story about an extraordinary friendship between the author and a classmate, whose influence on Levi—sharing his love of mountaineering with the author—may well have, in the end, enabled Levi to survive Auschwitz.
(It’s the unasked question at the end of the story which made the huge impression on me.)
Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live.
Ties well with Viktor Frankles “Mans Search For Meaning.” Having a purpose gives you the drive to survive tough times.
https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M
zenman:
I see the two as very different. In addition, the two had very different experiences during their stay in camps as well as very different ways of writing about it. Here’s a view of Frankl with which you may be unfamiliar.
That book sounds interesting. I shall have to see if I can find a copy.
It reminds me of a book I encountered almost 40 years ago: “A Photographer in Old Peking” by Hedda Morrison, 1986. Morrison fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and found a job running a photography studio in Peking (or Peiping as it was then known). Her photographs are a rare record of an ancient culture that has now been obliterated by war, Communism and the heedless torrent of modernity.
I bought a copy and sent it to my friend Avram Davidson as a gift. He served in the US Navy in WW II and was stationed in Peking in 1946 (he was a “corpsman” (combat medic) with the 5th Marine Regiment) so he had seen some of the same things Morrison recorded.
I just checked and was pleasantly surprised to find that our library has a copy of Morrison’s book.
And our local library also has Vishniac’s book! So, two more titles for my hold list.
I seem to remember photos made through a microscope by Mr Vishniac being used in some commercial in the 60’s.
IMO the second most important thing Eisenhower did, after winning the war against Nazi Germany, was documenting and publicizing the Holocaust, because the reasons he gave for doing so are starkly needed today.
https://remember.org/facts-aft-lib-eis.html
More history about Ike and the camps.
https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/film-of-general-dwight-d-eisenhower-visiting-the-ohrdruf-camp
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/299896
by Jeff Dunetz in 2021 (includes a screencap of Eisenhower’s cable to Marshall)
Recommended for inspiration:
Hassidic Tales of the Holocaust – Yaffa Eliach. Prof. Eliach compiled these from 89 oral histories and interviews. The three story tall room at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington DC with the photographs of the Jews of one small town used photos taken by Eliach’s mother.
Sparks of Glory: Inspiring Episodes of Jewish Spiritual Resistance – Moshe Prager. Taken from first person interviews. Most of the subjects, and Prager, are long since deceased.
Those Who Never Yielded – Moshe Prager – resistance through non violent non cooperation with the Nazis regarding Jewish life.
Moshe Prager was Gerer Chasid from Poland. He was instrumental in the then Gerer Rebbe’s escape from Europe in that the Rebbe’s papers were provided by a non-Jewish friend of Prager’s. When Prager went to get the documents, his friend had two sets and told him that if he didn’t save himself too, his Rebbe wasn’t going to get the papers.
Recommended for comic relief (no humor is darker than by survivors):
The Dance of Genghis Cohn – Romain Gary
A Jewish ghost, a comedian named Genghis Cohn, haunts the Nazi officer who had him killed in a mass execution. As the Nazi gave the order to fire, Cohn turned around, dropped trou and shouted in Yiddish, “Kish mir in Tuchas” (Kiss my ass).