The Search for Meaning

The Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Society on Aging in March, 1997, included a presentation entitled "Providing Care to Survivors of the Holocaust." As clinical social workers, the two presenters offered a series of "clinical interventions" in how to ease the burden of survivors who wished to speak of their experiences. After the injunctions to "listen carefully and emphatically" and "don’t judge," they urged clinicians to "help them [survivors] find meaning in their survival." Similarly, Steven Spielberg’s Visual History of the Shoah Project recommended that their volunteer interviewers read an article by journalist Mary Rothschild which insists that interviewing survivors will "make sense of the insanity that happened in Europe to the Jewish race." In his engaging novel Waterland, Graham Swift discussed the function of "stories," histories and Histories, personal and universal, which, he wrote, provide order, structure, "meaning"—stories that "make things not seem meaningless." Perhaps nowhere in recent historiography has that somewhat jaded or even cynical perspective confronted the modern era than in discussions of the "meaning" of the Holocaust.

Virtually every group involved may offer significant opinions: perpetrators have their varieties of explanations; so do bystanders and even rescuers; and so, too, most poignantly and importantly, do survivors, the victims. Beneath each of these perspectives lies a quest for some meaning, an explanation which might draw some reasonable, graspable rationale for why the Holocaust occurred. Scholars, too, have searched for the same thing: a rational hypothesis to explain a seemingly irrational course of events. One might expect that no subject would produce less controversy: what could be more definitively evil than the murder of the Jews, the ultimate victimization of an essentially innocent and helpless population by an overwhelmingly malevolent force? Yet scarcely a word can be uttered without evoking deep and even profound controversy. This phenomenon erupted in the protracted and infamously celebrated debate over Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s work, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Yet, while the level of public attention and vitriol may have escalated in that altercation, there remains little new in its intensity or, for that matter, in its content. And beneath it rests the determination to reject what appears to some as a series of facile answers to fundamental questions about mass murder, history, genocide, racism and antisemitism. Some of Goldhagen’s critics fear that those questions only yield constitutively stochastic or random conclusions.

In the frankest possible terms, meaning seems to me to elude any purely rational examination of these events, especially when viewed through the prism of survivor testimonies. Certainly different "lessons" or "meanings" emerge from different groups, indeed, from different individuals within each of those groups. In his final work, for example, Victor Frankl, father of a school of psychotherapy, psychological or even spiritual guru, and Holocaust survivor, sought not just meaning, as he had in his remarkably successful Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl’s work may remain the urtext, the archetype for the quest for meaning. Near the end of his life, borrowing heavily from that early work, he posited the prospect of Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning. More than a psychoanalytical study, that volume emerged as a religious work in which Frankl wrote about "another dimension" which was not accessible to reason or intellect and therefore impossible for science and rational thought to comprehend. He revealed this religion as intimate and intensely personal and in effect drew his followers into battle with nihilists, proclaiming: "it is equally conceivable that everything is absolutely meaningful and that everything is absolutely meaningless . . ." As he had in Man’s Search for Meaning, a book taught in high schools and colleges virtually around the world, Frankl buoyed student (and teacher) spirits by his astoundingly uplifting ending.

Frankl seemed to embody hope for those who read him and many of his readers projected his feelings onto Holocaust survivors as a group. Apart from the rather obvious faux pas of generalizing about survivors, that phenomenon conjoins the question of meaning to a myriad of questions about survivor testimony. Do survivors seek and/or find meaning in their own experiences or in the Holocaust? Do they think or talk about it at all?

We should be gaining more evidence to answer such questions, as Holocaust survivor oral history projects around the world seem desperately engaged in collecting as many interviews as possible, perhaps because of the fear of losing untold stories, perhaps trying to catch the Spielberg Visual History of the Shoah project. A few of those projects have opted to return to survivors previously interviewed, reinterviewing more than once and to ask some new questions. Exploring some of the old inquiries as well, we who have undertaken such tasks have engaged not only in "gathering testimony," but in conversations or dialogues with survivors to delve more deeply into what courses their lives have taken in the last twenty years.

On such return trips, I again talked with survivors about why they chose to give testimony or to bear witness. The word testimony itself implies layered possibilities, deriving from attesting to evidence. The Latin word for witness is the same as for testis, sharing its root with testimony, and it means giving evidence of virility or truth. It implies, as it did in Biblical times in the ancient middle east as well, the most serious of vows. To bear witness, therefore, is to speak from one’s center, to offer evidence of truth, and invokes the concept of a covenant-like testament between speaker and listener. To speak under such circumstances, subliminal as they may be, implies a profound responsibility on the part of both speaker and listener and thee survivor-testifier carries a burden of nearly unspeakable proportions. Why, then, do survivors even attempt to do this?

Alvin Rosenfeld referred to Primo Levi’s writing as eerily victimizing, perhaps even "implicated in Primo Levi’s death." The books, Rosenfeld wrote, "are both testimony and reflection, a vivid evocation of the past and a continuing meditation on it by a survivor witness." Testimony, witnessing, speaking, approximates this description of Levi’s writing: a difficult process at best, painful to dredge up what is probably always present anyway, now often done in front of an audience. And therein lie some dangers, I think. We all know that survivor testimonies personalize the historical event of the Holocaust and bring it to a level perhaps more understandable and graspable by listeners, especially by students, than less personal media. Their voices also serve the important function of balancing information from other voices. As early as 1957 Benzion Dinur warned of the danger of reliance only on evidence from the criminals, the perpetrators—primarily written documents, of course. That particular focus, critical, of course, nevertheless "suffices to underline the significance of the personal evidence of survivors . . . ."

Most fundamentally, witnessing or testifying—talking—means telling stories, somewhat like historians. But one of the differences between survivor "tales" and historians’ accounts has to do with form: histories, the stories historians tell, are placed in some sort of order, given a shape, or structure; they go somewhere, have a beginning, middle and end. Survivor testimonies may not have any of these. They are often anecdotal—their strength, I believe, rests in that quality. When spontaneous, they frequently are unchronological, more like stream of consciousness, as one memory touches off another, triggers, as the term goes, multiple associations which may rush in so fast that they become almost unspeakable. All this lends them a fragmentary quality. Although the work seems conclusively discredited, that fragmentary phenomenon was nevertheless captured and described in Benjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Wilkomirski wrote that what he claimed were his own memories "are a rubble field of isolated images and events. Shards of memory . . . which still cut flesh if touched today. Mostly a chaotic jumble, with very little chronological fit; shards that keep surfacing against the orderly grain of grown-up life and escaping the laws of logic." Despite the debunking of this particular author’s "credentials" as a survivor, he managed to convey a quality well known to those who listen to survivor narratives.

That fragmentary ensemble, a virtual pastiche of remnants, residues of memory and the past, occurs both as a function of and a stimulus to an acute sort of honesty. If it seems incoherent, such honesty invaluably communicates a hitherto recondite truth: the fundamental uncertainty of each speaker about the reason they speak. Some survivors with whom I have discussed this feel they have a mission: to educate; to fight deniers or to convince students who might have had doubts planted by those deniers. Some simply feel a need to speak—both fulfilling an obligation to lost families and perhaps achieving some small catharsis. And I think most at least begin with a hope, fervent and even despairing sometimes, that the telling will offer some meaning, a point, even a lesson. They may speak, in other words, to snatch some vestige of reason from a realm of memories in which reason seemed utterly defeated.

In such attempts to find or create meaning from their Holocaust experiences, the choice of form often determines much of the content. For those who have become veteran lecturers, expounding in public provides a medley of possible private and public meanings. Indeed, the act of speaking to a group implies moving from private to public discourse. It creates a persona, perhaps an enlarged version of the private, but often something new, a public persona. And what does that imply? Has the survivor, or the survivor’s story, changed because they appear in the Visual History of the Shoah collection for Steven Spielberg? The stories remain sometimes emotional, deeply personal, and often there is a struggle to convert them into public talks. Like any public speaker, each survivor discovers techniques to combat the difficulties of such a conversion.

For some who construct that conversion, education has been fundamental. The USHMM, movies like "Schindler’s List," the plethora of courses and academic lectures has opened new doors and, in some cases, closed the most important ones to their listeners. For example, one survivor whose original interviews focused on his experiences and the specific ordeals of his own family, conveyed profound sorrow and profound anger. Over the years he has spoken with increasing regularity to groups ranging in size from ten to five hundred, from middle school children to veterans of World War II. And now, while he conveys clearly enough the stories of his lost parents and brother, the terror of Auschwitz, the shame of being forced to conduct business on the Sabbath, he also speaks about how many tons of hair the Germans collected at Auschwitz and how many trains left there. In short, his talks have taken on a more historical tone and with that, to some degree have distanced him from the private tragedies. He has explained to me in his most candid manner, that this information has facilitated talking. To speak historically is often to set up a defense against the private story.

Some survivors, like this one, begin to intuit what "works," what a "good" story is. That means, presumably, discerning what moves students or others who may be in an audience. And the term audience itself implies entertainment. If the story is boring, despite its possible truth and importance, it may not hold attention. So a survivor may learn from experience what takes hold of an audience and structure his/her talk to revolve around those moments. To what end, though, might this be done? Frequently a survivor will try to idealize pre-war life. Conceivably the speaker recalls the idealization as truly accurate, both an individual story and an apotheosis of Jewish life before the Holocaust. Here, for example, is an account of Bernard O’s memory of his boyhood in Krakow. One of four children, his family lived in a two-room apartment, in severely cramped quarters. His father, a traveling salesman, barely eked out a living. Yet here is his description of life in the 1930’s:

This account, charming, emotional and warm, has an obvious point as it announces, along with several other anecdotes, his memory of a loving, enfolding family life. The fullness of the silence at the end of this brief anecdote conveys some sense of choices Bernard O. must make—what to tell, how much, which words to use. His pauses, silence and weeping communicate more than words here, a depth of memory and emotion nearly ungraspable, overlaid with the end of more than Friday nights spent listening to the brichot (blessings). Yet, for all its poignancy, it stands in sharp contrast to the description given by his brother who recalled bitter arguments with his father, his own antipathy toward religion—including Friday night dinner—antisemitic attacks from school classmates on the street, poverty and concerns about enough food for the family.

And what do such conflicting anecdotes teach? Will they salvage a lost way of life, if only to pass on the memory? Will they show what it meant for a Jew to be swept up into the maelstrom of the Holocaust; what a child had to endure; what loss is about; what not to do and what to do? Will speaking make survivors feel better? It may be cathartic for some; the feedback is certainly gratifying; but it may also depress and debilitate others.

In his review of Wilkomirski’s remarkable memoir, Harvey Peskin asks "is Holocaust memory a feature of the turmoil itself or its remedy?" Perhaps daunted by that question, he then portrays survivor narratives as representing the "teller’s assiduous search to know." This psychoanalytically directed insight may kindle another somewhat startling hypothetical question: Is every talk or interview or conversation a "search to know"? Is every talk or narrative, every memoir like Elie Wiesel’s or Primo Levi’s or Binyamin Wilkomirski’s, a search for a meaning? And if that is at least in part the case, do survivors typically emulate Viktor Frankl’s sanguine conclusions?

After struggling through a death march from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz and then to Ravensbruck, finally winding up in a displaced persons camp without family, Agi R. recalled one of the moments, the moment of selection after arrival at Auschwitz, that has divided her life forever:

How does such a feeling, recalled and written down in 1965, spoken again (and again) in 1982 and later, transform itself into roseate depictions of meaning?

To speak of "lessons" from or the meaning of the Holocaust to a survivor like Agi reduces the complexity of the event and, more significantly, reduces the multiplicity, the simultaneously held contradictory attitudes she encounters routinely within herself.

Somewhat like Agi, yet dramatically different in important respects, David M. sometimes circumspectly, at other times directly, confronts the questions of meaning. To the unasked question of what he believes he learned, he answers that the lesson echoes clearly for all time: take what you can when you can at anyone’s expense. So now the lesson of the Holocaust should be clear, the lesson according to David M.: "everybody gets paid." Everyone has a price and the Holocaust reveals the meaning of life in stark relief. How explain this disturbing man? Sharply contrasting with Agi, for example, he exudes bitterness and anger, cynicism and sarcasm. He possesses a nihilism that transcends any ideological abstract view of life because of its fundamental concreteness and specificity. There is no joy, no goodness, no redeeming social value, no value whatsoever in the world, which is after all a continuation of the world of Auschwitz. That sentiment reflects what survivor Samuel Pisar had said to French President Giscard d’Estaing as they together paid homage to the dead at Auschwitz in 1989:

In either world, Auschwitz or the post-Holocaust one, David M. gratified his appetites, his lust or his hunger hedonistically through graft, greed, payoffs and reciprocal deals. Even in Auschwitz. That bizarre phenomenon, hedonism in Auschwitz, meant taking what one could whenever the opportunity arose. He lived, he said, from moment to moment, not thinking of the future, but only of what he needed and could get that instant or in the immediate future. Pisar’s remarks, like David’s, avoid an inspirational prophecy; both eschew any hopeful prediction; both avert blithe and buoyant predictions. Pisar’s answer to his attempt "to make sense of the tattoo on his arm" seemed to resonate with fear or anxiety. The meaning? The worst can happen. Or, in the words of another survivor, the "lesson" is to "run sooner." As recently as 1984, this person kept a suitcase packed in his front hall closet should the need arise for Jews once again to take flight. It was a need, he believed, that might occur any time and any place. If a "lesson" emerges from such comments, it may be simply that "the worst can happen."

Despite the perplexity of this concise and simple value system, this unabashedly misanthropic attitude, David M’s honesty appeared genuine; perhaps that compounded his (and my own) distress. That sincerity and probity revealed the source of his own torment. His view of the world had so depressed him that he had attempted suicide twice, wept over his memories, lashed out at his peers and those who offered him any assistance. He could not abide sentimentality or mendacity, whether about Auschwitz or human nature. His personal and professional life followed rigid precepts derived at least in part from his Holocaust experiences. He carried those precepts into the rest of his life like some time-bomb or a disease which began spreading throughout his being, pressing against his life, crushing any gentle or tender elements that threatened to intrude into it. What caused his fleeting tears as he tried to speak of the past? What memories that he would not voice welled up during his interviews? What was he recalling but not retelling?

Reluctant to speak about life before the war, he responded with monosyllabic, curt statements to questions about his family and home. Why would he not speak of his father and mother, or his siblings? Were there no friends, no warm recollections of childhood? Was his relationship with his family already problematic in 1936 or 1938? He revealed almost in passing, almost embarrassingly that his father practiced Judaism faithfully as an Orthodox Jew who hoped his son would attend a yeshivah, a Jewish university. He rejected that life even then, it seems, although he remains closed mouthed about any confrontation over religion or his future. Only later does he retell his mother’s final words, divulging that she, too, was Orthodox: "When they took my mother away [pause, weeping] . . . her last words were ‘pray to, pray to, pray to God. [Pause] The Jewish people believe so much in God, you know? [Pause; weeps; regains control and asks to stop.]"

During the following session, David describes the death march during which no one helped him and implying that he helped no one: [Did anyone help you?] "If you couldn’t walk they shot you." [Did any of the other prisoners help you?] "Anybody who couldn’t walk, they shot." He’s admitted his own isolation, his own refusal to be concerned with fellow prisoners. More, he’s revealed the heart of the nature of those marches, of Auschwitz and the Holocaust experience as a victim lived it: his testimony is about "how I survived," totally narcissistic, unrepentingly self-centered. Even when he described brief moments of assistance from other people—his brother, an SS guard, a German doctor—David focused on himself. Here is his account, finally, of the arrival at Birkenau:

At the end of his interview David revealed that his last

illness had caused him to recall "everything in the past." He referred only to the Holocaust: "Thought of Auschwitz again . . . I remembered everything. Haunting me. Everything in the past." [Long pause; weeps and silence.]

Having expatiated upon himself throughout the testimony, revealed his antipathy for religion, he returned to both when he amplified his description of the second, horrible train transport. Typically, he began with himself after a terse reference to the pandemonium in the boxcar:

Behind the cynicism lies anger, shame, remorse, perhaps. But David will not reveal it; after four sessions he falls silent and believes he has concluded. The persistent weeping, his inability to speak of his mother or other members of his family seems grounded in what he knew that they did not know upon arrival (or before) at Birkenau. His knowledge separated him from everyone else: "I knew from the start [in the ghetto] that everything was forgery. The whole world was forgery. You couldn’t live without smuggling or black market. The whole world." That is David’s knowledge of the meaning of life—it derives from his unique comprehension of the Holocaust, has the same meaning.

While some survivors—like Viktor Frankl—have tried to draw meaning from the Holocaust, others, like David M. have denied any or found only their embittered and cynical lessons. More subtle, equally depressing, have been the words of those like Primo Levi, who remained profoundly troubled by the dubious "privilege" of survival. Yet he begins his discussion of the prospects of a moral life after thee Lager at a point not far from David’s ground zero. In both his first and last books Levi detailed the utter degradation of life fostered not only by the outrages perpetrated by the Germans, but "by hunger, fatigue, cold, and fear." Such circumstances completely altered the "moral yardstick" of the prisoners. Beyond that, "all of us had stolen": from each other, the camp, wherever one could find anything that might serve the first principle of the camp "which made it mandatory that you take care of yourself first of all." Levi explicitly denied the presence of guilt and focused instead on the feelings of shame that he himself experienced and that he had observed in other survivors. The idea often comes into survivor narratives after prolonged talking. Here is Nathan O.: "In a way, we were ashamed of our experience," he whispered, a survivor of Auschwitz and several other camps, "and we maybe didn’t want to open up old wounds by discussing or telling about it." Primo Levi echoed this comment in his disturbing essay, "Shame," which appeared in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved: "those remain silent who feel more deeply that sense of malaise which I for simplicity’s sake call ‘shame,’ . . . or whose wounds still burn."¹³ In The Drowned and the Saved Levi wrote pithily of his shame, comments which Tony Judt assesses as "the shame of not being dead ‘thanks to a privilege you haven’t earned’." That concept may lie at the center of Levi’s first book, Survival in Auschwitz (the American translation of If This Be A Man): "what does it mean to reduce a person to ‘an emaciated man, with head drooped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen’?" From that observation derives the shame at being a human being: shame for sharing qualities with the human victims as well as with the human perpetrators. Sharing that status induces shame and more in Levi.

"I felt shame," choked Erna as she described her post-Holocaust feelings at age ten, "can you believe that? Shame." Born in Metz, she and her family had attended a wedding in Vischnitza, Poland, home of her father. She was five years old when the wedding occurred at the end of August, 1939. Unable to return to France, she, her older sister and her parents lived with her paternal grandparent, in the ghetto, for about a year and then, wisely, her father must have decided to take his family and run to Erna’s maternal grandparents in the Ukraine after a year of deprivation and misery. Her only memory, a child’s memory, remains constant and overwhelming fear: fear of her her paternal grandfather, dressed in black who treated her with anger and even violence; fear of the Germans, persistent and terrifying. From this miasma of fear emerges the image of Poles in the house "and the family disappeared." Thus, they left, and she "assume[s] they were taken and were shipped [to Auschwitz] . . . or maybe they were shot right there. They were just not there. I was young." Since this must have occurred before the German invasion of Eastern Poland, it is unlikely Erna’s family went to Auschwitz—at least not then. They all died.

Less harsh, she remembers her maternal grandfather with some affection—sitting on his lap, walking hand in hand to synagogue, but still "I remember a lot of fear, a great deal of fear." Erna suffered shame near the end of and after the war. But the dominant, pervasive motif of her interviews recurred in a nearly obsessive fashion: fear. Like other child survivors, Erna remains haunted by fear; it never seems to drift too far from her. In Rosvotov, the Ukraine:

The Germans had invaded and the Einsatzgruppen, the SS mobile killing units executed their murderous Aktionen.

With this, Erna emphasizes another motif entwined with the first two and already sounded: silence, a silence born from her terror and not easily overcome—not even after the war, not until the 1980’s, when she began to speak of her experiences.

Her uncle and father had lifted some floor boards and with cups had dug

Affirming the details to herself as she speaks (beginning with "yeah"), Erna repeatedly notes the demand for silence, growing more agitated each time the subject arises during the interviews:

Each night the family entered "the cavity" and each night Erna’s mother brought a pillow—but not to rest her head. Her mother held it as Erna lay in her lap, poised, like a weapon, to be used if Erna cried or spoke or made any sound whatsoever. Their lives and the lives of the rest of the family depended upon this, and yet "they all disappeared." And Erna remembers the pillow, can barely speak of it, but sees it in her mind’s eye.

Her memories flow quickly as she recounts them, however reluctantly, admitting nervousness, and "seeing" again

Silence and quiet became equivalent to fear and terror. This coupling of feelings and behavior remained active in Erna’s life, and the Holocaust meant fear, shame and silence. They did not dominate her life as long as she hid them; but when they emerged in her interviews, the secret and directive power of such memories and associations revealed itself devastatingly. Finally, hidden, little changed in terms of these emotions, motifs and connections. Erna would not emerge from "hiding" until the 1990’s, and continued to emerge, adding anger and a new ensemble of fears to these indelible memories. Despite difficulty remembering—internment in a camp, she thinks—"I have a sense we went out of the camp." Her father had somehow found a farmer who agreed to hide her immediate family in the loft of his barn. Ambivalent, at best, this mysterious farmer left conflicting sentiments in Erna: