Thinking about triggered intergenerational trauma during these difficult times, and how it affects what I’m managing to share and what I’m not…
I’ll share this: when the movie about my grandfather (Saba) started the production process I had my concerns and doubts about it. I knew him as a pretty private and quiet person, and couldn’t imagine him wanting this kind of international attention. I did wonder sometimes, as I grew up hearing about his bravery as a partisan, how come not many people heard about him - while his comrades and friends, such as Abba Kovner, were so well known. I feared what I might find out when other people started digging into his history and my family history.
Primarily, I feared that I would hear about horrible traumas that I avoided knowing about for years. Having read the testimonies of the exact horrifying way some of my grandfather’s brothers were murdered was enough of that knowledge for me, and I avoided ’digging’ into it for a long time. A detail I discovered (there are worse descriptions, which I won’t share here) was that at least two of them were murdered in the first 'round', on the day the Germans arrived at their Shtetl. As far as I could understand, this was by Wehrmacht soldiers, not SS. This was after I spent my teenage and young adult years thinking of the wife and little child of my great uncle. I could grasp or imagine how they were murdered, but also couldn’t get it out of my head (it was briefly mentioned to me at some point, with no further details, not even names, and it stuck with me every single Holocaust Memorial Day.
I also feared to think what skeletons he may have had in his closet. I knew there was much that wasn’t shared with me, and I feared it might make me see him in a different light.
While the first fear came true – I heard more details about the horrible fates of some of the family, or at least additional pieces of the puzzle that could make me imagine what may have heartbreakingly happened – there were some positive surprises. One significant one was how, by allowing myself to learn some of the names and details, I finally got to take another look and see the courage, humanity, and caring that my murdered ancestors and their community had. If to use Leonard Cohen’s metaphor – like tiny rays of light shining through the cracks, little messages from my ancestors seemed to shine through the details. Reading through testimonies of those who survived, the only ones left to bear witness, I realized how many fought for their dignity, their community, their culture, and their family, with every bit of their strength and until their last moments on earth. Something in it was strangely, unexpectedly, reassuring. You will not see any of this part in the movie - there are barely any scenes speaking of the details of my grandfather’s larger and extended, lost, family, or the documents and details we discovered. It isn’t possible to put it all into one movie and I do understand that.
What one does see in the movie relates to my second fear – the unknown details about what my grandfather may or may not have done after the war. While the name of the movie is sensational and ‘in your face’, and some images and details in the movie are gory and hard to watch (I have so much criticism of the ‘pornography of death’ photos I grew up seeing on Holocaust Memorial Day and the use of horror photos today), the details that were slowly revealed were surprisingly not as upsetting to me as I feared. Perhaps because it looks like whatever he allegedly may or may not have done, he did it with careful research and targeting specific, indisputably guilty (some with the blood of thousands on their hands) criminals. Not their families, not innocent people who happen to be of one ethnic group or nationality or the other, not anyone in their vicinity. ONLY them. And if - if he did what the movie insinuated he may have - it was because it was made clear to him and to the many members of his holocaust survivor community, that no one, not in their country of origin and not in the host country they arrived to seeking safety and to build a new life, was going to arrest them and bring them to trial. Let alone make sure his community of survivors and their newly established and growing families would be protected from harm.
So yes, the movie's title includes the words 'revenge' and 'killer' in it. And yes, since October 7th it is all that much more triggering. Hard to think about and scary to confront. At the same time, watching the movie and paying careful attention to details may also bring some much-needed solace at this time. The unbelievable resilience and strength that my grandfather, his brother, and the amazing holocaust survivors interviewed in the movie show. How they still have a sense of humor, an appreciation of life, and a sense of dignity and self-agency that so many in the world seem to repeatedly (be it by actual force, historical revisionism, or omission) try to take away from them. The fact that this topic, revenge, is one we - the Jewish community and families of holocaust survivors in particular – fear and struggle with, discuss the morality of, shows something, I believe, of what our grandparents knowingly transmitted to us; that life is more important than death. That they would put all their efforts into making it end there, with their generation. That they would do all they can for us not to be part of it, but rather to focus on life and to have the ability to focus on humanity, to be kind and open and appreciative of life.
Whatever the skeletons in my grandfather's closet, I hadn't thought about the possibility that what he hid from me was to do not only with how painful it all was, or with trauma and the secrecy and brutal tactics he had to learn when at war – it also had to do with protecting me from a world of hate. Shielding me not only from what may have been actual, real danger by hateful people who never stopped wishing my community harm but also from holding wishes for revenge in my heart. Actually, one of the bravest things he could have done was to hold hope for me, and for my future. How I wish the details of his life were not as relevant as they have now become to me. How I want to hold on to this hope for the sake of his memory, and for my children, too.
If you're in the UK - the movie is coming out on BBC Four tonight. If you're in Australia, you can see the two-part TV documentary on ABC iView. I'm adding both links here (one in the comments below).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vn46
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/revenge-our-dad-the-nazi-killer
