by Maggie Fazeli Fard
Published in Community Life
The room is flooded with light, and the 18 senior citizens seated in a circle, cheerily talking and remarking on how big the class is on this particular Friday, don’t notice that their instructor, Bette Birnbaum, has lit a small candle.
The chatting and giggling fade to inaudible whispers as Birnbaum hands out a packet of poetry, the topic of this month’s “Mindscapes: Explorations, Journeys and Stories” session at the Bergen County YJCC.
She runs her hands along the side of her head, matting down the tight, dark curls shorn close to her head, and takes a breath. As Birnbaum recites the words, page after page, the energy in the room palpably shifts.
Through the chimney of the crematorium,
A Jew wafts upward to eternity.
Looking for a way to ‘fix it’
Staff Photo By Roy Caratozolo Ruth Zimbler, who escaped on the first kindertransport prior to the Holocaust, shares her experiences during Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Bergen County YJCC
It is Friday, May 2, the day after Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In a nutshell, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , the word “Holocaust” describes the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of about six million of Europe ’s Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, disabled people, some Slavic peoples, Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals, by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.
The experiences of the people affected by the Holocaust, however, prove harder to squeeze into that nutshell.
There are the millions who perished, and there are others who survived the cruelty of concentration camps. And then there are those who were lucky enough to get out and, some would say, unlucky enough to be charged with reminding the world of what happened.
Acclaimed Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein assumed that responsibility head-on, explains Birnbaum.
Born in Lublin, Poland in 1896, Glatstein found himself growing up smack dab in the wake of the Age of Enlightenment, when, among other things, a certain level of “normalization” took place among the Jewish communities in Europe.
“There was the idea that Jews could engage in the larger society,” explains Birnbaum, “participate in secular culture. Jews could be treated not as ‘the other.’”
Glatstein was the descendant of a long line of rabbis on his mother’s side of the family and educated orthodox Jews and musicians on his father’s. He received religious and secular educations, and his father introduced him to famous figures in Yiddish literature. Glatstein, inspired, began to write.
By the time Glatstein was a teen, anti-Semitism was on the rise, and in 1914 his family sent him to New York to live with an uncle, where he enrolled in law school at New York University .
In 1934, Glatstein returned to a changed Europe . In the wake of World War I, it was as if the attitudes of the Enlightenment had disappeared and Glatstein was shocked by what he saw. The shock continued as Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric took root in , as people were first shipped out and later killed off. From Glatstein’s shock was born his collection of Holocaust poetry, “I Keep Recalling.”
“It’s going to be a rather ‘down’ program, but an introduction to some powerful poetry,” Birnbaum tells her class. “What you’re going to see is this incredible amalgam.”
To understand this amalgam, a blend of Glatstein’s extensive religious education and his need to understand the events of the modern era, Birnbaum guides her students through the poems using traditional liturgy as a stepping stone. Through passages from the First Testament, the students are reminded of God as a creator and a punisher, an all-powerful being. In Glatstein’s poems, the class is introduced to God as a being who is overpowered.
“Man’s inhumanity to man is making God cry,” Birnbaum says. “If punishment is outside of God, we have a separate power. If punishment is greater than God, we have a problem… It’s a real theological statement.”
There is some discomfort among the students as Birnbaum talks about faith, its apparent loss and God as a victim of the Holocaust, but the class appears most agitated by some of the more brutal imagery in Glatstein’s work.
Through the chimney of the crematorium,
A Jew wafts upward to eternity, Birnbaum gently recites from the elegiac “Smoke.”
And as soon as his smoke disappears,
His wife and child curl upward too.
And up above, in the heavenly pale,
Holy ghosts keen and wail.
O God, up where Your glories resound,
Not even there can we be found.
Birnbaum tells her class that the poem alludes to ancient sacrifices, once conducted to cleanse the community of sin, as well as to martyrdom, detailed in old Jewish teachings. But her students sigh and shudder as she reads; the words are imbued with more than allusion.
“I can take the old liturgy and make it positive,” one student, Eva, says of the ancient stories of sin and sainthood. “[But] I look at this and…” She shakes her head; she cannot see any trace of light or hope in Glatstein’s words.
Yes, there are feelings of shock, fear and anxiety in Glatstein’s work, says Birnbaum, but there is never resignation.
Glatstein was once quoted as saying, “The Yiddish poet must become the aesthetic chronicler of what happened, and he must fix it for all time.”
More than 60 years later, Birnbaum’s class wonders aloud if anything has been fixed.
“Holocaust remembrances depress me,” says Isabelle, a student. “We lived through it. We know what it is. The remembrances should be for non-Jews. Those are the people who should learn. We should never forget. I just wish it [that message] would go to the non-Jewish community,” she says with a shrug.
“What’s the follow-up?” Birnbaum asks. “If you don’t make action in the world, what’s the point of remembering?”
The point of remembering
Ruth Zimbler is one woman who to this day sees remembrance itself as an active step.
Her action, like Glatstein’s, is through words, spoken rather than written. Engaging and jolly, Zimbler is happy to talk to anyone who will listen about the Holocaust. On Thursday, May 1, as part of the Bergen County YJCC’s Yom Hashoah remembrance program, she spoke to seniors about her own experience.
Zimbler readily admits that she was very lucky. She left her hometown of Vienna, at the age of 10 before World War II began. She saw her synagogue razed and her family’s apartment boarded up on Nov. 10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass,” but she never walked the grounds of battle or execution.
She was separated from her parents for close to one year, shipped off on the first kindertransport out of Vienna , the program that rescued 10,000 Jewish children between Kristallnacht and the start of the war in 1939.
“For a year there wasn’t a hug; there wasn’t a kiss, a ‘well done,’ a ‘bad girl.’ There was none of that,” Zimbler recalls.
But as she reminds herself, there were many children who never saw their parents again at all.
Yes, Zimbler was lucky, but there were so many who were not. She hopes that by sharing her memories she can keep their memory alive. And if she can do that, maybe there won’t be another Holocaust.
Zimbler has few mementos from that time. She has a photograph that was taken the first time she saw the ocean, the North Sea actually, while living in Holland with other rescued children. She has two leather cases that she made herself while living in Holland , and in them she carries letters, some from people she no longer remembers and others from those she will forever cherish.
“I have my memories,” Zimbler says. “The Nazis took about everything we had. The whole world was silent. Nobody said boo. But I have my memories.
“You see, that’s so important,” she emphasizes. “They tried to erase us. But they couldn’t. They couldn’t erase my memory, or my soul. Because they are mine.”
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