On Being a Naked Baby

I am 11 years old and I realize I am like a "naked baby" and a total misfit. I must learn to fit into a normal society and I have no training for that, no education to speak of, no manners, such as table manners, hygienic training, etc.. When I speak it is a mixture of three languages, German, Dutch, and Yiddish.

I know how to survive and live in a camp. But that is all I know. I am not proud of some of the things that spell "survival". I am a camp-rat, and I am comfortable with it. I don't know or remember that there is an "outside" where things are different. I feel very angry, bitter and ashamed for being so different from others -- perhaps even for surviving, when so many others did not."--Betty Gerard "The Pain of Liberation."

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked--Genesis 3:7

A few days ago, my dad told me that a friend's mom had died. She had been a member of the Dutch resistance during WWII. Because Jews had no organized resistance in Holland, I asked, "a communist?" My dad nodded. "How did she survive the war?" My dad said, "I don't know." "You never asked or heard about it?" "No. It's not the kind of thing we spoke about." The commercial and political exploitation of collective memory is so familiar to us that we might easily overlook the possible existence of shared reticence.

When we got home from lunch, he handed me two typed written pages. Betty, who died this past year, was my dad's oldest surviving friend. (Below the fold a short interview with her.) Betty and my dad spoke of each other as siblings.  They met in Westerbork (around 1940).* Betty's text helped me grasp features of the "conspiracy of silence" among a community of survivors of persecution. 

Betty's piece is about the period "April 9th, 10th, and 11th [1945]" when the "German Army and guards have just left Camp Westerbork" and the "middle of July 1945," when she is "able to leave Camp Westerbork -- NOT A HAPPY DAY FOR ME!" It was written as an exercise in a writing class that Betty took more than a half century after the experiences described. So, we can't overlook the real possibility of some backward projection of feelings onto her memories.  In particular, as Betty writes, she knows "how to survive and live in a camp. But that is all I know." My dad was four years younger than Betty, and he has no possible memory of life outside camp; he had been a refugee and displaced person from the fifth month of his life. That camp life is  radically different from the "outside," might have been apparent at once at liberation, but all the subtle respects in which she was so "different from others" must have dawned upon Betty over time.

 

Betty and my dad were kids, and so did not initiate the practice of reserve; the elders of their community and disinterested societies did so. But they participated in it through much of their adulthood. We need to feel secure with others and ourselves to share our vulnerability or shame;  it's unlikely that one learns the habits of thought that facilitate such security in a place where the vast majority of people one encounters disappears, and one's parents and older friends fear to be next.

I'll let Betty have the last word:

 

 

 

 

* The closing line of Betty's "The Pain of Liberation," is: "My family are the people of Westerbork and that holds true to this day."

Comments

[Malka Schliesser]

Not only that - (as if it isn't enough) the fear, shame and reserve continue long after the experience itself and next generations take over this coping mecanism and create their world view based on it.