The most
pervasive preoccupation of child survivors is the continuing struggle with
memory, whether there is too much or too little… For a child survivor today, an
even more vexing problem is the intrusion of fragments of memory—most are
emotionally powerful and painful but make no sense. They seem to become more frequent with time and are triggered by
thousands of subtle or not so subtle events… Some are able to protect
themselves by splitting time into past, present, and future…[1]
“I’m a survivor. I’m extremely intelligent. I know I’m good people. I always try to help others. I’m lonely. I’m strong.”[2]
Ruth Hagen Nemovicher was the seventh person I interviewed, and she struck me immediately as cynical and often surprisingly unemotional about many of the experiences she recounted. She fascinated me because she had never spent time in a concentration or death camp, and yet was more negatively affected by her wartime experiences than many of the people I interviewed who had been incarcerated in ghettos or camps. Initially I could not grasp how Ruth could have a more pessimistic worldview than an individual who had spent two years in Auschwitz, and I was frustrated with what I saw at the time as markedly non-resilient attributes. As I listened more closely to Ruth, however, I began to understand the vast impact her childhood environment had on her memories, identity, and present functioning. I also gradually grew to comprehend her tremendous abilities to adaptively negotiate and make meaning out of the traumas she has experienced. Because I was able to understand her through our time together, I believe the best way to present her here, at least initially, is also through her own words.
“I was born in Germany, in
1928, in a city called Magdeburg, which is in the northern part of
Germany. I don’t know if it’s because
my father couldn’t make a good living or whatever, but we moved from Magdeburg,
I don’t know how old I was. I know that
we lived in two more cities in Germany.
In 1934 my father had a business, he was doing some kind of selling—he
was a born salesman. Sold anything and
everything. But in 1933 [the Nazis had]
already come to power, so people at the time were being stopped in the streets
and asked for documents, because Hitler was looking for the Jews already. And my father was stopped in the street and
asked for documents and even though my last name is a German sounding name, his
first name was Israel. And Israel, in
those years, was a dead giveaway… In Europe it meant you were Jewish.
“So he was arrested, how he
was able to be freed I do not know. I
have a feeling that’s why we probably moved from one city to the next, meaning
he probably was told that you are a Jew, you have to get out of town. We moved to another city, and in 1935 my
father was arrested the second time. I
know that he had a business, he had a small store that was selling house
wares. The Germans took the business
away from him. He was lucky that he was
taken by the Gestapo to the police. The
chief of police or the inspector, whoever it was at the time, said to my father
that he knew what was going to happen to us Jews. He said he was going to put his file at the
bottom of the pile of files that he had on his desk. He said, ‘Go home, pack your bags, take your children and your
wife, and move out of the country.” And
my father did.
“So in October of 1935 we
left Germany. I have no memory of it
because it must have been very traumatic to me to know that my father had been
arrested. God knows what my mother was
saying, maybe she was crying or whatever.
They never discussed it with me afterwards, because both my parents did
survive. But I know that all my life I
was always afraid to say that I was Jewish.
As children, we were taught to be very well-behaved, not to make noise,
not have any friends, not to bring anybody in the house. It wasn’t until I came to this country,
where I felt a bit more comfortable and was able to make friends. All my childhood I never had any friends.
“And we lived in Italy from
1935, at first we lived in the northern part of Italy near the Austrian
border. In a city called Meran. And then we moved to Milan. And in 1939, when Mussolini made an alliance
pact with Hitler, my father got scared—he saw the handwriting on the wall. He had a feeling that probably the Germans
were going to come to Italy, which they didn’t right away. They didn’t until 1943. But in March of 1939, my father hired a
smuggler, and we crossed the mountains and we went into France—we crossed the
Alps in the middle of the night, with the help of a smuggler. Smugglers were very helpful in those
days. Very expensive, but [helpful].
“The one thing that the
Jewish people knew [was important] in Europe in those years was trading your
money for dollars, because the dollar was always valued very highly, because it
was a life-saving money. But the Jews
also made sure that their wives always had jewelry that they could sell. I remember, as a child, my mother always had
rings and bracelets and things like that.
So probably they sold some of their jewelry and hired a smuggler and we
went into France. We were arrested at
the border, and put in jail by the French police, and I don’t remember how long
it took. I do remember that the
crossing of the Alps in the middle of the night was very scary because the
smugglers always took you up to a certain point, and then they always said, ‘I
have to go check something out,’ and they never came back. Because I crossed two borders like
that. They never came back, we got lost
in the mountains. But we made it, we
made it.”
At this point, I interrupted
Ruth and asked if she had any brothers and sisters. She answered and then immediately continued with her
narrative: “I had a brother and a
sister and my parents. And there were
some other people that did the crossing the same time we did.” I then interrupted again to inquire about
their ages, to which she responded, “In 1939 I was ten years old. My brother was two years older and my sister
was two years younger.” She then
continued again with her story.
“I do remember that one of the families that crossed with us were friends of mine, friends of my parents, really. They had one son that we knew and when we lived in Meran, they stayed there and we moved to Milan. And I don’t know if it was purely accidental that we met at the crossing or if this was something that our parents arranged. And there also was an elderly woman that only had one arm, I remember that. An old lady, you know when you are ten years old, if she was fifty or sixty she was an old lady. But since then, I have met again that boy. He lives up in upper Manhattan, and he said that she was a very old lady. I did not remember that the woman only had one arm. He reminded me of it. I don’t know how long we were in jail, if it was one day or two days I don’t know.”
To clarify her story, I asked her whether her family was together at this time or whether they were separated. She replied, “No, we were together, as far as I remember. And then the French police assigned us a city that we could live in. And the city was Lyon, which is further north—it’s the central part of France. We stayed, we got an apartment. As a matter of fact I remember that because my brother was going to be thirteen that year, my brother had his Bar Mitzvah when we reached Lyon, which was in April of 1939.” After a couple of questions and a few tangential comments, Ruth went on. “Of course, in September of 1939 the war broke out. That winter the city was being bombed. We lived in and out of the basements of the cities. We walked around with gas masks.
“I was going to school at the time. Each country that I lived in, when my parents signed me up for school, I started with first grade all over again. Every time, because I didn’t speak the language. So I did first grade in Germany because when I left, I was already seven years old. When I got to Italy, I did first grade again. I do remember that when we moved to Milan, I guess because of the racial laws, I went to Hebrew day school. Yeah, they had a Hebrew school, because I don’t know if the Jewish children weren’t allowed to go to regular public school. My parents were Orthodox. So maybe that was the reason that we went to Hebrew day school.
“In the summer of 1940, when the Germans
invaded France, my father purchased a car and we moved towards the Spanish
border. The city that we stopped in, I
mean we migrated, thousands of people were on the roads. And at some point we even had to let the
French army run ahead of us. They
stopped all the refugees from running, to make way for the French army, because
they had to go faster. We lived in
Toulouse that summer. And I think that
my parents tried to get into Spain but unless you had a lot of money to pay a
smuggler, I don’t think he was able. I
found out later on, much later, that some people did make it into Spain. But we didn’t.”
At this point, I asked Ruth whether her father was getting a sense that things were spreading throughout Europe, and if he was thinking about going or trying to go abroad. Ruth replied, “Oh sure, he purchased false visas to many countries, [including] South America, but somehow we couldn’t leave. We had relatives in the United States and my father begged them to send us a visa and they never answered. That’s one of the things that I found out later on—a lot of the European Jews were very angry at their American relatives. Because their own relatives wouldn’t want to help. Even though we had relatives, my father had relatives here—his father had come to this country before World War I, and had brought over a lot of the relatives. And he went back just before World War I to get his children—he was a widower already at the time. He went to get his children, and got stuck in Poland because of World War I. And those relatives later didn’t want to help my father. So when my father found out that half of France was going to be unoccupied France, we went back to Lyon. And Lyon was bombed out, et cetera, and we stayed there for a while—this was the end, I guess, of the summer of 1940!
“And I went back to school. And then in 1941, they started picking up the Jews. So we went into hiding. Sometimes I was with my family, sometimes I was not with my family. We were dispersed. Until the end of 1942, then things got really bad. Because I remember my father saying that, in Paris, people were wearing the yellow star, and my father had a sixth sense. Before things really got very bad—not that they were good—but before they got worse, he always started to run. And with the help of a smuggler, we went into Switzerland. We crossed illegally, again, illegally, the border into Switzerland. In ‘42, the fall of 1942, I think it was October. And only my mother, my brother, my sister, and myself crossed the border, because it was known that the Swiss would not let the men in. They allowed women and children in. But if men crossed the border and they got caught right at the border, they would be sent back.
“So just the four of us crossed the border. Again the smuggler, up to a point, and then he said, ‘I have go check something.’ And he disappeared. And my dear, when I heard it, it was very scary. It was [a] very, very dark night, a very cold night, and he said that there was a little bit of water, like a little river, [but] it wasn’t a river… A stream—that on the other side of the stream is Switzerland. And we started running, and I remember hearing dogs bark, and then all of a sudden we heard a voice speaking in German. And I remember my mother started to cry, and say, ‘Oh my God, this is the Germans, we got caught.’ But, it was a soldier dressed in the same color as the—I didn’t know this, but my mother said it was at the time—same color and same type of uniform as the Germans, and he spoke German, he was on a bicycle, and he had a flashlight, and he said to us in German—I mean we all spoke German—‘Don’t be afraid, you’re not in Germany, you’re in Switzerland.’
“And he took us to a place where it was warm, and they, I don’t remember where they took us that night, I’ve blocked it out. I mean, by that time I was fourteen years old. I don’t remember where he took us, but the next day they took us to Geneva. And there is a stadium there, and they had thrown some straw on the floor, in the, I guess in the dressing rooms and things like that, and there were thousands of people there. We slept in our clothes and everything. I don’t know how many days we were there, and then they put us, they sent us to different camp in the German part of Switzerland. And then they separated us. My brother was sent one way, my sister another, my mother another way, and I spent two and a half years in Switzerland until the end of the war.”
Here, I asked her how old she was at this
point in her story, and she responded, “I was fourteen at the time. By the time the war was over, I was almost
seventeen. I was separated from my
parents. The first few camps that we
were in, the Swiss were guarding us with rifles that had bayonets on them and
we were not allowed to go outside. They
took us on walks. We were accompanied
by these soldiers with their guns, we were not allowed to talk to anybody, it
was like marches. Just to get some
fresh air.” When I asked her then what
the living conditions were like, she replied, “Living conditions? We were sleeping on, it’s just like, you
know, when you see the concentration camps, these wooden barracks? That were three levels? And they threw some straw down and that’s
what we slept on. For seven months. Until we children were sent to different
places, in children’s homes. And once
or twice a year I saw my parents. My
father made it on his third attempt. He
tried crossing over a couple of times, and, the smuggler told him he wouldn’t
be able to make it. And the third time
he made it… And then later on my mother and my father were together. In camps.”
Here, I clarified that Ruth was able to see her other family members but wasn’t allowed to stay with them. She reiterated, “I couldn’t stay with them. I think I saw my brother twice in the two and a half years. My sister, because she was younger, was later on placed with a family. And she stayed with a family, and I didn’t see her for a couple of years—I didn’t see her until after the war. And my parents, a couple of times I saw them.” Because it was clear at this point that that was all the detail Ruth was going to offer about this time in her life, I asked then what happened after the war ended. It was at this juncture that the structure of the interview and the form and content of Ruth’s narrative underwent a dramatic shift, which can only be shown in the following excerpt from the actual transcript:
RN: After the war ended my
parents returned to France, and through the Red Cross they asked their children
to be sent back. And that’s how we went
back to France. And we went back to
Lyon for a while.
AG: Oh okay. And then, where? So the five of you were finally living together in France—
RN: France.
AG: And then?
RN: Then I got a job near Paris,
working in an orphanage, taking care of children that are very young children
that lost their parents. I felt that
this was something that I had to do.
Because I was saved, I wanted to—.
And my parents eventually moved to Paris and at the end of 1947, we
moved back to Italy. And we lived in
Florence, I lived in Florence for eight years.
From ‘47 to ‘55, until I came to United States.
AG: And why did you go to the
United States?
RN: Everybody wanted to
come to United States. Everybody was
running away from Europe… Everybody was dreaming, in the United States you’re
going to be free, you’re going to find jobs, and it’s true. It’s easier—in Europe it was very difficult
to find jobs.
At this point, I interrupted the
narrative that we had begun to construct together, and asked if Ruth had ever
returned to her hometown, to which she replied, “No. But I’m in contact now with Germany, and I am planning to go
there next year… I want to trace my steps.
I had, when my parents died, my parents died in Israel ten years ago,
eleven years ago. When they died, I found
things that my father had written down, so I have all the various addresses of
where we lived in Germany and because I have no memory whatsoever, I want to
see if I go back, if some things will come back to me.” I then continued probing for her narrative,
which continued to come in “fits and starts,” primarily as responses to my questions.
I
asked if Ruth had gotten married at this point, and she responded, “No I was
single. I speak several languages so I,
even though I didn’t have an education, I was able to find work. I knew how to type a little bit. The first job I had was with a Swiss
company. They needed somebody who spoke
German and French, because they wanted me to do filing for them.” I then asked, “Did it, was it everything
you’d hoped for?”, to which she responded:
“It was very hard for me to adjust.
Originally I came, I came three times really. I came in 1952 and stayed six months. I came back in 1954, because my re-entry visa was expiring, and I
stayed another six months and missed my family terribly. And I went back. But the second time I had already made friends here. I hadn’t realized I was already more
assimilated to the American way of life than I thought. And when I went back to Italy, I wasn’t
comfortable in Italy anymore. So I
stayed a short time and came back. So I
definitely, after ‘55, this is the place where I knew I wanted to be.”
At that point, I inquired as to whether she had gone back to school or had begun to work. Ruth responded: “No. I never, I mean when I was living in Italy, I went to school and I studied at the British Institute, English and literature, but regular school I didn’t. In Florence they also had a section of the University of Cologne. So I went there to study French history, et cetera, but it wasn’t really a formal school, I just was hungry for education. But because I never finished high school, I don’t even think I finished middle school, you know? I couldn’t go to regular university so I did the best I could. And when I came here for a very short time I went, after I got married. I married in 1957. I went to Nassau Community [College] for a couple of semesters and took literature, philosophy, things that interested me.” This short story prompted what I see now as a critical exchange of questions and answers, which will be discussed in more detail later:
AG: And is your husband American or?
RN: I am divorced. I did, I did marry an American, yes.
AG: Oh okay. And when did you get divorced?
RN: 1966.
AG: And do you have kids or?
RN: One daughter, that was born
in 1959.
Because it was clear that that was the
end of that line of discussion, I went back to ask Ruth, “And so have you been
working, or, what do you—?” She
responded: “Oh yeah, I worked. I raised my daughter up, I divorced when my
daughter was only six and a half years old.
Because of my languages, I started working in the import/export
industry. Even when I was a single
girl, I worked in the same thing, I knew how to type a little bit. And, it was easy for me to find job[s] in
the—at first it was in the export industry.
Preparing documents for customs and things like that, checking
documents. And then when I was married
I also worked…
“And, eventually, from job to job to job
to job, I was able to establish myself in the industry and make a name for
myself and I became import manager for Gucci shops. Because I speak Italian.
They hired me, yeah. I was even
man-, for a while until new management came in I managed their warehouse also. And I had thirty-five people working for
me. But management came, changed, and
the new management brought in a man that I had to train, you know, the usual
story. Who immediately made more money
than I did. But I had to train
him. From Gucci I went to Fendi, and I
set up their importing operation, I was operations manager there. I set up their warehousing operation and the
import and transportation. And then a
few years ago I retired.” Finally, when
I asked whether she speaks a lot now about her past experiences, Ruth replied,
“I am [a] volunteer here, but even before that, back in 1993 I joined a support
group of hidden children. That’s when I
started speaking in public schools.” It
was at this point that it became clear to me that I could probe no further
about her post-war narrative, and I went on to ask the more specific questions
on the interview guide.
Ruth begins her narrative as most individuals would begin their life stories: with her own birth. However, she turns immediately to her family’s first move, and her narrative quickly becomes centered around her father and the decisions he made for the family, as well as the constant uprootings they experienced. She does not discuss her childhood before the moves, her religious upbringing, her siblings, or anything else connected with her early life. Her narrative at this point thus becomes organized geographically and temporally, with the main themes of time and location threaded throughout. Thus, she doesn’t know how old she was at the time of the first move, but she does “know that we lived in two more cities in Germany.” Ruth then jumps quickly to 1933, and Hitler makes his appearance in her narrative six sentences after the beginning. She continues to speak in a manner that I would label as “father-centered,” with Ruth’s father as the main character in this segment of her life story, rather than herself.
Ruth
then tells a story that could be called a “hero tale,” again with her father at
the center. This particular account has
elaboration and vivid dialogue, even though she clearly could not have
witnessed it herself. This is the first
showing of a rather consistent theme throughout her narrative, in which she
places her father as the main character and “heroicizes” him as the family’s
savior and sole support. Many of her
stories-within-the-narrative, in fact, are presented as narrow misses or
conquests over adversity, with her father making all the right decisions and
leading the family to safety “just in time.”
Ruth often comes across as a pawn, or even a silent character in her own
life narrative. She is just the
objective teller of stories, in which she barely plays a part. This could certainly be seen as a direct
corollary of her role in the actual events—after all, as a young child, she
probably was more silent and dependent, and her parents clearly must have had a
more active role in their family’s survival.
However, I often expected that Ruth would at least talk about her own feelings at the time, or her subjective experience of the events she described. Whether her role in them was active or not, she experienced them nonetheless, and experience carries with it emotions and thoughts and memories. And yet she never places herself in the narrative as an “emotional story-teller.” After this story, she then abruptly shifts the structure and content of her narrative, with the first mention of a “traumatic” event and, interestingly, her first reference to her lack of memory. Indeed, the theme of “missing” and reconstructed memories is present throughout Ruth’s narrative.
Even at this point, as she attempts to describe her family’s first major relocation, she seems to be retelling a story that has been told to her. Her comment about having “no memory of it,” however, constitutes Ruth’s first real “I” statement since her mention of her birth. Her further discussion of a fear of being recognized as a Jew is a sign of meaningfulness and significance in her life, being as it is, in fact, the first time she appears as a main character in her own narrative. It is also the first time she inserts emotion into a story, as well as her first comment on any circumstances of her early childhood. She goes on to evaluate this story in light of her life in America, stepping out of the narrative and relating it to her present life.
Ruth then immediately shifts back into the geographically- and temporally-ordered narrative, discussing more cities, more moves, and more father-centered action. She discusses her family’s crossing of the Alps, noting that it “was very scary.” Ruth’s insertion of the words, “I do remember…” seems to signify an attempt to prove her memory, or to make more explicit the references to an actual memory that she owns. It is as if she is trying to separate for me the statements that she is repeating from someone else’s memory of the events, from the statements that come from her own memory. She makes sure to tell me, “I don’t remember how long it took,” but in the next sentence she emphasizes what she does remember. It seems that this journey was particularly traumatic for Ruth, but her explanation of why it was “very scary” is presented in an extremely sparse and brief manner. Her lack of description of what occurred between “we got lost in the mountains” and “But we made it, we made it” is particularly striking. The seemingly quick and easy resolution appears abrupt and out of place after an event that clearly sounds difficult and traumatic.
I interrupted Ruth’s narrative at this juncture because I was feeling like I was not grounded enough in her background to be able to understand the stories she was telling me. In most of my other interviews, when I had initially asked the participant to “tell me your story,” I had received a good deal of information about the individual’s life before the Holocaust. They tended to tell me how many siblings they had, how religious they had been, what their parents were like, and how life had been in their small towns. Ruth, however, had launched so quickly into her “Holocaust narrative” that I had been unable to get a grasp of her background and early childhood.
I decided to interrupt her to at least
get some information on the makeup of her family, and I was hoping she would
backtrack and ground her narrative of “life during the war” a bit more firmly
in “life before the war.” I found that
this background was not forthcoming.
When I asked about her siblings, Ruth centered her one-sentence reply
within the war narrative, rather than giving any added information about her
relationships with her siblings or their childhoods together. While I had been attempting to re-position
her to tell me more about growing up before the Nazis came to power, Ruth
seemed to interpret my question as asking for clarification within the story
itself. She thus responded as if I had
been asking who had crossed the border with her, rather than with whom she had
grown up. I made another attempt to
clarify my goal by asking about their ages, but Ruth still did not oblige (the
way I wanted her to). She answered the
question succinctly and immediately returned to her narrative.
Back
in her life narrative, Ruth elaborates further about the people who crossed the
border with her family, prefacing her description again with the phrase, “I do
remember…” She then makes a similar
statement: “And there also was an elderly
woman that only had one arm, I remember that.”
A few comments later, however, she confesses that she had found this out
much later from a man who had, as a young boy, crossed the border with her
family. She seems to simultaneously
need to reassure herself of her memory as well as acknowledge that some of it
was not originally her own. She tells
me that the man had agreed with Ruth that the woman who had crossed with them
was “a very old lady,” but then she confesses, “I did not remember that the woman
only had one arm. He reminded me of
it.” She is clearly admitting here not
only that she has specific memory holes, but also that many of her memories
were reconstructed after the fact, and enhanced by the memories of others
around her.
Ruth’s
narrative continues to be peppered throughout with self-criticisms of her
memory, with comments such as “as far as I remember,” and “as a matter of fact
I remember that…” She also continues to
offer very little emotional elaboration, restricting her narrative to a clear
locational and chronological organization.
Then she tells a story about her schooling. Even though it immediately follows a statement about the city in
which she was living being bombed and about having to wear gas masks, this
story-within-the-narrative is significantly decontextualized from the war. She is clearly choosing to elaborate about
her experiences as a student and not about her experiences in a war-torn city
or as an emotional being at the time.
Her repeated statements about having to “[start] with first grade all
over again,” however, show a great deal of frustration and bitterness.
The narrative continues after this interlude with another abrupt shift back to Ruth’s father as the main character. She discusses his attempts to get the family into Spain, ending with a statement that “I don’t think, he was able” to pay a smuggler to help them do so. This appears to be the first failure on her father’s part, or at least, Ruth’s first discussion of a failure. While the rest of her stories about him and about her family’s relocations have placed him in the center as the resourceful, intelligent hero, this has a decidedly different feel to it. Upon my questioning, she elaborates about her father’s repeated efforts to lead the family out of Europe, showing a clear sense of his appraisals of situations and of his intentions. Ruth then again mentions her father’s failure, this time to get them to America. This time, however, she situates his inability as more a fault of the relatives that refused to help than of his own powerlessness. She then continues with her “father-centered” talk, with a mention of another relocation initiated by him.
Again, there is a period during her
narrative in which Ruth is strikingly unemotional and unwilling (or unable) to
elaborate. She mentions that the city
to which they moved was “bombed out, et cetera,” and then switches immediately
to, “And I went back to school. And then
in 1941, they started picking up the Jews.
So we went into hiding.
Sometimes I was with my family, sometimes I was not with my
family.” She is so matter-of-fact and
distant about events that would appear to be devastating on so many
levels. It is not clear whether her
lack of emotion here comes from a lack of coherent memory or a reluctance to
tell me about it, or even from a perception that I may not have been interested
in this particular story.
However, the strict chronological
ordering here attests to the possibility that she is recounting a list of
events that she knows occurred, but is unable to elaborate with real, personal
memories of the actual circumstances.
This may indeed be another instance of a hole in her memory, albeit not
explicitly described as such. Ruth
nonetheless continues with her narrative, focused on her father’s “sixth sense”
of knowing when the family was in danger.
She places him as the hero in the story yet again, but then abruptly
takes him out of the narrative when she speaks of crossing the Swiss border with
her mother, brother, and sister. Because
her father was not allowed to cross with them, he suddenly drops out of the
tale and becomes conspicuously absent.
The next story-within-the-narrative is perhaps the most vivid, most elaborated upon, and most emotionally recounted of Ruth’s entire “Holocaust narrative.” She tells the story as if she sees its image in her mind’s eye, and it seems clear that she was traumatized by the event. She inserts dialogue into the story, which both deepens the image and clarifies its meaningfulness to her. She also alludes to the emotions and the bodily senses that the event, and the memory, evoked: “it was very scary;” “It was [a] very, very dark night, a very cold night;” “I remember hearing dogs bark…”; “I remember my mother started to cry…” All of these statements attest to the clarity of Ruth’s memory of this event, and the full elaboration of the story is a powerful indication of the traumatic nature of it. She also makes an unambiguous distinction between what she actually remembers and what she does not remember, as seen in the dichotomy between her multiple “I remember…” statements and “I didn’t know this, but my mother said it was at the time…” Ruth not only has a lucid understanding of what is an organic memory of her own and what has been added after the fact, but she is also unabashedly willing to say so.
Ruth extends this part of the narrative, describing in relatively vivid terms where the family was taken after their crossing. This particular account, however, is fraught with admissions of her memory holes, as is clear in the many “I don’t remember…” comments. What is unique here, though, is that she follows one of these confessions with, “I’ve blocked it out.” This is Ruth’s first mention of a potential psychological mechanism that may underlie her inability to remember often-crucial details of her narrative. She also appears to recognize that this inability is unusual, because she goes on to say, “I mean, by that time I was fourteen years old.” She seems to be implying that any normal fourteen-year-old would be able to recall these types of details. Nonetheless, she goes on to describe a major family separation (with her father still noticeably absent from the story) with a total lack of emotion. She switches immediately back to a temporally-ordered report of the events, noting not the emotional effects of such a relocation, but only that she spent two and a half years isolated from her family in this manner.
When Ruth continues with a depiction of the camps in which she spent time in Switzerland, she makes two highly significant comments comparing facets of her own experience to a concentration camp experience. First, she tells me that the walks she took with the soldiers who guarded her camp were “like marches.” Then, she makes an explicit reference to the wooden barracks of concentration camps, and their similarity to her own living conditions. These two statements could be interpreted a number of different ways, about all of which I am not willing to speculate. It suffices to say that Ruth’s memory of this period seems clear and although she does not retell the story with a great deal of emotion, the anger and bitterness about her treatment during this time was apparent to me during the interview.
She goes on, in her narrative, to quite matter-of-factly state that she saw her parents only “once or twice a year.” Her father finally makes his reappearance in the narrative, but there is no elaboration on what has happened to him during this time, where he was, or how he managed to reunite with the family, other than mention of his multiple attempts to cross the border. Ruth only reports, “later on my mother and my father were together. In camps,” in what could potentially be considered a third reference to a concentration camp-like lifestyle.
At this point, I attempted to get Ruth to elaborate on a period of her life that I assumed had to be traumatic for her (and for her family), and about which I would have normally expected some emotion to be evoked. She simply reiterated that the family was separated. This was the moment at which, I later realized, Ruth’s narrative of her experiences during the Holocaust ended. Everything after this point was not a part of what she had constructed (on her own) as her narrative.
Because she had demonstrated the ability to create a relatively coherent narrative about the trauma she had experienced (albeit with some specifics less elaborated upon), I expected that she would have constructed at least a semi-organized story about what occurred after the trauma. This never appeared. After a substantial pause following what was, in effect, Ruth’s final statement in the Holocaust story, I had to ask what happened after that. From that point on, the interview made an abrupt shift from her telling a story while I offered little more than verbal and non-verbal encouragement, to my having to constantly probe her for answers. It was clear that the cohesive narrative had ended, and everything that came afterwards was simply a series of disengaged answers to specific questions.
In response to my initial set of probes, Ruth mentions that she became employed in Paris, doing something “that I had to do. Because I was saved…” This is a powerful statement, and it appears to be the first allusion not only to an emotional meaningfulness in her survival, but to the possibility of her attribution of some positive force at work. Her words, however, also seem to imply an obligation, attesting to potential feelings of guilt and questioning of her worth as a survivor. Ruth then switches back to the familiar themes of geographical location and chronological organization within the narrative, with little elaboration. She does, however, make her first mention here of employment in America and what appears to be a romanticized view of the country. This sets the stage for Ruth’s focus on her work life, which comes later.
At this point, I questioned her about a possible return to her hometown, to which Ruth responded by discussing her difficulties in remembering. “No memory whatsoever” is indeed a meaningful statement. It is clear that the war caused a profound disruption in Ruth’s memory, life, and ability to construct a cohesive mutual narrative of both. In her statement about wanting to see “if some things will come back to me,” Ruth seems to be living her present life in the shadow of these memory holes, in constant search of the life experiences of her past. In a personal communication recently, during which I asked her if I could use her real name in my discussion of her, she specifically asked me to include her maiden name. She told me, “My married name has nothing to do with my history, and I always still hope that someone related to me might see something about me and then contact me, wishful thinking, but I am an optimist.”[3] In this sense, it seems that Ruth is constantly keeping watch for links to her past, with little sense of resolution or closure because of her feelings of loss.
After more short, relatively disjointed questions and responses, when I finally realized that a post-war story was not going to follow Ruth’s “war” story, I began to ask more pointed questions. I had to probe for what she did when she arrived in the United States, whether she had come by herself, and how she had felt about America and that drastic life change. Overall, while Ruth responded to each of my questions honestly and openly, very little information followed spontaneously after the initial “Holocaust story.” While this will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter, it appeared to me at this point in the interview that she had assumed that that was all I wanted to know.
Ruth’s responses to these questions, whether they were intended as part of her independently constructed narrative or not, do tend to show a great deal about how she views her life after the war, especially in terms of the opportunities she was afforded and the life path on which she ended up. Specifically, when I asked Ruth whether she had begun to work or attend school after arriving in America, she responded with a rather lengthy discussion of her educational history starting directly after the war. In this story, she mentions that she “just was hungry for education,” followed by a few statements that clearly connect her chaotic upbringing and the war to her inability to finish her schooling and the lack of later opportunities to do so. Many of her comments appear to be encased in regret, both about her childhood experiences and about the manner in which these experiences appear to have significantly colored her own views of herself and her life.
Only in the context of this very education-centered story does Ruth happen to bring up the fact that she was married: “And when I came here for a very short time I went [to college], after I got married.” She then grounds the marriage comment in a reference to the year it occurred, and then immediately shifts back to her education narrative. Obviously, I wanted to know more about the circumstances surrounding her marriage, and I was shocked at the time that she was so clearly uninterested in telling me anything further. Again, I will not speculate here as to whether she did not want to talk about this particular topic at that juncture, on that day, or to me; or whether she simply did not think I was interested or should be interested.
What is also significant about this point in the interview is the exchange that followed Ruth’s first mention of having been married. In an attempt to get more information out of her, I probed three consecutive times. First I asked about her husband’s nationality, to which she replied that she is divorced, and then added that he is American. Then I had to probe for when she got divorced, to which she responded bluntly with the year and nothing further. I became increasingly perplexed at this point, and so asked a final question regarding whether she has children. Ruth said, “One daughter, that was born in 1959.”
At the time, I was again flabbergasted as to why she would be so brusque about topics that must hold significance for her and about which she must have a lot to say. As I look at my frantic, probing questions now, however, I wonder whether I didn’t get exactly what I asked for—after all, I asked closed questions and I got closed answers. Ruth clearly was not willing or able to present me with a narrative about either her marriage or her experience as a mother, and at the time of the interview, I remember feeling that I had gotten as much information as I could get (and was lucky to have gotten that much).
When I asked another closed question about what she has been doing since, however (“And so have you been working…?”), Ruth responded with a long and elaborated account of her employment history in America. She even included a comment about how old her daughter was when Ruth and her husband divorced, and an allusion to her independence as a working mother. There was a great deal of pride in this particular story-within-the-narrative, and the proliferation of elaboration clearly attests to the meaningfulness of employment and independence in Ruth’s life.
The employment story has a beginning (“I
started working in the import/export industry.”), a middle (“And then when I
was married I also worked…”), and an end (“And then a few years ago I
retired.”). This particular narrative
shows some continuity with Ruth’s previous statements about work and its
importance to her, which gives her overall life narrative coherence as far as
theme and meaning. In her choice to
give a narrative in response to a non-open-ended question, rather than a simple
one-sentence answer (as before), Ruth shows the significance her work has had
for her, and the large part it has played in her life as a whole. There is also some bitterness when she
mentions how “the new management brought in a man that I had to train, you
know, the usual story.” This seems to
reiterate the subtle theme of loss of opportunity throughout her life, much of
which she seems to attribute to her chaotic childhood.
Ruth finally ends her narrative (or at least, I stopped probing for further stories) with a short statement about becoming a volunteer at the Center and starting to speak about her Holocaust experiences in schools. Although this comment comes as a response to a pointed question, it seems like a resolution, in a sense. Ruth never really constructed a cohesive “after the war” narrative, but she was able to give temporally ordered and meaningful responses to a series of questions. It somehow seemed fitting to end her life narrative with a mention of speaking about her experiences, since that placed us back in the interviewing context.
As Ruth talked to me, it was clear that her memories were spotty, at best. Indeed, at first glance, the narrative above seems incomplete and abrupt in many places. It is clear, however, that one must analyze what is not there as much as what is there. Throughout our interview, there were points at which I had to probe for details that appeared to have been left out, some of which she knew, and some of which she did not. The narrative itself was disrupted as a result of her lack of cohesive memories of the events she described, and this disruption clearly was the dominant influence in her struggle to construct meaning out of these events and her story. Throughout her narrative, in fact, she continually referred to the holes in her memories of the events that had occurred, and seemed almost apologetic at times.
At one point, Ruth acknowledged that at least part of her difficulties with her memories may be her own desire, whether conscious or unconscious, to forget what she perceives as the many negative experiences she had during the war. She also noted that this is a behavior she displays to this day. She told me: “Even today, if something very unpleasant [happens], let’s say you and I had an argument, about anything. If I see you tomorrow I’m not going to remember it. I know that there was some unpleasantness between us, but I would not remember why we had an argument. I just forget. This is something that, my whole life, anything that is unpleasant, I do not remember.”[4] This is apparently not an uncommon response for Holocaust survivors. In a recently published book on hidden children, another survivor describes similar memory holes and similar present-day reactions to displeasing events:
So much of my
childhood between the ages of four and nine is blank… It’s almost as if my life
was smashed into little pieces… The trouble is, when I try to remember, I come
up with so little. This ability to
forget was probably my way of surviving emotionally as a child. Even now, whenever anything unpleasant
happens to me, I have a mental garbage can in which I can put all the bad stuff
and forget it…[5]
When I asked Ruth if she believes that she still carries these memories with her, however, she replied, “Oh yeah. Yeah. I make myself forget, unconsciously, but I make myself forget. Because even certain things, [like] when I lived in France…right after the war, I’m sure I must have had some pleasant times. I don’t remember. I was seventeen when I went back to France. I don’t remember.”[6] Ruth emphasized here that it is not only negative life events that she cannot remember; it is everything. She does not seem to show a process of selective forgetting—it resembles more a large void in her memory in which both the good and bad experiences are lost. She reiterated that she just wants to remember these things, both the positive and negative. She simply wants to reclaim her life from these voids.
From all of these statements about memory and loss and disruption, it seems that Ruth has not only not integrated her childhood experiences with her present life, but also has not been able to create cohesion out of the life events that have come after these chaotic early years. Thus, the narrative that came across in our interview was similarly rough and disconnected. Whether this is because she is not able to organize her life and sense of self after such disruption, or because she has not attempted to, or simply because of the interview context in which she was talking, is difficult to conclude for certain. She seems to have a sense that something is “not right,” or missing, and it appeared that her lack of cohesive memory simply precludes all possibility of creating a cohesive story.
To go a step further, however, it seems that perhaps the most difficult issue for her is that she knows that she is missing vital pieces of her memory and knowledge of her life. It is not like the experience of an amnesiac who is simply unaware that he is missing memories. Ruth is left dealing with the emotional ramifications of these experiences, without the memories of the events themselves. She is filled with emotions that have persistently stayed with her, but cannot understand specifically where these feelings came from and why they are with her. This is again strikingly similar to the survivor quoted above, who later remarked, “I’m still afraid of being hungry…I never leave my house without some food… Again, I don’t remember being hungry. I asked my sister and she said that we were hungry. So I must have been! I just don’t remember.”[7]
Ruth simply feels a void, and she knows that what she “must have” experienced caused this loss. She refers both to this void itself, and to the experiences she had (and did not have), as a loss. Halfway through the interview, she told me: “It’s with me all the time, everything that I have missed in life. Because of my upbringing, because of what I have lost. That made me later incapable of trying to find, I don’t know what it was that I could have found. But I know I don’t have it.”[8] As far as this sense of loss and pain, van Ravesteijn has written:
A smell, a sound, an image
evoke fragments of images or emotions, more compelling than current reality,
fragments to which all experience pain, anger, fear, shame, and powerlessness
have attached themselves. Must a
coherent account be given, then it is often painfully apparent that this is
impossible. Most often, the person is unable
to present an overview of this period.[9]
It is thus likely that Ruth’s inability
to form a cohesive narrative of either her experiences during the war or her
life afterwards is a direct consequence of her incapacity to piece together
these emotionally charged fragments of memory.
Because her memories are incomplete, they cannot be compartmentalized
into “the past.” Therefore, they remain
in her consciousness and prevent any real sense of closure while simultaneously
thwarting attempts to create an integrated and coherent life narrative.
Ruth seems to agree that her life has very little real cohesion. She mentioned that she had been in therapy for a short time but had come to no resolution on this issue. She told me, “I resent the fact that I lived in so many countries. That, I mean, I have twelve years of wandering. From 1934 to 1945. And even after the war, you know, the first two years in France, I couldn’t stay put. I stayed put once I was in Italy. But I don’t have any childhood memories, I have no childhood friends, I have no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. I had a very isolated life. And I did for a very very long time afterward. I don’t think I started having close friendships, until I really joined this support group.”[10] Only very recently, therefore, has Ruth been able to reverse this sense of isolation, and it has only been in the form of talking about her experiences and the similar experiences of others.
Indeed, Ruth spoke often of the support group for hidden children of which she has been a member for over seven years. She believes it has been a tremendous influence in her post-Holocaust life and on her continuing struggle to come to terms with the traumas she has endured. For a long time, she told me, she had been feeling angry and resentful, but could not understand where it was coming from. She remembers that people would tell her how envious they were of her ability to speak so many languages, but this only served to remind her of the constant uprooting and instability she experienced as a child.
She “didn’t realize that what I was feeling was anxiety. That I was getting very angry, every time people said that to me. And I wouldn’t explain to them how come, I said, ‘I just lived in those countries.’ ”[11] Ruth began to understand more and more that she felt cheated out of her childhood. She told me, “One of the reasons that I was so angry is that I know I am an exceptionally bright person. Because I’ve been able to accomplish a lot in my life. As a single mother raising a child all by myself without any help from anybody. I was able to accomplish [a lot] career-wise, [despite] the lack of education. I’ve always searched, I never had the time to [continue my education]. That’s one of the reasons that I was angry.”[12]
In light of their similar experiences, attending meetings and talking with the other members of the group was extremely cathartic for Ruth. She reiterated, “For a very long time I was very very angry. At the world. Just angry. I didn’t know, I didn’t understand why I was angry. I just knew I was angry. And all of a sudden I meet a lot of people, who had lived through some of the same experiences. I thought I was all alone!”[13] Through the development of relationships and the sharing of stories and emotions with the other survivors, Ruth feels that she was ultimately able to transcend her anger and move beyond the bitterness by which she had previously felt weighed down. Indeed, she mentioned that, after a substantial period of time in the group, she felt as if a burden was lifted from her, “because my anger finally left me. It took several years, [but] just the process, being able to talk, and being able to cry. Being able to cry with people. I never cried before. Now I cry at the drop of a hat.”[14]
Thus, Ruth was able to deal with the emotional consequences of her wartime experiences, even though she still cannot remember the events that precipitated these feelings. She was also able to form relationships with other individuals, and she was able to see that hers was a common response to similar experiences. Although she credits this support group with a great deal of her healing process and ability to grow emotionally, she still admits that forming real bonds with other people is something she simply does not do anymore. While she refers to many of the other members as her friends, she does not consider these relationships to be truly deep.
Ruth still believes that she, herself, is her only reliable source of support. Because she often referred to “functioning” as a descriptive reference to how she lives her life, I asked her to define what she meant by that term. Ruth responded, “Not being so depressed that you hide under the covers. That’s what I call functioning. Getting up and taking care of yourself. And making a living and not depending on anybody. That’s what it is. Not depending on anybody. That to me is functioning. Being to able to make it on your own.” Part of not depending on anybody, Ruth agreed, is not trusting anybody.[15] Thus, her emotional state and her relational interactions are deeply connected both to each other and to her Holocaust experiences. As will be clear below, her relationships have also been deeply affected by the events in her early life.
When I asked Ruth what she found to be the most traumatic of all her experiences during (or after) the war, she replied, “Well, I think, besides the fact that my parents weren’t a ‘mommy’ and a ‘daddy,’ and my brother and my sister because, I guess we had been separated so long, that, I don’t know if it’s my parents’ fault or if it’s the fault of the war, that we couldn’t gel anymore, that we couldn’t have any intimacy.”[16] She appears to believe that the war did indeed cause an irreparable disruption in her family’s ability to interact with each other. There was simply no unity, no sense of togetherness. She told me, “I grieve that I have no relatives besides my parents. My family was never a nice family after the war. We were just five people who happen[ed] to live in the same house, the same apartment. One of the reasons that I was so angry [was that] I felt my parents weren’t nurturing. I was always running away from the family, this is why I took the job [at the orphanage in Paris].”[17]
Ruth also believes that this was a primary motivation for her decision to immigrate to America. Again, she reiterated that the war had a great deal to do with this. She remarked, “I think I was running away from my family. Because I wasn’t happy with them, and this was due to the war. I know that my brother and my sister were not happy people. My brother is dead now a long time, and I have no contact with my sister anymore. She’s the one who chose not to have any contact with me. I tried many many times.”[18]
Although it is clear that Ruth attributes her family’s lack of collective nurturance and togetherness to the war, one could also argue that this is another example of the idealization of pre-war circumstances. When I questioned Ruth about her memories of the life she and her family led before the war, she replied that she did not remember anything. Indeed, all she mentioned of this period in her narrative was her memory of attending Hebrew day school and of her father being a salesman. What frame of reference does Ruth have when she compares her family life after the war to life before it? Or is such a reference even necessary? Ruth has no doubt that the war caused a fundamental rupture in her relationships and interactions with her family. Such a disruption simply is, in her eyes. It need not be analyzed or explicitly discussed.
Ruth speaks similarly of her marriage. Although there were different sources of conflict and unhappiness for her, she simply seemed to know that things were not right. Here again, however, what she perceives as the basic problem in her marriage, as well as the basic problem with her family’s lack of cohesion, is not viewed as being caused by her. She told me: “It’s unfortunate that I married the man that I married. Because it wasn’t a happy marriage either. And that wasn’t my fault. I married a man with three young children. I thought this would be a nice way of setting roots, of…[creating an] instant family. It didn’t work out because he was not the right man.”[19] Just as her family simply did not interact the “right” way after the war, her ex-husband just was not the “right” man. It is striking here that Ruth has such a clear understanding and perception of what is good for her and what is not. After all the displacement and instability she experienced in her formative years, she still seems to know what she wants and when she is not receiving it.
It is also significant that Ruth took it upon herself to end her marriage. One would assume that, with such a long and painful history of disruption in her life, relationships, and environment, an individual like Ruth would remain in a basically stable situation simply for the sake of staying in one place. Happiness might be considered secondary to stability in light of these types of past experiences. Indeed, Aaron Hass writes of a “greater reluctance to dissolve a marriage” in survivors, perhaps attributable to Old World values. He also theorizes that “Perhaps some survivors also felt too frightened, too weakened, to contemplate another beginning.”[20] Ruth surely felt all of these things. And yet, she left when she realized that the marriage could not succeed. She remarked, “I tried very hard to make this marriage, I mean, I took care of the children and I went to work, because he didn’t have much of an income. So I really tried very hard to make it a family. But he was a drinking man.”[21] She did the best she believes she could, but was nonetheless able to disentangle herself when the need arose.
Indeed, Ruth speaks of her decision to leave her marriage and the ensuing period of hardship with great pride. It was clear at the time of the interview that she considers her independence and ability to be completely self-reliant as tremendous strengths. She listed her accomplishments in this realm: “…being able to come to this country by myself, and being able to find work and supporting myself. Being able to get out of a bad marriage. And know[ing] when to get out…as hard as it was. I made the decision. Being on my own with a young child, but making it! I mean, I had no child support, no alimony, no nothing. It took a lot of courage. A lot of strength. Not courage, strength. But I did. I just knew that if I was going to stay in that marriage it would kill me. And I was able to make it!”[22]
Alongside the pride she feels at finally “knowing when to get out” of her marriage, Ruth also believes that she could have, and perhaps should have, behaved differently in all of the relationships she had with members of the opposite sex. When I asked her what, if anything, she would do over in her life, she replied, “My relationships with men. I hung on at times too long, and was not able to separate when I should have.” Both before and after her husband, and even during periods of her marriage, Ruth believes, “every time, I did not know when to separate. I would like to do that over. Instead of spending—I eventually spent my whole life alone. Because I picked the wrong people, and because there have been so many separations in my previous life, as a child. I never wanted to separate from the wrong man.”[23]
Thus, one can see, and Ruth recognizes, that the disruption in her early life paved the way for the interactional styles she uses today. Because she was uprooted so constantly during her childhood, she never had the time or the appropriate environment in which to create lasting friendships. In fact, she mentions having no childhood friends at all, due at first to the constant relocations but later certainly to her fear of abandonment. Because Ruth was so used to having the relationships she had made cut short, and because this leaving (and being left) was so traumatic for her, she simply stopped trying to connect with others. Independence became her motto, and “hanging on” to other people or relationships became a weakness, in her eyes. From her perspective, this is a safer and less upsetting way of life.
When I asked Ruth what the most painful part of her experience was for her, she told me: “The trauma that I’ve had is hiding, and being afraid of people constantly. I lived for twelve years from day to day. I think I still do to this day. From day to day. I was hoping that at the end, something nice is gonna happen. I’m still hoping. I mean, you have to try to make it happen. But do I try very hard? No. Because I don’t trust people. So, you know, there are some people in my life that are friends, but there are still a lot of things that I am shy of trying. All this has to do with my twelve years of running.”[24] It is thus clear that Ruth ties her experiences during the war inextricably to her present level of functioning. She has simply proceeded along the path that her childhood carved out for her.
Because Ruth was so deeply affected by the instability in her childhood and the ensuing emotional and relational difficulties she experienced with her family directly afterwards—all of which she attributes to the war—the coping strategies she employs today appear to be mere responses to the traumas of fifty years ago. She reacts to experiences today the same way she reacted during the war, and she recognizes that the way she lives her life presently is a direct response to the pain she has been carrying with her from her childhood. One of her deepest concerns revolves around her knowledge that this pain keeps her from doing things differently, or doing different things. The “loss” of her childhood has instilled in her a sense of fear—fear of loss and abandonment, fear of being really known, and fear of really knowing others. Ruth remarked: “I feel that people that were in camps suffered more than I did. But at the same time, I lost twelve years of my life! For twelve years and even afterwards, I was afraid. It wasn’t until I think the ‘60s that I was able to say to people ‘I’m Jewish!’”[25]
This fear of being recognized as a Jew clearly persisted well into Ruth’s post-war life. She spoke of it often during the interview, referring to “this terrible fear that I have of being found out as a Jew, that I had for many many years,”[26] and remarking that she (and other Jews) “had to live with fear that people wouldn’t like me, if they found out that I was Jewish.”[27] Although all of her current friends are Jewish, she admitted that she is still “hyper-sensitive” as far as her awareness of the people around her and whether her surroundings are “safe” for Jews. She reiterated, “I just don’t trust people. I mistrust everybody. I trust myself. That’s it. I have close friends, but I don’t know how far I would trust them.”[28] When I asked her whether she believes that something bad could really happen to her as a result of being Jewish, she simply replied, “I’m very cautious, so I’m protecting myself all the time.”[29]
Ruth went on to tell me that this constant concern she has for her own well-being became translated to, or projected upon, her daughter. While some degree of protectiveness is certainly natural for any mother, Ruth believes she went beyond what she considers “normal” and even transfused her own “problems” into her daughter through her overprotective tendencies. She told me: “I was overprotective with my child, who is now forty. Who, because I was so overprotective and—this is something that we have discussed in our group, that some of our children have tremendous problems because they were raised by us.”[30] When I inquired about the impact she believes she had on her own daughter, she agreed that it was undoubtedly negative.
In this sense, Ruth’s childhood experiences have overwhelmingly colored how she looks at the world and how she responds to it. She remembers being afraid during her youth, but she cannot place this fear in specific situations or experiences. Therefore, this free-floating anxiety and apprehension still plagues her and still manifests itself in her daily life. Her coping strategies during the war were adaptive at the time: caution in social situations is certainly justified as a response to being constantly discriminated against, and being hesitant to emotionally attach to people is a natural reaction to having experienced so many relational losses. However, it seems that Ruth still hangs on to these strategies, although the direct threats do not exist in her life in the same fashion as they did during her childhood. She is responding to her present life in the same manner as that in which she was conditioned to respond to her past experiences.
I saw this tendency clearly in the following two statements made by Ruth. At one point she told me, “I have made many wrong choices and I think, more than making choices I have many times just let life go by. Rather than making decisions. Because I’m afraid of making decisions.”[31] Later, when discussing her present functioning, she remarked: “I am still angry at—not angry because I don’t have anger anymore—but I feel like the world has let me down. That I could have had a terrific life. But because of my experiences, I was afraid to try many things in my life, to make my life better. I would rather—even to this day, I would rather vegetate at times than go out and try something that maybe could make my life better, but I’m comfortable the way I am. Because I don’t want to be hurt.”[32] Again, it is clear that Ruth is driven by her psychological need to stay safe at all costs. “Comfort” means not being hurt, and achieving this comfort comes at the expense of trying new things, which would require stepping outside that safety zone and opening herself up to potential “hurt.” This tendency to preserve her emotional stability and psychological safety would appear to be a direct response to having these needs challenged so often and so fundamentally during her childhood.
Ruth also strives to protect herself by simply not thinking about the pain she carries with her. She remarked to me, “How often do I think about my life? I try not to. Actively, I try not to.”[33] Later, she stated, “I never think about the past.” When I asked her if she attempts to just push it away from her consciousness, she agreed: “So I have this life today. I go to work, I take care of my child, I go out to the movies, and I don’t think about this.” Indeed, for Ruth, her daily life and her childhood memories are very separate. There is no integration between her present and past experiences, and there is no way to allow them to coexist in her consciousness.
She must push her traumatic memories away in order to function on a day-to-day basis, and she “feel[s] like crying” when she does talk or think about her past. However, she reiterated that she “never gave up. Well like I said, I lived from day to day. Never thinking about tomorrow. Today I have to do this, and I do it, and that’s it.”[34] While Ruth seemed adamant about her ability to keep her memories away when necessary, I noted a number of contradictions in how she talked about their presence in her life, and contrarily, how she fights this presence. For instance, there were a number of times during the interview when she discussed the constancy of her pain and frustration at not being able to access her memories. In a letter I recently received from her, she wrote, “you want to know how much of my past is part of my present life[?] ALL THE TIME.”[35] Thus, it appears that Ruth’s past experiences and the emotions that stem from them cause a great deal of conflict for her. She sees the Holocaust as a constant and powerful force in her life in general, but continues to fight its influence over her daily functioning.
Indeed, Ruth considers it a tremendous strength to be able to “function” at the high level that she has achieved. When she spoke of “liv[ing] day to day,” she seemed to imply that simply being able to recognize that a job needed to be done and being able to do it well was a source of power and pride. Her ability to push away her emotions in order to accomplish a goal is one for which she is grateful, and that has been adaptive for her in many ways. She did acknowledge, however, that she cannot keep her emotions out of her consciousness indefinitely. She remarked: “This doesn’t mean that, emotionally, when I’m alone and I’m at a very bad point, that at times I don’t feel terrible, and am depressed. But there are people that go through life with terrible depressions because of what they lived through. And I don’t. I have my highs and my lows. Which I think are pretty normal. But I never get that low, that I don’t take care of myself.”[36] She later reiterated, “I pick myself up. And I keep going!”[37]
In the final analysis, Ruth sees herself as a strong, resourceful, accomplished, determined individual. She has weathered many “lows,” and she feels the emotional repercussions of these experiences. But she knows how to handle them, and she knows how much she can handle. Above all else, she has a driving force in her life: to live. She told me, “I had a father who was very resourceful. I think this is a strength that I got from my father. That no matter what, you live. You try very hard to continue your life.”[38] Ruth copes with the disruption her wartime experiences have caused in her life, her relationships, her emotions, and her functioning strategies. Sometimes she pushes the trauma aside, and other times it comes, unbidden, to the surface. Sometimes she is overpowered by the negative influence it has had on her life, and other times she overcomes it and moves beyond it. There is a constant push-and-pull interplay between her conscious emotions and unconscious traumas, between her need for closure and her inability to achieve it. Ultimately, however, she believes in herself and she describes herself in positive terms, despite her sense of loss and knowledge of her fallibility. Thus, it seems that she is indeed stronger than the trauma.
Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin, in their book, Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, prescribe that the budding qualitative researcher should make use of a variety of analytic strategies. One of the most valuable, they have found, is “to occasionally check out assumptions, and later hypotheses, with respondents and against incoming data; that is, simply explain to respondents what you think you are finding in the data and ask them whether your interpretation matches their experiences with that phenomenon—and if not, then why.”[39] Partly as an attempt to sample the array of qualitative methods currently in use, and partly to allay my own concerns about the interpretive process in which I have engaged here, I contacted Ruth after writing the majority of this chapter, almost seven months after our interview. I found that our conversation shifted my thinking about a number of key issues dramatically, and I also found that the interplay between the researcher and the participant—even after an interview is “officially” over—can be absolutely (and surprisingly) invaluable. Thus, I believe that it is important to add a short epilogue here, in an effort to represent Ruth and her impact on my research as transparently as possible.
When I called her, I was not planning on going into too much detail about the specific analyses I had made about her, but I was concerned about a couple of interpretive leaps I thought I had made and I wanted to get her feedback. I felt I needed to make it clear that she was the only participant I was planning on discussing at such length. I also wanted to remind her that her real name would be used, and that when the thesis was finished, many of her friends at the Center in Long Island would be able to read up to thirty pages dedicated to an in-depth analysis of her. I told her that I was presenting her as a case study of disrupted memory, and that I had delved deeply into her transcript to look for references to memory holes, disconnected stories, and disrupted coping, relationships, and ability to construct a cohesive life narrative.
Because this was my first attempt at an analysis of an individual on this level, I was anxious that my interpretations might be misconstrued, taken too seriously, or altogether wrong. To my utter surprise and amazement, Ruth agreed with nearly every issue I discussed with her, and even expanded on some of my hypotheses about why her stories were incomplete and why her life seems disrupted. She was brutally honest in her self-analysis, and she did not seem surprised that I had come to similar conclusions. Ruth attempted to clarify points that I told her I had addressed, and appeared to be utterly committed to giving me the clearest possible picture of herself, with no judgment and little self-consciousness. In the interest of showing Ruth’s pure voice, with less interruption and less of my own analysis than have appeared in the chapter itself, I would like to quote here some of the reiterations she presented to me.
When we discussed what I had perceived as the constant pain she feels at the loss of her memories and the impact that has had on her current emotional and relational functioning, Ruth told me: “I had no childhood friends, no one to attach myself to. Even though I don’t remember the goodbyes, I know I experienced them, so I don’t want to attach to people because I don’t want to say the goodbyes again. There are very painful things that I don’t remember, but the pain is there. I have a terrible regret of not having those memories. I know that something is missing and I know what is missing—like my relationships with my friends and my family—but I just can’t get it back. If I had the memories, I would still feel the pain, but at least I would know that there were people that I loved and that loved me!”[40]
Ruth went on to talk about her daily life now and her perceptions of herself and her emotional well-being: “I felt all my life that I just live day by day—I never made plans for the future. I did what I had to do, but without too much happiness in it. I’m not happy now, but I’m content. I’m independent both financially and—well, no, not emotionally. There’s really nothing else in my life, like a relationship with a man. There’s just my daughter and granddaughter—they are my only close emotional relationships.”[41]
She continued, discussing the pain she has experienced in her relationships and the coping strategies she utilizes to constantly minimize the potential for being “hurt”: “I have always had bad relationships with men—I was never able to communicate my needs, and they didn’t care. After that I protected myself. I figured, ‘If I never get into a deep relationship with a man, he won’t hurt me.’ I think a lot of survivors are like that. I had a need to have a man and have children, but I’ve met single women who never had those needs. Some of us survivors, including me, never wanted too-close relationships even with women, because I don’t want to get hurt! There were just too many times that I had to leave or was left. It was very painful. And to avoid pain, you avoid closeness—I just gave up communicating my needs. I present myself as this happy-go-lucky, gregarious person, but there’s that other part of me—don’t come too close because I don’t want to get hurt.”[42] It is clear here that she sees a connection between the relationships in which she was involved after the war and those before it.
One of the issues I had most wanted to clarify with Ruth directly was that of the disparity between her semi-complete “war” story and the lack of a cohesive narrative of her life after the war. When I told her that I had found it significant that she had not volunteered information, but rather, that I had had to probe her about her experiences in America, she responded: “After I became single again, all I was thinking about was just living, raising my child. I haven’t analyzed it as much, I really haven’t thought about it. I’ve never been asked about it—you were the first person who asked me! There is a story, but it’s a nothing story, to me! I had a child, I had to work, I had to raise a child, I just went on. I don’t think people find it interesting. I never thought of it as interesting. I was surprised that you asked about it at all.”[43]
These statements have proved crucial to my evolving understanding of the narrative constructions of Holocaust survivors. My initial assumption that Holocaust survivors are valued for their Holocaust stories, and thus, place an inordinate amount of their self-worth and identity on their status as survivors, was not only confirmed but deepened to a level that I had not conceptually reached before my conversation with Ruth. While I had already assumed that survivors are validated by the general public only as far as their survivorship, I had only seen this as extending to their “public” narratives, in a sense. I had assumed that they could separate what the world thought was interesting about them from what they thought was interesting about themselves. Thus, I had expected that I, as a representative of the “general public,” would receive the traditional Holocaust narrative (scripted and all), and would have varying amounts of difficulty extracting the narratives of their lives after the war. However, I viewed this as only the product of the years of conditioning that they have received, indicating that their value to the world is as survivors of the Holocaust and not as whole people with whole narratives expanding beyond the Holocaust. I found out, through Ruth, that this is not the “whole story.”
In fact, what she told me seemed to indicate that this conditioning did not simply affect her “public” narrative, but her private one as well. It is not simply that she didn’t want to tell me the narrative of her post-war life; it is that she never constructed one. And while I had recognized this, I had again assumed that this was merely a result of the tremendous disruption of the Holocaust in her life and memories. In reality, she has internalized the public’s view of her. Because they don’t find anything beyond the Holocaust interesting, she doesn’t either. And because no one seems to care about her life after the war (and certainly because no one has asked her about it), she has never bothered to construct a cohesive story about it. Indeed, she seems to think, “If the world doesn’t want to hear that story, I won’t even create it.” What the public initially wanted to hear and what the survivors initially wanted to say were often highly opposing ideas. However, these have now become fused, whether intentionally or not, and survivors now often cater to what the world wants and expects of them. Unfortunately, they have conformed to these expectations personally as well as publicly, to the extent that their identities have become, in large part, a mere reflection of their value to the outside world.
Ruth’s
final statements in our conversation showed an intensely conflicted interplay
between her pain at being rejected by the outside world and her desire to not
be affected by that pain. She told
me: “I’m very cold about everything in
my life. If I hear a sad story about
anything, I can look at it and say it’s not so terrible! Because of what happened to me, I’ve become
hardened, hardened to my own experiences also.
After losing twelve years of life, and divorce, and being alone, and
having to make a living—nobody ever helped me and nobody ever lent a helping
hand. Nothing can be worse than
that! The reason I am such a strong
survivor and I don’t let things touch me so closely, is that nothing can be as
bad as that. I’m here, I’m alive, I’m
independent, I drive my own car, I live in my own apartment, I don’t have to
worry about money—I’m content in my own little world.”[44] Ruth has finally decided on a strategy: to reject others before they have a chance
to reject her. She relies on her own
vision of herself, and she trusts only herself. Everything in the present is viewed in relation to her past
experiences, which continue to loom over her daily world.
I have presented this
detailed description of Ruth’s experiences and feelings both during and after
the war as an extreme example of the multi-faceted disruption that the Holocaust
can cause. I emphasized at the outset
of this chapter that both the presence and the absence of Holocaust memories
can cause a great deal of difficulty for survivors. Ruth’s case shows that the lack of a cohesive narrative for the
events of childhood (or for a period of trauma) can have drastic implications
for future identity formation, relational abilities, coping abilities, and
emotional functioning. Her sense of
self is as incomplete as her memories, and her sense of the world and those
around her has been dramatically influenced by the emotional consequences of
this lack of integration.
[1] Krell 384.
[2] RN transcript 30.
[3] RN, personal communication, 12/30/99.
[4] RN transcript 27.
[5] Marks 188.
[6] RN transcript 27-28.
[7] Marks 188.
[8] RN transcript 26-27.
[9] van Ravesteijn 195.
[10] RN transcript 17.
[11] RN transcript 13.
[12] RN transcript 18.
[13] RN transcript 14.
[14] RN transcript 15.
[15] RN transcript 33.
[16] RN transcript 16.
[17] RN transcript 15.
[18] RN transcript 15-16.
[19] RN transcript 17.
[20] Hass 123.
[21] RN transcript 18.
[22] RN transcript 30-31.
[23] RN transcript 36.
[24] RN transcript 19-20.
[25] RN transcript 19.
[26] RN transcript 23.
[27] RN transcript 21.
[28] RN transcript 23-24.
[29] RN transcript 24.
[30] RN transcript 24.
[31] RN transcript 19.
[32] RN transcript 25-26.
[33] RN transcript 27.
[34] RN transcript 28-29.
[35] RN, written communication, received 2/25/00.
[36] RN transcript 32.
[37] RN transcript 33.
[38] RN transcript 21.
[39] Strauss and Corbin 45.
[40] RN, personal communication, 2/12/00.
[41] RN, personal communication, 2/12/00.
[42] RN, personal communication, 2/12/00.
[43] RN, personal communication, 2/12/00.
[44] RN, personal communication, 2/12/00.