My father was an
>orphanage
Urk, that should be "in" an orphanage, but that is definitely a typo that's true,
best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 12:39:47 -0500
>From: Rebecca Seiferle <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Should have said....
>To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics
<[log in to unmask]>
>
>Thanks for that story, Ken, which I don't know how to reply to. My father was
an
>orphanage and lost contact with his family and so whenever we moved, which
>was very often, we would always look for 'seiferle' in the phone books, never
>finding it. So I can imagine what it must have been like to see your surname on
>these lists as cargo. I feel in a way as if I know mostly the other half of this
>sense of all of us being survivors, for some of my family were not cargo but
>Nazis, in fact or perhaps in sympathy. After a loss of contact for some forty
>years, my father's brother found him and came to meet us all, a happy reunion
>which quickly began to break along the same faultlines that had been existant
>before the separation (just to give a brief for instance, the brother was taken
out
>of the orphanage by their father, my father was left there, that sort of thing).
But
>my uncle was married to a German woman and eventually it became known
that
>she was from an upper class German family and had been a woman officer at
>one of the women's camps; while horseback riding she was strafed by a low
>flying Allied plane and retired her comission. It was all rather vague, she didn't
>say what she did, why she was a Colonel, but she was very proud of her
family's
>still existant connections in German and their positions in various industries
>that used slave labor, and it's further vague because this is not anything she
>told to me, but rather in some late night conversation with another relative
who
>told it to me much after later. Even so, it was like some crisis in my head
>whenever I talked to her, which was not very often, for I wanted to be kind to
my
>uncle who had gone back home and had a nervous breakdown and attempted
>suicide, unsuccessfully, though it left him blind, and it was hard not to see the
>ruin that surrounded her, or all of her real or neuresthenic complaints as some
>kind of karmic levelling. Once my uncle died, some two years later, there was
no
>further contact between us. On my mother's side of the family, I heard stories
>about my great grandmother who liked to take lunch to the German pow's who
>were sent to work in the sugar beet fields, she liked it because she could
speak
>the "high German" she knew rather than the low German that a few neighbors
>spoke. This distinction of the language affected my aunt Sigrid as well, for a
>relative who had a German friend thought the two of them would like to meet,
>but once the other woman said anything in German, Sigrid, hearing her accent,
>dismissed her coldly. This too was conveyed to me later, and at a remove, so
>none of these events were events that faced me, that I had to reply to, but
>stories that arrived later, and yet still so troubling. For I think I understand
what
>you mean here by taking it personally as that way in which the historical and
>cultural and all of these ruins can intersect with me, profoundly troubling, like
a
>sharp pin driven through one's being that one cannot evade or squirm away
>from, for me anyway it has something to do with writing poetry, just as the
>Mandel poem Doug posted conveys, I think.
>
>best,
>
>Rebecca
>
>---- Original message ----
>>Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:15:54 -0500
>>From: Ken Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
>>Subject: Re: Should have said....
>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>>Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>>
>>>Oh, and while I'm here, I wanted to say, Ken, thanks for your posts in these
>>>threads, all that impassioned questioning which I'm still thinking about,
>>>
>>>
>>I take this stuff personally even if it's "not about me" in the sense
>>that anyone I know did time in a Gulag or is an Armenian who had stories
>>about 1915 handed down through the generations (by the way, it amazes me
>>that to this day the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge it even
>>happened). And, even born Jewish, I still needed time to absorb and
>>personalize the enormity of the Shoa. One day in 1990 or '91 I was in
>>the Jewish Federation library near where I lived, and found a volume
>>called _Memorial Book to the Jews of France_. It was not a narrative.
>>It was collection of railway cargo manifests, and Jews were the cargo.
>>They were dated by departure from Drancy, the French "holding" camp, to
>>clearly indicated destinations: mostly Auschwitz and Majdanek, with a
>>couple of Sobibors and Treblinkas thrown in there. They also listed
>>country of origin: in most cases the country of original was Poland. My
>>best guess is that Jews fled Poland in September 1939, figuring they'd
>>be safe in France, that the Nazis would never get that far. Wrong. It
>>is hard for the ordinary human mind to encompass global evil.
>>
>>I found the name "Wolman": and to describe what I got as a chill
>>understates my reaction. Whoever he was, he was Polish, from a large
>>city, was probably in his 40s or older. I borrowed a pad from the
>>librarian and kept going. I counted 25 Polish-born Wolmans (and other
>>variant spellings) on trains that ran from France to Hell between early
>>1942 and early 1944. Are they "mine"? I don't know, of course, nor do
>>I know if anyone survived. But I reasoned that because large families
>>were the rule back then, my grandfather surely had brothers, sisters,
>>etc., who chose to remain in Poland rather than go to the "Goldene
>>Medina" of the United States, and it's quite likely that many were swept
>>up by the monstosity that took place. Others not on the manifests?
>>Some might have moved east into the waiting arms of the Russian army,
>>which could have sent them to Kolyma or places like it.
>>
>>I walked out of the library that day thinking "ALL of us are
>>Survivors." That is a bit grandiose but at some geneological level or
>>level of Fate it is quite true. I was born in February 1944. The
>>chances are I would never have been except that my father's father
>>supposed that life in New York couldn't be any worse than it was in Lublin.
>>
>>He called it.
>>
>>Ken
>>
>>--
>>Kenneth Wolman
>>Proposal Development Department
>>Room SW334
>>Sarnoff Corporation
>>609-734-2538
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