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
|