What rich stories. "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to
write..."   Good luck everyone!

Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com




> 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