As the child of a Holocaust survivor (and a war child delivering goods to the ghetto) your mind naturally wanders off in all sorts of directions and goes off on all kinds of tangents, one of them being, what were those times like? Were there any signs and – perhaps more importantly – how would it have affected me and what if anything would I have done? We all want to be the heroes in the stories we dream and live but when it comes to generational guilt and trauma, those wishes and ideals intensify. We know we can’t save our parents, because they’ve already been traumatized. But deep down inside we know that we have to, because we are the embodiment of their hope, it is because of us being alive, living, breathing, acting that they know their memories and those of their parents (and in fact all those who were murdered in the Holocaust) will be kept alive. We have to carry that legacy, and then pass it on to our offspring or to the younger generation(s) we interact with. And because we carry that legacy –  mentally, emotionally and in our DNA – we notice things more, namely the little microaggressions that are usually shrugged off but that mean so much more than they purport to be. Ignoring the foreign student in class, not understanding what someone else is saying because you don’t want to hear it, or just repeating something you’ve heard that stems from a more nationalistic ideal (you may or may not be aware of). 

Those incidents surround us, and because we took on board a few things growing up (things that are hard to hide but never seem to happen in the “normal” families) we are on hyper alert. My father would go above and beyond to ensure I had enough reading material, to the point of going out of his way after work so he could buy me English magazines that were only available in one place, which just happened to be on his work route, and getting money for books was never a problem. But read anything in front of him and WWIII would break out. He said it stemmed from the guards reading right in front of the prisoners as though they didn’t exist, not even part of the air they breathed. As a child, you don’t really understand, you just know that you can’t read in front of this particular parent, so you repair to your room a lot (which is also a great place for when your parents fight, but that’s a whole other story for a whole other time). And then you notice things around you that others don’t, things that set off alarm bells but only for you. And you start wondering yet again – because you actually started wondering about this in your youth, around the time you first found out what went down just before the Holocaust – how safe you would have been even then. Would you have gotten off on a technicality (well, really you look so Aryan, you couldn’t possibly be) or would they have taken you away on some pretext, that’s if they didn’t physically remove you from the only home you’d known (or your previous home) to cart you away because “one look is all it takes for everyone to know just what’s up.”

It’s hard to explain what exactly you notice long before the proverbial shit hits the fan, but you do. And it’s the subtle things, like the locals living in their own bubble without realizing how The Other lives and how everyday life  – and most of all their actions – affects the foreigner who decided to make their bed in that particular place regardless of how long. But it’s also the things that are said and the actions (not) taken. When people start falling all over themselves in order to condemn and pledge their support, you quickly recognize the cues that are merely trendy or verbal, there to score points but without any actions behind them. You recognize too, how these indications have always been there, but no one paid any attention, because you are just reading way too much into this (yet again). And then you know exactly what happened and how it could have happened, before your parents or grandparents were carted off (some never to be seen again), but you are just as helpless as they were (and as you were in the beginning, when you saw small subtle signs here and there, barely visible to others), because the lavine was set in motion, rolling off the mountain it was always perched on, with every intention of never stopping until it has hit its designated target. 

We are not above those who are (more) grounded in the places they live in. We were merely trained all our lives to spot and identify the signs, because we know firsthand what it means to (not) be safe.