The History of the Holocaust Survivor
I.
At six, she moves to the town. At thirteen, she is forced out, and at fourteen, she returns. It is no longer the town then, but an outline of what had been the town. She drifts through its streets with yellow skin and a fist for a stomach until she finds a man with a car. Drive me, she begs him. Take me to the house. He agrees. The house is an outline of what had once been the house. She looks at the insides of her eyelids and wonders if she too is an outline. Can outlines wail?
II.
After the war, no one says holocaust or survivor, let alone the two together. Nations are still counting the dead, assessing the scale of destruction. Everyone is looking, searching for someone or something. Identity is a concept in flux. In documents, officials use names like Displaced Person, Deportee, and Jewish War Orphan. They all apply to her. Every name has roughly the same meaning: problem.
III.
At seventeen, the Holocaust Survivor is married. At eighteen, she moves to a refugee camp in Germany with her husband. He is also from the town, also sees outlines. He works as a delivery driver in the camp until their papers arrive. When she is nineteen and he is twenty-seven, they board a boat sailing west, at sea for a full month. Once on land, they leave again, catching a train west, always west, a train for a city that is not the town.
Trees pass by, fields, buildings. Geese. She sees signs she cannot read with words she does not know and feels nothing, her mind blank. It’s only her lap that’s full, the baby pulling at her hair and shirt, wanting more.
IV.
In the city that is not the town, the Holocaust Survivor cooks. She cooks like there can never be enough food. She cooks whole chickens and potato latkes and cholent brisket and tall pots of soup. Outlines are hard to fill, so she learns to bake too, challah and crescent rolls and cream-filled pastries. She learns to mend and sew and crochet and clean. She has three children. They are born as she and her siblings had been: a girl, a boy, a girl. She is too busy for memories, too tired for patterns. They hurt her eyes too much.
V.
The term Holocaust survivor is a backwards-facing term, grounding identity in the past. It pronounces the violence over, the act of survival complete. It is shorthand for sob story, for too terrible to talk about, for what luck, for deep guilt. It frames a person as unwanted, unlikely, inspiration for others. It means lesson.
VI.
For the Holocaust Survivor and her husband, the past is an open maw. She refuses to let their children be pulled down in it. They are meant to be birds. She fluffs their feathers, opens their wings, and points them toward the sky. They have full bellies and thick, lovely coats. She makes their clothes from scratch, makes their beds in the morning, makes their parties, their plans, their food. She is always making, a gale of action. The Holocaust Survivor gives in all the ways mothers give, but not in all the ways birds need. What does she know about ornithology?
VII.
The Holocaust Survivor is thirty-two when the family moves countries again. She never asks herself what is next because she never wants to know. The answer has crushed her too many times. Across the river, her husband opens a restaurant and closes it. There’s no business. He looks for work and finds nothing. She looks and finds a job at the auto plant. The Holocaust Survivor wakes at four in the morning. She sews leather seats on the assembly line, turning thread into food for her family. Health insurance and a pension too. Her husband stews, steeped in jealousy. He buys himself a taxicab, driving strangers he doesn’t have to face.
VIII.
The term Holocaust survivor grows from a description to a type. It suggests a certain aesthetic, certain characteristics. Multilingual, but with a thick European accent. Pushy, but apprehensive. Insatiable, but full. The type of person who buys a nice sofa then covers it in plastic. Who dresses well and bargain shops better. Generous and thrifty, defiant and resigned, it is the type of person who wants to rest but never does. The type of person who is also a paradox.
Is she, the Holocaust Survivor, a type? Can she meet every one of those criteria and still be something more? Can she be her own person? She doesn’t ask herself such questions. It’s only other people who wonder. Other people want to know everything, want to study, reflect, remember. She can’t imagine why. The future is in the other direction.
IX.
Years later, the Holocaust Survivor’s husband wants to see the town again. She says no. The timing is not good. He is determined and takes his brother. The men visit an outline of the town, saying goodbye to an outline of the dead, headstones that mark the lives of their parents but not their bodies. On the flight back, in the space between a home lost and a home made, assembled with papers, seals, grief, and time, her husband has a heart attack. At fifty-seven, the Holocaust Survivor becomes a widow.
When the mirrors are uncovered, she doesn’t see a survivor or a widow or a lesson or a type. She only sees herself.
X.
Three weeks after her husband’s death, the Holocaust Survivor is with her daughter when she goes into labor. This is why she would not visit the town. Their daughter was pregnant. The baby was coming. The baby is now thirty-two, though the Holocaust Survivor can never remember. She is ninety. She’s always been better with numbers than words, but still nothing adds up. How did she become an old woman? With swollen feet and an apartment outside Chicago? Her daughter hires caretakers for her, and she finds their faults, one by one. She is the caretaker. She is the mother, the wife, the worker, the bride, the girl for whom care was not taken. When her granddaughter visits, she carries the girl’s backpack, setting it on the flat black seat of her walker. When her granddaughter leaves, the Holocaust Survivor returns to Lifetime movies and Shark Tank. The caretaker hands her too many pills, and she tosses them in her mouth or feeds them to the armchair. The town is far away and sometimes, so is she.
XI.
Once a type, the term Holocaust survivor stays a type. Like a museum display, the image has been set, well-coiffed and out of touch. Only now, the type ages. It stiffens. It becomes mythic, or lost, or doubted, or revered. It becomes a point to make, a tool to wield, but mostly it fades, a frayed edge, a heavy arm, a quiet sound in a noisy room. It is an outline that will not fill, but it never empties either. The term means everything it has always meant, but now it also means old.
XII.
The granddaughter is at it again. She’s always writing, that one. The story, she thinks, is a line and the line, she feels, is broken. But what would happen if she redrew it, thick and whole? If the many fragments—the town, the house, the camps, the moves, the city, the plant, the food, the loss, the life—came together? What if sense was brought to the nonsense of trauma, the contradiction of survival? What would become of the present if the past was processed? The Holocaust Survivor does not care what the granddaughter writes. All she hopes is that she makes a little money. She wants setness for her life, the semblance of stability. She likes when the granddaughter holds her hand and also when she lets go.
XIII.
The town is Sighet, Romania. The city that is not the town is Windsor, Canada. The auto plant is General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck. The Holocaust Survivor is Golda Indig. The narrative distance is a shield. The details are a relief. The birds are the birds. The granddaughter is trying. She rolls her neck when she writes, her muscles taut. She keeps looking back, keeps writing. She reads the news, feels sad, sees her nephews, feels happy. The line, she thinks, make the line. Draw it thick, draw it whole. On, she writes, turning her neck, stretching her self. The past is the only place now where she can find her grandma.
Brooke Randel (@brookerandel) is a writer, editor, and associate creative director in Chicago. She is the author of Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. Her writing has been published in Hippocampus, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. The granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, she writes on issues of memory, trauma, family, and history. Find more of her work at brookerandel.com.