Hiding in the Holocaust

To be Jewish on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is to have, generations after the defeat of the Nazis, a place in your mind, for some small, for others large, that whispers: What would I do if it happened again? What would I do if, "never again," became "let's do it again"?

Unlike most events which happened before I was born, that seem to grow fuzzier as I age, the Holocaust grows more defined. Over time as personal connections to the Shoah grow like a collection of neurons, a kind of Holocaust memory develops.

My collection began with a tattoo. In the Talmud and Torah they are forbidden, but this isn't about that. Soon after passing my driving test, on a trip to Los Angeles, I found myself in a Jewish bakery. Being a hungry teen, I asked the woman behind the counter for a black and white cookie. As she handed it over the counter, I noticed a number that was tattooed on her inner forearm. I tried not to stare, but it was my first time encountering someone who had been through the Holocaust, and I wasn't sure what to do with it.

My high school world history book didn't have a word about the tattoo. My father who had enlisted in the Navy to fight the Nazis, and my mother, a daughter of Belo-Russian immigrants who had come to the U.S. in part to escape anti-Semitism, had never talked to me about it either. In Hebrew school, rather than discussing the death camps, my teachers were much more focused on the Israel War of Independence. So somewhere in my mind, apparently in a different place than where I kept phone numbers and times tables, I stored that tattooed number away.

Soon, my Holocaust memories began to grow, and a kind of anxiousness as well.

A college roommate, who I grew up with, told me that his father had survived the death camps. Another roommate began to date the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. I met other children of survivors through a Jewish student newspaper.

Years later, I met a woman who survived the forced labor camps, and a man who as a young adult escaped Europe on the kindertransport. He showed me a Kiddush cup he had smuggled out.

Trips to Holocaust museums and monuments helped me to gain a time-line understanding of the Nazi period, but with that knowledge, and from meeting survivors and their children, came even more curiosity and even imagining about what it must have been like to be a Jew during that time.

That others were beginning to interact and even act out their knowledge and gained memories of the Holocaust, was reflected in author Nathan Englander short story, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank." In the story, which has been collected in a book of the same name, two contemporary Jewish couples, while getting stoned around the kitchen table, play a game called, "Who will hide me." "In the event of a second Holocaust," says a character in the story. "It's a serious exploration, a thought experiment that we engage in," she continues.

In a time when the economy is shaky, politics polarizing, and recently, teens casually marking a Jewish home with syrupy swastikas, I wonder how many are now playing Englander's game? In a recent Israel survey conducted by the Dahaf Institute, between 36 and 40 percent of Israelis believe that the Holocaust could happen again. So when I play, I guess I am not playing alone. The rules are simple, just ask: which friends, which neighbors would be willing to risk everything? Whose doors would remain closed by the kindest of rationalizations? And whose would unexpectedly allow refuge?

The game may be just a harmless fantasy of paranoid-lite. But it does allow its players, like me, a way to work through a lifetime of built-up heavy Holocaust what-ifs. You can play for hours. There is no winner.

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."