Bearing Witness

A colleague at Stanford was a naturalized citizen of German-Jewish birth who had survived her wartime incarceration in Dachau.  She was a neurotic mess, occasionally remarking that she wished she had thrown herself against the electrified fence there and ended her life.  So strong was her instinct for suicide that despite having a very nice Jewish American husband, two darling children, a tenured position she did indeed manage to do herself in.  She haunted me later on since through my friendship with her husband my wife and I moved into the top floor of a two family house that his mother let in Brookline where I took up residence when we moved back East for my job at Boston University.  This was the quintessential Jewish mother, all Gemutlichkeit but tough as nails, who asked me once "Why did she do it?  That was years ago, why didn't she get over it?" words spoken I realize by a Jewish grandmother who could never excuse the psychic damage suffered by those little ones, but to me betraying a shocking indifference to what it meant to be a Holocaust survivor.  Years later on a trip through Germany I visited Dachau as a conscious act of piety toward my former colleague, and had a weird experience.  I had picked up a hitch hiker, a young German male, a college student on his way to Vienna.  We were just outside of Augsburg, and I told him that I would take him to the exit ramp near Munich.  He figured out I was going to the town of Dachau--I didn't even realize it was a town!--and said he would get off there downtown.  Moments later he popped up with the intuition that I was going to the camp, preserved as it was as a monument to the Nazi horror and a memorial to its victims. He wanted to join me.  And so we went, and it was so laid out that once you started going through, looking at all the photos, growing increasingly more menacing and frightening as the Nazis bore down on the Jews, there was no way out but to turn back ignominiously, or suck in your breath and continue on to the horror of the logical end.  By the end the young man and I were holding hands and crying, he muttering "They never told us any of this when I was in school." A couple of years I was in Munich with my sons, and I felt I had to take them through, although they were only in their early teens, and then a few years later I was with my daughters, and so another guided tour was imposed upon them.  I felt false this time, as though I had assimilated the experience too much, made it mine, the way teachers do, could talk about it with my offspring in a meaningful, intelligent way, help them with their anguish.  But afterwards after a brief pause for coffee or whatever, they looked up from their guide books and asked excitedly if we could now visit the famous Munich zoo, and as the image of a zoo came into my head, a concentration camp for animals I suddenly realized, I burst into tears and sobbed as I had not done so strongly before, but it was not for those beasts, but the vision of the fence that enclosed them, perhaps not unlike the fence against which my long ago colleague yearned to hurl herself.