B E F O R E : Reflections on Yom HaShoah

Today is Yom HaShoah, and I am riveted to my non-Jewish husband’s family tree. The family tree that starts in eleventh-century England and is memorialized on an elaborately framed canvas, complete with black-and-white photos and distinguished portraits of people and places stretching far back into antiquity. My husband wears his lineage lightly, a birthright he takes for granted.

I am admittedly obsessed with that family tree on its elaborately framed canvas. I find myself simultaneously drawn to it and repelled by it, just as I find myself in admiration and in envy of my husband’s unchallenged sense of self, anchored in centuries of carefully preserved and well-documented personal history. I have nothing with which to compare it.

The first and only time I attempted to create my own family tree, I was in middle school, that coming-of-age period where self-doubt is ubiquitous, and self-discovery is paramount. My efforts came to a screeching halt with my great-grandparents, who immigrated to die Goldene Medina – “the Golden Land,” as they referred to the U.S.A. in their native Yiddish – at the turn of the century from Poland (maternal side) and Romania (paternal side). When I pressed my grandparents for more information, they shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders, resignation writ large in their body language, and explained that all Jewish records were destroyed in the Holocaust, and that any relatives who had not already fled to the U.S.A. or Israel prior to Hitler’s rise had been murdered in the death camps. My family tree had leaves in abundance, but only the thinnest and shallowest of roots in the topsoil of die Goldene Medina. 

It was very strange for me, not yet in my teens, to be told there was no “before.” I felt rootless, despite that my family had clearly set down roots and became established and even prosperous in the U.S.A. I was bereft, the double whammy of having lost my entire extended family and my entire ancestral history to the Nazis leaving me reeling. The overwhelming sense of loss and disconnect seeped into my psyche and my bones, becoming an indelible part of me, my personal legacy. I will never share my husband’s bold self-confidence. Is it possible to be boldly self-confident without knowing who you are, and is it possible to know who you are without knowing where you came from, without a “before?”

Today, as I gaze at my husband’s family tree, caught between divergent emotions of yearning and despair, I am also painfully aware that the years are marching on. Survivors of the Holocaust and refugees who escaped the Nazis are older, and many have died. Now more than ever, it is our responsibility to hear their stories and acknowledge the darkness and hatred of the Nazi regime that decimated Jewish life in Europe and hacked off the roots of so many family trees. Antisemitism has spiked these past few years, with the Heil Hitler salute, Camp Auschwitz t-shirts, rallying cries of “Jews will not replace us,” and often fatal attacks on synagogues becoming the new normal. It is as important as it ever was to take a pause and remember the Holocaust individually and as a community. We must once again consider how our fate is tied up in each other's humanity, and how we can each take personal responsibility to speak out against injustice lest there be (to quote from Martin Niemöller’s famous poem) “no one left to speak for me.”

Recently, I learned that the commonly-held belief that no Jewish records survived the Holocaust is a myth, and that it is, in fact, possible – challenging, but possible – for Jews to trace their heritage back to pre-20th century Europe. My grandparents’ admonition notwithstanding, there is a “before,” and we must seek to uncover and understand it in order to make sense of the present, to make sense of our place in the world, to ensure that “never again” is not just an empty slogan. Perhaps it is time for me to revisit my family tree.

Dawn LaRochelle

Executive Director, Maine Jewish Museum

Dlarochelle@mainejewishmuseum.org