One issue, aside from sex, was taboo for the Jews.
It was a matter that was avoided, that caused shame, that was repressed and kept in secret mental drawers.
Eventually, I had to uncover it. Once confronted, it would bring about inexorable changes.
I lacked something that my schoolmates had in abundance. As immigrants, our family was small.
There were cases of children who had dozens of uncles, cousins, and close relatives. In my house, I only knew my maternal grandparents. A black cloud covered the past. Where the hell was my family?
If the family history was a black hole, the ghosts of the past made themselves present. The only prayer Elena never missed was the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. “Why are you crying, Mom?” I would question her. “For nothing, for no one,” she would respond. However, “no one” must have been something important because her tears were scarce in her life.
There was a great secret, and it would take time to uncover it.
It was related to the cultural activities of the WIZO.
An annual event held enormous importance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This commemorated the armed Jewish resistance of 1943 in Poland and was generally forbidden to minors. But one day, I attended thanks to the advantage of being the organizer’s 33
son, and I observed that the woman paid homage not to please either God or the devil.
The event featured speeches from leaders who spoke about how Poland, with its three and a half million Jews, had been the Jerusalem of exile, the homeland of their parents, the one that welcomed them when they were expelled from Spain and Western Europe, the one that did not create mandatory ghettos, and where they lived through a thousand years of good and bad history. Then, the Nazis came, and three million of them were annihilated.
“What can I tell you?” the rhetorical question from Mrs. Lodka, who spent four years in Auschwitz.
She worked in a textile factory and narrated how she reached such a state of malnutrition that she lined up four times to be gassed. She was either unlucky or lucky, depending on the interpretation, because the chambers were full. When one of them was dynami-ted and the Nazis searched for the culprits, they inte-rrogated her, and since she didn’t know the identity of the saboteurs, they cut off her fingers. As the woman told her story, I looked at the overprotective and loving mothers and the WIZO friends who stuffed me with their sweets and pastries, and I thought about the gas in the showers.
After that performance, I began to understand.
Elena, like those present, had been deeply affected by the Holocaust. She could have left before 1939, but she inherited the guilt of survival, earned 34
by chance, by inconsequential decisions, without any merit. This would lead her to bury her past, her family, her country, her language, which would be a decision of dubious results.