In the latest Gallup survey in Europe, it turns out that a large sector of citizens believes that Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. Of course, they would prefer, given their collaboration and indifference, that we didn’t. However, this hostility fails to understand that for victims of genocide, whether they are Jewish, Armenian, Mayan, Tutsi, or Serbo-Islamic, things are very different. That’s why we can’t stay silent, like they did when the genocide was in full swing or right now with the savage attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
I received one of the Yiskor books about my mother’s town, Dlugosiodlo, in Poland. Yiskor books are memoirs that commemorate the Jewish communities destroyed by the German genocidal machinery.
They are published by survivors who tell the story of the town, its inhabitants, their customs, and the possible places and ways they died.
I looked at some of its pages, and I come across a surprise. Among the citizens who were exterminated in the camps, the name and photo of my mother appear. I look at the photo of my mother as a victim in Treblinka.
Treblinka was a Nazi extermination camp located in German-occupied Poland during World War II. It was one of the six extermination camps established by the SS as part of Operation Reinhard, a plan to 36
kill millions of Jews. Between July 1942 and October 1943, approximately 900,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers at Treblinka. Victims were transported to the camp by train where they were deceived into thinking they were being resettled or sent to work camps. Upon arrival, they were subjected to a selec-tion process, with those fit for work being temporarily spared while the majority were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
If my mother was sent there (and the Germans were very meticulous in identifying those they sent on the death trains) then I was never alive. Survivors don’t live in Einstein’s physical world. We are more in Schrödinger’s quantum realm. There is a famous experiment with a live cat and a dead cat in a box that proves that two contradictory things can happen at the same time. The cat can die if poison is activated, or it can live if it’s not. What activates the poison is an electron that can behave like a bullet or like a wave.
In case it behaves like a bullet, it kills the cat, and if it behaves like a wave, it leaves it alive. According to quantum physics, in the box, since it’s unpredictable what the electron will do, the cat would be both alive and dead at the same time.
Genocide survivors, like the cat, are, thanks to chance, both alive and dead, born and not born.
Unlike those who didn’t suffer genocide, we are cats who aren’t sure why the poison wasn’t activated. The only thing that guarantees some resolution to end the 37
anguish is our role as observers. Quantum theory confirms it: the observer (or the witness) influences the outcome of how the cat will be when we open the box.
If my mother ended up, as the book about her town in Treblinka claims, then I was never born.