The Imperative to Tell

 

Based on the works of Dori Laub entitled “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle”

Loosely based on the desire to know my heritage, strongly based on trying to the tell the story of a man who was not able to tell his own.

It’s a conversation every Jewish parent has to eventually have with their child, we weren’t originally from here, we actually came from… In my case, Poland.

I got the talk once, I don’t remember feeling sad or happy or any emotion really, I just remember the facts, the hard core facts. But why did he leave? Did he want to? He didn’t want to leave, he had to.

“He had to”. The penetrating words. Pretty simple English upon reflection, but I remember the words being engraved into my mind, like a tattoo, like a stamp on my brain. “He had to” explained what I was doing here, it explained the nature of my community, the nature of archive, the nature of trauma, the nature of memory and speech. The simple nature of my heritage rested on the three words “He had to”. And so almost one-hundred years later, Maurice Sirin, formerly Mirch Cyrinsky, has long left us, I still wonder the nature of his trauma, and his story and the way in which he experienced the world.

From a young age, every Jewish child that attends a Jewish Day School is exposed to the idea of the Holocaust, we are extensively explained and taught about the Jewish Genocide; in fact, I knew about the Holocaust before I knew what Apartheid was. It was only once I became a scholar that I did my own research and started fixating on the idea of memory, archive and importantly speech; that I started to divulge into the realm of memory; how did Maurice (my great grandfather) love, how did he speak and how did he explain. In some ways Dori Laub managed to answer these questions for me. His essay on truth and testimony extensively explaining the nature of trauma and struggle from a psychological point of view made me begin to construct the type of man Maurice was.

Laub speaks about the position of a witness. The level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being witness to the testimonies of others and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself. All I have is testimonies from his family and some archival stuff; an old suit, his old passports, maybe a couch or two; but nothing of immense significance. One rainy afternoon, I sat in the kitchen with my grandpa, with a good cup of tea of course, and discussed what it was like growing up, and the experience of having an emigrant father. All he clearly remembers is the one particular mantra “It isn’t nice sleeping on a park bench.” He recalls that this life was bound and guided by this mantra,

“Jamie, we came from nothing, I tell you, nothing. That’s the reason he was short, he was underfed as a child. He always had something to prove, he told me in his thick Yiddish accent, you want a car, you go work for a car. So I did, I showed him, I owned a fucking car shop because of that. He wasn’t very, how do I say it, nurturing.”

He also recalls a sense of otherness, Maurice never spoke a single word of Yiddish or Russian in South Africa, he burnt all his foreign papers and was determined to forget sixteen years of his life prior to his escape. I tried to dig deeper, to collect all the information I possibly could, but it was difficult, almost impossible.
“We weren’t allowed to discuss that type of thing, I don’t think he wanted to recall those memories, if you ask me.”

I was desperate to try find out why he was determined to (attempt) to erase all these memories; he had tons of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and of course parents who all perished in the Holocaust. Laub discusses the nature of otherness and the constant feeling of being a misfit due to the refusal to substitute for and completely fit into the world of parents, brothers, and children that was so abruptly destroyed. There definitely has to be some type of guilt, Maurice was the only one of eight children who was able to escape, the family couldn’t afford to send any others. How did he manage to live with himself knowing that the rest of his family were murdered, and stamped and tortured at the hands of evil; while he was making a life for himself in South Africa.

“Oh, but it wasn’t a life (snigger). He couldn’t speak a word of English, he changed his name to forget the past; to let go. He knew no one, and other Jews didn’t want to help him because they were too poor. His life was miserable and lonely for a good ten years before he met my mother; your name’s sake. Imagine sleeping on a park bench Jamie, it can’t be comfortable.”

I keep returning back to the idea of story-telling in order to survive, this imperative to tell and be heard can become an all-consuming task. But it seems that no amount of story-telling can accurately encompass the injustices and the trauma of such a violent history; of a genocide and war that changed the nature of Semitism. Maybe Maurice realised that his story could not be captured in speech or thought. Maybe his continuance and meaning provided a sense of healing and restitution for the loss of his entire family. Did my grandfather become the compensator? Was he unable to fully fill that void? Did Maurice’s silence create an eerie history, an unknown past and the inability to substitute for an unimaginable loss? I’m not sure, but as a witness to this silence and my grandfather’s inability to share his own father’s story, I start to wonder and acknowledge the absolute imperative to tell your story.

It’s safe to say that none find peace in silence, even if it is their choice to remain so. Laub explains the nature of trauma and how the survivors become victims of their distorted memory. The longer the story remains untold, the more distorted it becomes in the survivor’s conception of it. So, two hours down the line I said, “Come on Gramps, tell me something I don’t know already.”

“Would you ever kill someone?”
“I hope not”
“I also said that until I heard this one. Your great-grandfather’s brother was part of the vigil-anti, he fought with the underground movements. He came home one day, and the Nazi’s had killed his wife and four children, so he took his doctor’s bag and just started running, he eventually joined the underground movement and he was in-charge of killing the captured Nazis. And do you know what the bugger did? He injected those fuckers with diesel and watched each and every organ shut down over a four-day period. It’s known to be the most painful way to die. My father didn’t know this about his brother; or of his whereabouts. I met him when I travelled through Europe in the seventies and managed to track him down. My father didn’t want me to visit his hometown, but he didn’t give me a reason.”

And as a result, we are left with collective delusion. Who was this man that we all loved so deeply, yet knew so little about? Did he get the peace he deserved? Even if he didn’t, I’m still here and we are still here and my need and deep obsession with story-telling and the retelling of my violent history is within me. So, it is essential that this narrative that could not be articulated or told by its source is to be transmitted and be heard by the future generation. The remembrance and commemoration of our violent histories eases the pressure and enables the survivors to bear witness to their own trauma; and validate the collective trauma.