"Her poem was called “Death,”...and her parents enlarged it, framed it and hung it in the living room." -Taffy Brodesser-Akner
And let me tell you: On the matter of the Holocaust, we were educated. I need to disclose to you that yes, I am hyperbolic and that I know that hyperbole combined with the way the brain rounds down when it has been trying to make a point for too many years is deadly, but here it is anyway: In my most bitter moments, in times when I realize how much of my foundational education was given over to the war and how little was given over to, say, gym or art or the other humanities that would have helped me in life or at the very least in work meetings, I say I went to a Holocaust high school, a magnet school for Jewish death studies. I say my school taught us masters-level World War II history and also just enough math and science to pass the New York State Regents exams. I’m joking, but am I? I left high school having read “Macbeth” not once but Elie Wiesel’s “Night” three times over the course of my education. I can probably autocomplete any sentence from Anne Frank’s diary if you start me off with three words. I have forgotten more about the Holocaust than I ever knew about the American Revolution.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized that there was an official Holocaust Remembrance Day, because it always felt just like a rolling, year-round thing.
Her poem was called “Death,” and it began with the lines: I feel death coming/and so do the people around me. It ended with its narrator’s hearing the footsteps of Nazis, being grabbed by the arm, tied up and pushed against a wall and shot. It was signed “Ilana Lindenblatt, Age 10,” and her parents enlarged it, framed it and hung it in the living room.
The Lindenblatts sent their daughters to Jewish schools. They went to synagogue each week, kept a kosher home. This was where Ilana one day came home with the poem she wrote about death via a Nazi firing squad. All these years later, when I visited her, I saw it again. I said to her: “See? This is the exact thing I object to. Look at you, 10 years old, being asked to imagine a girl’s death via firing squad! Look at how they framed it!” And she said, “No, they framed it because they were proud of me,” and I said: “Exactly! They were proud of your death poem!” But she shook her head and laughed a little and said she didn’t really understand what I was talking about, and now that I’m writing it, now that I’ve been doing this for a few months, honestly, neither do I.
So here it is, an old Jewish story about the Holocaust and a man who somehow survived the pernicious, organized and intentional genocide of the Jews. But right behind it, just two generations later, is another story, one about the children and grandchildren who have been so malformed by the stories that are their lineage that some of them made just as eager work of running from it, only to find themselves, same as anything you run from, having to deal with it anyway.
I should have understood that a lifetime ago is not actually a very long period of time.
This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write - Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Hat tip Sabrina Orah Mark