To begin: You have to know who you are, to understand where you are going. In many ways, I have walked my life in a gauzy haze of undefined history, a scattered and broken family tree that blew away like tumbleweeds. It is only recently (after a stilted attempt years ago with my beloved Nana, her mind already starting to fold into the dementia that would be her death) that I have managed to make the connections and reach out to the few distant relatives that I have heard of to put the pieces together. My mom's side of the family is for another blog post, an exploration of outcasts on the Isle of Man, and horse thieves of unknown origin in the early settlements. Of my father's side, I knew just a few things: there weren't many of us left, and we were Jewish. Jewish wasn't so much an identity for me, as a reason for having dual holidays in December (my Jewish father married my Episcopalian mother), as well as something I occasionally got teased for growing up in a rural, white, Christian upstate New York community. My big Jewish nose. My frizzy Jewish hair. My ample Jewish backside. "Jewish" became something that I subtly learned to hide, and certainly not a cultural identity.
Enter Friday night. I am in the D.C. area for two weeks on the FEMA campus, learning the balancing act of being an emergency manager, contemplating a career direction I never expected and yet find deeply satisfying. On Friday night, I had a chance to leave campus and meet up with my father's cousin, a man who had friended me on Facebook last year in an attempt to put his own pieces of the puzzle together. Suffice it to say, that from the minute I sat down across from a man who channeled the image of my grandfather (who passed away when I was 14), I was handed the thread to start weaving the story together. Along with his wonderful partner Marcie, over sushi we pored through pictures of relatives, the women strong-boned and powerful and eyes deeply set, women who looked like me. Great aunts, great-great grandmothers, distant cousins, a small but distinct tribe. Words I had never heard like "Sephardic", "Shtetl"; place names like "Janow"... all pieces of a nebulous mystery I had yearned for years to begin understanding. Our visit was all too short, but I left with a new sense of belonging, and a mission to seek answers to a question at the Holocaust Museum the next day: Why are there only a small handful of descendants?
The next day, I met up with a few classmates from EMI, and we walked for hours around the national mall, taking in the monuments and memorials with reverence and awe. We chose as a group to visit the Holocaust Museum a few days before, made all the more interesting by our mixed political views. What follows is a visual tour, a personal discovery, and call to awareness. The "story" to each photo is below the photo. Please read the photos of captions from the museum.
This is the banner that was hanging above the entrance to the Holocaust Museum. "Some Were Neighbors".
Several in line were sporting red "Make America Great Again" hats, and I even spotted a small pin of a confederate flag. We were all in line for the same experience. Something had brought each of us there, whether it be answers, validations, curiosity, or challenges. The words "collaboration and complicity" echoed in my head. At the same time we waited patiently in line, the current president was signing anti-immigration laws into measure and demoting the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the Director of National Intelligence. He then appointed White House Chief Strategist and admitted white nationalist Steve Bannon to the National Security Council. Please read the next photo very carefully, especially the smaller print.
Let me repeat: the president placed Steve Bannon at the top of the National Security Council. I'll quote the Washing Post to give you a better idea of what the NSC does:
"The idea of the National Security Council (NSC), established in 1947, is to ensure that the president has the best possible advice from his Cabinet, the military and the intelligence community before making consequential decisions, and to ensure that, once those decisions are made, a centralized mechanism exists to guarantee their effective implementation. The NSC is effectively the central nervous system of the U.S. foreign policy and national security apparatus."
Make America Great Again.
America First.
We will have so much winning, you will get bored with winning.
Believe me.
National Day of Patriotic Devotion.
Needless to say, my hair did not fit into the acceptable hair color swatches. Those were actual swatches of hair that were used to determine whether a person was of a superior race. I had kept my hair tucked up under a hat, but I chose that moment to let it down.
The day before, I had never heard of Janow and Janow Lubelski. Here, I see in writing on glass the towns that my ancestry were pushed in to, before they were subjected to "the final answer". This is a glass wall of place names, the length of a hallway. Villages, Shtetls, ghettos that were systematically exterminated while much of the world lay silent. These were the places of my people. The Grabers (the "y" was added in "Grayber" after coming stateside, to sound less Jewish) were primarily in Janow and the surrounding areas of Lublin Voidodship.
Until this point, I had mostly felt numb. Numb observation, and sense of heaviness. A weight I couldn't fathom, and a sense of aching aging. And then, I saw the words of David. David Graber, 19-years old, fighting to carry the message of the atrocity beyond what he knew would most certainly be the end of his life. I can't quite describe the moment of finding my family name emblazoned in a Holocaust memorial.
I found a corner and leaned into it, and at last, felt the heat of tears. I tried to keep my face to the glass, and feel the grief of this moment privately. An elderly woman came up gently next to me, and placed her hand on my back. "Is this your first time here?" I didn't make eye contact with her, for fear of sobbing. I just nodded. "We are all family. Shalom."
Shoes. These are not replicas, these are a small sampling of the millions of shoes that remained, long after the bodies had been gassed, or shot, charred, and dumped in mass graves. These are the shoes of the men, women, children, elderly who became the receiving end of rhetoric of fear, and the face of blame and evil. These are the shoes that they wore as they were herded like cattle into train cars, and the shoes that they wore into the undressing rooms, to feel the bare earth under their feet one last time. These are the shoes that covered the feet of my family. All these years later, and in a sterile museum, you can still smell the leather.
I was compelled to take this picture. Behind me is a collection-- a massive pile-- of hair. Hair that looked like mine, dark and wavy and unruly; hair that had been cut off the heads of the naked women and children just before they entered the gas chambers. Hair that was then bundled into 40 lb bales. Jewish hair was considered unfit for wigs, so it was used as fill for mattresses and blankets.
This woman came from the Lublin region. It was jarring to see her picture, and feel almost as if I was looking into a mirror. Her eyes. Her hair. Her cheekbones and lips. Was she a Graber? There was no identification; she was one of a large settlement that was shot to death in a mass grave. The rail cars were full, and there was rumor of rebellion.
Who will you choose to be?
406. In the holocaust registry, that is the number of individuals who share my name who were murdered. Most of those 406 died in the lesser-know secretive extermination camp of Belzec, although it appears some were sent to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka. Between 450,000 and 500,000 Jews were slaughtered at Belzec. There are only 7 known survivors of that camp.
43. That is the number of Gra(y)bers who survived the Holocaust era in entirety.
You have to know who you are, to understand where you are going.
It was less than a hundred years ago that over 6 million human beings were brutally rounded up, branded, tattooed, tortured, and murdered simply for being a race that evoked fear and suspicion in a small segment of a nationalistic population. A brashly spoken and rather disregarded non-politician who wasn't taken as a serious political force took power, manipulated and silenced the media, and created a cabal of loyal henchmen (known as "the Reichstag") who would take control and power of an entire nation within 6 months. The world would mostly remain silent until the horrors were delivered to them in the form of war threatening their own liberties. By the time the camps were liberated and the war ended, 2 out of every 3 European Jews had been murdered. By 1945, most of my ancestors abroad had been exterminated.
You have to know who you are, to understand where you are going. My path forward from here is as clear and distinct as the eternal flame that burns in genocide memorials across the planet. Where will you stand? Will you remain silent? Will you look the other way from the fear and anger and brewing hate, regardless of origin? Or will you take my hand and stand with me and say, "never again"?
