As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor...
I think about the Holocaust all the time, not just the horrors, but also the myriad ways people resisted.
Dear Friend,
"Franci's determination and focus was using her writing to energize communities by bringing important issues to a broad audience." From my mother’s obituary. Franci Gallegos 1937-2000
Boom!
On May 4th I officially outlived my mother (a lifetime smoker) who died at the age of 62 years and 228 days. I pulled up her obituary in memory of her and was absolutely struck by the sentence above. Somehow, I’d missed this in previous readings of her obit. My mother, a badass activist who spent her life organizing resistance to anything she considered bullshit, from the Vietnam War to logging our community forest. My tiny little mother was larger than life and never once assumed that her voice was not important. She had things to say, and she made sure her voice was heard by the powers that be and within her community.
My mother was not a Holocaust survivor, not the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She was the daughter of a survivor of pogroms and Trotsky’s flag boy. Needless to say, with this lineage, I feel genetically predisposed to activism.
My father is the Holocaust survivor among my parents, and it is really his story of miraculously surviving this atrocity that his own parents did not survive that informs pretty much everything I do. Even if I wasn’t born into a family of activists, I was born to a Holocaust survivor, and it is this part of my family history that drives me to speak up whenever I witness injustice. On a deeply cellular level, I remain hyper-vigilant for human rights abuses, and will do whatever I can to stop them.
I was interested (and relieved) to learn that it isn’t just my imagination that my family’s Holocaust experience is embedded in my DNA. I have obsessed about it my entire life but could never understand why it held such an intense grip on absolutely every aspect of my life. Marsha Lederman’s Kiss the Red Stairs and Julie Brill’s Hidden in Plain Sight – both accounts of their respective parents’ personal stories of surviving the Holocaust – provided some really good insight about how those traumas are passed down through the generations via epigenetics. I can highly recommend both books.
In social media posts, political letters, and all manner of communications, I have started a million sentences with “As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor…”, not as a woe-is-me pity party tactic, but to lend some credibility to what I have to say. Honestly, I’m tired of using that phrase and I wish I didn’t feel the need to, but as we watch hatred and ‘othering’ in all its ugly forms on the rise, I feel the constant need to remind people that my beautiful grandparents were murdered just because they were Jews, and we cannot allow this to happen again. We said, ‘Never again’ and we meant it! And, yes, this definitely goes for Palestine too!
I think about the Holocaust all the time, not just the horrors, but also the myriad ways people resisted. Hooray for the brave heroes who ferried hundreds of Jewish children out of Europe and the soldiers who fought the Nazis, but there were also so many others resisting on so many levels. I remember my father talking about some of his paternal aunts who went underground with the Partisans in Nazi occupied Yugoslavia. Apparently, their contribution to the war was to sew buttons on the uniforms for the Partisan soldiers. That may seem mundane and insignificant, but those uniforms required buttons and some of my great aunts made sure they had them.
Another family story is that my father’s Aunt Ruža who’d married a Christian man and converted but was widowed by the time WWll broke out, took in my father when the Nazi call for women and children came. Knowing full well she was risking her own and her daughters’ lives (they lived upstairs from the foreign secretary who’d signed the deal with Hitler and across the street from the German embassy), she did not hesitate to save her young nephew from certain death.
There is another story about Ruža's sister Finka, my grandmother, who worked in the kitchen at the Sajmište concentration camp where she would steal an onion or potato to share with the other women in her prison barrack, as told by a woman who was released from this concentration camp and sought out my great-aunt to bring her news of her dear sister. Whether it’s sewing buttons or stealing potatoes or sheltering a young fugitive, these relatives were part of the resistance. When I start a sentence with “As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor…” I am writing for them.
Resistance comes in all shapes and sizes. Some of my great aunts sewed buttons. My mother took her kids (us, as well as her high school students) to peace marches, sued logging companies, and wrote articles (to name just a few of her acts of resistance). My sister has planted potatoes for her local food bank (ain’t no one going hungry on her watch!) and is attending rallies, etc. My lifelong bestie is hanging protest banners from highway overpasses. I write letters. Everything we do is important, as long as we are doing something. We are witnessing the terrifying rise of fascism led by some truly fucked up individuals. We know exactly how this could play out. We have a job to do to fight this with whatever skills we have. Whatever you do, be noisy!
Here's an email I sent to the Republican senators back in March, as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor…
ICE is out of control!
Dear Senator,
Every single day I am reading new horror stories of ICE agents acting like Nazi Brownshirts. They are illegally detaining US residents and citizens as well as unsuspecting visitors to the US from Canada and the UK. Perhaps you also read about the 10 year-old child (a US citizen) who was deported to Mexico with her parents when they were apprehended while they were rushing her to the hospital for emergency care for her brain cancer. And then there’s the highly trained transplant surgeon here legally on a H1B visa who was snatched from Brown University and deported despite a court ruling against her deportation. Not only has her life been upended, but now her kidney transplant clinic and her patients are struggling without her. Hundreds of people are being rounded up and imprisoned and/or deported without due process. Innocent people are being handcuffed and sent to detention centers in different states where they are treated like criminals. These are just a few of the horror stories I’ve read this week. I’m sure there are many, many more. ICE is out of control!
And now, Trump and ICE are ignoring court orders and are continuing to illegally deport innocent people. I am sure you agree that Trump is not above the law and neither are his immigration henchmen and yet, they are breaking the law and ignoring court orders. Are you speaking up or do you support this?
Senator, as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I am deeply familiar with how this story goes. My family was demonized by Hitler, just as Trump and Vance have demonized anyone who is not a white male. My grandparents were rounded up by Nazi Brownshirts and sent away to concentration camps, just as ICE agents are doing to our neighbours and colleagues now. Anyone who cannot see the direct comparison is not paying attention. Senator, are you paying attention? We saw this happen in 1930’s Europe and we know how it ends. As our elected official, you have an obligation to speak out against this rising fascism. I expect to hear you publicly decry the illegal and inhumane actions of ICE. You cannot sit back in silence and allow this to happen!
Jessica
