Robert Eli Rubinstein reflects on his mother’s recollections of the Holocaust, the difficulty of speaking of its horrors, and the future of Holocaust memory as the number of living survivors dwindles:
According to Primo Levi, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, survivors fall into two categories: those who talk and those who do not. He was surely describing my parents.
My mother’s memories surged out of her in a mighty torrent, and this had a cathartic and healing effect on her. The passionate eloquence of her words enabled her to impose meaning on what would otherwise have been unbearably meaningless. But she was quite exceptional among survivors in her ability to talk about the past.
Far more characteristic was my father, Bill Rubinstein, who never talked about the past. Not only did he steadfastly refuse to discuss his own wartime experiences: Whenever a conversation drifted toward pre-history—that is, the period before his arrival in Canada— he would try his best to change the subject. If this did not work, he would find a pretext to leave the room. This was my father’s way of coping with his intensely private pain. And really, who could argue when the strategy seemed to work so well for him? This decent and beloved gentleman was able to build a remarkably successful new life in Canada by banishing his demons—at least at the conscious level. When he was adrift in the helplessness of sleep, the nightmares held sway, every night without mercy until the end of his nearly 99 years.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/who-now-will-bear-witness