The numbers on her arm began to crumble
Like a taoo on a sailor’s arm
She imposed silence upon herself for thirty-five years
Upon the line of numbers on her arm,
Which began with the letter A
She wanted to live the HERE and the NOW
She wanted to live the sea, the house, the children
And if she occasionally revealed herself
It was with an accidental life of the sleeve
And now, five abandoned digits remain in my mind
Refuse to return to silence
To the stillness of the Times Table.
This poem, titled ‘Silence’ and originally wrien in Hebrew, was composed by Itamar Yaoz-Kesset. Itamar was born in 1934 in Hungary as Péter Ervin Keszt to an assimilated Jewish family. His grandparents and parents believed that the answer to an,semi,sm is full integration into the Hungarian society.
This unfortunately did not spare the family from persecu,on and death when the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944. Aged 10, Itamar was sent to Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Seeing so much death and destruction around him, he regards his survival of the camp as ‘Divine intervention.’
Itamar managed to rebuild his life in Israel where he later became an educator and a poet. He was very far from keeping silent about the Holocaust. His first-hand childhood experience of the horrors of the Holocaust features heavily in his poems and essays.
In his poem ‘Silence’, wrien 35 years a+er libera,on, Itamar describes the passing at the age of 40 of his cousin Elizabeth. She survived Auschwitz death camp as a young child together with her mother.
After liberation, Elizabeth lived her life, she got married, had children, and had a good job.
For 35 years Elizabeth never spoke about her experience of the Holocaust and the traumas of Auschwitz Death Camp. Her response was – silence.
HOW CAN LIFE GO ON?
The only way for Elizabeth’s life to go on, and the only way for her to live the HERE and NOW, was through silence. This silence did not necessarily come from an awareness or an informed decision.
This silence, experienced by so many Holocaust survivors, and survivors of other genocides, is like a spiritual disability. Breaking that silence takes the survivor from the HERE and NOW, back into the horrors of the THEN and THERE. Many would not be able to survive that experience – mentally and spiritually.
The only testimony to Elizabeth’s harrowing experience was the taoo on her arm, only to be revealed accidentally, at the life of a sleeve. She took her taoo, and her story, with her to the grave.
The Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel left the gates of Auschwitz at the age of 17. For a decade after the liberation, this prolific writer kept complete silence about his experiences. Life for young Wiesel had to go on. It took a great deal of persuasion and encouragement by the French journalist François Mauriac for Wiesel to start writing about his experiences. Wiesel broke his spell of silence, and he never stopped writing, and never stopped telling the world his experience of the holocaust.
Why do so many survivors of genocide choose to keep silent?
There are a few reasons for that.
Like Elizabeth they want for LIFE TO GO ON. They want to a live normal life, get married, establish a house, and go to work. For many this aempt would be futile, as the past comes back to torment them. It could be through:
• Dreams and nightmares;
• The habits they adopted during their trauma;
• Marks and scars on their bodies – and on their souls;
• TV images of other conflicts;
• Attempts at reconstructing history and Denial of their suffering
• Or news about the rise of ideologies and powers similar to those that led to their experiences.
They keep silent because they want to spare their families and dear ones from the trauma of their experiences. Yet, we know that there is no escape for the second and subsequent genera,on of survivors. It is some,mes even worse when survivors themselves are unable to talk about their experiences. The silence that comes to protect becomes the tormenting shadow for the next generations.
They keep silent because in many societies there is a lack of understanding of the survivor’s experience. They are asked questions such as:
· Why were you led like sheep to the slaughter?
· Why didn’t you fight?
· Why didn’t you hide?
· Why didn’t you escape?
Explaining and debating is just too difficult and traumatic, and silence is the easy way out.
Yet, it is this ‘comfortable’ silence that is often at the centre of the survivors’ inability to leave the past behind. Silence could o+en result in denial of justice to those who are wronged, and it can let their perpetrators get away with murder.
In his 1986 Nobel Prize speech, Elie Wiesel stated:
“Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
As hard as it is at times, breaking the silence of survivors often helps bring about the process of justice, and the process of healing, for survivors and their family. Most importantly, it helps with the preven,on of future miscarriages of justice.
Itamar Yaoz-Kesset wrote about the silence of his cousin Elizabeth – a Holocaust survivor.
Yet he used his words to tell us the story of the tattoo on her arm.
And by doing so he managed to break her 35 years of silence, and the tormenting secrets she took with her to the grave.
Life must go on.
Yet, the story of victims and survivors has to have a voice.
Rabbi Yuval Keren
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