Second Generation Video
(script)
In my ongoing effort to avoid working too hard, I’m once again recycling some old creative material here. This is the script of a 25-minute experimental documentary video I made during graduate school sometime in the 90s. It’s sort of a companion piece to my dissertation/book: Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. It’s about memory of the Holocaust in the lives of my father, who was a survivor, and myself.
Most of the words were written by myself or my father; his were taken from his memoirs. In order to convey the idea of the lack of a firm boundary between his memories and my own, I had all the text narrated by my Aunt Buzzy and withheld explicit signals indicating which words were his and which were mine. I’ll go ahead and provide those signals here, though, along with some (low tech) stills from the video.
Me: I had the idea for some time that I wanted to do an oral history of my father.
Although he had written his memoirs, I still had many unanswered questions about his past. I kept thinking I would do this oral history someday.
But then he told me over the phone that his chest pains had gotten worse, and that he might have to have another heart surgery at some point, even though he was a bad risk. It was then that I made the decision to fly to England and visit him over the summer, and do the oral history then, because, as unbelievable as it seemed, I had to face the fact that there was no telling how much time we had left.
I was hoping to get from my father a copy of a videotape that he had. The last time I had visited him, he had taken a videotape out of a drawer and said I might like to see it. He had said it was a copy of a film, taken in 1945, in which he appeared.
I was caught completely unawares. As far as I had ever known, there existed no pictures of his early life. He showed me the video on his TV. I watched it in a kind of daze. The film had been taken in the summer of 1945, at an orphanage in France.
He had been liberated from the concentration camp Buchenwald several weeks before, along with the others who appeared in the film.
We froze the picture on him.
I could recognize his face. He looked happy.
The images had been copied over and over, passed from hand to hand among the group of Buchenwald survivors who remained friends even as, over the years, they scattered across Europe and North America. My father got it from Ancsi in New York, who got it from Pista in Switzerland, who got it from Simone in France.
Still, while I thought that seeing these images would help me to clear away some of the mystery surrounding my father’s past, the images themselves, became, for me, just another mystery.
Dad: It was in 1982 or 1983. While strapped into my seat aboard a plane for several hours, my mind started wandering, and I began to think about my early childhood. I was trying to recall certain things, and I realized that my memories had begun fading. I tried to recall the picture of my mother and father, and I had to make a strong effort to visualize their faces. It has been on my mind on numerous occasions that someday I may not remember them at all. Every tangible evidence — photos, documents, letters — has been either taken away or destroyed. The only object that still remains is my mother’s wedding ring. I realized that I had very little concrete knowledge of my family. What I know now is what I have seen through the eyes of a child, and I became convinced that before that begins to vanish, I will have to preserve it by writing it down.
Titles:
James Hirsch.
Born Imre Hirsch, 1928, to a Jewish family in Satu Mare, Romania.
In 1931, when he was 3 years old, the family moved to Carei.
In 1940, when he was 12, Nazi Germany awarded part of Romania, including Carei, to Hungary.
In March 1944, when he was 16, Germany occupied Hungary. One month later, he, his family, and a majority of the Jews of Hungary were deported to Auschwitz.
Eight months later, he and thousands of others were force-marched to Buchenwald, inside Germany.
He was liberated in April 1945, one year after his deportation.
He and one cousin were the only survivors of his family.
Several weeks later, he was taken in by an orphanage in France.
After two years in Paris, he emigrated to the United States.
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Dad, continued: Pista, Ancsi, Kassy, and I began to work out a proposed itinerary. We thought that we would like to include in the itinerary Budapest and Carei, and after Auschwitz and Buchenwald, we would end our trip in Paris.
Kassy while filming video: That’s Jimmy. And that’s the hotel. And that’s Ancsi. And that’s Pista. And that’s me taking the pictures.
Dad in Kassy’s video: Take down the camera.
Dad: This trip is made to remember and physically reaffirm the 50th anniversary of our deportation to Auschwitz. We cannot relive those days, nor do we wish to. What we hope we can do is to get nearer to the last thing we remember about our families, in the milieu in which we lived our lives with them, before the moment of destruction.
Me: I’ve often wondered when it was that I first learned about the Holocaust, and that my father was a Holocaust survivor. I don’t remember being told. It’s like I’ve always known, like I was born knowing, as if someone had whispered it to me in the womb, so that by the time I was born, no more needed to be said.
I developed frozen pictures in my mind of what I imagined my father’s childhood had looked like, the house he had lived in, his parents, the moment they had to leave their house. These pictures must have been based on fragments of memories I had heard from my father, and later, when he started to give me more information, I realized how inaccurate my pictures were. Nevertheless, I guarded these pictures jealously and felt threatened by the prospect of having to give them up as false.
They showed us the documentary Night and Fog at Temple when we were children. Mostly, I remember the scene in which a bulldozer pushes a pile of bodies.
This scene became one of the main ways I visualized the camps. I looked at the bodies, and thought, “Jews. What we are.” Later, as an adult, I watched Night and Fog again on video. When the bulldozer scene came, I stopped the tape, rewound it, and watched it again, pausing every few seconds to see all the details. I watched the scene several times that way. I had remembered the bulldozer being driven by a Nazi, but, watching it again, I realized the scene was shot after the liberation. In the six shots that make up the scene, you never see the driver.
The name “Night and Fog” comes from the German expression, “bei Nacht und Nebel davon gehen” [to go away by night and fog, i.e., to vanish]. The elusive object of pursuit recedes into the night and fog, and then disappears entirely.
When I was in college, my father started telling me about his past. At first, it felt too embarrassing, and I didn’t want to hear about it. Later I developed a compulsion to find out everything I could about it. I read books about the fate of the Hungarian Jews and began planning a trip to Hungary and to Auschwitz. I would pump my father for information. But he would only speak about it objectively. It felt like he was skirting around some central thing, some primordial separation that was too painful to reveal. I didn’t believe I would ever find out what it was.
Dad: This particular night I woke up from a deep sleep. I had been dreaming of Carei. In the dream, Kassy and I were driving down the main road, approaching our street. I turned left into our narrow street, but it did not look familiar anymore. I stopped the car and we got out and decided to go on foot to find our street. This was more like the way I remembered it — the street wider, acacia trees on both sides of the street. We are almost there. I could feel my heart pounding faster. We felt excited that we finally arrived.
The house was not there! Just something vaguely familiar, like the acacia trees. We stood there frozen to the place and looked at one another in horror.
Sunday, May 15, 1994. The 50th anniversary of our deportation. At Birkenau, Kassy and I were trying to figure out the ramp, because I remember, as the train came in, that we disembarked from the train on the left side, facing the locomotive. And Kassy remembered differently. And then, when we went through the selection, I remember we went in through a sort of barbed wire gate, and then we went to the left, between rows of wire. And Kassy remembered something else. Well, I mean, there’s nobody we can ask.
We drove toward the old camp, Monowitz [Auschwitz III], but could not find it. Then we remembered the old road leading out of the camp, and backtracked, and then we found it. There was not a trace of the camp. There was a small settlement of farmhouses. Among them we spotted a stone cross. Near the bottom was a small sign indicating that it was the spot of the concentration camp Monowitz.
Me: Then my father told me he was writing his memoirs. A week later he gave me the first chapter, and I took it home to read it. He described his early childhood. It sounded idyllic. A world before the Holocaust. Then he started to grow up. The Germans came. Toward the end of the chapter, the story picked up speed, offered less and less detail, was reduced to a short series of blows. They had just boarded the boxcar in Satu Mare and were waiting for it to begin moving when the chapter ended. I put it away in a box in my closet and began waiting for chapter two.
In 1988, I went to Eastern Europe for the first time, to Hungary and Poland. Riding the train to Auschwitz was frightening. The loud clacking of the train reminded me of boxcars filled with Jews.
I kept thinking about how my father had asked me, “Why are you going?” We took a taxi to the camp. The parking lot was mobbed. There were many tour buses parked there, lots of Polish tourists. At the end of the Jewish exhibit was a memorial room. Six visitors stood around a shrine. There was a recording of a cantor singing the Kaddish. One woman cried, the others frowned.
I felt very small the entire time I was there. Leaving felt anti-climactic. I felt like I had accomplished nothing.
He didn’t bring up the subject of chapter two again. After several months I became convinced that I would never receive it. They would be stuck there forever, on a boxcar that would always be about to lurch into motion.
About a year later, I received a package in the mail. It was his memoirs, finished. Ruth wasn’t home. I read it alone lying on the living room carpet. Ruth came home when I was almost finished. She wanted me to talk about it, but I couldn’t. I took her into the bedroom, and I asked her to lay down on top of me, and then, holding on to her, I cried.
Dad: On our second day in Birkenau, somebody came and said my mother was outside the barrack. So the barrack altester, the prisoner in charge of the barrack, allowed my father to go outside. And he came back after a short while, and said, “Your mother is alive, and she is out there, she would like to see you.” But the altester did not allow neither I nor my brother to go out. So I never saw my mother again after that. My father said that her hair was shaven, and she was in a striped uniform. But I don’t remember her that way.
After the war, I wrote to my cousin Joe who had survived forced labor and was living in Romania, and told him where the box was buried, and told him that he can have the jewelry, except for my mother’s wedding ring, which I wanted as a souvenir. The rest he can sell and use the money to help him escape from Romania. He did escape, and some years later, he came out to Canada, and I got my mother’s wedding ring from him. This was in 1949.
Much later, when I returned, and I was trying to locate the spot where I had buried it, I found that the landmarks were all gone. There was no pole, nor fence, nor woodshed anymore.
I really would have been happier to find a photograph than the jewels, to be honest. I remember two photographs of my parents. One of my mother, posed in a photographic studio, in a wide brimmed hat, with a slender figure, wavy hair, a softly pleated skirt, high heeled shoes with straps around the ankles, holding a bouquet of flowers with both hands. And one of my father, about 20 years old, wearing a military uniform — was it Romanian or Hungarian, I never knew — taken in a pose, a pistol in his right hand, at mid-body height, diagonally pointing down to the ground. Very handsome!
Dad (This is the second time we hear these words, but this time, instead of being narrated by Buzzy, we see and hear a clip from his oral history video): And my father came back after a short while, and said, “Your mother is alive, and she is out there, she would like to see you.” But he did not allow neither I nor my brother to go out. So I never saw my mother again after that. That was the last time I might have seen her. My father said that her hair was shaven, and she was in a striped uniform. But I don’t remember her that way.
