Unerased
(Note: this essay contains some material previously published in my post “Second Generation Video” and on Instagram.)
I grew up knowing there were no photos of my father’s life before 1945, the year he was liberated from Buchenwald at the age of 16. No photos of him or anyone he knew. No documents. I never even saw a photo of him younger than middle-aged until I was middle-aged myself.
In fact, the only thing that made it through the gauntlet of those years — other than my father himself, his cousin Joe, and his friends Paul and Pista — was his mother’s wedding ring, which his father had instructed him to bury along with some other jewelry in a box in the back yard before they were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz. After the war, he wrote to Joe, who had gone back to Romania (the Hungarian-Romanian border having moved once again, leaving their hometown, Nagykároly, just inside Romania, its name changed back to Carei) to work for the Communist secret police in order to hunt down Romanian Nazis, according to my father. After a couple of years, Joe had decided to leave Romania the only way he could — illegally. My father told Joe where the box was buried and that he could sell all the jewelry except his mother’s wedding ring, and use the proceeds to finance his escape, which he did. (How he got into the back yard to dig up the box I never learned. I don’t imagine he knocked on the door and asked permission — although during those chaotic and contorted years, stranger things happened.) Joe resettled in Toronto and my father obtained the ring, which he eventually gave to the first of his children to marry (my half-brother Dwight, named after Eisenhower).
The lack of photos or other physical evidence that my father had existed before 1945, rather than appearing by spontaneous generation as a 16-year-old at Buchenwald — that he had had a family, friends, and an entire Jewish community in the small city of Nagykároly and the larger, nearby city of Szatmár, where his extended family had lived — always symbolized, for me, the gaping hole left in my family tree by the Final Solution.
I grew up pointedly aware of this gaping hole, though I have no memory of anyone explaining it to me. It’s like I’d 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 had a good-sized family on my mother’s side, but on my father’s, there was only Cousin Joe, whom I only remember meeting once, when he traveled to Dallas for my bar mitzvah. (My father eventually distanced himself from Joe for reasons I never fully understood.) In an inexplicable parallel, my father had a gap in his own family tree, as his father had had no contact with his own family. My father never met them, never knew their names, wasn’t even sure where his father was from.
When I was growing up, my father still spoke a teenager’s Hungarian. And he had a whole substitute family of fellow Hungarian Jews liberated from Buchenwald. But as a child, I never heard him speak Hungarian or met any of those men. Another gaping hole.
This is the story of three times I was caught by surprise to find that images of my father’s erased history had been unerased.
1. After liberation, James Hirsch, born Imre Hirsch, faced the same choice as countless other youth orphaned by the Holocaust: whether or not to return to their country of origin. As it became clear that he had no family left in Nagykároly or Szatmár and that returning to Romania would mean committing himself to a Communist state to which he felt less allegiance than to the US Army that had liberated him, he decided to go west rather than east. He was one of about 400 boys who accepted an invitation from France to travel there by train to be rehabilitated at an orphanage in Écouis. At the orphanage, they fattened him up, gave him a set of false teeth to replace the ones that had been ruined by starvation, and set him up in an apartment building alongside other young survivors in Paris.
I visited my father one day during the late 1980s. I had returned to Dallas after college and my father had moved to a lakeside golfing development in rural East Texas (he did not play golf). On that day, he casually reached into a drawer under his TV, took out a VHS tape, and slid it into the VCR. It was 45 minutes of film footage shot at the orphanage in Écouis while he was there.
He appeared in three shots.
We froze the picture when he appeared. I could recognize his face. He looked happy.
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The images were severely distorted — grainy and wavy — as if, like my father, they had barely survived the gauntlet of time, displacement, trauma, and loss. The tape 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.
In retrospect, beneath my excitement and surprise at the sudden appearance of these images, there lay a quieter layer of incomprehension at my father’s casual attitude as he revealed the tape. It was a missed opportunity for emotional connection through the seemingly miraculous unerasure of his past.
2. After a number of years had passed since his emigration to France and then the U.S. (I have no idea how many), my father began occasionally traveling back to Hungary and Romania. Growing up, he had never traveled very far from Nagykároly and Szatmár, had never seen Budapest, the Hungarian capital. He reconnected with old classmates in Carei (non-Jews, obviously). From one of them he obtained a copy of his old class photo; another remnant of his past had resurfaced. I even joined him for a class reunion in Carei. His jovial relations with these old classmates appeared to be free of mutual suspicion; I imagine that in their nostalgic conversations, they never delved into the bloodstained layers of the past — of who had supported the Nazis, who had cheered the expulsion of the Jews, who had expropriated Jewish property.
Note that only 8 of 42 students are (or appear to be) girls.
3. A few years ago, when I was moving my mom out of her condo in Dallas, I went through ten big boxes stuffed with letters and memorabilia in her attic. There I came across some letters from Cousin Joe to my parents and opened each one. One letter from 1962, the year I was born, said, “I am sending here a picture of our grandparents, I have some other pictures too, but only one copy. I’ll have some duplicates made and send them to you next time.” This photo was still in the envelope.
I have no idea where Joe could have gotten this photo or when and where it was taken. Finding it was a moment of pure astonishment, even joy. A little piece of the hole had been filled in. It feels uncanny when I look at the photo for more than a few seconds, like I’m looking at two materialized ghosts.
While the photo filled in one piece of the past, it raised several new questions — questions I never even thought about until I started writing this piece and rereading Joe’s letters.
What were the other photos Joe mentioned? In a letter dated three years later, he once again promised to send them, but I found no sign of them. Did he not keep his promise?
And most perplexing of all: why did my father never mention this photo? Why was this treasure that had been rescued from oblivion left in an envelope (which remained in my mother’s possession after my parents divorced) and not immediately stashed in a place of honor where it would never be lost again, or framed and hung on the wall?
I’ll probably never know. I can’t even ask Joe’s children about the other photos because I lost track of his family, having not developed an interest in them until after my father had died, leaving behind no clues as to their whereabouts. (Being more or less estranged from Joe, he probably never even knew what became of the children.) I even called a private investigator in Toronto, but he said the name Joseph Katz is so common that he doubted he’d be able to locate the family. A genealogist friend of a friend of a friend is conducting a search on my behalf, but I hesitate to hope.
And so continues the war of attrition between memory and entropy. I am grateful for the battles memory has won. I also recognize that, in the end, entropy always wins the war.
