Choosing Joy

My parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland who met in 1945 in DP Camp Foehrenwald in the American zone of Germany. They immigrated to New York, separately, in 1947 and 1948. I grew up in the United States without grandparents, aunts, uncles or first cousins. My parents’ friends, all survivors and their children, became family.

What seemed unremarkable to me as a young girl – their boisterous Saturday night gatherings and our summers together in bungalow colonies where we freely walked in and out of each other’s porches – became a source of fascination as I grew older and saw the wonderment in my American friends’ eyes. There was clearly a discrepancy between the image of survivors in popular culture as broken people and the lived reality at home. The reality was far more nuanced. But their ability to express joy was a choice, not a given.

My mother told me that when she arrived in DP Camp Foehrenwald in November 1945, at the age of 19, she was deeply despondent and had no desire to go on living. An UNRRA worker, an older Jewish woman from Czechoslovakia, took notice, and brought her on as her assistant. Helen Matousek later became my godmother and inspired my career choice – international humanitarian work with the UN.

I was taught that the best response to hatred is living well and loving fiercely – that hate only destroys the hater. My parents were able largely to let go of their animus. But exactly how were they, and others like them, able to achieve such post-traumatic growth while living side by side with incalculable grief?

For years, I never set foot in Germany. Finally, in 2015, I made it to Munich – and took the opportunity to visit the site in nearby Waldram of the former displaced persons camp. There I met a group of local German volunteers who were working to renovate what had been Foehrenwald’s former central bathhouse. They were creating a museum to capture the extraordinary history – one that had not been taught in the local schools. Decision-makers had preferred to forget that the town had been built by I.G. Farben to house munitions workers in the late 1930s, that slave laborers had been used, or that a Jewish displaced persons camp had existed there from 1945 until 1957.

These volunteers were “paying it forward” for future generations, those who – unlike us - will not hear the first-hand accounts of survivors in person. So many survivors that I have spoken with, reflecting back on their long lives, express deep warmth for that period when, improbably, Jewish shtetls cropped up in a land that just a few years earlier had been “Judenfrei.”