Taking the Holocaust Survivor to the Holocaust Museum
My grandma is not one for reflecting. There are so many other things she’d rather be doing: cooking, baking, eating, asking you if you’re hungry, making you food anyway, watching daytime soaps. But when it comes to reflecting, true reflection on the past, particularly on the year between 1944 and 1945, she’d rather not. She’s not interested in recalling the year she became an orphan, the year she was starved, robbed, imprisoned and death-marched through Europe, the year she turned fourteen. An episode of General Hospital sounds much more enticing.
So when my grandma, the inimitable Golda Indig, told me she wanted to go to the Holocaust museum, I was surprised. It had been decades since she’d last stepped foot in a memorial of any kind. Each impeccably curated museum is like a shrine to her PTSD. Who would want to remember that? But now, after so many years, my grandma was curious. For whatever reason, she wanted to see the museum.
My mom and I set a date for the three of us to go, unsure of what to expect. Would the museum trigger suppressed memories for her? Would she break down? Would we? To me, it felt monumental. Three generations coming together, reflecting on the most pivotal and painful year of our family’s collective history. I cleared my calendar for afterwards should my eyes be rubbed and red.
I couldn’t have been any more wrong.
Just outside Chicago, on a grassy patch of land off I-94, a tall, two-faced building juts out between the trees. Its left face — dark, ominous, gray — is matched by a white, hopeful right. The overall effect is industrial and intimidating. Exposed beams draw lines out and away. The Illinois Holocaust Museum, built in 2009, is the largest of its kind in the Midwest. Its permanent exhibition contains more than 500 artifacts from before, during and after the war. To enter, there’s a set of dark doors on the left side, daring you to step inside.
Before going to the museum, my mom and I had to first find a way to wrangle my grandma’s new walker into the backseat of the car. She can walk fine without it, but her balance has been unsure lately, unreliable. One fall and two broken ribs later and my mom decided it was time. She bought her a walker with what I imagine are the latest, breakthrough features in walker technology: thick caster wheels, sporty bicycle brakes, ergonomic handles and a padded, fold-down seat in the middle — for the octogenarian on the go.
We collapsed the walker to its slimmest form, still a bulky metal contraption, and started jamming it into the backseat. My mom stood on one side of the car and I stood on the other, maneuvering with the grace of two left-footed lumberjacks. When we finally got it inside, I joined it in the backseat, its gray wheels pressed into my side-turned face and lap.
Once we arrived and un-wrangled the walker from the backseat, my mom, grandma and I entered the dimly lit museum. A volunteer handed us a map right away and told us we were just in time. A free guided tour was about to begin.
“There’s a tour. Starting now. Do you want to take the tour?” my mom shout-asked my grandma. (On top of balance, her hearing is also not so hot.) We were steps away from the docent and an eager group of guests assembling around him.
“No, I don’t need,” my grandma shout-replied, rolling right past the group.
I gave them an awkward, gracious smile and sped to catch up to my grandma, who was already pushing her way to the start of the first exhibit. Time waits for no woman and my grandma waits for nothing.
The museum’s main exhibition is arranged chronologically from pre-war — here begins the rise of fascism, here is Kristallnacht and all that breaking, broken glass — on through to liberation and resettlement. For my grandma, this means the museum lines up bizarrely well with her own steady rise, from infant to adolescent. Each step forward through military maps and propaganda posters aligns with a different personal milestone of hers. 1936: the year Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland and my grandma’s sister Suri got pneumonia. 1937: the Nazis opened Buchenwald and my grandma’s family moved from Czechoslovakia to Romania. 1943: when the Nazis seized control of Rome and her brother Bumme was working the night shift at the local bakery.
Walker in hand, my grandma made none of these correlations. Instead, she was flying. Room after room, she flew through the museum like she had a personal best to beat. She didn’t pause to examine the artifacts on the walls, to gaze at the photos of frail, uniformed young men who could’ve been one of her brothers, or the videos of little girls with eyes like her sisters. She simply pushed her walker forward, turning the museum’s labyrinthine layout into her own Monaco Grand Prix. We lost my mom right away.
After several sharp turns, my grandma hit a small roadblock. In the middle of the museum, there’s a Nazi-era rail car, the exact kind she was pushed onto with her family in 1944. A steep ramp leads up to the train, where museum-goers can then step inside.
My mom caught up to us at the train and warned us to go slow. My grandma’s walker, intensely fast on flat ground, was less capable with inclines. My grandma began to push her way up the ramp with my mom and I supporting her from behind, two women rolling a third up a hill. When we made it to the top, I tried to get my grandma to pause, even for a moment, to consider the train.
“This is one of the real train cars the Nazis used,” I told her.
“Ugh, I know,” she replied, already heading for the down ramp. She was not going to lose this race against no one.
I took the walker down first and let my grandma take the railing. The ramp was too steep, too dangerous with a walker like hers. But once she was on flat ground, walker back in hand, she was off again, 86 years old and a cartoon blur.
Finally, near the liberation section of the museum, my grandma got tired enough to sit. The museum estimates the main exhibition takes two to three hours to complete, a tiring task for anyone.
It had been 15 minutes since we came through the front door.
“Ay ay ay, what they did,” my grandma sighed. She began to share a few fragmented memories — the violence she saw, the illness that consumed those around her. How, before that, she was sent to the crematorium. How, after that, she escaped. How she spent months in fear of being found out, of being gassed and burned. The thought of burning stuck most in her mind, perhaps because she had smelled it or perhaps because it had been her own mother’s fate.
My grandma does not need a museum to remember the Holocaust. A year of imprisonment gave her all the scars she needs to think of it daily. It gave her regular nightmares, haunting memories and those small fantasies where your loved ones don’t die of bullet wounds, stomach disease and chemical gas. She didn’t want to hear others’ stories at the museum, she just needed to know they were being told. She needed to see that others were still grappling with what happened, too. Still grappling like her.
After finishing the last section of the exhibition, my grandma and I found a long bench to sit on while my mom perused the gift shop. There were flyers for upcoming events nearby, including one for a lecture by a Holocaust survivor.
“Would you ever do this?” I asked my grandma, then clarifying. “Tell your story to others.”
“Oh, I can’t talk like that,” she said. “I’m not that good.”
I disagreed, but didn’t push it. She has been talking to me about her story for the last two years now and I’ve been writing it down. She leans on me to explain what she cannot. She doesn’t mind that I also can’t explain.
My mom finished in the gift shop and came to get us. Our meaningful day at the museum was approaching twenty minutes and it was time to go.
“Bubbie,” I asked, “Can I get a ride on your walker?” The fold-down seat between the handlebars was still open from before.
“I don’t mind,” she said.
I sat, facing backward, and she started to push. I was suddenly giddy with nerves, door jambs and walls approaching willy nilly, as we coasted toward the exit. I couldn’t see where we were going but had a perfect view of her face. I felt somewhere between a baby in a carriage and a blind person on a roller coaster.
My grandma pushed us out into the parking lot and toward the car. She looked just as focused pushing her walker here as she did inside. She was trying to get to the car as fast as possible, her sights forever set forward. Get there, get here, push ahead, move on. She asked me if I was hungry. The sun spread over us and I felt like the building behind me: light with luck and dark with history and truth.
