When I hear Trudy Strobel’s story, I think about my grandmother. True, they may seemingly not have many parallels at first glance. My grandmother is about ten years older than Trudy. Trudy was from the Ukraine, while my grandmother grew up in a small German town. Trudy was Jewish, and my grandmother was not. But they are united by the war they both endured. Truth be told, I do not know my grandmother’s story of the war very well. Some vague details have emerged with time - she and her siblings left their little town to go somewhere “safe for the children” until my grandmother decided that they needed to go back home,and so they walked and rode themselves back; some members of my family witnessed the bombing of Dresden; somewhere, we have a family tree with a Nazi insignia on it certifying that someone in my grandmother’s family was free of Jewish blood and therefore allowed to teach. I know that my grandmother studied nursing in England after the war and met my grandfather, a Jewish doctor from America, and they moved to California together, where my mother and her siblings were born. My grandmother is turning 90 in a few months. She is still remarkably self-sufficient, driving herself places, volunteering at the Huntington Library and going to plays and operas. Even so, it seems as if I have so many gaps in my knowledge and I wonder if I am going to be able to fill them. How do I start a conversation? When? Should I even ask, or does she not want to talk about it? Would it be better for her to not relive some things? Has she already shared what she needed to share?
As we move into the future, World War II and the Holocaust are becoming events remembered only in history books and in the minds of an aging generation of survivors. In 25 years, there may not be anyone with clear memories of that period in history. We, as a collective, begin to forget. We forget how war uprooted and terrified the world. When the voices of the people killed and dehumanized and displaced trickle out and go silent, we no know their pains or remember their smiles until they are figures and names swimming in old documents.
When I hear Trudy speak, I am also reminded of visiting Auschwitz. I was ten years old, and we were visiting Poland to trace our family history with my other grandmother, who had seen the camp before and didn’t wish to see it again, so stayed behind in Krakow while we drove out for the day. I remember rain dripping from the sky as we drove in. It seems like the place where it is always quietly raining. There are train tracks that go into the camp, and then simply - end. In one direction are the gas chambers. They are open to the outside, now, cinderblock walls with the instruments of death removed from them. Everyone moves through them silently. The air is too heavy for words to move. We go to the museum. There are rooms full of people’s things that were taken when they reached the camp. Rooms with giant glass cases full of suitcases. Eyeglasses. Shoes. Prosthetic legs. Hair. We walk to the memorial at the far end of the camp. It is still drizzling. It is still quiet. We visit the barracks. Bent bunk beds stacked one on top of the other, bowed as if the people who slept there were still laying in them, pulling them down with their skeletal bodies. We drive away, back to Krakow, and the heavy feeling fades into a memory in the recesses of my mind but does not leave, and every time someone talks about the Holocaust I am walking across the field at Auschwitz, sinking into the heavy mud in the weeping rain.
