It Never Goes Away

Warning: Holocaust Jokes enclosed. Difficult subject matter. Potentially triggering.

I often joke, with a kind of bitterness, that visiting Auschwitz broke my sense of humor. Since I returned from my semester of Jewish studies in Prague, I've been able to laugh at the very worst of Holocaust jokes.

"What's the difference between Jews and pizza?"
"Pizza doesn't scream when you put it in the oven!"

My laughs at these jokes are often punctuated by a sharp intake of breath, or a low whistle, a slow nod - some acknowledgment that it hurts. Part of me does not want to laugh at Holocaust jokes, but I do. I've already spent so much time hurting and grieving and mourning, and I still have nightmares about Nazis. This is the gift of cultural and familial memory, and right now, I want no part in it. I need to pretend it doesn't hurt. So I laugh, hard, belly clenching around the knife it wants to ignore. Some day, when it's farther away, perhaps I can take it out, face it, deal with it and put it to rest. For now, I can't - I know how dysfunctional I get when I even see a Holocaust movie, or read a Holocaust book. That's not the kind of work I need to be doing right now.

But there's a problem with my strategy. Every time I think I've desensitized myself, something comes sneaking past my defenses and rips me open, exposing all my grief and fury. This time, it was a conversation about a private investor in Russia, wanting to market a gulag 'experience' for wealthy tourists. This would include forced labor, being shot at (with paint-filled 'bullets'), planned escapes, etc.

I thought: how long before Poland relinquishes Auschwitz into the same hands? The idea of it made me sick. I burst out into an angry rant about disaster tourism, my family history, the academic obsession with the Holocaust and my experiences in Europe (see horseradish for more on this).

I hadn't felt so angry in over a year. I let her comfort me a little, knowing how little she understood, knowing how much she understood, and how much of her own cultural and personal pain I will never understand. In the light of the day after, I am still distracted, a little unfocused, wandering through this pain like...well, like I wandered through Auschwitz itself.