Last Words

For Two Decades, a UMD Professor Has Led a Writing Workshop for Holocaust Survivors. Seventy-six Years After World War II’s End, Their Task Has an Urgency Both Personal and Public.
By Sala Levin ’10 | Photos courtesy of U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection IN 1964, Peter Gorog and a few friends hitchhiked from the southern border of their native Hungary some 800 miles north to the Baltic Sea. Along the way, they passed through Warsaw, where a monument commemorated the 1943 ghetto uprising. Gorog wanted to stop there. It was the closest thing he could imagine to a gravesite for his father. Born in Budapest in 1941, Gorog was the son of Olga, a hatmaker, and Arpad, an office manager. “It wasn’t a good place to be born in a Jewish family,” says Gorog. During Olga’s pregnancy, Arpad was conscripted into forced labor, and was allowed to meet his son only for a short time three months after his birth. In 1942, Arpad was sent to Ukraine. The Hungarian Ministry of Defense declared him dead in January 1943. Twenty-one years later, Gorog sneaked out early one morning in Warsaw to stand before the 36-foot stone wall depicting the leaders of the uprising emerging in bronze. There, free from the state-mandated forgetting imposed by formerly German-allied Hungary, he felt a connection to the man he never knew. “That was the first time I related to the Holocaust and to what happened to the Jewish people and personally to my father.” Yet even after he defected from socialist Hungary to the United States in 1980 and began talking about his wartime experiences—from living in a protected apartment purchased by Swedish architect and humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg to being liberated from the Budapest ghetto in 1945—his memories of that morning in Warsaw remained buried. What shook them loose decades later was a prompt handed out in a writing workshop run by a University of Maryland faculty member. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s bimonthly “Echoes of Memory” program for survivors who volunteer, now marking its 20th year, is many things to many people: a community where those who lived through the Holocaust can connect with others, a space to make meaning of their experiences, and—a writer’s perpetual frenemy—a deadline. Margaret Polizos Peterson Ph.D. ’14, assistant clinical professor in the College of Education and workshop leader since its start, recalls that in the beginning, most participants were older survivors who had endured ghettos and concentration camps and were determined to ensure that history was written by those who had lived it. Facts, dates, names, who was lost from the family—that’s what they focused on. Now, as the number of those survivors continues to dwindle and members of a younger generation who were children during the war assume prominence, the urgency of preserving their memories remains, but a more nuanced understanding of their task has emerged: one that recognizes that remembering a traumatic life event is a necessarily subjective project. “One of the survivors said this great thing which sticks in my mind,” says Peterson. “She said, ‘I don’t write a fact, ever.’ What she meant was, ‘I’m telling my story. I’m telling the experience that I lived.’” Many survivors still feel the desire to solidify history in writing, says Peterson. But many also feel a more personal mission to tell their grandchildren and great-grandchildren that they were there, and how that felt.ON A SPRING AFTERNOON, nine Holocaust survivors and I gathered in a video conference to discuss their writing. My own maternal grandparents were born to Jewish families in 1911 and 1917 in Poland. Each survived ghettos and concentration camps with just one brother apiece; the rest of their families died. They wrote down nothing in their lifetimes, but my mother heard enough to know an outline of their histories—inherited knowledge for which my brother and I will one day be entirely responsible.[caption id="attachment_26584" align="alignright" width="300"]

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Perhaps imagination is the purview of the young and like other more tangible faculties diminishes as we get older. I cannot pinpoint the time when the undeniable reality of the death of my sisters extinguished the last glimmer of hope of seeing them alive. But for the past 20 years I have been lighting memorial candles on the Hebrew date corresponding to February 11, 1944. ... On rare occasions, I have allowed myself to believe in an afterlife, a time when I might finally embrace my dad and my sisters. But like my mother, I am too anchored in reality to allow such musings for long.
—Al Munzer
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BEGINNING IN earnest in the 1990s, survivors were at the center of an intense effort to capture their testimonies, including at the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg. It now houses more than 54,000 video recordings. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection holds some 25,000 oral testimonies.


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As far back as I can remember, every time I was in a difficult situation, in physical pain or emotional distress, in seemingly hopeless situations, I conjured up an image. It was an image I had never seen, but it was more real than anything you can imagine implemented in a high-definition, 3-D movie. In this scene, I see my father walking in knee-high snow in the endless Ukrainian steppe, in his worn-out civilian shoes, wearing clothes that were not meant for the brutal Russian winter, hungry and fearful that he would be shot if he stopped for a little rest. At that moment, all of my pains dissipate, my hopelessness turns into vision, and my disappointments become negligible. I realize the sad truth—that he never had a chance to pursue his dreams, that he was half my age when he was robbed of the opportunity to see me growing up and to have fun with his grandchildren.
This imaginary scene gives me hope and strength when all else fails. In spite of the tragedy that robbed me of a normal childhood and took my father away, I am thankful for the memory of my father’s unfinished life.
—Peter Gorog
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