Can anyone have a read of my piece and tell me if its any good? Any comments would be great...
History has shaped the meaning of the landscape for all its inhabitants.
Statement of Intention
In this reflective piece I took on the persona of a second generation Holocaust survivor, who reflects on the passing of his mother and the memories which she never had a chance to divulge to him. I focused on the contrasts between the lives and landscapes of the first and second generation survivors and the glimpses into the past which the writer found through the small sentimental connections he was able to make with his mother’s history. Furthermore, I drew on the idea of the landscape as explored through stories, highlighting the legacy that the second generation survivor must hold onto and pass on, in order to ensure the passage of history.
In regard to Jindabyne, I drew on the idea that the landscape is viewed differently when seen through the eyes of people who are in different emotional states. As both the white and Aboriginal Australians saw the landscape differently depending on their past experiences, so do those who directly survived the Holocaust, and those children who must live with the stories of their parents survival ingrained within the family histories.
The Legacy of the Second Generation
It is amazing how despite living with someone your whole life, in truth you know so little about them. I must have spoken to my mother nearly every day for the fifty years that we had shared together yet, as she gazed at me faintly from her bed, days before her inevitable passing, I realized that despite our years together and the cherished memories which I will continue to hold dear, I knew surprisingly little about her past, about her stories and about the experiences that had shaped her into the person I saw before me. Here was a brave woman. One who had endured the terrors of war and had witnessed the ultimate in human indecency. Before me lay, despite her age and her physical weakness, a woman who had conquered life despite the obstacles which had been posed in her way. These memories of traumatic obstacles remained clear in her mind until that last day. I know that for sure. Behind her here greying eyes, her physical weakness could not hide the stories that were buried deep within. Yet all I was left with were snippets – glimpses into a past that was dark and unknown.
It is no doubt difficult to express to another one’s deepest memories. Within each soul lie hundreds of images, sounds, impressions and whispers, yet to articulate these into words is often a task too daunting for those whose memories raise within them their deepest emotions. Secrets, which had been buried deep within the confines of one’s soul for so long, seem to lose their place over time, their meaning almost forgotten until they are reawakened in our darkest hours. To express in words the grief and the trauma of war is not something that comes easily. To relive pain and the suffering of watching one’s parents being murdered is not easily relived. Yet the memories remained, however buried, waiting to resurface, yet never truly doing so.
For years, my mother had remained silent about her life in Poland before the war and the loss of her family during the Holocaust that plagued much of Europe. A topic too traumatic to discuss, the stories remained hidden to me, a man who was yet to understand the true nature of mankind and its capacity for evil. Locked away with the confines of my mother’s spirit lay both questions and answers not only of the Holocaust but of a more personal nature; the stories of my grandparents, the stories of my heritage.
I never met my grandparents, who were murdered at the hands of the Nazi regime in Poland years before I was born. A tattered photograph is all that remains; my maternal grandparents barely visible in front of a large oak tree, in what I can only imagine is their front garden. Yellowing and faded, this snapshot of a past life is my sole connection to my mother’s parents whose identities were lost with my mother’s passing. Never would I know the nuances of their personalities or their distinguishable character traits. Never would I know whether I inherited my blue eyes from my grandmother or my grandfather. Lost – these memories were simple lost in the passage of history and the vacuum of time.
My mother and I grew up in different times, different places and different landscapes. My mother remembered most vividly the images of trauma and terror that war brought on, even if she was unable to express these in words. I see a carefree childhood of happiness, different in nearly every respect to my mother’s own struggle for survival. However, these differences do not restrict me from carrying on my mother’s legacy, however slight it may be. If anything, the need to pass on her stories becomes more imminent when witnessed in contrast to the prosperity of my own world and the safety of our own lives.
As my mother closed her eyes for the final time, relinquishing her spirit to an unknown force, I had the sudden urge to scream, to plead for her hand over the memories of her past life. I needed the connection, the bond that was more substantial than a splotchy photograph whose subjects I could barely make out. How am to live, I asked myself, with no connection to the past, with no link to a family which I barely knew? I have nothing – nothing to take me back through history, nothing through which to remember by, nothing to hope for.
Here I am, left with merely a few glimpses into my family heritage – a tattered photograph here, a gravestone there. Yet I realize now the weighty bequest I have received, no matter how physically small. I have been given the legacy of a second generation survivor. At least I have something to hold onto, if only a tattered photograph. The legacy goes further, however, than merely a physical artefact which I can pass down to my children. I know now that I must honour the fact that, despite her hardships and traumas my mother survived, and her blood as well as those of her parents, runs through me, their son. She was a survivor, and it is this very fact for which she must be remembered. No matter how little I may have to take me back to the days of her youth or to connect me with my heritage at least I have the image of my mother’s face ingrained within my mind and it is this fact which will allow me to keep her memories and pass on her legacy, that of a survivor.
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