Recently in Auschwitz Category
Synopsis
The Last
Sunrise by Harold Gordon
My name is Harold Gordon now! But 55 years ago I was a (10) year old boy whose
name was Hirshel Grodzienski. I lived with my family in Grodno, Poland, a city
of 65,000 inhabitants. 25,000 were of the Jewish faith and the majority were of
Catholic persuasion . We lived side by side and in peace most of the time.
Grodno is located at the most north Eastern corner of Poland, on the Niemen River bordering Lithuania. 136 kilometers to the North was the Baltic Sea and the Polish port city of Gdansk.
Within months after the Nazis occupied Grodno, my entire family except for my father, were gassed, burned and vaporized without leaving a trace of their existence.
All those years while I was imprisoned in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other extermination camps I kept praying to God. Often, when the pain became too much to bear I would say, God if you let me live I promise to take revenge and kill every Nazi that crosses my path. I will make them pay for taking my family from me and leaving me without a burial site to visit.
On May 8, 1945, when the war ended it was time to keep my promise. I began thinking. How many Nazis can I kill before I die, 10, 100, 1000. ? Then what? Who will remember my mother, grandparents, brother, aunts and uncles after I am gone.
I said to God, God, please forgive me for not keeping my promise. I have another plan in its place. I will make a good life for myself. A life that my mother would be proud of. I will raise a family, leave behind descendants so that there will be grandchildren for them to remember after I am gone. I will not forget my ancestors, I will put my memories in the deepest corner of my mind to recall them before my days on earth are ended.
Suddenly and without warning, I heard a call. Something began rumbling in my brain like a volcano. I knew it was time to fulfill my second promise.
I sat down at my computer every night after work, like a video it was all right before my eyes. Two years later, my book, The Last Sunrise was completed.
I couldn't help but wonder. Was there something else that God had in mind for me to fulfill? I was the youngest survivor from a city of 25,000 Jews. Why was I chosen to live. I was not the smartest nor the strongest. I was tormented looking for an answer.
I walked into this book cautiously, even though I was excited to read it. I had read excerpts from it and loved the writing, but was prepared to hate it because of reviews that denounced the book for being too sexually explicit.
As noted in my research paper, the book was denounced by the guardians of Anne's diary because it was "racy". Supposedly, Dogar wrote a scene in which Anne and Peter had intercourse, but I must have missed that scene. All there seemed to be in the way of sex was some heavy petting and some fantasizing on his part. All I can say to that is he was a 15-18 year old boy trapped in a small space with two girls his age. Obviously, his mind is going to wander to that--so I don't understand the controversy over it, really. This may make it a book that you shouldn't give to your nine-year-old, but anyone who has passed into the realm of puberty can and would relate to his feelings.
I think the argument represents just how iconic these eight people have become--matyrs and symbols of the Holocaust. To some degree, they are almost treated like saints. They were just regular people who hold a very special place in history. And I guess some people don't like it to be tampered with and treat it almost like a Bible story. A fresh perspective is poo-pooed, even if it comes from accurate research.
I thought the book was, indeed, excellent. I hadn't cried over a book in a long time, but Dogar's book did just that. I guess because I've shied away from Anne's story because of its level of sainthood, I hadn't really looked at them as people. Dogar's portrayal of both Peter and Anne are just so human and heartbreaking. I haven't read Anne's diary in a long time, but from what I remember, Dogar successfully captures her vigorous spirit and longing to write something "first-class" that will "change someone's life". And she did--just not in the way she'd hoped.
The ending is what particularly struck a chord with me. Dogar effortlessly captures the feeling of isolation and uses the tone to convey how forgotten people in concentration camps felt. Peter keeps asking throughout the book if we're listening to him, a commentary of the attitude of people during the time period and a call to action for the people who need to be listened to today. Particularly heartbreaking was Peter remembering Anne encouraging him to tell his story, to find the words, even if they didn't come easily to him. Dogar describes Anne as possessing a certain light, that Peter hopes went out painlessly and quickly upon her death--a metaphor for all of the children with hopes of the future who die at the hands of ruthless dictators before their time.
After letting the book sink in, I watched Anne Frank: the Whole Story, the 2001 Emmy Award winning mini-series based on Melissa Muller's book. Even though Dogar's book was historical fiction, it still gave me a more intimate sense of the characters and the movie impacted me in a different way than it ever had before.
Sometimes fresh perspectives help us see old stories in a new light. I think Dogar's did just that.
Granted, I haven't seen the entire performance, but I had one major complaint with it. Although I did enjoy the concept, the lighting and the music, I felt too much emphasis was put on the masses and not enough put on the individual. Personally, I feel the only way people can make connections to the Holocaust (and bridge it to current happenings) is to recognize the humanity in the victims. When puppets stuck together to form rows of prisoners are placed on stage, it is hard to get a sense of any individual, which is the real loss in the Holocaust or any other genocide. We aren't losing masses of stick people, but actual people with families, hopes and dreams, faults and flaws. We are losing people just like you and me, which I feel is always essential to make people begin to understand something so outlandish. A well written character passing away under the thumb of an oppressive regime is much more heart breaking than watching masses of faceless, characterless people go to slaughter--at least in my opinion.
The installation is over in New York (although may be playing elsewhere), but you can look at a video here:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCWNQ2g9bLk">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCWNQ2g9bLk
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What do YOU think?
You can view Hotel Modern's website here.
The other night, I sat around with a group of friends as we talked about different things going on in our lives. Someone spouted the age old wisdom that "It all works out in the end", which someone else challenged saying that "It does all work out, unless it doesn't." Being me, I brought the subject of genocide to the table asking whether or not the Holocaust, indeed, "worked out" for the victims. To say everything works out in the end when regarding the mass murder of innocents doesn't quite make sense. On a more micro level, it can be hard to say that everything works out in the end for children who die of serious illnesses, etc. Sometimes I find myself wondering if everything works out in the end only for those of us fortunate to have everything work out.
My friend argued that good things have come of the Holocaust. I'm not sure where I stand on this statement, as I'm not someone who buys into the idea that the Holocaust happened for an actual reason. At least, to this point in my life, all of the reasons people have proposed to me haven't seemed rational. I guess when discussing the Holocaust, there fails to be a rationale.
This friend cited that one good thing that came out of the Holocaust was Lisa Kudrow reuniting with her long lost relatives on "Who Do You Think You Are?". While that episode was certainly touching, and probably available on NBC's website, it is hard to justify that the Holocaust is equal to that.
However, if you read Imre Kertesz's work, Fatelessness in particular, he speaks without reservation of the joy and humanity found in the Holocaust. The message of the movie, which he was heavily involved in, is no doubt a message of humanity and the "good times" spent in the camps.
Recently, I discovered Ruth Kugler's memoir Still Alive, in which she says "Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps," she writes, recalling an argument with a naive German graduate student, "and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for?"
This is perhaps an argument that could go on cyclically forever. We cannot take the Holocaust back, so looking forward, what we can do is control our own future and look for the good in the cinders and ashes of it.
Maybe not everything works out for the best, but maybe looking forward, we can move toward healing the wounds.
