Dear friends,

I wanted to let you know that “Owning Auschwitz” is available to watch on YouTube.

As you may already know, “Owning Auschwitz” is a documentary about my aunt, Zypora, returning to Poland in 1998 to confirm whether she, we, my family own(s) part of the Auschwitz concentration camp. She brought documents that her mother / my grandmother had saved when she moved property into her children’s names at the end of WWII. (The story of how my grandmother got, her family [and only her family] out of Poland when she saw what was coming isn’t part of the documentary). 

A camera crew followed Zypora in and out of agencies, to the camp, to other properties, so she could see and hear for herself: was this place built on Jewish land? 

It was broadcast on 1998, and until now, I only had a VHS recording that my Dad made off the tv, and more recently, a DVD version of that.

Here’s the link: How A 60-Year-Old Jewish Widow Inherited And Reclaimed The Land Auschwitz Was Built On | Our History – YouTube

It was made available by ITV Studios on their “Our History” YouTube channel, apparently some time in November. A couple of weeks ago, Mikhail, the superintendent in my apartment building mentioned it to me as I was coming in. The story must have come up in conversation between us at some point; he started tentatively, letting me know that he wasn’t sure if he should say anything to me, and then finally said that he saw the video online, and that he remembered me telling him about my Israeli aunt, my great-grandfather’s tar factory in Poland, with large ovens to boil the tar, and railroad tracks leading into the compound…and so he thought of my family.

It’s gruesome to say it like that, conjures up hideous and horrific violence, I know. I hate saying it — it’s like a smack or sudden, raging grabbing and shaking of your whole being — but denying it, working around it, is worse for me.

This is my story.

I’ve never gotten very far into talking about it; I let it live in a kind of limbo between hating it and matter-of-factly accepting it, this blank, desolate, bizarre space inside me that I enter when I remember our connection to Auschwitz.

It’s been 25 years since my aunt decided to find out the truth, “the real” as she would say. Ever since then from time to time, it comes up, and I say the gruesome thing.

Zypora was my father’s sister. Somehow, she retained quite a bit of Polish, which amazes me. I can barely say a sentence in Hebrew. My accent is appalling — I can’t even pronounce my name, lost the ability to roll my r’s ages ago.

It’s about 50 minutes long. Sometimes they speak in Polish, and there are no subtitles, but eventually my aunt will say everything in English. She does this thing where she processes out loud (we’re definitely related), and I think she’s doing that for us watching as much as for herself.

January 27th is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust – observed with ceremonies and activities at United Nations Headquarters in New York and at United Nations offices around the world. This year, 2024, is the first that I knew about this holiday.

They’re hosting Exhibition: “Fighting for the Whole World” – Lower Saxony under Nazi Rule in the Visitors’ Lobby at United Nations Headquarters through 23 February 2024. I’m going to try to see it.

I’m also planning to see this exhibition: The Drawing Center: Stéphane Mandelbaum — probably on Sunday, February 4th. “A grandson of survivors, Mandelbaum made a conscious choice to grapple with the weight of the Shoah by aggressively appropriating images of Nazis, boldly drawing them over life-size and placing them in juxtaposition with snippets of pornography, derisive caricatures, doodles, and random lists. The representation of images that most people would prefer to avoid was an act of identity-building for a young, rebellious artist hoping to shock. But it was also an act of ownership of a history that Mandelbaum refused to allow to be buried.”

Also, some work from The Holocaust Project by Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman is included in “Herstory” an exhibition of a wide range of Judy Chicago’s work, at the New Museum, until March 3rd.

And, here’s a link to an article published in the New York Times back in 1998: Hadera Journal; Jewish Family Heirloom: 15 Square Miles of Death.

How to close?

I’m sharing this now because now I can, and because over time it’s become important for me to have a better connection to my history, a clearer, more personal sense of my lineage. I really don’t have more on that…this is all still living in that blank, desolate, bizarre space inside me…this email is like a porch leading into that house.