To Bear Witness (day five)

Last night, I told my story.

Originally (up until two minutes ago) I had planned on posting it story, roughly transcribed as I had told it. Now, writing from the loft at M’s beautiful home, listening to him play with his two sons outside, I know that is not what I need to write right now. In a few days, I might, but so much has happened in the past twenty-four hours.

The whole day yesterday, my stomach was in knots; I was incredibly nervous to tell my story, worried about not getting details right, and stressed about it not going how I wanted it to. Typical type-A neurosis. But then when I sat down in the circle—with N on one side and Natty on the other—and started talking, it all happened just as it was supposed to. I feel like this whole trip, and everything leading up to it, has happened just as it was supposed to.

Mine was the last story. Over the course of four days, we had listened to eleven others. They were incredible, and ranged from hopeful and enlightening to devastatingly sad and horrific. I have never been both so upset by and proud of the human capacity for destruction and survival.

But I realized that nobody quite pulled it off like my grandparents.

I don’t think I had ever told their story in any semblance of its entirety. Considering the amount of adrenaline pumping through my body and the knot that had been tightening in my chest all day, I was ready to cry. I expected to lose it once I got into telling their stories.

Throughout all twenty-four minutes of my story, I was beaming. I could not stop smiling—literally, I tried, and my face just wouldn’t. At first, I was confused, and couldn’t figure out why I felt so elated; then, I was just frustrated, because I felt like I should be crying.

And then, about halfway through, I realized that my story isn’t sad. It’s not horrifying or depressing or filled with depravity, although in a paradoxical way, every Holocaust story is, at its most basic level. That anger I wrote about is founded and reasonable, and some truly horrible things happened to my family. The Holocaust happened to them, with them, and around them, and as I wrote the other day, the Holocaust was really, really shitty. They were threatened, terrorized, beaten, and brutalized for two years.

However, that is just the background. The rest of their story is a series of fortunate happenings—I don’t want to label them miracles, but something aligned correctly somewhere in the universe. And before last night, I had never connected all of these non-coincidences in a single stream—they had just been interesting snapshots, not a story.

When I finished, I felt like a weight had been lifted off of me. I hadn’t even realized that I had been carrying anything, and I hadn’t understood that our story is so unbelievably, unabashedly, extraordinarily positive. Everyone in the room was smiling. It seemed so perfect to end with this, and to finally finish with the joy and hope we’d been working towards the whole time.

We all bear witness now. Before, each one of us had carried our stories alone—even though some of us were lucky enough to have support from our families, we all came into this experience on our own. My story is no longer just my own, and my family’s. Eleven other people carry this story now, as part of their own, and I carry theirs as part of mine. To bear witness is not just to know, and it’s not just to chronicle, or record, or repeat. To bear witness is not just an action, it’s a load you carry; that’s why they chose the verb “bear”. We feel the weight of our history and we shoulder it as best we can.

These stories are heavy, and they are full—of meaning, sadness, pain, guilt, joy, promise, and hope. They are overwhelming alone. But when you share the act of witnessing with eleven other people, it’s possible to bear.