The Memory Generation

Episode 12: Elizabeth Rosner

INTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: Hey Everyone, I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Welcome to The Memory Generation – a podcast about the memories we inherit and the stories that are passed from one generation to the next. Today we are talking with the author Elizabeth Rosner and reading from her book Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory.

Both of Elizabeth’s parents were Holocaust survivors and she carried their stories from the day she was born.  Some stories she was told and others she learned through the silences that threaded their way through her childhood.

Elizabeth Rosner: My mother spoke only in snippets about her past and it became clear, I think, to my siblings and to me pretty early on that it was painful to ask her too much about her childhood.

Rachael Cerrotti: Elizabeth’s father spoke very openly though and as she got older, she traveled with him to Germany on a few different occasions to hear him tell his story in the country where he was raised. It was those visits that laid much of the groundwork for Survivor Cafe.

CARL ROSNER (USC Shoah Foundation Testimony): My name is Carl-Heinz Rosner.

Rachael Cerrotti: That’s Carl. Elizabeth’s father - telling his story to USC Shoah Foundation back in 1997. He was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1929. 

CARL ROSNER (USC Shoah Foundation Testimony): I remember Hamburg very well. I lived there actually till I was, let's say 15 years old. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Every Holocaust survivor’s story is unique and seems like it deserves it’s own movie and Carl’s is no different. In the early years of Nazi rule, Carl’s father left the family and his mother was on her own. She was single and struggling to take care of her three boys and had no choice but to place them into an orphanage. Events unfolded – nearly unbelievable stories about being spared from deportations, surviving a rain of bombings and an unsuccesful attempt to get out of Germany. But eventually Carl and his brother were imprisoned in Buchenwald – one of the more than 44,000 camps and incarceration sites that Nazi Germany and its allies had established throughout their time in power. Carl was just 16 years old when he was liberated in April of 1945.

CARL ROSNER (USC Shoah Foundation Testimony): One day they announced that we have several trucks lined up… there was one truck that was, they announced would go to Hamburg. So my brother and I know nobody told us what to do or what to wait for, what they had planned on or what they might be able to do. Nobody knew where to go. And so we decided, Well, why don't we go back to Hamburg on that truck? So that's what we did

Rachael Cerrotti: Carl’s story would eventually lead him to Sweden where he would meet his wife, Frieda, Elizabeth’s mother, whose testimony is also in Shoah Foundation’s archive. Her story is of course unique as well and includes escaping from the Vilnius ghetto as a child by being thrown over the walls in a potato sack.

Carl and Frieda eventually moved to the United States and that is where Elizabeth and her siblings were born. And as an adult – Elizabeth began to write the family story. 

CARL ROSNER (USC Shoah Foundation Testimony): My daughter actually is a writer and she wrote a series of short stories about my experiences. shes had luck recently getting them published as poems. Probably a dozen of her poems have already been published. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Elizabeth went from getting those early poems published to becoming a prolific author, teacher and speaker. As you will hear today, she is a poetic thinker who continues all these years later to explore her family history. Her books teach us that it is our sensitivities that will save us and highlights how we are all connected through very intrinsic human experiences. She has written two books of fiction, collections of poetry and her nonfiction book Survivor Cafe which both she and I will read from today.

Elizabeth and I recorded this conversation on October 10, 2022. She was at her home in Berkeley, California and I was in Portland, Maine. 

INTERVIEW

Rachael Cerrotti: I know that these are long histories. There's lots of details here.And especially as the years go on, the stories get longer. And you are of the generation where you have two parents that are Holocaust survivors. So I'm of a generation where I have one grandparent who's a Holocaust survivor and another grandparent who might be considered a survivor but got out of Germany in 38’. So maybe more categorized as refugee, depends who you ask. 

Elizabeth Rosner: Mmhmm

Rachael Cerrotti: To be the child of two Holocaust survivors, that that is a very heavy inheritance from the first day of your life. As a kid, where you're just trying to live your life as an American, what does this history mean to you? What role does it play in your life?

Elizabeth Rosner: Well, it's funny you say at birth and also American. Two things come to mind right away. One is I feel like - and I'm writing about this in my book now - I feel like I was listening to these stories before I was born. I mean, I know that sounds a little woo woo, but I think I was feeling it in utero. I know my mother was genuinely for the rest of her life, completely traumatized by what happened to her in her childhood. And so she had that in her body. I was feeling it as I was forming in her body. And we know all these things about epigenetics that I've written about. Our expression of our DNA is modified by the trauma experienced by our parents. And so I feel like I showed up already affected by what my parents had lived through - both of them. And I also felt not particularly American. I remember even when I would learn American history in school and then we would learn European history in school, I always felt like, well, European history is my history, not American history. My family wasn't here. And so then when my classmates would be kind of mystified by studying European history and we would be writing a fill in the blank kind of story about, you know, when did Germany first act aggressively toward Poland? And there was like one sentence, you know, we were supposed to say 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. And then we were supposed to, like, go on to the next multiple choice question or something. And I'd be stuck on that question going, ‘Wait a second everybody. That was what happened to my mother.’ There was this sense I had that I was the only one who understood how recent that was and I wasn't the only Jew in my class. There were American Jews in my class. But accept for a lot of my parent’s friends who also had survived the Holocaust and who also had children sort of my age, I didn't feel like I had American peers who were like me for a long time. And I don't say that to say, oh, I was so alienated or I felt so special. It's just that sense of difference was there always for me. And weirdly, I don't have memories of talking about it with my siblings, my older sister. Maybe she had that experience, too. But there was something I was especially attuned to when I was listening to the different accents in the house. My parents spoke Swedish when they didn't want us to understand what they were saying when they were keeping secrets. German was the forbidden language. There were all of these daily reminders really of where they had been before and what they had been through. And even when the details weren't being spelled out, it was all around me all the time. I really felt it all the time. 

Rachael Cerrotti: You carry this into your adulthood in a much more forward facing way. All of this history. Cause then you end up writing about it. And as much as you tell your own family story in Survivor Cafe, it really really feels like a book that's full of connective tissue. Where you're saying, okay, I understand that this is where I come from, but I'm also seeing those spaces where this connects me to other people because of what they went through, not because I know their experience. But because I know what it's like to carry a heavy experience and I know what it's like to struggle with that. There's just this like constant weaving in and out of this book of your own particular experience. And this question, this curiosity, this space of what does this mean for me in the greater context of the challenges the world faces. More specifically the challenges that people of the world face.

Elizabeth Rosner: Yeah and thank you for that recognition of what I was trying to do. I think that the only thing I would sort of modify about that is to say my hope is that it isn't just me showing you what I think or what I feel about all of these connections and resonances. But by way of my saying. I hope you also get curious. I hope you, the reader, also ask what do you carry and what are the stories that shaped you and that my effort to make those linkages is a way of saying not I'm so special, but we all can be this sensitive. and I hesitate to say should, even though I think that's sort of what I'm implying or getting at, is that that sensitivity is the only thing I think that's going to save us. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Im going to use that to jump right into your book. I'd love to read you a paragraph, and you can maybe speak to it a bit if you're okay with that.

Elizabeth Rosner: Hmm. Thank you. Yeah.

Rachael Cerrotti: So this paragraph comes from a chapter called The S-word, which is pretty close to the start of the book. And you write 

“...it occurs to me that Jewish people have a complicated relationship with trains. With chimneys, and billowing smoke. With showers. With turning on the gas. With boxcars. With the sound of the German language, particularly when it's shouted. With a flat hand raised at a certain angle. With German shepherds. With a certain kind of mustache or haircut. With a certain kind of uniform. With playing hide-and-seek.” 

This is a powerful paragraph. You know, for me as a grandchild of this history, I mean, you're totally right, but I never thought about it this way. It's like one of those things where someone opens up you to your own sensitivity and you're like, Oh, I am sensitive about that. I do have a complicated relationship with that. So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to this paragraph and this idea that you were exploring.

Elizabeth Rosner: Well, thank you for reading it to me. I haven't read that paragraph myself in a long time and –

Rachael Cerrotti: I like reading people's books to them.

Elizabeth Rosner: Yeah, no.

Rachael Cerrotti: It's a hobby.

Elizabeth Rosner: It's really quite a remarkable experience to be, given your words back like that. And also it maybe sounds egoic to say it, but it actually gave me chills to hear it because I can still feel the me that wrote those words and I can still feel how true they still are, you know, that maybe they will always be true that certain associations we have, they're so hard wired into us that maybe those things are unchangeable. And I was recognizing, I think, somewhere in that same chapter or maybe elsewhere in the book, I can't remember where it is, but I talk about a conversation between the wonderful African-American poet Lucille Clifton. And who's the other poet she's talking to? I've already forgotten. Oh, my goodness. So they're having a conversation because they're driving along the California coast and the woman who's driving says to Lucille, you know, aren't these trees so beautiful? These coastal California live oaks or Monterey Pines or whatever it was she was pointing out? And Lucille says, you know, black people have a complicated relationship with trees. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Hmm

Elizabeth Rosner: And it was just a stunning moment to me of - oh, yeah, other people have their own horrific associations. So if a black person is looking at a tree and thinking, could a lynching have happened here? Could someone have been hung from this tree? Now I'm going to hold that association because now I know it's her association and maybe a whole landscape of human associations that she has that weren't mine. But now I can not exactly inherit them, but as a witness to her witnessing. Now I write about this in the book a lot, too, that we become witnesses when we hear other people. And that's Elie Wiesel's famous, eternally memorable line. You know, when you listen to a witness, you become a witness. Those associations that if I tell other people about mine, then maybe they'll recognize and it goes back to what I was just saying about sensitivity. If we're allowing ourselves to be as sensitive not just to our own vulnerabilities and fears and inheritances. But if we recognize that other people have theirs like somebody wouldn't know that to say. Oh, did you forget to turn off the gas? they would say it like it's some kind of joke and it would launch me into some kind of moment of terror. You know that if I told them. By the way, that freaked me out there for a moment, you know, like that’s how we that's how we help each other, you know, that's how we don't repeat the terrorization of each other.

Rachael Cerrotti: To go to this famous idea of to be a witness to a witness makes you a witness. I'm wondering if you think that's why sometimes it's so hard to listen to one another. It takes a lot of energy, bandwidth, emotion to just alone carry our own stories and our own memories and our own associations. So then to put yourself in a position where you become witness to someone else. Now you're carrying that, too. And most people would say that that's a pretty good deed to do. But it's really challenging, right? Sometimes we're so overloaded with witnessing our own lives that the idea of carrying the associations for someone else just feels overwhelming. It feels impossible

Elizabeth Rosner: It is really hard. And what you say about about sometimes or maybe often wanting to say, no, it's too much. I can't I'm already like bent over double in pain. I'm already on my knees with suffering. I can't carry more. I think that's a profoundly individual set of measurements. I mean, only you know how much you can tolerate and when you have to say no. And people often ask me, you know, when I was writing Survivor Cafe, how did I take care of myself? Because I was steeped in atrocity all day long. I was researching, I was remembering, I was interviewing. And I did have to take a lot of breaks. I took a lot of walks. I went swimming a lot. I had long conversations with my dog, you know? I mean - I really needed to know what my limits were. I had to allow myself not to be infinitely spacious for suffering. It's too much for anyone.

Rachael Cerrotti: I want to go back to something that you said earlier. You were mentioning about the idea of if somebody says to you, did you turn the gas off for the oven? Right. And I think the other side of being a witness and sharing with people the things that hurt you, scare you, that you carry from your family's past or your own personal experiences. Some people can also weaponize that. And we see that happening all the time. It goes both ways. So how do you create boundaries for yourself of being like, I'm gonna let you in. But please don't take advantage of that.

Elizabeth Rosner: Hmm. It's so interesting to hear you say that because, I mean, maybe this is just how I'm psychologically organized, for better or for worse. That isn't what I worry about. What I worry about is people thinking that I'm too sensitive and that I should just toughen up and that it's my problem. It's not so much whether or not they're going to weaponize it. It's that they just sort of roll their eyes at my sensitivities. And then implying or even stating overtly that I shouldn't be so sensitive and that the preferable way to be is to kind of be tough. And I think that leads to numbness and normalization. And then what happens next after that? You know, the whole thing starts over again. So I think the greater danger is not that those words or images or behaviors are going to be weaponized. They already were weaponized. They will be weaponized. They are being weaponized. My fear is that people aren't paying enough attention to how dangerous those images are right now. Those words are being used again right now. I think numbness is the greater danger. It's not that I'm at risk because I've exposed my sensitivity. It's that we are all in danger of allowing ourselves to be less and less sensitive and therefore paradoxically more and more at risk. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Hmm. I sometimes tell my mom and I hope she’d be okay with me letting this out into the world. But especially as I've gotten older, I've started advocating for myself more because I'm a pretty stoic person. That's not necessarily a good thing. It's very much a defense mechanism. But, you know, my mom and I have this pattern where, like, you know, she's my mom, so of course, I get more emotional with her than anybody else because that's often times the dynamic. You know, and she'll be like, oh, you're being so sensitive. And I've started saying to her, I'm like, I'm trying. Like I'm really -like - really let me. Let me be sensitive because I've spent so much of both my childhood and my adulthood zipping it up to function that like I'm craving that type of emotion. You know, I’m always jealous of people who cry really easily. I'm like, god, that looks like it feels so good. You know.

Elizabeth Rosner: That would be me.

Rachael Cerrotti: Umm Yeah. 

Elizabeth Rosner: That would be me. Wow, that's so interesting. You're making me realize something that I don't think I ever completely put this together before because I was always being told by both my parents that I was too sensitive and I think it was not just that they didn't want to have to take responsibility for hurting my feelings or saying something mean or being mean in some way. But I think my father especially was trying to like teach me not to be so vulnerable in the world because he was afraid of how much the world was going to hurt me. And I've never really thought about it that way until this moment. Cause I do also have - I mean, you'd never know it by how easily I cry - I do have a certain kind of toughness that I can put on, like I can kind of armor up, but it doesn't really come that naturally to me. It feels like a mechanism that I learned and maybe that was what my dad was trying to teach me. Because he was an old softy. I mean, he would cry easily. And the family joke was always, Oh, Dad's having an allergy attack. Like that was serious. They were trying to convince us that… Yeah

Rachael Cerrotti: Let me take that as an opportunity to bring up another passage in your book. So this sentence comes from a chapter called ‘3G and the opposite of forgetting’. And 3G is like shorthand for third generation of Holocaust survivors. So I would consider myself a 3G. This is just one line and you write: “Sometimes I am more afraid of forgetting my parent’s stories than I fear losing track of my own.” And I'll also say that this one sentence is isolated as its own paragraph. I'll read it once more –  “Sometimes I am more afraid of forgetting my parent’s stories than I fear losing track of my own.” Elizabeth, I'd love to hear you talk about this and I'll also acknowledge that earlier this year, your father passed away. So you have spent so much of your career writing about your family history, but now you're in this new chapter of your life where you're still working with your family history, but now neither of your parents are alive. And I would love for you to incorporate a bit of your reflection on that into this as well.

Elizabeth Rosner: Well, when I wrote that sentence and of course, the whole book Survivor Cafe. My father was still very much alive and we were very much still in conversation often about my wanting to know as much as I could about him and his life so that I could hold it inside of me. So this idea that I was still imagining my way toward the future that I'm now in, which is I can't ask either of my parents any more questions now. I can't fill in any of the gaps any more than I already have so it was that feeling of wanting to be like the storage unit, wanting to be not just the photo album or the recording device, but to hold all the feelings of it and to hold all the tears and the soul level ache of it. And then to also recognize at a certain point. How much of it does belong to me? What does it mean to be holding someone else's life story? And can you even have room for your own if you're so busy holding others? And it sort of ties in with the other part of the conversation about the weight of carrying so much. Is there such a thing as too much? And this paradox of - it didn't feel like I was diminishing myself to prioritize my father or my mother or both of them. For a long time. I think it just felt like that's my duty, that's my obligation. I used to call my devotion to their histories a loved obligation that there was, yes, a burdensome aspect to it, but that I was choosing it. I was embracing it. And yet I also recognize that if taken too far, it can be unhealthy. 

Rachael Cerrotti: You follow that sentence. I'm jumping ahead. Just a very little bit. You say “I practice a resistance to forgetting.” And this is something that's been on my mind a lot, which is like, when is it time to let go? when is a time to forget? I mean, I've been entrenched in my grandmother's story for literally my entire adult life. And her story then threads into so many other people's stories that I sometimes can't tell like when I'm living my own life and when I am - I'm just too deep into my work and I think about it, particularly coming from the Jewish culture where we have such a strong emphasis on storytelling. Like we have such a big value on not forgetting. I mean, we have the whole concept of l’dor v’dor which is from generation to generation, which is a really important aspect of Judaism. But also if you look at our holidays, I mean, I always say this as a joke, so I’m gonna say it as a joke here, but it's also serious, which is like all of our holidays are like, hey, they tried to kill us. They didn't. Let's eat, you know? Like, this is so much of the story that we are told, not just year in and year out, but week by week being raised in this culture. And I don't know how healthy that is sometimes. When is it hurting us to hold on to the past versus helping us? 

Elizabeth Rosner: It's such a good question. And it's really such an individual answer. But for myself, I feel like the key is balance. But that oversimplifies it. I mean, it's much, much more complex than that. In the beginning of the book, I talk about the kind of strange coincidence it is that Passover and the liberation ritual, the remembrance of liberation from Egypt is around the same time as the anniversary of my father's liberation from Buchenwald. And the Passover remembrance rituals actually tell us to tell the story as if we were there, as if we ourselves experienced that liberation. As if our souls were present among the souls of those who were taken out of Egypt. Out of slavery. Into freedom. And this idea that we're being encouraged to actually merge with the memory, you know, like to not see ourselves as separate from it, looking back at it from this vantage point, but actually as if it shaped us internally. I think that's like an understanding of epigenetics that long predates our current science, understanding of inherited genetics, you know, and this idea that these memories are part of our cellular memory. We can try to distance ourselves all day long. Or we can try and tell ourselves enough is enough. We can say, okay, I'm not going to feel those feelings anymore. I'm not going to over identify, let's say, with my grandmother's experience and yet our bodies tell us something else. And when I use the phrase ‘the labyrinth of memory’ as part of the subtitle for Survivor Cafe, I don't know how many times you've walked a labyrinth or anyone who's listening, if anyone's ever really walked a very beautifully designed labyrinth, but sometimes when you think you're at your closest to the center, you're actually the farthest from the center. And when you're at the outer perimeter of the labyrinth, you might be a few steps away from the very center. That's what memory does. Memory is non-linear. Memory is really mysterious. And personally, I don't really believe we consciously choose what to remember, what to forget, how much distance to place between ourselves and the past. I think a lot of that is evolutionary. And some of it is, as you say, you know, how healthy is it? How unhealthy is it? But I think that line that you quoted, I practice –

Rachael Cerrotti: I practice a resistance to forgetting.

Elizabeth Rosner: Mmhmm. Mmhmm. You can feel how labyrinthine that sense is in a way. You know, it's always that kind of push pull. The title of the chapter, you know, ‘3G and the opposite of forgetting remembering’ isn't exactly the opposite of forgetting, it's something else. And forgetting isn't exactly the opposite of remembering. It's something else. The other line I love there, two one that was by a Holocaust survivor that I didn't hear personally, but that was cited to me who said, ‘I don't live in the past. The past lives inside me.’ That's one thing that I love because it just feels so true to me. When I'm so-called accused of dwelling too much on the history or not living my life in the moment or something like that. It's like it lives in me. What can I do? You know. And then the other thing that's from 12 step programs which I love is you can look back but don't stare. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Oh. Oh. I'm like oh gosh. Yeah. Yeah. 

Elizabeth Rosner: It's how do you relax and soften your gaze? And you can't, like, throw these burdens up in the air. You can just sort of unfurl your fists and hold your hands out and let things lift off by themselves. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Let me read you something else, actually from that chapter. And I think that this is really relevant to this conversation and a really important another layer. Because as you and I sit here, you know, we have this shared history, but there's lots of other peoples with lots of other histories from lots of other corners of the world that are asking themselves similar questions. And you write: 

“During these next few years, certainly within another decade as the final survivors of World War Two die off, we will all experience the threshold where the Holocaust becomes disembodied history and its recollection becomes as haunting and as secondary as an echo. The last person whose skin and bones were radiated by the bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki will die too. In much the same way, once upon a time, the last person alive who held a personal memory of the Civil War passed away. And the last living African American who was enslaved. And the last survivor of the Armenian genocide.” 

I think this is so important. We do not look back at the past to only understand ourselves. We also look back at the past to figure out how to have connections with the people around us. That's my personal take. And I think this paragraph is a really beautiful way of highlighting that. It's a really big conversation in the Jewish community now. I can't name the number of times I've gotten up to public speak and somebody has introduced me by saying that Holocaust survivors are dying. I mean, my grandmother has this great quote in her diary from like the mid 1990s where she went to go speak at a high school classroom and the teacher was like, you guys are also lucky because soon the Holocaust survivors aren't going to be here anymore. And my grandmother went home and wrote in her diary and was like, what the hell? You know, I'm - I'm right here. I am. I'm alive. I'm alive. Hello? I'm alive. You know, so this has been a really big concern of the Jewish community. And it probably goes back to the way that we value memory of like, what do we do when the witnesses aren't here anymore? What is our role? What does this history mean? But you tie it together so beautifully looking at this that this is not an issue specific to any group of people. This is something that we all grapple with. 

Elizabeth Rosner: Yeah. I think it was my way of saying this is collective memory. This isn't Jewish memory. This is human memory. And Hiroshima and Nagasaki are human memory. And centuries of enslavement, human, collective, historical, traumatic memory. And indigenous devastation, genocide on this continent - human. As a member of a tribe of myself, I can say, yes, I have a certain tribal affiliation that's very, very deep in me. But we are members of the human tribe. And so that loss, that last remaining witness isn't just disappearing for the tribe. It's a disappearance for the collective. And every time I could in Survivor Cafe - every time I could keep referencing those. It wasn't to set up comparisons and it wasn't to create a kind of hierarchy of suffering or to talk about, you know, the victim Olympics and who suffered more. It was more - we each separately and also together carry this. And it's our shared sorrow, but it's also our shared possibility. And I don't end on, like, the most hopeful note because I feel like that sense of shared humanity is so at risk. it doesn't just continue without effort. I think we have to actively retain that sense of shared humanity. 

Rachael Cerrotti: There's something in the book that I would really love for you to read, and I thought it would be a nice way to end this conversation. But before we get there, I'm curious if there's any passage that feels like you want to explore right now in this conversation together. 

Elizabeth Rosner: It's the thing I feel like we've been touching on all through the conversation, which is how does the past connect to the present which connects us to the future. One of my impulses for writing this book was because I was thinking forward about where we're all going collectively. So in the epilogue of the book is where I close with those sorts of questions. So I want to just read a small part of that. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Please do. Thank you. 

Elizabeth Rosner:

“What will happen when we can no longer see the minute impressions of grief and loss inscribed on someone's skin, not just the tattooed number, not just the relentless hunger, nor the absence behind the eyes, not the tears or the silence. There is something so literal and tangible that we will lose when we cannot sit across the table from the person who was a six-year-old girl making herself quieter than a mouse behind the secret door, the person who pretended to be dead amid the mounds of the dead. The person who once was a boy staring into the camera for the file card, with the shaved head, with the gaze of resolve. 

My father's fifteen-year-old face and my forty-nine-year-old face. My own shaved head, bald from chemo. The way they do and do not match at the barely discernible hairline, the shadowed scalp. 

My eyes are green and his are brown. His lips are wider than mine, his eyebrows are darker and thicker. He is looking into the machinery of death. And what am I looking into? The future of staying alive, in spite of everything, just like he did, just like he still does, for as long as he can, for as long as I can.” 

Rachael Cerrotti: Mmm. 

Elizabeth Rosner: Oh, that makes me so sad. He's gone now.

Rachael Cerrotti: He passed about not that many months ago, right? 

Elizabeth Rosner: Yeah. April. He stayed alive for as long as he could. He really did. It’s what he did. He was so tenacious. Umm, yeah.

Rachael Cerrotti It's amazing how our own words - the words that we agonize and perfect and scratch out and rewrite all over again. That they can have such a different weight as time goes on.

Elizabeth Rosner: Yeah.

Rachael Cerrotti: Our own. Not someone else’s. Our own.

Elizabeth Rosner: Yeah. Even our own. I mean. Yeah. Because we write them in a time and a place and a moment of, you know, as much truth as we can conjure. And then we change. We change. The words don't, but we do. So as we change, our understanding changes. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Mhm. 

Elizabeth Rosner: Yeah. 

Rachael Cerrotti: I want to end on a note which just selfishly is for me, the most important part of this book of how the particular and the universal hold space for each other and how they actually compliment each other really beautifully and you start the book with something called The Alphabet of Inadequate Language. And I really want to end this conversation here because I think it's, umm, it just holds a lot of weight for me, and I'd love to hear you read it. So if you wouldn't mind, I know it's a couple pages long.

Elizabeth Rosner: It's more than a couple pages long. It's four pages long. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Well, you know, that's okay. 

Elizabeth Rosner: Well, thank you for giving me the chance to, to reflect so deeply and intimately with you. So writing this book, as I mentioned earlier, involved a lot of research, a lot of interviewing and a lot of remembering that was kind of painful. And there were many times along the way where I felt overwhelmed and really like it was too much. Not just that it was too much for me to feel, but that it was too much for me to manage as a writer. That I had taken on too epic a task for myself. And I was about two thirds of the way into the book when I just said, okay, I'm just everything feels so inadequate. I just don't have words for what I want to say and this alphabet just poured out of me. And, at the time I was writing it, it felt a little bit like a purging kind of exercise. But once I really dropped into it, it was just so profound, the experience of writing it that I realized that it's like the alternative table of contents for the book. It's like the map of the book. So that's where it came from.

The Alphabet Of Inadequate Language 

A is for Auschwitz, where more than a million were gassed and then burned into ash. The word that could speak for everything that follows. 

A is for ARBEIT MACHT FREI, The words on the gates of Auschwitz. WORK MAKES YOU FREE. Except that the phrase is untranslatable. Like so much else. 

A is for atrocity. A is for Armenian genocide, words that are illegal to say aloud in Turkey. 

A is for atom bomb. 

B is for Buchenwald, where my father and my uncle were imprisoned, yet did not die. 

B is for Bergen-Belsen, where and Frank did die. B is for Belzec, where half a million were murdered. B is for Babi Yar, the ravine and largest-known mass grave. 

B is for Birkenau, the “sister” to Auschwitz. 

C is for concentration camp. C is for crematoria. 

C is for collaboration. C is for communism. C is for Churchill. 

C is for Cambodia. 

C is for children. One and a half million murdered children. Also the Hidden Children, and the Child Survivors. 

D is for dictator. 

D is for Dachau. 

D is for Death Camp. 

D is for Death's Head Insignia. 

D is for Deutschland. 

D is for denial. 

E is for Eichmann. E is for extermination. E is for Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads. E is for Ethnic Cleansing. E is for Euphemism. MUSIC IN: Tolls Folly / Blue Dot 

F is for Final Solution. F is for Fuhrer. F is for Fatherland. F is for Forgetting, which both is and is not the opposite of Remembering.

G is for Gestapo. G is for Gas Chamber. B is for Goering. G is for Germany. G is for Ghetto. G is for Genocide. 

H is for Holocaust. 

H is for Hitler. 

H is for Himmler. 

H is for Hoss. 

H is for Homosexual. 

H is for Hutu. 

H is for Hiroshima. 

I is for Identity Card. I is for Immigrant. I is for Ideology. I is for I Don't Know How to Go On like This but I Cannot Stop Because the Words Keep Coming. 

J is for Jew. J is for Jude. J is for Jehovah's Witnesses. J is for JEDEM DAS SEINE, words on the gate of Buchenwald. TO EACH HIS DUE. 

K is for Kristallnacht. K is for Khmer Rouge and for Killing Fields. K is for Konzentrationslager. 

L is for Lager. L is for Lynching. L is for Liquidation. As in, the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Lodz Ghetto and the Vilna Ghetto, where my mother and her parents were forced to live before they escaped to a hiding place in the Polish countryside. 

M is for Mengele. 

M is for Mauthausen.

M is for Maidanek. 

M is for Murder, Memory, Massacre, Motherland. 

N is for Nuclear Bomb and Neutron Bomb. N is for Nagasaki. N is for Neighbors, the ones who hid Jews and the ones who denounced Jews or denounced other neighbors for hiding Jews. N is for Nuremberg. The place of the trials. The place of a nearly impossible quest for justice. N is for Nazi. 

O Is for Oven. O is for Other. 

P is for Pogrom. P is for Prisoner. P is for Parade. P is for Ponary, the forest near Vilna, where 100,000 Jews were executed. P is for Poland, once home to more than 2 million Jews. P is for Perished. 

Q is for Quarantine. 

Q is for Questions That Have No Answer. 

R is for Reich. R is for Roma, whose numberless dead have never fully been mourned. R is for Rwanda. R is for Romania, the birthplace of my father's father and the citizenship that saved my father's life. R is for Relocation. R is for Refugee. R is for Roosevelt. 

S is for SS, for Stormtrooper. S is for Shoah. S is for Sachsenhausen and for Sobibor. S is for Stalin and for Synagogue and for Soap. S is for Sola, the ash-filled river at the edges of Auschwitz. S is for Sonderkommando, the special detail of prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria. S is for Selektion. S is for Stolpersteine and for Secrets. S is for Silence. 

T is for Treblinka. 

T is for Theresienstadt. 

T is for Tattoo. 

T is for Twins, whom Mengele chose for special experiments. 

T is for the Thousand-Year Reich, for Terror, Trauma, Tenacity. 

T is for Tutsi.

U is for Uprising. U is for Underground. U is for Uber Alles. U is for U-boat. U is for Undesirable. U is for Understatement. 

V is for Vichy. V is for Victory. V is for Victim. V is for Vanquished. V is for Vietnam, the name of a country. V is for Veteran.

W is for Warsaw. W is for Wehrmacht. B is for War, and War, and War. 

X is for X. For everything that cannot be expressed in words, for each and every name of the dead that may have been forgotten. X is for Xenophobia, fear of the stranger, the Other. 

Y is for Yiddish, the almost-lost language? Y is for You, the one reading this alphabet and all the ones yet to be born. 

Z is for Zyklon B, the gas used to murder millions of men, women and children in Auschwitz. Now. Go back to the beginning. See, under A.

OUTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: Thank you to Elizabeth for joining me today. The book that we read from is titled Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory. You can find that book and her other work linked on our website.

The Memory Generation was created in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation which is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide - including Elizabeth’s parents. You can learn more about their work and the Visual History Archive at sfi.usc.edu. 

You can find additional links, book lists, testimony clips and all types of other resources and stories on our website: memorygenerationpodcast.com. Our editor is Lene Bech Sillesen. Our executive producer and co-creator of this show is Stephen Smith. The music is from Kodomo.

I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Thanks for being with us.