An Unbroken Chain

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, April 16,2004

All over the world, every minute of the day, things happen that may end up affecting you and me – things that, taken by themselves, may not seem to add up to much. Does the price of tea in China really make a difference to us? At first glance, no; but if the Chinese decide that they need cheaper sources of tea and decide to invade India in order to get some, a seemingly obscure economic fact like Sino tea price indices may end up being very important to the rest of the world – because China and India both possess nuclear weapons.

Sometimes, you realize what kind of impact an event – or a series of events – has upon you only long after the fact. An incident that, in a certain context, seems minor or irrelevant may end up having a great deal of influence on subsequent events. You only realize the incident’s importance after the fact – after it’s already become a catalyst for subsequent, more obviously important, events.

What’s true on the world stage is also true in our personal and family lives. The fact that you’re sitting at home or in your office here in Israel reading this article is a good case in point. Most of us immigrated to Israel from some Western country, to which our grandparents or great-grandparents came after leaving the “old world.” If our forebears had not made that fateful move and left their communities for an unknown future, would we still be where we are now? It’s impossible to know, but logic indicates that if not for the fact that they moved where they did when they did, our lives would be considerably different.

Unless you have a family tradition or a tale that was handed down from one generation to the next, though, at this point it’s probably too late to determine the specific reason or incident that caused your great-grandfather to leave his shtetl or Jewish quarter for an ambiguous and unsettled future. Those generations are long gone, and it’s very likely that their immediate children never got around to asking them why they left the Old World for the New, given the attitudes prevalent in many first-generation progeny.

But if there are living Holocaust survivors in your family, you still have an opportunity to record the specific events that they themselves experienced, events that contributed to their survival and the fact that they are still alive to tell the story. Imagine being able to record the small details and incidents that caused a grandparent or uncle to do A instead of B – leading to his or her escape!

Recording specific incidents and organizing them into a family history can be very helpful – even therapeutic – when trying to understand how and why a person or family finds itself in a specific location or situation, especially when trying to come to grips with something as unspeakably horrible as the Holocaust.

And looking at personal history as a series of causes and effects helps us not only come to terms with our own family histories – it helps us understand the thinking of the Jews who remained and got caught up in the firestorm. Many of us born after the Holocaust tend to criticize those who did not leave Europe before Hitler's rise. Of course we would have left – we would have seen it coming. Why didn’t they?

There are as many answers to that question as there are victims. Each person, or maybe their parents or family, both martyrs and survivors, and came to a fork in the road at some point. And pinpointing those decisive events can help us understand why things happened the way they did – for us, our families, and the Jewish people.

The key idea here is to organize the available information in a manner that will make sense and be accessible to you and your children for many years to come. Once, organizing a family history was an expensive and difficult task, but now the only hard part is getting the information. When it comes to organization tools, there are dozens of computer programs that can help give you a global perspective on a family or community history. The difference between these kinds of organization tools is the approach they take to correlating your data.

If you want to look at how specific incidents joined together can create a big historical picture, you might find using a timeline to mark off the events and their relationship to each other very helpful. And Timeline Maker (http://www.timelinemaker.com/index.html) is an excellent, free timeline program for Windows machines that you can use to put your events that happened to members of your family into historical context.

Timeline Maker is a database program that includes tools especially designed to display and manage information and details about specific events. It’s simple to use; you open a new file and add an event, and each event contains fields for event starting and ending date, places, notes and information sources. You can display the information on a list with details, or on an actual time line. Once you've entered all the information into your timeline, you can display and print the whole thing or any selected events for a customized layout. You can print any display of your data, or publish it as a Web page. You can download several ready made time lines from the program's Web site which will show you examples of how to use the program. Sample time lines include history of music, technology, English royalty, and a time line of Jewish history, among others.

In order to input your family information you first have to get it together. Garnering the information is not as easy as it sounds, though – often, interviewers don’t ask the right questions and don't get the information they’re really after. Oral histories are delicate, non-renewable resources, and need to be conducted and recorded very carefully. To get a good education on how to conduct an oral history interview, point your browser to the Tell Me Your Stories Web site (http://www.tellmeyourstories.org/curriculum/index.htm), which contains a full curriculum (which has been taught in high schools and middle schools across the United States) on interviewing elderly family and community members.

One frequent problem interviewers run up against, for example, is how to convince an unwilling subject to participate in an interview. If a relative with key information refuses to speak to you, says the site, "The subject can be reassured that this is not a test, that whatever they recall will be perfect." If the interviewee begins to cry, the interviewer "needs to be reassured that he or she has not caused the person to cry, and has not upset them… just sit and wait, maybe offer a tissue."

And although it is difficult, sometimes even discouraging, garnering information from elderly relatives and acquaintances that lived through the Holocaust is a vital activity, and anybody with access to survivors has a moral obligation to interview those survivors and record their experiences. Learning about the events that led a survivor to be able to escape the clutches of the Nazis is essential and fascinating, and will probably teach us a thing or two about dealing with crises we faced – or nay yet face – in our own lives.'

Send comments/questions to ds@newzgeek.com

http://www.tellmeyourstories.org/curriculum/index.htm

http://wow.blogs.com/photos/hitler/

http://www.jr.co.il/hotsites/j-holoc.htm