Holocaust Memory Through Art

Transformative Encounters with Holocaust Memory Through Art

“Art is not just ornamental, an enhancement of life. It is a path in itself, a way out of the predictable and conventional… a map to self-discovery.” – Gabrielle Roth

“Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

Time and time again, I discover how I can’t know what I don’t know, and I can’t see what I don’t see—until, one day, I do. Socrates tells us, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” It’s a journey that requires curiosity, honesty, and a load of courage. The journey’s essence is the process of peeling the onion of self. 

I am interested in the intersection of Intergenerational Trauma and Art. Both are mysterious. Intergenerational Trauma is elusive, filled with secrets and unnamed shame, and Art is a sphere beyond words and explanations. Yet something about their essence felt magical when I encountered their intersection. I am fascinated by how trauma transforms itself. Does it change, evolve, and lessen with time?

The stories and reflections I share here are not about triumphant moments of great insight; they are not about a solution or a how-to guide. Instead, the act of writing this essay is about the wounded eagle inside my soul that wants to spread its wings. It wants to fly, to get distance, to observe with detachment, and to find compassion and love. It is not an easy process. It forces me to reconnect with dark memories, but I don’t know if there is a better way to strengthen the healing muscle.

Art is a method of breaking intergenerational silence—it’s hard—as the poet Ingeborg Bachmann said, “I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.”

Scorched Earth

“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.  Visceral warning signs constantly bombard their bodies.  In an attempt to control these processes, they often become experts at ignoring their gut feelings and numbing awareness of what is played out inside.  They learn to hide from their selves.” – Bessel van der Kolk

Let me take you to a place where memory and landscape fuse into one. The year is 1951. It’s a typical summer afternoon in Donaueschingen, a small town in southern Germany near the Danube River. The town is devastated, like the rest of the country. The Allied carpet bombs left a thick trail of destruction and death. Six years since the surrender, Germany is licking its wounds—the visible ones and the unseen ones. Mounds of rubble and ruined structures are all around. A few big trees stand at the town outskirts alongside a one-lane road that leads to the town center. There’s a large concrete structure with multiple sections, some destroyed and others intact. It was a German Army bunker not so long ago. The field around the bunker is dotted with craters of various sizes from the bombs. The day is warm, and the blue sky is cloudless. A light wind whistles as it flows through the grass and the tree leaves. A lone engine hums in the background from a car on the road. Beige, green, and blue dominate the scenery. A few old brick houses with gray shingles are nearby. Two kids are playing hide and seek. They are about six years old and in school uniforms: short gray pants, white shirts. One of them, a blonde with rosy cheeks, crouches behind a big block of fallen, tilted concrete slabs with protruding reinforcement bars. The kid does not move. He tries to make himself small—in his mind, invisible. He notices that one of his shoelaces is untied; it will have to wait, he thinks. Soon though, the other kid will see his stooped shoulders behind the slab. A big scream of discovery, surprise, and joy will break the silence.

Years later, one of these kids will become famous for his monumental artworks. They’ll depict the desolate scenes and scorched earth he’ll remember from his childhood. Some will call him the greatest artist of his generation. His name is Anselm Kiefer. He’ll say, “Bunkers are for me the most beautiful art-for-art’s-sake architecture.”

In the book In Conversation with Klaus Dermutz, Anselm Kiefer speaks about his early childhood: “The war was still going in March ’45. Bombs fell on Donaueschingen, a railway junction where I grew up. The French were advancing. I was born in the basement of the hospital. My parents stuck wax in my ears, like Odysseus did to his companions, so I wouldn’t hear the bombs. The bombs were the sirens of my childhood.” To another question, he said, “Aside from the fact that I almost starved as an infant, everything went along normally. The rubble was always in sight. The house next to us was completely bombed out. I never experienced this rubble as something negative. It’s a state of transition, of reversal, of change. I built houses with the stones scavenged in the big cities by the so-called rubble women—who are today an almost mythological concept. The rubble was always a starting point for the construction of something new.” (Rubble-Woman refers to women who helped clear and reconstruct the bombed cities of Germany and Austria in the aftermath of World War II. This monumental task fell largely on women because many men had died or were prisoners of war.)

I did not know any of that when I accidentally first saw Kiefer’s works. In 1988, new to Los Angeles, I ventured downtown and walked into the MOCA. I always loved museums. I stepped into an exhibit hall. No other visitors were present, just a guard standing in the corner of the room. She was heavy-set and dark-skinned with wavy black hair, her hands in her pockets. The guard was wearing a navy blazer with an AIDS ribbon lapel pin. I wondered if she had lost someone to the disease. The space was ample with high ceilings and white walls that ended with a clean edge. The room was cold and dead silent. I looked up. On the wall in front of me was a large piece. If my memory is correct, the painting was Nigredo (Blackness). That was my first sighting of Anselm Kiefer’s art. It felt like I got punched in the stomach. I wanted to vomit. My repulsion was so visceral that I knew right there I was standing in front of great art.

Anselm Kiefer is the most famous artist addressing the painful chapter of 20th-century German history. His works are monumental—both in size and in the search for the world’s inner truth. He makes art from a mix of rubble and mythology. He combines extreme, unusual materials, such as straw, dirt, lead, charcoal, tar, sand, epoxy, and gold leaf. His color tonalities are on the grim side of the scale. Landscapes are never just that; the land is heavy and sad; it smells of burnt-out remains; it’s loaded with tragic aspects. Critics and curators accuse him of having no regard for the permanence of his materials. The straw will not remain intact in 50 years—but it does not discourage collectors.

It’s easy to see how Kiefer’s paintings are drawn from the imagery he witnessed in childhood. But I think there is more to it than just the visual destruction that moved him to create the gloom and devastation of German soil. Yes, Kiefer is well-educated and well-versed in mythology, theology, and literature, but it’s more than that.

Those who experienced the horror of the Holocaust often wanted to protect the young from their past. Yet, the horrors slip through the cracks of their being. We, the second generation of survivors—or of German perpetrators—knew more of our parents’ past than we were told. They may have thought that the unspoken was buried in the confines of their minds and memories, but we knew. Sometimes we just sniffed the elusive signs, as the old saying goes, “If you pick up a scent, then you have a clue about something.” At other times, the trauma was clear and loud—straightforward as could be.

Growing up, it felt like my parents never entirely left the concentration camps. The camp stayed in them, even though they lived in Israel. Some part of their mind was still there. They were always tense and quiet. I don’t remember much laughter in the house. The apartment was always spotless; everything was in its place, as if otherwise, the Nazis would be knocking at the door at any moment, ready to snatch them away. I wonder what kind of experiences, what little conversations, and human behaviors Anselm Kiefer and his generation witnessed that gave them clues to their elders’ past. How did the trauma pass on to them?

In the memoir The Pendulum, Julie Lindahl describes her journey to uncover her grandparents’ role in the Third Reich. Her grandfather, she discovered, had been a fanatic member of the SS since 1934. During World War II, he was responsible for enslavement, torture, and murder in large estates he oversaw in occupied Poland. He eventually fled to South America to evade war-crimes trials. She writes:

“When a generation responsible for evil deeds rejects its own guilt, it creeps insidiously into the hearts and minds of the next generation and transforms itself into shame; an evil deed in itself, because it unjustly condemns the bearer to carry the burden of crimes they did not commit. To agree to live in this dark room without signposts and believe that you must stay there to protect those who came before you is an astoundingly common and counterproductive instinct. Isolation breeds mistrust, which, in turn, asphyxiates the family relationships we prize most. Shame will unrepentantly creep into the next generation and, like a chameleon, take new forms unless someone breaks the dictate and looks back.” (Prologue, page xiii)

I wonder, did Anselm’s next-door neighbor come back from the battlefield with the war’s fire in his belly—the kind that never goes away? Did he witness that fire blasting out from time to time in fits of uncontrolled rage? Or maybe he partook in the kind of conversations Julie Lindahl recounts in her book.

One, in particular, made a strong impression. It happened when Julie came to visit her grandmother after a long absence. Julie had a loving relationship with her Oma (Grandma in German). Yet the conversation is layered with both explicit and subtle tones—innuendos that reveal how shame haunts and creeps into the next generation.

The conversation starts with tender expressions of love and care:

“My dearest Julchen. Well? You are looking very slim these days. Very slim indeed. I have made some warm lunch—trout with potatoes and steamed vegetables and your favorite berry soup with vanilla sauce for dessert.”

As they sit at the dining table, Oma says:

“Now, make sure you take enough. You’re young—my word, just twenty-one years old—you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and you must eat. Do you menstruate normally?”

The question sounds innocent and caring. But knowing Oma’s history as the wife of a high-ranking SS officer, I hear the Aryan ideology in the background. The Nazis encouraged “strong and pure” Aryans to proliferate.

Julie responds in a nonchalant manner:

“Yes, Oma, everything is fine.”

I wonder if Julie thought the same thing I do, and did she let it pass over her head out of respect for her grandma?

Oma says:

“Oh, let’s talk about something else. Have you noticed all of the wonderful spring buds opening outside? Nature is the strangest and most wonderful thing. It clears out the weak and supports everything strong and vital. We humans haven’t respected that principle, and Nature is punishing us for it. Just look around! We offend her laws all the time!”

This statement sounds like Nazi Social Darwinism propaganda—the ideology of natural selection and survival of the fittest.

Julie responds with innocent curiosity, and maybe also a bit of bravery. Her question is an opening for a blunt answer that might make her uncomfortable:

“Yes, I have seen the tree. What is it that should not be alive? What laws do you mean we have offended?”

Her grandmother doesn’t mince words:

“Well, that is quite plain. Just look at the AIDS epidemic. You don’t think that is a coincidence, do you? Those people are bound to die because what they are doing is unnatural. In any case, the world’s population is growing far too fast, and AIDS is Nature’s way of correcting the situation. Now, tell me, what are you studying?”

Julie: “International affairs. We’re studying the Cold War.”

What better subject than international affairs to get Oma going on issues of history, Germany, and of course—what else?—the Jews:

“War, war, people will never stop fighting. Man has evil inside of him that he will never be freed of. There will always be wars. You can read all about it in here.”

Oma points to a copy of War and Peace.

“Bloodthirsty princes battled with one another for no better purpose than the ridiculous glory of spilling blood. How many young men believed them and returned, if they did at all, without arms and legs! Terrible, ter-ri-ble! But no one speaks about that anymore. It’s all about us and the so-called awful things that we Germans did. But let me tell you, it was nothing compared to what people did to one another back then!”

Oma doesn’t beat around the bush. Her worldview is clear as a cloudless sky. Julie, being a learned person versed in world history, is in a tough spot. She loves her grandmother, yet she sees and smells the ugliness in her point of view. How does one deal with this conundrum without feeling conflicted? Maybe you light a cigarette and silently watch its burning smoke.

Julie tries to move the conversation toward a more cheerful subject:

“I have some great news at the university.”

Now, she may try as much as she can, but Oma is not swayed. She has more to say, and it’s straightforward with no breaks:

“And what do they say about that business with the Jews at your university? I am sure they tell you all sorts of lies. Let me tell you straight, from someone who was there, that nothing like this ever happened. It was all a lie by the media so that we Germans would feel that we had to keep our heads down. Germans were responsible for everything bad, but no one ever talks about the good that we did. And doesn’t everyone seem to want to come and live here!”

At this point, Oma’s eyelids suddenly began to flicker uncontrollably, and she leaned back on the headrest of her armchair. And if what she had said wasn’t enough, she added with a sentiment of self-pity, “Oh, my eyes! I have tried everything—inoculations from the doctor and all manner of treatments, but nothing helps. It’s an illness of the nerves, you understand, to do with everything we have been through. It was all too much. But the Holocaust, I can assure you, did not happen. It’s all just invented nonsense. We had beautiful times, you know.”

Julie Lindahl’s exchange with her grandmother offers a chilling glimpse into how denial wears the mask of tenderness. The conversation stirs deep empathy in me for Julie.

There aren’t many conversations I remember with my father, but one stands above all others. It was very short—four words, to be precise—not exactly a dialogue. The moment was visually stunning and forever haunting.

It took place while driving a Jeep up in the Golan Heights plateau, close to the border between Israel and Syria. I was the driver, a soldier at that time, wearing the unique paratrooper class A uniform—a tunic-style shirt with a belt on top, the red beret folded beneath the left shoulder strap, and high-top red boots. On the backseat lay my short M16 rifle. My father, in his late fifties, sat next to me. We visited my brother, who was also a soldier at the time, serving at a nearby base. I was focused on the narrow dirt road, navigating the open grassy fields scattered with giant dark gray basalt boulders. It was a beautiful day and rare to spend time driving with my dad. The horizon line was endless, uninterrupted from side to side—the kind of scenery that cracks my heart open. A herd of sheep came across our path; I slowed the Jeep. Out of the blue, my father said, “That’s how we walked,” by which he meant—to the gas chamber. I was stunned. I turned my head and looked at him briefly as the vehicle rolled forward. He was in his own space, gazing at the wool breeds flocking together as one.

I regret not being more empathetic; I kept quiet. I had nothing to say. I hate to admit it, but at the time, in my early twenties, I agreed with my father—they walked like sheep to the slaughter.

It took me years to realize that silence was not absence—it was weight.

Julie’s conversation and mine are tiny little examples of how intergenerational trauma passes on. The burden of shame, humiliation, sadness, and anger are parts of my generation’s shadow—the darkened area we are trying to make peace with, reconcile, and accept as part of who we are. Our story is not unique. Interestingly, it has many similarities with our counterpart generation on the perpetrator’s side.

I remember attending a lecture at LACMA in 2009. It was in honor of an exhibition opening, Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Culture. Artists, academics, and the show’s curators reflected on the exhibition. The German artists talked about their anguish living in a divided country, separated between East and West. The academics talked about the two political systems and the distinctive versions of postmodern art. As the talk progressed, I started feeling upset. The fire in my chest was raging. “There is an elephant in the auditorium,” I thought. “Right there in the front row, and nobody mentions it?” They either chose not to talk about the Holocaust or could not talk about it, as if the brightness of the sun was forcing them to look away.

At the end of the event, I happened to see the German curator and LACMA’s curator, Stephanie Barron, walking across the courtyard by the iconic Chris Burden’s Urban Light. I plucked up my courage and approached them.

“Hi, my name is David. I attended your presentation—thank you. May I share with you some of my reflections?” They appeared taken aback but nodded their heads, and Ms. Barron said, “Sure.”

“I heard much about the pain over a divided country and postmodernism, but very little about the Holocaust and its impact on German art. I wonder—did the images, stories, and horrors have no place in this discussion? Are the shame and guilt so great that you can only write about it in the fancy catalog? As a son of two Holocaust survivors, it feels painful.” I tried my best to keep my nerves and shaking voice at bay while looking them straight in the eyes, as mine were moist and enraged.

They evaded my intensity. They did not respond, just said, “Thank you,” and moved on. I felt bare, perplexed, but mostly drained.

It takes guts to break the veil of silence around intergenerational shame and guilt. Anselm Kiefer was not the first artist to do so. There were others—mostly poets and writers—but he was one of the first visual artists to do it. He came out with his paintings in the early 1980s, quite some time after the war. Why did it take that long? Yes, Germany lost the war, but what about the ideology? Ex-Nazis and sympathizers were all around. Perhaps Germans tried to forget and move on. It’s complicated. I know this shame. It creeps through and stains the human soul in crafty and cunning ways.

Kiefer’s art is a loud and clear voice. “This is our land,” I imagine him saying to his fellow Germans. “This is our history and mythology—look at it. Get disgusted, vomit if you want, but know this: there is no way to make it nice. There is no way but to learn how to live with it and try to repent the best we can.” Those who had to wrestle with the heritage dumped on their shoulders voiced this sentiment—a generation forced its way out from under the ruins, the ghosts of guilt and shame.

I always sensed that my body is keeping a score of intergenerational trauma—a sense of being haunted by ghosts, by memories that, though I did not experience firsthand, felt like I did. Feelings were not processed. The vocabulary was not present, nor encouraged. If anything, sensitivity was belittled. Imagine a warehouse packed with shelves, stocked up high with boxes labeled: anger, violence, shame, etc. The sensations locked in the packages were dormant, but sometimes one package would fall, or a complete set of shelves would break down—and once or twice, the entire warehouse was in flames. Feelings had no healthy way out.

It’s not an enigma why trauma occupied a central theme of my art. I chose not to use grim, dark colors to describe the unimaginable tragedy realistically. Instead, I tried to seek beauty through abstract shapes and vivid colors. I focused on a voyage away from Auschwitz—of going out from the camp, as opposed to the journey into Auschwitz’s gas chambers—with one common core theme: the trains. I used stunning molten-colored fused glass to melt together and transmit light. Making art became analogous to a journey from horror into a new light. It’s meditation in action, dedicated to healing.

I have had a few encounters with art that felt transcendental—not seeing or hearing God, but as close as you can get. Those were singular moments with a mystical dimension. Moments forever carved crisp and clear. These moments helped me develop the language that penetrated my inner incoherent screaming silence. These moments of soul impact also showed me that I am not alone in my pain and search for meaning and recovery. They helped me understand who I am.

Shoah

“Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.” – Peter Levine
“If you bring forth that which is within you, then that which is within you will be your salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, then that which is within you will destroy you.” – Peter Levine

I was 26 when Shoah first screened in Israel. The screening was divided into two evenings due to the film’s length. I remember arriving at the intimate Tel Aviv Museum auditorium, a bit anxious, scanning the crowd, sensing the temperature, looking for someone familiar. I was by far the youngest person in the crowd of elderly, respectfully dressed attendees. I recognized one person, Professor Gabriel Moked, standing to the side, speaking with a good-looking dark-haired woman in a light blue knee-length dress and a white blouse. Professor Moked is a Holocaust survivor and a well-known figure in the Israeli literary milieu. I had attended his class, Philosophy of Aesthetics, the previous semester. The class discussions centered on Beauty and its objective evaluation. I remember that Professor Moked’s theory revolved around the notion that an objective assessment of Beauty exists. To this day, I think it’s a provocative idea, especially in today’s media-driven culture, where everything is so subjective. A purple handkerchief had a prominent spot on my professor’s gray jacket. He always had the manners of a gentleman.

I walked over to him and said, “Good evening, Professor Moked. My name is David. I attended your class last semester.” He recognized me, and we shook hands. I remember the look of surprise—maybe astonishment—expressed in his big almond-shaped eyes, which became even bigger as he saw me there, a kid in that crowd. Sometimes, it’s the slight nod that can lift a spirit.

In the opening scene of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, a man in his 50s, with curly hair and a handsome, round face, is rowing a boat on a river. He sings as the dinghy eases through calm waters. A dark green-grayish forest is in the background. The man’s gaze is melancholy and distant. I imagine he is in a different place—in memories of images and sounds from the times he rowed on this river during the war. He sings in Polish, the language of a country that betrayed millions of its Jewish citizens. Nevertheless, his singing carries a deep sense of longing and a soft-hearted soul.

Later in the film, as Lanzmann converses with this man, his miraculous survival story comes to light. We learn how his melodic voice helped him stay alive. Simon Srebnik was one of only two survivors of Chełmno, where the Nazis gassed 400,000 Polish Jews—the first camp where Jews were gassed. Srebnik was 13 when he was put to work by the Nazis, collecting the remains of his fellow Jews and dumping sacks of human ashes into the calm river. During his captivity, he was taught and compelled to sing for his captors’ entertainment. Two days before Chełmno was liberated by Soviet troops, the remaining prisoners were shot in the head. Srebnik was among them—but he survived.

Shoah, the Hebrew word for Holocaust, means catastrophe—an apt name for the unthinkable. Lanzmann’s film is a magnum opus documentary, but he insisted on calling it “a fiction of the real.” He amassed over 230 hours of location footage and interviews—with Jewish victims, German perpetrators, and Polish bystanders, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. It took him eleven years to complete. I imagine the grip of madness—going to sleep and waking up day after day with the thought: this part must stay, and this needs to be cut. It’s like the infamous selection gesture made by the SS doctor on the train platform at Birkenau—who lives, who dies—boiled down to a flick of the wrist.

Lanzmann refused to use any historical documentary footage. Instead, he toured the world, looking for eyewitnesses to Hitler’s Final Solution and conducting interviews. At that time, many Holocaust survivors were still alive, with intensely strong memories. Also still alive were many Germans and Poles who had played a part in the killing machine or had witnessed what happened. The film is built almost entirely on conversation—mesmerizing, agonizing talk that reveals the unspeakable through speech. Sporadically, the interviews are interrupted by images of locomotives, train tracks, and pastoral scenes of the places where the killing took place. Common to all that imagery is the accompanying silence—no voice-overs, complete stillness.

Lanzmann is an incredible interviewer; it’s his mastery. He is patient, and his questions are about the little details. In this way, he draws out some chilling, harrowing accounts. Most unsettling, for me, is that of Abraham Bomba, the former Treblinka barber. The interview took place at a barbershop in Tel Aviv as Bomba cut a client’s hair. In Treblinka, he cut women’s hair minutes before they went into the gas chamber. At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum library archive, I found the entire script of their conversation. These are some of Lanzmann’s questions and a couple of Bomba’s answers:

Lanzmann: “You said that you didn’t shave them.” Lanzmann: “You cut it with what? With scissors?” Lanzmann: “There were no mirrors?” Lanzmann: “Can you imitate now what you did?”

As the conversation unfolds, Bomba’s scissors move faster, as if the rhythm of cutting might shield him from the torment rising within.

Lanzmann: “With big movements?” Lanzmann: “You say you were about 16 barbers.” Lanzmann: “This means you cut the hair of how many women in one batch?” Lanzmann: “And after that, the doors of the gas chamber were closed?” Lanzmann: “Where did you wait?” Lanzmann: “I asked you, and you didn’t answer. What was your impression the first time you saw these naked women with children arriving? What did you feel?”

Bomba: “I’ll tell you something. Over there, it was very hard to have any feelings. Working there, day and night, among those people, those bodies, men and women—your feelings disappeared. You were dead to your feelings—you had no feelings at all. As a matter of fact, when I was chosen to work as a barber in the gas chambers, some women came in off a transport from my town, from Częstochowa. I knew a lot of those women.”

Lanzmann: “You knew them?”

Bomba: “I knew them. I lived with them in my town, in my street, and some of them were my close friends. When they saw me, they started hugging me. What are you doing here? What is going to happen to us? What could you tell them? What could I tell them? A friend of mine, who also worked as a barber—a good barber—in my hometown, when his wife and his sister came into the gas chamber…”

At this point, Bomba goes silent. You can see the wave of emotion running through him. He struggles to hold it together.

Lanzmann: “Go on, Abe. You must go on. You have to.”

Bomba: “It’s too hard.”

Lanzmann: “Please, we have to do it, you know we do.”

Bomba: “I am not able to do it.”

Lanzmann: “You have to do it. I know it’s very hard. I know, and I apologize.”

Bomba relents, and the rest of the story unfolds.

My hair prickles; I’m overcome with emotion as I see the visual image of the barber cutting his wife and sister’s hair a few minutes before their final separation.

Some critics said that Lanzmann was too forceful in pressing the survivors to recall their experiences, even at the cost of reopening old wounds. He explained to reporter Howie Movshovitz in 2011, “No one history book may give you the emotions, the strength of a human face when the people are paying the highest price in order to revive what they went through.” Lanzmann also said, “And I think that the only way to answer the ‘why’ is to go into the most extreme details of the ‘how.'”

In 1991, my father, newly retired from a lifelong military career, invited my brother Israel and me to join him on a trip to Poland and Germany, following the route he had shared with his father, David, from 1939 until the end of the war in 1945, when they were separated forever. The veil of Communism had just been lifted, and Eastern European countries had begun to open up. We met at Warsaw airport—my father and brother arriving from Israel, and I from Los Angeles. Warsaw looked gray, old, filled with a sense of decay and gloom. We traveled to Łódź; it was even grayer and more dilapidated. We found the house where my father grew up, and for the first time, I heard him speak Polish—as if he had spoken it only yesterday and not over 45 years ago. From there, we continued through four different concentration camps, all the way to his liberation in Dachau.

My brother and I had equipped ourselves with the best camcorders available at the time; they were big and heavy. We knew nothing about sound recording, and it shows in the many hours of footage we collected. Nevertheless, we were enthusiastic. I thought, this is my chance to role-play Claude Lanzmann. I hoped to draw from my dad the stories he never told and the emotional tones he never used. It didn’t work. At the time, I was 31 years old and far from having the mastery and emotional maturity required for such a task. I’m not even sure I was ready to hear it all—perhaps I was too afraid.

From a young age, I had wondered about the things my father didn’t say. To start with, he was not a big talker, but more of a task-oriented master. Like many of his generation, he was focused on building and defending the young state of Israel. He worked in managing Israeli military food logistics; his mindset was always centered on doing, not being. Still, growing up in the shadow of the horrors, I was curious. I wanted to know about his emotional state, his fear, the violence, the sounds, and the abuse. I longed to understand his special bond with his father, and his sense of grief and loss. Anything that could fill in the detached, clinical way in which he told his story. He stuck to names and dates; everything in between was dry, colorless—like that of a reluctant storyteller. I had clues that there was much more beneath the surface. I heard things—sometimes from my mother—but mostly from my intuition.

There was an implicit message in my father’s inability or refusal to speak more about his past. I understood early on that there are things you simply don’t ask. It was about respecting his space and the way he carried himself. It was an early lesson in boundaries. But there were things that even a less sensitive child than I would have picked up on. His height, for example—my father was a short man. He never grew taller than he was at age 14, when the war began. The blue number tattooed on his wrist was always visible. His quietness followed him almost always, interrupted sporadically by uncontrolled rage. He was quick to raise his voice, which I suspected had something to do with the camp guards’ shouts he had endured. I also suspected he had been physically beaten—and maybe even sexually abused. But I knew, instinctively, that I wasn’t allowed to breach any of those subjects. That left me in a place of void, and I filled the open spaces with my imagination.

The motif of the train in Holocaust memory is central. The logistics of transporting Jews from across Europe to the concentration camps—all located in Poland—was an immense operation, orchestrated by Adolf Eichmann. Trains have become a dominant theme in a series of artworks I created over the years. Behind the façade of colorful fused-glass tiles, laid horizontally on fabricated plexiglass, lies a conceptual vision of a landscape. One of my recurring fantasies was being in my father’s place, inside a cattle train, smooshed tightly among other bodies. The train is en route to Auschwitz. I’m standing next to a wooden interior panel and find a tiny crack to peer through. I pick at it and see a breathtaking landscape—green, blue, red—all in motion. I get lost in the view outside; it comforts me. I escape from my body and emotions. I am free.

👉 For a deeper look at this recurring vision and the art it inspired, read my blog post: Healing Trauma Through Arts.

I created a film for an art exhibition at the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Museum in Queens, NY. Imagine a video camera mounted on a train engine, filming a ride through stunning Norway. The geography is monotonous—endless white snowfields beneath a blue-gray sky. The image is meditative, conveying calm serenity—until the train enters a tunnel. The darkness engulfs the screen; it becomes a portal to memories of a different train ride—cattle cars and train station signposts, echoing Lanzmann’s Shoah. The audio track underscores the contrast between the magnificent Norwegian scenery and the tunnel’s haunted memories. The music shifts from meditative soundscapes to agonizing cries. The film is four hours long, looping endlessly—because the journey away from these memories never ends. I named the installation The Train from Auschwitz: A Journey from Shame to Self-Realization.

👉 View the exhibition catalog here.

The Whirling Dervishes

“Movement is my medicine, my meditation, my metaphor and my method, a living language we can rely upon to tell us the truth about who we are, who we are with, and where we are going.  There is no dogma in the dance.” – Gabrielle Roth

“To sweat is to pray, to make an offering of your innermost self.  Sweat is holy water, prayer beads, pearls of liquid that release your past.  The more you dance… the more you sweat, the more you pray.  The more you pray, the closer you are to ecstasy.” – Gabrielle Roth

“The dance is not where we lose ourselves.  But where we find ourselves.” – Gabrielle Roth

I am a dancer. At times, my energies, my body, my muse, and the music move me into a swirling motion. I open my arms, tilt my head, keep my eyes open just enough to avoid colliding with other dancers. And I swirl. My focus is heightened. My legs are strong, my muscles and bones tense, yet my spirit is light as a feather. I am floating, sweat dripping, flying like a bird, empty of thoughts. There are other dancers around, but I am alone in my space – one with no worries or fears. In those moments, I am not only connected with the oneness; I am the oneness.

Once a year, in December, thousands of Sufis make the pilgrimage to Konya, Turkey, to celebrate the life of the poet Rumi—the great thirteenth-century philosopher and mystic of Islam. In 2014, Danna and I joined the crowd.

Our hotel room window faced Rumi’s shrine with its many blue-colored spires. Opposite the wrought iron bed was a wall clock that puzzled us – its dials rotated counterclockwise. Although Konya is a center of the Mevlevi Sufi order, it’s not an overly religious place. On the contrary, we felt welcomed—maybe in the spirit of Rumi’s famous line: “Come, come whoever you are, a believer or non-believer, a Muslim, a Christian or a Pagan, just come however you are.”

I felt a sense of hopefulness being in Konya and having the experiences we had. The Sufis are a persecuted sect of Muslim mystics who advocate unlimited tolerance and awareness through love. The splendor of the breakfast buffet was second to none. We roamed the city streets, listened to lectures, and in the evenings attended the Sema ceremony.

A group of forty Dervishes stood along the perimeter of a circular court. They stood in attention with arms crossed over their chests, wearing white robes—symbolizing their egos’ shrouds—and black hats—symbolizing their egos’ tombstones. It was the center stage of an auditorium, resembling an ice hockey rink. A crowd of Sufi devotees and spectators sat in silence as a live band played traditional Mevlevi music. One by one, the Dervishes stepped into the court in a slow counterclockwise swirling motion. Their arms raised, right palm upward toward the sky and left palm down toward the earth. The dancers didn’t do much but spin at a fixed speed; their skirts opened like flower petals, their heads tilted to the right. The dancers’ skirts changed colors as the stage lights alternated from white to green, blue, and red. Everything is turning in the universe. The world turns, the sun turns, human blood under the skin turns—and so do the Dervish dancers. It’s a dance ceremony in honor of their great teacher, Rumi, but it’s much more than just a dance.

👉 To read more about Konya and Rumi, see my travel essay: Exploring Turkey, Rumi, and the Forty Rules of Love.

There is a growing body of research and interest in the relationship between trauma and physical ailments such as cancer and ALS. Yet, the physiological impact of emotions is still far from being fully appreciated. The argument is pretty straightforward—when we shut down emotions, we also affect our immune and nervous systems. Thus, the repression of emotions, which once served us well as a survival mechanism, becomes the root cause of bodily illness.

That same year I watched the Dervishes dance, I was surprised to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. I was 54—relatively young for the outburst—yet it becomes less surprising when reviewing my history. Cancer is a word that evokes danger, fear, and death. Fear, in particular, is an elegant weapon. It hovered above me like a drone, engulfing my psyche with the buzzing sound of anxiety. It came just as I embarked on a new chapter of my life—recently divorced after twenty-five years of marriage, with a growing intuition that something was missing in my healing journey. I felt I had done a lot of therapy and processing from the chest up—but not from the chest down.

“David,” my friend Andre, a doctor and therapist, suggested gently, “Have you considered that the cause of the cancer is your deeply rooted anger that had no healthy outlet?” It was upsetting to hear—but the truth stings. The somatic component of my healing was missing. I decided to reconnect with yoga and dance—two disciplines I knew well from my teen years. In the words of Martha Graham, “The body says what words cannot.”

I had two Focal Laser Ablation procedures to remove the cancer cells—once in New York and then in Miami—a cutting-edge procedure not yet widely accepted. I remember lying face down inside an MRI tube, fully awake aside from local anesthesia, listening to Enya, focusing on my breath while my mind held on to the images of loved ones waiting outside. Roni, my platoon buddy, leaned over and whispered in my ear, “It will be alright.”

The table wheeled out of the machine, and the doctor adjusted the tiny optical fiber to the tumor’s precise location. Mind you, the entire prostate is the size of an almond. The doctors wheeled the table back in, rechecked the position with the imaging machine, and if all was aligned, a heatwave was sent via the fiber probe to burn the cancer cells. Back and forth it went for a couple of hours. Every time I felt the burning sensation, I took a deeper breath. The procedure was not as difficult as the long recovery that followed. It took quite a few months—a process I sum up with one word: bloody.

On a Sunday morning, a week after the second cancer removal procedure, I went to a dance class. I was still in discomfort and low energy. There was no cheerfulness in me. I positioned myself near a window, close to the bright sun rays. My dance was pretty static. I closed my eyes and rattled my wrists, touching whatever energies I could bring up to make them move. I wanted to dance inside my body—where no one could see me. On that day, that was all I had. As the weeks and months passed, I found myself, at times, dancing with the cancer—as if it were a fellow dancer—synchronizing our steps and energies with gentleness and love. At other times, my dance mimicked a Tai Chi master, moving in slow motion, with grace and intensity—as if I were trained in that martial art. The one thing I could not do was swirl. I did not have in me the lightness it required.

It took a few years before swirling came back, and it did. I coined a term to describe my attitude toward my ailment: “surrender without giving up,” by which I meant relinquishing with grace that which I couldn’t control and, at the same time, continuing to move forward. The critical challenge was to stop the fight and to accept that surrender is the ultimate act of freedom. This was a key turning point in my journey. In 2017, my doctors declared me cancer-free. Around that same time, a new dance teacher came into my life: Kate Shela, and her husband, Tim Booth.

I am a practitioner of a dance methodology that calls for personal interpretation and freedom of exploration while following a teacher’s instructions. The teacher leads the class through five rhythms of energies: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness. There is no choreography, but the soundtrack builds the structure. Kate and Tim thrive in Chaos; it’s the tempo that takes me into my primal state of being and the depth of my sadness. Often in Chaos, I connect with other dancers. I let their energies take me deeper and higher—all at the same time. It’s the rhythm where I find my release and freedom. Dancing opened doors to locked rooms—some I never visited or didn’t know existed. It’s a somatic healing experience—I have yet to find anything better. As the class progresses, the other rhythms lead me back toward integration with the oneness that makes me who I am.

Black Milk

“We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.” – Gabor Maté

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

Driving our daughter Rae to UC Berkeley for her freshman year in 2019 was a trip filled with emotions; the comings and goings were at full blast. While she and her mother were running errands, I had a few hours to burn. What better way to burn time than a visit to the Modern Art Museum? I thought Andy Warhol’s retrospective would be the main attraction, but I was wrong.

I had to climb to the sixth floor and enter the halls dedicated to Post-WWII German Art to find a jewel. There was a headphone device next to Anselm Kiefer’s painting Shulamit. I picked it up, placed it over my ears, and got ready for the painting’s story to expand me. I was expanded—and much more than that—but not in the way I expected. What I heard was a poem. What I heard was hypnotizing. It flooded me to the core with a visceral sensation—nothing rational, nothing I could articulate. I’d heard the poet’s name before but had never read him. And what was the connection between the poem and this particular painting? It sent me on a search and a profound discovery.

Paul Celan wrote “Death Fugue” in a Nazi labor camp a few months before the war ended. A fugue is a state of amnesia, where you wander for hours, days, or even weeks. After you recover, you can remember what happened before the fugue, but everything during is lost. Fugue is also a musical term, in which one or two themes are repeated. The poem incorporates both definitions.

The poem’s narrator describes what went on in his mind while living in the Nazi concentration camp. I was struck by the cadence and imagery of the repeated phrase “Black milk of morning” and “We drink and we drink.” I thought, “I’ve seen this dark mushy color before—but where, and when, if at all?” It took a moment to locate it in my memory bank. Then it hit me: this was my father’s description of the food in the labor camp.

Imagine a queue of men dressed in black-and-white striped outfits that resemble pajamas. They are skinny; their cheekbones protrude from pale yellowish skin. Their shirts hang on their bodies as if draped over hangers. They are stooped and silent. Everything about them screams submissiveness. They wear wooden shoes reminiscent of Dutch clogs, and on their heads, dark headpieces like berets. My father, Baruch, is fourth in line; his father, David, is behind him. The queue moves toward a platform. The men are, surprisingly, pretty energetic and eager for their turn. On the scaffold stands a prisoner next to a big soup bucket and a pile of bread loaves. A few minutes later, when their turn arrives, they stand side by side, examining their daily ration.

Black milk is poison. Milk evokes the biblical “land of milk and honey,” a land of plenty. Add to it this dark-colored, watery, tasteless soup, and it becomes a starved man’s hypnotic fantasy. In addition, the rhythmic repetition of the phrase in Celan’s poem holds its structure and intensifies the narrator’s sense of hunger and anger. My grandfather finds a piece of potato in his cup. He slices it and gives half to my father.

Death Fugue, translated by Pierre Joris:

Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease

He calls jab deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play
he grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue
jab deeper your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the dance

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon we drink you evenings
we drink you and drink
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes

He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland
he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air
then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland
we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink
death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue
he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air
he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit

My grandfather and father left their home in Łódź, Poland, in 1939, when the German Army invaded. Their goal was to locate and prepare a safe place in the east for my father’s mother and three sisters. The family reunion had to wait until 1948 in Israel. Together, my father and grandfather endured four different concentration camps, starvation, cold, hard labor, cattle train rides, and the Death March from Auschwitz. They were separated into different workgroups just two weeks before the war ended. My father was liberated in Dachau by the American Army; he weighed 60 pounds (27 kg). After a few weeks of recovery in a monastery hospital, he searched for his father—until one day, he met someone who told him that his father had died of typhus just days before the end. I’ve heard my father share only bits and pieces about this unbearable loss after all they had gone through together. Sometimes I wonder how much of it loomed over my own experience as a father.

Trauma is painful. It made me want to escape into an inner world and isolate myself. It made it hard to trust and to ask for help; I had to be self-reliant. As the years go by, I am becoming more aware of its effects and slowly changing my perspective. Rather than seeing it as a curse, I now see it as a source of wisdom and profound teaching. Trauma has given me the gift of introspection and the power of creativity. It gently, yet doggedly, pushes me to lay aside internal violence and embrace connection—with forgiveness, compassion, and love. Healing requires community. It’s ongoing, never-ending, full of ups and downs; it will never be perfect. Still, recovery can begin again and again, as many times as it takes.

Picture this moment. My friend Giora and I stood atop a crematorium in Birkenau, slightly elevated above the flat green grassland. A forest stretched far in the background. There were no other visitors—just us. It was late autumn. The dark gray clouds obscured the sun, but a silver lining shimmered at the edge. The green pastures gave no hint of the mounds of ash scattered all around. Given our shared background as children of Holocaust survivors, it felt natural to tell Giora about General Douglas MacArthur—evidently a Freudian moment. I mimicked the General’s pathos, quoting his promise to the Philippines: “I shall return!” as he evacuated to Australia. Suddenly, something caught our eye, and our conversation stopped.

A young girl was walking across the field, not far from us. We were mesmerized. It looked so romantic, so pastoral. She wore a white skirt, a light yellow sweater, and a backpack—probably on her way home from school. Everything around us appeared like a black-and-white film, except for the girl.

“Surreal,” Giora muttered.

The strange thing is—it was simply there. Detached and distant. The same sky, the same colors, just as it was then, and as it will be. There was nothing to say. Yet I stood in a bubble of screaming silence.

Reflecting on that moment from 1999, I now see that I have a choice in how to interpret it—and that choice reflects how I view myself and the world. Anger and a sense of victimhood are one response. That scene belongs to the category of the unbearable lightness of life. After all, it may seem a sacrilege to use this sacred burial ground as a shortcut. But on the other hand, the girl was young, pure, and innocent. She wore color amid the melancholy. She symbolized hope. She is the future.