How to Hide

An actor reads from “How to Hide: Instructions from a Daughter of Survivors”:

If you are short, stand next to pillars of basketball players — you’ll appear to disappear. Wear faded t-shirts with pictures of animals and your hair in braids. Ask other people to reach objects on high shelves. You want to find out who is willing to help. Keep a low profile and an unpublished phone number. Practice getting lost in crowds.

This is essential: have several places to hide.

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Host Aaron Henne: Welcome to this episode of The Dybbukast, the show in which we ask: What do poems, plays, and other creative texts from throughout history tell us about the times in which they were written, and what do they reveal about the forces still at play in

our contemporary societies? This is Aaron Henne, artistic director of theatre dybbuk. In this episode, presented in collaboration with Lilith magazine, we'll be hearing excerpts from, and exploring issues connected to, an essay originally published in Lilith in December of 1994. It's titled “How to Hide: Instructions from a Daughter of Survivors,” and you've already heard actor Rebecca Rasmussen read a section. During the episode, she will read selections from throughout the text.

And now, episode six: “How to Hide”:

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Actor 1: Shlep that suitcase tied with a rope long after the rope breaks. Clutch an old brass lamp you once bought at a corner antiques store. Polish it up. Go on, buy a bulb. In your next home, conjure plenty with the scarves you drape over sticks of furniture. People will remark on your resourcefulness.” How long will you be staying this time? A connoisseur of string and packing tape, you recite street names like a litany.

Karen Propp: One time I watched Hogan's Heroes — I don't know, that was a television show. And I was watching it, maybe with my brother and sister, and we were kind of laughing at it — you know, we're laughing at the German SS officers. And my mother came in and she just came in and shut it off. She shut the TV down. She was like, you are not allowed to watch that. That is not funny. So, that was pretty much it. You know, there was no explanation; no, you know, no pouring forth of her story or anything, but she was like, that is not funny. And she said it in such a way that I guess, as kids, we knew that it was verboten.

Aaron: This is Karen Propp, a writer and independent editor, and author of the piece we are exploring. Her essay investigates the legacy of what parents’ experiences in the Holocaust might've meant for some of their children as they walked through the world. In the portion of our conversation you just heard, she was reflecting on her childhood and those things which remained unspoken. As the episode continues, she shares more of her experiences and points of inspiration for the piece.

Actor 1: When the landlord shows an apartment, pretend to inspect for closet space, cockroaches, and fire hazards. Count the electrical outlets. In truth, you are looking for back staircases, trap doors to attics, closets that open into hidden rooms. Do this also at parties when everyone has forgotten you: standing against the wall, a mild expression on your face, hands behind your back. Creep around looking for basement entrances, spare rooms, back doors. If anyone asks, say you re interested in architecture. The astute individual who notes your communings with walls and thresholds, someone s father, will praise your gift for relating to space.

Dr. Laura Levitt: The early 1990s were really an incredibly important moment in a kind of American popular imagination. In the early ‘90s, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington, DC in 1992. Schindler's List was an Academy Award-winning film, and out of that film came Steven Spielberg's commitment to what becomes the Shoah Foundation video testimonial library.

Aaron: This is Dr. Laura Levitt, a professor of religion, Jewish Studies and gender at Temple University. She was offering her observations about how our openness to discussing the Holocaust evolved in the 1990s, the era during which the piece was published. Later on, she will take us even further back in time so that we might begin to understand how the ways in which people related to Holocaust history and narratives progressed. But first, she discusses in more detail the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Laura: When the museum opened, they didn't expect the kind of crowds that they got. They had to actually get new filter systems because they have an area which has the shoes displayed in large bins that are open, and because there were so many people coming through, the air filters weren't able to filter all of the dust that came out of people's clothing, like wearing jeans. And so they had to actually clean the shoes off because there was so much debris, and they had to figure out ways to do this. So it was a moment where lots of people, not just Jews, were really thinking about Holocaust memory.

Actor 1: One or both of your parents hid from the Nazis and is alive today partly because of the good will of others. Kept in attics or basements. Passed off as visiting relatives. Perhaps they assumed a false identity and traveled with false papers. They were lucky. Someone sponsored their immigration.

Karen: It’s a short prose piece. It's kind of a hybrid story-essay. It's not really fiction. It's not really nonfiction. And I guess it's technically creative nonfiction. It's written in the second person, the not-necessarily-you you, that ostensibly describes some of the behaviors and life perspectives of individuals and their offspring who survived the Holocaust. These were people in my parents' generation who were born in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and my generation — I was born in the ‘50s— and also ‘60s. But, you know, it's kind of a pastiche or a collage.

Actor 1: If you hold an office job, nod sympathetically when friends arrive panic-stricken at your cubicle and say they are hiding” from the boss. Talk about yourself reluctantly, if at all, and always be willing to listen. Be considered private.” But loyal.

Karen: Looking back, it directly came from a group in Boston that I was very involved with called One Generation After. And it was facilitated by Boston-area psychotherapists, people like Miriam Greenspan. She was the first person I met. And so I guess they were sort of support groups. And that was really important to me. For five or six years, there was about five or six of us would meet in each other's homes. And basically we met to talk about our parents and the experiences in the war and how they had not had — or had not — communicated, those experiences to us, and how we felt impacted.

Actor 1: In general, when asked your religion, say, I wasn t really raised to be anything.” If pressed, drop your eyes and say, Jewish.” Or, after a long acquaintance, inadvertently mention you are Jewish. As if it s a shoe size. Be pleased when the person exclaims, I didn t know! You certainly don t look Jewish.” Sigh with relief. You can pass. If you have blond hair or blue eyes, or both, feel especially lucky.

Laura: So, after the war, people did talk about what had happened. They didn't talk about it as publicly or as vibrantly as those of us know who are born after the war. I was born in ’60. By the time I was a teenager in 1978, ’79, the Holocaust shows up on television. That trajectory is quite different. After the war, people talked about the camps, but there wasn't as much focus on the experiences of survivors and the ways in which we think about testimony now.

Actor 1: ingratiate yourself to a few powerful individuals in your social network who have a sensitivity to anti-Semitism. Tell these people the truth.

Karen: I remember, like the first several months of our meeting, we would just go around the circle and we would just repeat our parents' stories over and over again. We were very, very urgent that we do this. And each time we talked, new details would arise, or we remembered new things, or, you know, we'd comment in different ways, or we’d find parallels between our stories.

Actor 1: Live with a quiet, unrelenting and nameless fear in the midst of good fortune and ease. A whispering secret that won t leave you alone, and one that arrives like an intruder when you are alone. You are mostly alone. Your life is like a thin strip of light under the door: surrounded by blackness and in danger of being shut off. And you aren t even the one who was in the war.

Laura: There are scholars who are going to argue with each other so let me just kind of put that out there, front and center. Hasia Diner, on the one hand, is a wonderful American Jewish historian who wrote a very big book about this — to talk about the ways in which, from the time right after the end of the war going forward in the United States, people talked about the camps, they talked about what had happened, they talked about the experience with Nazis. They didn't necessarily use the term Holocaust, which does not really come into public parlance until the 1960s and many people connect it to Elie Wiesel, but it was something that was acknowledged. Even on television shows, you know, you'd have people who’d say like, you know, “What's my line?” or whatever, and people were camp survivors.

But, what I would argue, and this is where I would quibble with Hasia Diner, is that — Peter Novak, who was a very brilliant historian, wrote a book about the Holocaust in American memory. And he really says that something changed after 1967. I think he's right about this, that the kind of critical engagement shifts. ’67 is important because it is the Six-Day War in Israel. And some psychoanalytically oriented folks would argue that this was a moment where Jewish lives were threatened, and yet, this time, the Jews were able to fight back. Some theologians, like my teacher Eugene Borowitz, imagine God coming into history in 1967. I find that very very disturbing and very problematic for lots of reasons. But I do think something changed.

Actor 1: Remember: a nice person is the American translation of a good German. Learn to distinguish between a nice person and everyone else.

Karen: What came out of it was: we were all protective of our parents, I'd say. At the same time, we were also all kind of anguished by our relationships with them. And we were confused about what we owed them.

Actor 1: Wear dark, dreary, nondescript clothing that hides your figure. Slouch if you are tall. Drape yourself around chairs. Hesitate to stand. Let your hair fall across your face. Walk the edges of corridors, taking small, quick, wavering steps.

Karen: I want to say our parents' stories were in a whole range. Some people had survived concentration camps. Others had hid in Europe under false papers. Others had got out early. One person had been born in a D.P. camp in Germany after the war. And I was also at that time obsessively reading a lot of Holocaust literature; I guess a lot of diaries, memoirs, biographies, histories, fiction. I think in retrospect, I was trying to find my mother in history basically, and I was trying to piece together what had happened to who and when and how.

Actor 1: Hide from yourself. Who are you anyway? Isn t every breath of your existence taken at the expense of six million? That readiness to step into the crevices others leave. An unwillingness to impose. Your famous reticence. Without even having been told, you act as if the penalty for a real self is to be shot down, turned in, taken away.

Laura: I think that the willingness of so many American Jews to be able to talk about the Holocaust, and for survivors to feel safe enough to tell their stories, really did change after 1967. Jacob Neusner, for example, who was a scholar of ancient Jewish and rabbinic Jewish culture — he wrote lots and lots of books, but one book was about Holocaust and Israel in a kind of American Jewish imagination. And this is a kind of Holocaust redemption narrative, a kind of coupling of those two experiences together. And I think that — his book was called Stranger At Home — he did different iterations of it, but that was the first book. And I think that what he captures is that sense of both the ability to engage the trauma and also to imagine something hopeful, right? If you were ever at Yad Vashem before they reorganized the museum, it was very much set up in that way, as a kind of redemptive narrative that was about the creation of the state of Israel.

And of course that's become much more complicated in the present moment, but I think that that was a kind of opening up in a different way. It wasn't that there was no acknowledgement of the Holocaust before, but I think it opened up a different kind of critical engagement. And so we are heirs very much to that legacy of kind of popular discourse, public discourse, the proliferation of Holocaust narratives by survivors. Think about the Fortunoff Collection at Yale or the testimonies that ended up coming out of the creation of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, et cetera.

Actor 1: Statistically, you should not be here. Mistrust statistics. Believe in the exception to the rule.

Laura: If we move from there past the ‘90s, we find ourselves in a really complicated moment in the present because so much of that narrative, even with its complications, was a kind of affirmation and an acknowledgement of the horrors of the Holocaust, and a sense that we can't imagine this ever happening again. And it was really articulated with an acknowledgement that there are moments of antisemitism across the globe but that, in some ways, particularly in the United States, American Jews are safe and we don't have those kinds of worries.

Actor 1: Avoid controversies. Be neutral. Be the advisor instead of the star.

Laura: And yet, since 2016, we've experienced an uptick in acts of antisemitic violence against Jewish communities over and over again, whether we're talking about the horrors that happened in the synagogue in Pittsburgh and in California, or all of the bomb scares and threats that went out to Jewish day schools and Jewish community centers, the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, and the rise of Neo-Nazi white supremacists — white nationalists who have felt entitled to affirm their antisemitic sentiments and their, in many cases, pro-Nazi positions.

Actor 1: Rise in an organization where no one would ever expect to find you: for example, the Y.M.C.A., when you are neither young, male, nor Christian.

Laura: So there were people on the 6th of January of 2021 wearing t-shirts that evoked the Holocaust in affirming the genocide of Jews. And I should also add, there were also some Jews who were a part of those activities.

Actor 1: Avoid feelings of martyrdom and heroism. Think ahead. It could happen again.

Karen: My mother and her sister, my aunt Gertie — so they were born in Vienna to middle class parents. My grandfather owned a coal yard and my grandmother's profession was officially a milliner. They were not religious at all. They were not Jewishly-identified to any great extent. They were very active. They loved to ski and hike and swim. My grandfather, I found out not too long ago, his name was Berthold Hirsch-Jesernofski. And he was on the first soccer team for the famed Hakoah Sports Club. Soccer fans know of this club. And he was on it, I think, in 1918. And then after that, he fought in World War I as a soldier. But I don't really know that much about their life in Vienna before they left, although I know they always missed it, and they always spoke very fondly of, you know, when we were in Vienna, and they believe that everything good and great in this world came from Vienna; that kind of thing.

Actor 1: Maintain more than one permanent residence, preferably in two different countries. Keep busy buying two of everything, shipping boxes, and interior decorating: creating secure, beautiful homes for a complicated you requires stamina and devotion.

Karen: The family left in September, 1938. The Anschluss was in March — March of 1938 — and they left in, as far as we know, September. My mother remembers that it was very hot so maybe it was before that. And my grandfather left first. The story is that he hid in the back of a furniture truck. I mean, he was kind of smuggled out that way.

Actor 1: Keep your passport intact. Collect shoulder bags, leather bags, beach bags, lunch bags, overnight bags.

Karen: Sometime later, my mother, who was about, I guess, six at the time; my aunt, who was two; my grandmother, who was in her thirties — they took a train across Germany to the city of Aachen — Aachen, Germany. And it was a place that my mother always called the drei Ecken, the “Three Corners,” because it bordered on Belgium and The Netherlands. So then the story is that they followed the instructions given by a smuggler to meet at a certain bakery, and from there an older woman escorted them across the street to Belgium. That's how they left Germany and entered Belgium. And they went to a park where they met my grandfather. And after that, they lived in hiding with a farm family. My mother went to a convent school, I know that. We found some notebooks once that she’d been writing in French, which she had no recollection of later on.

Actor 1: Cultivate a slight, hard-to-place accent. Constantly refer to the locale where you are not.

Karen: I just want to say a little bit about the other members of my mother's family because I think it does shed light on the piece. So, my grandfather had quite a few younger brothers, and they were single, they were not married, they did not have children. So they apparently left or escaped by skiing across the border. They got/put on their skis. The story is that they got all dressed up in like their lederhosen and their wine flasks, and they got on the train and they went off for this merry ski outing that took them across the border either to Italy or Switzerland, I'm not sure. And so that's how they got out.

Actor 1: Boast about friends around the globe, but keep a certain aloofness.

Karen: Just recently, I've been thinking how much pretending was important. People have read it and said, okay, it's an example of constructing a false self. My mother had to sort of pretend to be Catholic, and my great uncles had to pretend to be these merry young men, and this person who walks them from the bakery across the road — you know, they had to pretend that she was their grandmother. So, I don't know, I guess in retrospect, I'm realizing how that was very central.

Actor 1: Experiment with giving a false name when making reservations or when meeting strangers in bars, airplanes, supermarkets. Make a game out of these opportunities to practice answering to a name other than your own, and choose names your parents would never have considered: Heather, Vanessa, Bobbie Ann. Tell friends who witness this behavior that it s the repressed actress in you.

Laura: I think that as next-generation folks began to tell their stories, we've seen a kind of echo through time, but I think that the mark is there, and sometimes it's not as conscious. Like, I think in the story here: this impulse to hide, this is exactly what kept her parents alive. And so it's a traumatic response to a dangerous situation, a heightened response. And yet it was the saving narrative. It was the thing that, you know, that protected them. And so it's sacred and it is kind of this thing that you feel grateful to. I'm kind of personifying the mechanism, right? But I think it's there. And so you nurture it, and I can't tell you how many children of survivors that I know — I had a neighbor who always had a packed bag in his closet. I mean, what she's writing about is not idiosyncratic.

Actor 1: Above all, avoid conspicuous living and arousing the envy of peers.

Laura: Scholars who've been sort of addressing this question about how different losses touch — I talk about it in more, sort of intimate terms; in terms of different familial legacies versus grand, historical sort of Holocaust memory. But I'm thinking of Michael Rothberg, who wrote a beautiful book called Multidirectional Memory, which is about how, again, our engagements with one kind of memory bring us back to other memories, and that we can find connections to each other. So I think about the scholars of literature, particularly feminist scholars of literature, many of whom, like Marianne Hirsch, for example — who has written beautifully on something she calls “postmemory,” — described reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, which is about the memory of slavery, and how reading that text brought her back to her own family's Holocaust legacy, right? So that sometimes we need to go afar in order to come back, and there's a movement between these different losses and they can be very fruitful and very powerful. And they don't have to be making them both the same thing ‘cause they're not the same thing, they’re never the same thing. But if we can allow different losses to kind of touch each other, they can illuminate each other in powerful ways. In the essay, there are two things that I think are really important. She says she keeps a room available wherever she lives, right? And that room is available for people who need shelter.

Actor 1: When you have a house of your own, maintain at least one room—neat and furnished—as a spare room. You never know. You believe in kindness; you practice quid pro quo. Shelter should not go unused in your single, childless life. People who will want to use the spare room for varying lengths of time include: friends adrift in their lives or in flight from live-in lovers, the teenage sister of a Catholic college friend waiting out her pregnancy far from her small-town home, commuting academics, a friend who comes into the city for monthly chemotherapy. And parents, who will visit often. Encourage your visitors to bring memorabilia, leave clothing, and use the phone. Make them feel at home.

Laura: There’s just something very beautiful in that moment because it's also about hospitality, right? So it's not a shabby room, but it's a lovely room, because you want to show a certain kind of generosity and a kind of graciousness, which is about welcoming the stranger, which is a kind of prophetic mode. I really, really admired and loved that piece of it. And then she also says, when you think about a profession, right, you want to be in a helping profession, because that will make it feel meaningful. Full of meaning.

Actor 1: Here are some obvious professions to consider: Teaching English as a second language (a new generation of refugees), adoption agencies (remember the children s transports), victims rights groups (your empathy and organizational skills). Real estate is an option, but one that may not satisfy your social conscience.

Laura: I think there are a lot of us in various Jewish communities who find ourselves working in alliance with other minority communities. There are synagogues and churches that have sheltered folks who came to this country wanting refuge and shelter. And there have been families living in those religious institutions for many years now, because that was a safe place — safe from ICE, right? Or I think about young people, like my students, who felt a need to protest at ICE facilities as Jews. And I've been very, very moved by some of those enactments. Being on the street this summer with so many different people coming together, I think that that has been a really powerful and rewarding way that many liberal left, progressive Jews have found profound meaning in the present, through those kinds of alliance politics.

Actor 1: Test the world. The well-meaning neighbor, the kind employer, the munificent lender, the tender friend and the honorable lover—goodness exists in fissures you fall through.

Laura: I think that when, you know, a Cambodian-American goes to the Holocaust Museum, they go with the ghosts of their family's stories, right? And they may recognize something that I can't see. Or again, someone who grows up in North Philadelphia and lives with

gunshots all the time and goes to the Holocaust Museum and maybe recognizes something that I couldn't see, or maybe they laugh because they can't believe how different it is that this people's experience is recognized in this way, and some of theirs is not. I’m thinking about some of the responses after Schindler's List, but, you know, thank God there's now this beautiful museum of African-American history at the Mall in Washington, DC. And I think that that is also a testimony to some of the power of the Holocaust Museum and then the Native American Museum. I think the fact that these museums are all there now is really, really moving to me. But we have to be open to what people actually feel and what they really experience, and that means risking something that might seem inappropriate to one of us, right? Because we want to keep that memory alive. And that's what I think the hope of these institutions is about.

Actor 1: Test the world, but if you're lucky, shed your unwieldy cocoon.

Laura: I teach a course on Jews and race. And, you know, I think trying to talk about antisemitism felt like I — you know, when I first started doing this, before 2016, you know, I had to kind of talk about it much more historically. And we also had to talk about the ways in which Ashkenazi Jews in the United States have benefited greatly by the ways in which racism works in the United States, and how white skin privilege works. And of course, even among and within Jewish communities, we also marginalize the others among us: Jews of color, African-American Jews, or African Jews, or Jews from the Middle East. I mean, there are a whole range of Jewish communities who are often elided in the narrative of white Jewish privilege.

Karen: Both my mother and my aunt received reparation money from the Austrian government. And it was quite a lengthy legal process, a lot of bureaucratic hoops to jump through, but they received money for my grandfather's properties. He had a coal yard that was apparently a property and that had been seized. So they received reparation money for — I’m not sure how they calculated the amount, but it was a substantial amount. And so that's made me think about reparation across the board, you know, for other peoples as well. Because that was important emotionally.

Laura: And then I also wanted to say that, you know, for people who have suffered — people who have experienced violation, loss, trauma — it’s a really lonely business. It’s a lonely place to be. And so finding companionship in the writing of another person like this beautiful essay is a real gift. And I really believe in that kind of companionship.

Actor 1: You might begin inhaling the scent of new luggage. Try flicking on a sturdy floor lamp. Go on, roll out the rug.

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Aaron: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Dybbukast. Selections from “How to Hide: Instructions from a Daughter of Survivors,” were read by Rebecca Rasmussen. Thank you to Dr. Laura Levitt and Karen Propp for providing their insights. Our theme music is composed by Michael Skloff and produced by Sam K.S. The series is edited by Mark McClain Wilson.

Thank you to the Covenant Foundation for supporting the launch of The Dybbukast and our development of related resources. Speaking of which, please visit us at theatredybbuk.org/podcast, where you will find links to a wide variety of materials which expand upon the episodes explorations. And if you want to know more about theatre dybbuk’s work in general, please sign up for our mailing list on that same website on the contact page.

In addition, please go to lilith.org to read not only the essay which we featured, but other pieces of writing from throughout the magazine's history. On the website, you can also learn about upcoming events and choose to subscribe. New episodes of The Dybbukast will be available every second Friday of the month. This episode was presented in collaboration with Lilith magazine and was produced by theatre dybbuk.

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Actor 1: Fasten a silver mezuzah on the door frame. Breathe deeply. No one’s coming up the stairs. Listen to what’s written on your heart. What you’ll repeat. You are here.