November 13, 2023

Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed, by Marsha Lederman

I think I learned about the Holocaust wrong. (It is possible that everybody has learned about the Holocaust wrong, no matter how they learned about it.) A decade and a half after Marsha Lederman did, I came of age in a public school system that had evolved to include the Holocaust in the curriculum, having read so many middle grade and YA novels about Holocaust experiences, and having taken at least one school trip to the Holocaust Museum in Toronto. I read about Nazis in so many books before I’d ever heard them spoken about in conversation, so much so that I remember being surprised when I realized they weren’t called “nazzies,” to rhyme to “snazzy.” When my family talked about the war, you see, we talked about “The Germans,” against whom both my grandfathers had fought in the Navy, and for the longest time—such a shamefully longest time—I’d understood that the whole purpose of the second world war, and my grandfathers’ service, had been liberation of the Jews. We were the good guys. It was all quite straightforward. Moreover, the stories I read in children’s books had all been sanitized, from the perspective of spunky kids who survived. Anne Frank and her fate, in my education, had been an outlier. And all of it, all of it, was in the past.

The problem with the way I learned about the Holocaust is that I still can’t quite believe that it happened, which is not to say that it didn’t—it did; I’ve been to Dachau; I also can’t believe that there are people who make a point of refuting these things—but just that the scale of it, the brutality, the evil, is still unfathomable to me. And I know that the difference between me and so many Jewish people is that, for them, it’s all too fathomable after all, a knowing they carry in their bones, one that’s literally part of their DNA.

Which is not to say that the way that many Jewish Canadian children learned about the Holocaust was necessarily the right one either. Beyond the DNA, and the fact of a tattoo on one’s mother’s arms, the conspicuous absence of grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins—which were Lederman’s experience growing up in Toronto in the 1970s—she and her peers were made to watch upsetting films, were subject to terrifying exercises that trained them to imagine Nazis around every corner, experiences that Naomi Klein recounts from her own upbringing in her latest book Doppelganger and names not as acts of remembering, but instead acts of re-traumatization. (Klein also writes that “Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us—and to stay in that state.”)

As someone who lives with anxiety and was on a list receiving the most alarming updates from my local Jewish community centre (of which I am a member) in the days after October 7, I am going to boldly assert that I understand a single percentage point of what my local Jewish community in general were going through at that time (some will disagree and that’s fine): it was scary and awful (and continues to be). And I’ve been thinking about that ever since, as well as about the very different contexts in which me and my Jewish neighbours are living, different contexts that were wholly invisible to me until now, contexts in which flags and phrases have entirely different meanings, the ideas of peace and ceasefire. October 7 itself, which to me is a single piece of a larger nightmare stretching back into the past and—devastatingly—into the future, and I can’t regard it as an atrocity onto itself because of how the brutality and loss of life has just been compounded every single day since then. (There was a line from Kate Atkinson’s new book that I was reading that very same week that struck a chord: “The old man was tired… Tired of the fear everywhere. It had been an opportunity to make the world anew, but they were, inevitably, failing.”)

I wanted to read Marsha Lederman’s Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed. I’d already been called “an enemy of the Jewish people” in my DMs in the last couple of weeks, which tells you plenty about the level of fervour at which a lot of people are operating these days (I am definitely not an enemy of the Jewish people, and also the person declaring me as such wasn’t even Jewish, just nuts. Side note: I have a theory that no one who’s ever screamed at anybody on the internet to “educate yourself” has ever actually been smart.) Having felt an iota of the dread that so many were experiencing post October 7, I’ve been curious to gain a better understanding, and so Lederman’s celebrated memoir about growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors (her parents’ first home in Canada was just around the corner from my house) seemed like just the thing.

It’s such a good book. Lederman begins in the wake of a devastating divorce wondering if something in her parents’ experiences (both of their entire families were murdered; Lederman’s father managed to get false papers and spent the war in Germany hiding in plain sight while working as a farmhand; her mother had been at Auschwitz and worked as a slave labourer) had lodged itself in her psyche making sadness and despair her destiny, the rest of the memoir an act of repair as she learns about the science behind epigenetics and trauma, and also attempts to fill in the blanks in her family history, to come to terms with what her family had lived through in order to create a different kind of future for her son. She writes about the pervasiveness of antisemitism, however, and what it felt like to see neo-Nazis marching with their tiki-torches in Charlottesville in 2017. Not all of the horror resides just in memory—which was clear to so many people when the details of October 7 emerged, people stolen from their homes and families, the rest of the world quibbling about the details and just *how* exactly the babies had been murdered, as if that was what mattered. The parallels are uncanny, but then so they are as well to the devastation in Gaza ever since then, people cut off from power, water, and sanitation, more than ten thousand lives lost (a statistic I saw someone counter with the fact of high birthrates, a detail whose callousness blew my mind).

I think what was most wrong about how I learned about the Holocaust was the idea that it was a one-off, extraordinary in any way beyond its scale, and that there is a special category of humanity with the capacity to inflict such violence upon their fellow beings (although white people do tend to excel in this area.) And Lederman writes about this in her memoir, finding solidarity with descendants of enslaved African-Americans, Indigenous residential school survivors, and others. This kind of barbarism is not just part of the Jewish experience, but part of the human experience in general, and—at this moment of antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric at such a disturbing high—we need to acknowledge that, and strive to be our better selves.