My View from the 4th Generation

For most contemporary Czechs, the Shoah is a chapter in a history textbook roughly somewhere between the Hussite Wars and the 1989 Velvet Revolution which brought us democracy. Not for me. For me, it’s the consciousness that you must always have a valid passport. The presence of security guards and checks at Jewish kindergartens, schools and synagogues. The “simple” appeals at Saturday family dinner that your ancestors in the concentration camp had nothing to eat, so now eat what you have on your plate. Last, but not least, it‘s visiting graves, somewhere in the woods behind towns and villages, with tombstones inscribed with the words “unknown when and where.”

I‘m a poet and professor at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, born in Stříbro and raised in a small town near the German border, in what was once the Sudetenland. Like most Czechs, mine was a secular family. My mother’s side was Jewish and my father’s was not. Like most Czechs, we rarely went to church, and celebrated Christmas at home. Although we owned a Hanukkah menorah and Shabbat candlesticks, they were kept in a cabinet. My consciousness of being Jewish came through two people: “Uncle” Hary, who visited us from Holland and had a strange number tattooed on his arm, and my grandmother’s stories about Evicka, one of the people who did not come back from the war. Eva was six when she had to go to the gas chamber.

Until I was ten, I was an only child who longed for a sibling. It was easy for me to imagine that Evicka and I were playing when there was no one alive at hand. In puberty, I read everything I could about concentration camps. However, my mother and grandmother didn’t let me hear the recordings made in 1982 by my great-grandfather, which map in detail his journey of deportation from his native Šumava village to the Terezín Ghetto, and back. When I finally listened to it as a teenager, I was surprised by how much humor it contained. It took longer before I understood (in the framework of therapy focused on transgenerational trauma) that our family used a strategy of irony to deal with the past. How thin the border was between irony and cruelty.

Over the past decade, I read about attacks on American synagogues and Jewish centers with growing unrest. And then came the attack on a gay bar in Bratislava, Slovakia in 2022. The shooter’s first target was a Jewish community center, but when he found it empty, he walked to a gay bar, where he shot two non-binary people and then himself.

The attack shook two integral parts of my identity: Jewish and queer. The shooter’s manifesto was sharply antisemitic, beginning with the words: “It’s the Jews. It’s the Jews.” I needed both of my communities to condemn the attack, but while the queer community did, the Jewish community was silent. “One of the survival strategies that we have cultivated for thousands of years is to not draw attention to ourselves.”

A year later came October 7: pogrom. Suddenly the word I had learned in history books was here and the nightmares I had grown up with were back. Within a few hours, I fell ill and refused to leave my apartment so that I wouldn’t have to deal with questions and say in advance that I didn’t agree with the bombing of civilians in Gaza. For the first two days, I kept checking feminist Instagrams because it was clear to me that Hamas were deliberately using sexualized violence as a weapon of war. No one on my feed mentioned it.

Soon after, I booked my first therapy session focused on the transgenerational trauma of the Holocaust. Then, on December 21, 2023, a shooter attacked the Faculty of Arts in Prague, where I had once taught, killing 14 people and injuring 25.

For most of the previous year, I had been preparing to do research in Israel and, in January of 2024, I was faced with the decision of whether or not to go. How to go to a country where there is war? How to do research there when millions of people are crammed into the south of Gaza without health care and food?

Since October 7, I had been aware of the walls growing around me as a left-wing intellectual. I felt a huge sense of isolation and a paralyzing fear that I thought probably wouldn’t get better in Israel. At the same time, I realized that if I was there, I could at least do “something.”

I kept the fact that I was traveling there secret from most of my loved ones because I didn’t want to give them unnecessary worries. I had read Lizzie Doron’s book Who the Hell Is Kafka? “The State of Israel accepted all the Jews who were expelled in the Diaspora,” she wrote. “Those who survived the Holocaust came to our country. Those who were fleeing the threat of Stalinism and pogroms in Arab countries also came. The State of Israel is basically a psychiatric facility for Jews suffering from post- traumatic syndrome.” When I told this to several Israelis, they laughed and said that it was true.

DALIT

In Israel, I met Dalit, who had just turned twenty. Dalit asked if it was true that many feminist groups in Europe had not condemned what happened to Jewish women on October 7. She knew the answer in advance and began to tell her own story of October 7th. She was driving to the Nova festival at night with her friends. An hour from the site, they decided to get some sleep in the middle of the desert. They were awakened by phone calls and messages from friends who had arrived before them. One remained in contact until he was shot to death. “I only went to funerals all autumn.” Dalit said that shortly after the attack, an exhibition was created from artifacts from the festival—tents, things, portable toilets, from which they had to wash off the blood. “I couldn’t go there, but I knew I had to go there because of my friends. ” I knew that just as I couldn’t fully feel what Dalit and hundreds of other people had experienced, I couldn’t describe it to others. I come up against the boundaries of my own language.

TALIA

Photographer Talia and I met one rainy Saturday morning in Tel Aviv. She took me to a derelict industrial area where many artists have studios, filled with graffiti and one—or two-room galleries with bi-weekly exhibitions.

In two hours we walked around about six of them, most responses to the seventh of October. Talia, a middle-aged woman who regularly demonstrates under Netanyahu’s windows, talked about Israeli society. She claims that the prime minister and his “fascist ministers“ are mainly to blame for the October massacre. Talia spoke of frustration over the postponement of peace dialogues. I asked if the Israelis knew what was happening in Gaza. 

“Those who want to, and read at least Ha’aretz, yes. Everyone mainly wants the hostages back. A normal person cannot want this to happen—that is, the war and the death of Gaza civilians. ” She didn’t want to talk about the settlers at all. “There are not many of them, but they are heard.” We moved to another small gallery, where houseplants and flowers from nineteen Kibbutz Be’eri families were exhibited, together with a slim book of photographs showing the places where the flowers originally stood.

Talia began to frown on. She didn’t like the exhibition, and started a discussion with the curator present. “We are marbling something that is still alive and present,” she said. We talked about the fact that the plants themselves were survivors. Many were dusty or had flower pots with bullet holes and burns. I tried to describe my reaction: that for me it was a rare opportunity to encounter direct evidence from the pogrom. A few days later, we met again for dinner, where her partner Bini was also present. We talked about feminism and the limits we faced. I don ’t know exactly when or how it happened, but suddenly my hosts were arguing about Gaza. Bini held a strictly pro-Palestinian stance that downplayed what happened on October 7, as well as the impact of the massacre on Israeli society. Talia shouted at him sharply that he could not deny what had happened, and that it was possible to condemn the bombing of civilians and admit what October 7 meant.

Sometime in the middle of my stay in Israel, a report appeared about a Molotov cocktail that two men had left on the steps of a synagogue in Brno—my synagogue. I attend sporadically, but consider it a refuge.

AUNT REZKA

She survived the Holocaust, has an Auschwitz number on her forearm; she was fifteen when she returned. A year later, Rezka left Czechoslovakia with her brother, went to a kibbutz, served in the army. She worked as a nurse, and later ran a kindergarten in Haifa. She and her husband raised two children, to whom she never spoke about her experiences in the concentration camps.

She didn’t talk about it with her husband either, although he also lived through the Shoah, or with anyone else.

After her children were born, she sought out a psychiatrist once or twice at an Israeli Shoah survivor center, who stated that her survival strategy was repression. Rezka says that when she came to Israel, she was born again. She didn’t forget her life before, but she didn’t talk about it. Still, as soon as she found out I was in Israel, she wanted to meet me—I was her cousin’s great-granddaughter.

“You know, my children don’t appreciate the smell of the Šumava forest, they didn’t grow up there. ”

Since her husband died, Rezka lives alone in Haifa. She has seven grandchildren, two of whom are gay. She showed me photos of their weddings and described how beautiful they were. In Israel, civil marriage for queer couples has been around for several years.

She speaks of the current government and settlers exclusively as terrorists and fascists:

“I fled Europe from fascism, and now it has caught up with me in this country… What will happen to my boys when people like Ben Gvir and Smotrich are in power? Will they take away their rights? What will happen to their daughter? We vote over and over again, and it’s no use. It‘s difficult for her to talk about October 7, mentioning the cases in which terrorists found contacts for mothers in the phones of victims, especially women, and mothers were forced to listen to their daughters being raped, tortured and murdered.

“I lived through the Holocaust, I experienced horrible, indescribable things. But I never experienced this. It will take another generation to get over this.”

I asked if she thought her children had been affected by the Holocaust, even though she refused to talk to them about it and raised them in a country that was supposed to be safe. “Definitely yes, especially my daughter.”

She showed me family albums. Pictures of a twelve or thirteen-year-old from the early 1940s, shortly before she was taken to the transport. After emigrating, she did not return to her native village until after the Velvet Revolution in 1989; but then she went to the Czech Republic repeatedly. The last time, she was 92, and took part in the laying of stolpersteine [memorial paving stones naming those deported and murdered by the Nazi regime] for her family.

Even after almost 80 years, my aunt still misses snow and the forests of Šumava.

“My home is still in Šumava. I’ve been an emigrant in this country forever. And I’m sure what’ s happening now is the beginning of the end for the State of Israel. We are not safe anywhere.”

NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM

Since coming back to the Czech Republic, I have realized what I desperately miss in our European discussions, and what I wish to be heard much louder if I am ever to feel safe again: A clear statement of the reality that the current patriarchal system has brought us to the brink of another world war, and added to that prospect a burning planet.

Czech society is strongly polarized, but it pales before the Israeli one. In that very small country, there are Israeli politicians who don’t really care how many civilians they take with them to stay in power. For Hamas, every dead civilian is a propaganda tool.

The shootings by lone gunmen in North America (such as the D.C. shooting of a young couple who worked at the Israeli Embassy) or in Europe are not really the separate deeds of a few “deranged” people. The attacks on Jewish or queer minorities are not isolated, but fueled by hundreds of years of hatred. Like femicide, it is not a “tragic family event” in which the public is “not in danger.” It threatens all of society.

I wish the walls that have grown up around me since October could disappear. But they have grown higher. Antisemitic attacks are increasing across the world and the Israeli government continues to do things in Gaza that are directly contributing to them. Israeli anti-government demonstrations continue, but they are failing to change the direction of Israeli society.

In the last eighteen months, I have lost many friendships, I am increasingly isolating myself, and I filter my reading of the news carefully in order to be able to function. If I speak in public, I know that it can be risky and I have to expect a confrontation. Outside my home, I never feel completely safe anymore, I am vigilant. I am always observing the space where I am and looking for possible escapes. My reality will never be the same again, and I am still trying to find my way in this new one.

Anna Stickova is a poet and Ph.D. candidate at Masaryk University Brno where she teaches Czech literature. She is also a member of a Jewish Congregation in Brno, Czech Republic. Her third book of poetry, “Then she saw geese everywhere,” was recently long-listed for two Czech literary awards.

Author and translator Helen Epstein was born in Prague. Find her work at HelenEpstein.com.