The National World War II Museum’s web site opens with a frightening statement: “Approximately every two minutes a memory of World War II—its sights and sounds, its terrors and triumphs—disappears. Yielding to the inalterable process of aging, the men and women who fought and won the great conflict are now in their 80s and 90s. They are dying quickly—at the rate of 550 a day.” The museum is in a race against time to record as many stories from these veterans as possible. Their mission is to keep these experiences alive and real, to make history books flesh and blood.
The passage of time is also having a huge impact on another, very special, group of people from the same war: Holocaust survivors. On December 6, 2013, The Wall Street Journal published an article about the rapidly dwindling numbers of men and women who experienced first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust and lived to tell their stories. For example, of the 50,000 inmates in Bergen-Belsen at liberation, only about 2,000 survivors remain, according to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and Museum. Like with World War II veterans, there are several museums around the world racing to preserve as much of this history in survivors’ own words as possible.
What these museums show us, of course, is that history is not just dates and statistics, or the famous generals and politicians. The impact of these museums comes from seeing a doll or reading a diary or hearing a voice, that there was a single living soul connected to that object. It’s really about the cumulative effect of millions of individual, personal, private lives.
What grieves me about this race against time is how many stories are being lost. I mean more than the heart-wrenching stories of bombings and starvation and heroism and cruelty. These stories are, of course, vitally important. But I also want to hear stories about going to the store to buy your first party dress; or what barbershops smelled like back then; or what wintertime felt like; or how the taste of carrots has changed over the decades. I think about how many family stories—small, insignificant, interesting-only-to-the-speaker-and-listener type of family stories—will never be told or heard.
I started to think about small, quiet family stories because of an off-hand comment my father made a little while ago. My 80-year-old father doesn’t see the need to buy any more clothes for himself. He hasn’t bought anything for a few years now. Even though his clothes are far from raggedy, his wardrobe is more along the lines of a comfortable habit than up-to-date trends. My father has never been a fashion icon but for a lot of his adult life he’s had the means to buy himself new clothes whenever he felt he needed to. But now my father felt, whether rightly or wrongly, that he had reached an age when he no longer needed to.
My mother asked me to get some warm clothes for my father this past Christmas. I got my father a thermal shirt and a fleece vest. I wasn’t there when my father opened the box (a week before Christmas) because we live in different states. But he tried on the clothes and loved them. When he Face Timed me to say thanks, he said, “These clothes are so fancy, I’m too embarrassed to wear them!”
I laughed because I thought what an odd comment that was. I was about to tell him that the shirt and vest really weren’t that fancy when he asked, “Do you remember saying that the first time you got new clothes?”
When I was very young, I was very sickly. So sickly, in fact, that my parents were afraid I might not live. Because of this fear, my parents always dressed me in old, worn, patched, ugly clothes. Their motivation was not based on the thought that I wasn’t worth buying new clothes for. They were actually trying to protect me. When I was a small child in Korea, people thought that if you dressed sickly children in nice clothes, Death would come and snatch that child away. As it prowled the towns and countryside looking for feeble, dying souls, if Death saw a pretty but weak child, it would covet that child and take it. But if that child were dressed in old, ugly clothes, Death wouldn’t be attracted and, instead, would overlook him or her.
When my parents finally determined that I was strong enough that Death couldn’t take me, my father bought me brand new clothes. When he gave me my new clothes, my father told me this past Christmastime, the first thing I said was, “These clothes are so fancy! I’m so embarrassed! I don’t know how to wear new clothes!” I have no memory of this, and my father laughed as he recounted this story.
What struck me, though, was how my father saw a parallel in our family story, how his new clothes to me when I was a very young child mirrored his new clothes from me now that I am a middle-aged woman and he is a grandfather. The continuity of that connection, the survival and reincarnation of that memory, which in turn reinforces our lineage, are what make family stories so indispensable.
Another family story concerns a huge absence in terms of national cultural history. Several years ago, I was reading a book on the history of Korean culture and customs. My parents were visiting me, and my father asked me if he could borrow that book when I finished. I was a little surprised because I assumed that since he had grown up in Korea, he already knew everything in the book. But he told me that since he grew up under the Japanese occupation of Korea between World War 1 and World War 2, he didn’t learn much about his own country’s history. The Japanese repressed as much of the Korean culture and identity as they could. And because Korean history could not be taught in schools, my father always felt a big rupture in his connection to Korea’s history and past.
Interestingly enough, a very similar sentiment was expressed to me very recently by a man of Persian Jewish descent. He currently lives in Ohio but grew up in Iran. He has written a memoir about his childhood and about being Jewish in a conservative Muslim country, and I am currently editing the second edition of his memoir. In his memoir, Isaac Yomtovian describes what it was like in the 1950s, when he learned for the first time about the Holocaust . He had no idea anything like this had occurred, even though—or maybe because—Iran had close ties with Germany. Most of his Jewish community in Tehran had no access to information from or connection with the “outside world” because of the repressive hold the conservative Muslim clergy had on education and information.
For my father and Isaac—and for me—these museums, and their collections or stories, are less about a promise never to forget and more about filling a gap in our identities.