"The unspeakable" - a historian's view from Prague

‘I’m wondering if others in this group have experienced the hushed side of the Holocaust in their families?’ Nicola Hanefeld posted this question on the Facebook Jewish Genealogy Forum in October 2022. As I hesitated to answer, my mind flashed back to a family get-together in America from the 1960s. I was perhaps five years old at the time, and grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were all dressed in their best, as was I myself. As we sat down to the abundant holiday feast, one very elegant, older aunty removed her long gloves. Above her milky-white pianist’s hands, an ugly, dark-blueish script appeared, tattooed on her forearm. Middle-class ladies from Long Island, New York, did not have tattoos in the 1960s. I had only ever consciously noticed one tattoo at that point – on my Little League coach, who had been in the Navy. If Aunty also had a tattoo, she was clearly very different from the other ladies I knew and very special. Had she also been in the Navy?

I was entranced and stared directly at her arm. Just as I wanted to ask her about it, Father whisked me away from the table to a bathroom far off at the back of the house, muttering: ‘Oh, someone needs to wash his hands …’ Once there, Father stood me up against the wall, squatted down to my height, extended his index finger in front of my face, and said: ‘You will not stare at Aunty’s arm. You will not even look at Aunty’s arm. And you will not ask any questions about Aunty’s arm.’ He said the words through slightly gritted teeth in a calm yet utterly menacing tone, which I knew from experience promised a serious spanking for disobedience. Only later, in adulthood, did I learn that Aunty had been married before World War II and had lost her first husband and children in the extermination camps.

During post-graduate studies at Prague’s Charles University, I slipped into the topic of local Holocaust history. A lovely, older researcher at the Czech National Archives had pointed out the existence of archived police files on Holocaust victims. The files were full of details of life in late 1930s and 1940s Prague. At times fascinating, at times comical, but often also harrowing. In my free time, I started helping people with archival research who were writing family histories. Others just wanted to understand the worlds of their missing aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents. In one happy case, I was able to bring together a pair of friends – one Gentile, one Jewish – for the first time since the Jewish woman’s deportation in 1942. It was heartwarming. I learned a lot and made new friendships. This type of research is its own blessing and reward.

But a family taboo? Most families have taboos, of course: the cousin who looks distinctly like a neighbor, the uncle with a drinking problem, etc. Such situations can and do regularly blight lives. However, they generally only affect a few individuals at once.

What type of family taboo might beconnected directly to the Holocaust? Taboos on the perpetrators’ side are obvious and understandable. One can imagine family reunions in Germany and Austria after World War II spent desperately trying to avoid the topic of what Dad had been doing out in the forests of Ukraine or Cousin Horst at some camp with an unpronounceable name in Poland.

But how can the victims and survivors have taboos around the subject?

Back in the present, Nicola’s question on the forum had brought back an unpleasant memory; I realised her reason for asking was not likely to be uplifting either. But something seemed to radiate from that simple question. Perhaps I sensed that, like Aunty’s tattoo, a bigger story existed behind it.

And so, I responded, saying yes, I did know something about families that hushed up the Holocaust. Nicola eventually sent me chapters from her manuscript with interesting and incisive questions. Her research covered several complex personalities from her extended family, whose memories she had clawed back from oblivion – an oblivion caused in part by her own relatives’ silence on the topic. Over months, as I read, a rich and intricate tapestry of intertwining survival strategies, of losses and triumphs, played out across several European countries and against ever-worsening odds. The Unspeakable is essentially the gripping tale of a successful, highly assimilated, German-speaking Jewish family from Czechoslovakia who are suddenly confronted with the very real and – although they did not always know it at the time – potentially lethal threat of Nazism to their lives.

What should they do? How do they escape? Do they escape at all? Based on an extensive collection of surviving family documents and archived primary-source materials, Nicola takes the reader on a thoughtful journey through several countries and sets of more or less perilous historic circumstances. Some stops include the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (that is, Nazi-occupied Czechia), Austria, Vichy France, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom – all of which forced family members to jump through numerous hoops as they sought to save their very lives. And those lives are far from simple black and white, good and bad. Here are complex characters facing extraordinary circumstances. Even as someone who has researched and written about the Holocaust for decades, I found new and unique material and insights in The Unspeakable.

However, this book is not simply a distant review of exotic and rare historical sources. On the contrary, the author takes the reader along on her own very personal journey of discovery about what taboos do to a family and its members – to those too affected by painful events to speak about them and to those born into the deafening silence thereafter. Any reader looking for an uncommon and refreshingly different approach to the Holocaust and families caught up in it will find The Unspeakable a very good read.

– Peter Richard Pinard, PhD, Prague, September 2024