Afterward

There was no way I could have known when I went to Germany to interview the descendants of perpetrators of the Holocaust for my film Afterward that this journey would take the form of a personal analysis. On the surface, I wanted to rid myself of my hatred for these Germans, who had done nothing wrong but whose ancestors tried to kill my people. I wanted to stop the cycle of hate and othering before I passed it on to my own sons, to the next generation.

When I was in my first year of psychoanalytic training, a patient once told me, “Enough with the Holocaust.” I felt he was denying not only my reality but also my identity. His words affected my capacity to attune and respond optimally to him at that moment. I wanted him to face my uncle, who spent four years in Majdanek concentration camp and lost his wife and two children. I wanted him to stand face-to-face with my husband, who lost his childhood on the run from the Nazis, along with his entire extended family. I wanted to shake him, to scream in his face that the Holocaust is a daily event in my home and in my life, and that I have no choice in the matter. I ended up not sharing my subjectivity with him. Instead, I wrote about him in my final paper that focused on those four words: “Enough With the Holocaust.”

After all, the Holocaust has been an event that has kept on being created anew. Just the other day, when I innocently pointed out to my husband, who is a Holocaust survivor, that there were twin cherries at the bottom of the bowl, he responded, “Like Mengele's twins.” In my reality, the word “twins” can never be an innocent one. Neither can the word “train,” for that matter.

In 2013, I was sitting across from Ingo, the former neo-Nazi leader of Berlin, listening to him share horrendous stories of his past. When I asked him about his experience talking to me, an Israeli Jew, he replied that he was not thinking in those categories anymore. At that moment, I felt as if the floor fell from un