On October 7, 8, and 9, I mostly sat in front of the television. In my pajamas. Safe in my suburban American home, the horrific images were painful to watch. Still, I couldn’t move. I needed to bear witness, to see so that I could tell. And throughout those three agonizing days, I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling about the viciousness and gleeful display of barbarity. None of this is new. I’ve been here before.
A couple of years ago, I first heard the term “intergenerational trauma,” a mental health condition where the shadow of extreme trauma is passed down through the generations. I know this sounds odd, but a sense of relief washed over me, and I dashed to my computer to investigate its full meaning. Finally, a name for these nebulous feelings of anxiety and vulnerability that are so easily triggered. But where did it start?
As an adult, I’ve felt compelled to uncover my family’s almost lost stories, particularly, the stories of the strong women who changed our family’s destiny. Research is my time machine, transporting me into the past to walk along the paths my ancestors traveled. As a Jew, most of the time it’s a dark journey.
All four of my grandparents were naturalized Americans before the start of World War II. But there was something in the shadows of our history, the faces missing at our Passover Seders, faces that belonged to my grandparents’ siblings and their children, great-aunts, uncles, and cousins murdered by the Nazis. The trauma cut so deep that their names were never mentioned. I’m still looking for the names of many of my family’s Holocaust victims, but this search led me to an earlier trauma. Its similarity to October 7 is striking.
According to the family tale, between 1913 and 1921, my maternal grandmother’s sister Dora brought our family to America. None of my maternal grandmother’s immediate family died in the Holocaust. No trauma there.
That’s what I thought. In the beginning.
Digging deeper into the history of Austrian Galicia and Mariampol, the little town where they lived, (known today as Mariyampil, Ukraine), I discovered that my family’s final years in Mariampol were defined by almost constant violence. Winston Churchill dubbed the First World War’s Eastern Front, “The Unknown War.” Before starting my research, it was certainly unknown to me. And yet, somehow, the trauma experienced by my family at that time lives within me, as integral to me as my sense of taste or smell.
Researchers are just beginning to explore how what happened, and what didn’t happen, during and immediately after the First World War, became the foundation for the destruction of European Jewry during the Shoah a generation later.
My ancestral shtetl Mariampol had the misfortune to be situated on the front lines during much of World War One. Shortly after the Russian invasion of Austrian Galicia started, on September 9, 1914, London’s Daily Telegraph reported, under the headline “Murderous Girdle of Fire,” that Russian General Brousilloff’s army “completely defeated the Austrians . . . at Mariampol . . .” My great-grandmother Hudia survived the “Murderous Girdle of Fire” in Mariampol. Like the other members of my family that survived the war in Mariampol, her wounds were on the inside. For the rest of her life, she was terrified during thunderstorms.
We know from recent news what Russian bombardment and occupation looks like. Destroyed towns, slaughtered civilians, abducted children, followed by starvation, and during World War I, there was also cholera, typhoid fever and dysentery.
It was even worse for the Jews. Added to this litany of suffering, homes and businesses were looted and burned, and Jews across the region were murdered, and subjected to torture, and rape.
To understand my family story, I began searching for histories and first-hand accounts of what happened in Jewish communities surrounding Mariampol. My search revealed a history of mass suffering that looked a lot like October 7.
Ethnographer S. Ansky traveled the area as an aid worker. He recorded in his diary how he was told that in the nearby town of Buchach, 40 “girls” were raped. In Burshtyn, 19 miles northwest of Mariampol, one source records that “…women were raped in the presence of their husbands, parents, and children.” When the Russian Army finished their looting, murdering, and raping, they typically burned the town’s marketplace and Jewish homes. In Buchach, Russian soldiers let the Jewish section of the town burn for three weeks.
In Tlumach, the Russian army rounded up all Jewish males between the ages of 10 and 70. They were marched out of town and on the first night, were forced to surrender their clothing to keep them from escaping. After marching over 90 miles under Cossack whips and rifle butts, the men were forced to dig trenches for the Russian army.
Like in nearby Tlumach, my great-grandmother Hudia’s nine-year-old son, Nathan, was taken captive by the Russians. The family sat Shiva for Nathan and continued to mourn him for the next three years. Nathan’s return to Mariampol three years after his abduction was remembered as a miracle. His return was announced when a neighbor ran up to the family’s doorway shouting in Yiddish, “There’s a red-headed soldier coming up the road.” Did I mention that my grandmother’s brother Nathan had red hair? October 7, children in captivity, and Mariampol collide, the painful past and the painful present swirling within me.
Looting, torturing, murdering, raping, burning, and taking captives was more than just war. As we witnessed on October 7, this was intended to inflict the maximum amount of pain and humiliation on a specific group of people, my people. As in most pogroms, no one came to rescue the Jews, and no one was punished. The war and the brutality directed at the Jews simply rolled on.
In 1915, the battlefield returned to my ancestral town, and in fierce fighting, Germany took control of Mariampol for its ally, Austria-Hungary. The victory was short-lived. The following summer, Russian Cossacks attacked and once again occupied Mariampol. Cossacks and Jews in the same sentence is almost never good.
This isn’t “Intro to World History.” This is my history, suffering passed down from one generation to the next. It is wrapped around my chromosomes and expressed in every aspect of my life, in how I think, and in how I feel.
World War One ended in November of 1918 and was optimistically dubbed “The War to End All Wars.” It was a hopeful time. But for my family still in Mariampol, the suffering continued. In December of 1918, a leading Jewish aid organization sent a desperate “Cablegram” to its headquarters in New York, “Tenthousand [sic] war orphans are left penniless . . .” In Grodno, Poland, aid workers resorted to creating clothes for orphans from donated flour sacks.
Fighting continued as Poland, Ukraine, and the Soviets battled for control of Galicia, the region that had been the easternmost province of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s hard to imagine, but during the conflicts that followed World War One, the suffering of the region’s Jews intensified.
By this time, many of the region’s Jewish towns were struggling to survive. Synagogues, study houses, Jewish schools, and mikvehs had been desecrated or destroyed in the war. People were living in cellars, or in the few structures that escaped the shelling, the looting, and the fires. Jews in the affected towns were totally dependent on foreign aid to survive. This included Mariampol. And things were about to get worse.
In September of 1920, Ukrainian hetman Symon Petliura and his militias passed through Mariampol during their struggle to create an independent Ukraine. Pinkas Hakehillot Polin, published by Yad Vashem, describes what happened in Mariampol that September: “. . . four Jews were murdered, including a pregnant woman, and 16 were injured. The hooligans raped four women and five girls (including two young girls) . . .The Jewish town did not recover from its destruction…” My family was there, and the wounded, raped and murdered were their
friends, neighbors and relatives.
Mariampol wasn’t the only town decimated by Petliura’s militias. In her book, Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917 to 1921, academician Irina Astashkevich, used the term “carnival of violence” to describe the intentionally public cruelty, and unbridled viciousness of what happened in Jewish communities across Ukraine at that time. In those pogroms, as in most of the pogroms that our European ancestors experienced, no one was punished. The perpetrators brushed themselves off, had a good laugh, and went on with their lives as our ancestors wrapped their wounds and buried their dead. And the women who were raped? In keeping with the mores of the time, they kept their mouths shut and their anguish to themselves.
A short time later, after witnessing that no one came to the aid of Europe’s Jews and that there weren’t any consequences for the perpetrators of the World War One era pogroms, the Nazis replicated their murder and barbarity on an industrial scale.
This brings us back to intergenerational trauma, to wounds on the inside that can be passed down through the generations. The pogrom in Mariampol that my great-grandmother Hudia experienced in 1920 looked a lot like October 7. That day, which should have been a joyous celebration of Simchat Torah, I sat paralyzed in my pajamas in front of my television.
And I was also in Mariampol, watching the carnival of violence, live and in color in my living room. I wasn’t alone. Instead of dancing with the Torah in synagogue, Jews around the world were thrown back into their own Mariampols, watching the carnival of violence with me.
