EPIGENETIC TRAUMA ON MEMORIAL DAY

When she was 47, my grandmother, Symcha Goldberg, was murdered by Nazis either on the cattle cars transporting Jews from the Lodz ghetto to Treblinka, Poland, or in the gas chambers inside the extermination camp itself. We have no reports from those who might have survived the hundreds of thousands who were killed at Treblinka.

I have welcomed the addition of historical email signatures designating the Native American tribe that used to occupy the physical space where the emailer now resides. Native Americans were also victims of genocide so that their lands could be usurped. It’s the least we can do to honor their memory and the true history of their genocide.

That’s why on this Memorial Day, I’d like to honor the memory – of which I have learned only secondhand -- of my grandparents, both Holocaust victims, by including them on my email signature:

P.S. That's me with the white hair on the sofa and my friends in 25Women. The woman on the far left in a black hat is Treva Reid, Oakland City Councilperson who is running for mayor. The woman on my left is my friend Rozella Kennedy, whose journal, Brave Sis, honoring Black, Native American, Asian, and Latina women who have been ignored in American history, will be published this December by Workman Press.

Sylvia Paull

contributing writer, PACEsConnection.com

granddaughter, Symcha Goldberg, Treblinka 1942

granddaughter, Herman Goldberg, Poland or Germany, 1939

I believe that people, however precious their souls, can be consciously/subconsciously perceived and treated by a large swath of otherwise free, democratic and relatively civilized society as though those people are somehow disposable and, by extension, their suffering is somehow less worthy of external concern (perhaps something similar to how human smugglers perceive their cargo when choosing that most immoral line of business).

One can also observe this immense injustice with the many Canadian indigenous children who’ve been buried in unmarked graves. When those people take note of this, tragically, they’re vulnerable to begin unconsciously perceiving themselves as beings without value.

A somewhat similar inhuman(e) devaluation is also observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in protractedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken nations; the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers and/or even its lack of ‘productivity’. Thus, those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news.

EPIGENETIC TRAUMA ON MEMORIAL DAY

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