By Judy Batalion
June 27, 2021
Though I prided myself on my progressive, ask-me-anything parenting, I secretly dreaded discussing three things: sex, death, and the Holocaust. My daughter was a questioner. At age three, Zelda leaned out of her stroller to ask why God could see people, but people couldn’t see God? Was she Zelda before she was born? Why don’t children have beards? When our cat was dying, I anticipated the interrogation and sought advice. Keep it mechanical, her preschool director told me. Children want facts. She recommended a book about a fish whose body stopped working. I read it to Zelda, thrashing her innocence. She was nonplussed.
When Zelda was seven, I became pregnant with my third. I knew that “where-did-I-come-from?” was imminent. I attended a sex-ed seminar at her elementary school. “Keep it positive!” they said and recommended a book. I forced a smile as we read it together. Nothing, not even an “ew”. Was she afraid to open up, repressing her feelings, affecting her capacity for intimacy forever? The usual concerns.
At this time, I was writing a book about the Holocaust. I was a third-generation survivor, but The Light of Days tells the true story of Jewish women in Poland who resisted the Nazis. These “ghetto girls” hid revolvers in teddy bears, flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine, whisky and pastry, and shot them. They flung Molotov cocktails, bombed German supply trains, and were bearers of the truth about what was happening to the Jews.
These fighters were in their early 20s, but stories about children were prominent in my research, especially as many activists helped hide Jewish orphans. Revisiting the war as a middle-aged, mortal mother was painful. I was haunted by desperate accounts of parents unable to feed their starving children; by stories of little girls whose families were shot dead in front of them, leaving them to roam through forests alone, eating grass; by the fact that Nazis didn’t want to waste bullets on children, so they buried them alive.
While I was working at a coffee shop near my younger daughter’s Jewish preschool, with its increased security measures, I read about a Gestapo who grabbed a toddler from his mother’s arms and smashed his head into a wall. I tossed and turned at night, thinking of my own children, of our precarious safety, of how impossible it seemed to protect us all. Zelda, by now eight, began probing. What was I writing about? I was vague: the war, history, strong Jewish women, go brush your teeth. When I was hired to complete an adaptation for children ages 10-14, Zelda offered to review a draft.
“Thank you, sweetie,” I said, my heart broken by her pre-tween keenness to connect. But could I really share this story with her? Was it time to tell her about the Holocaust? Sex could at least spin positive; death was natural. But here, all I could conjure was the torture: people forced to dig their own graves, to sing and dance on them while being shot.
“The war” pervaded my childhood; I had no recollection of a first-talk. At my Jewish school, it formed the core of the curriculum. I was raised by my grandmother, a survivor, who spent most afternoons telling me how her mother was turned into soap, her little sister gassed at age 11.
The Holocaust was not an abstract subject but lodged in my bones. I’d spent years running away from the trauma that leaked through the generations and into my own blood.
And here was the crux of it. The Holocaust was not an abstract subject but lodged in my bones. I’d spent years running away from the trauma that leaked through the generations and into my own blood, jerking my life onto a “goyish” track to avoid its grip.
My grandmother and mother, born in 1945 on my grandparents’ trek from a Siberian gulag back to Poland, both suffered from anxiety, paranoia, severe hoarding disorder and depression. I grew up fearful, and instead of a hot mess, I became a cool art curator – the least Yiddish word I knew – to turn things around. I’d spent so much effort trying to shield Zelda from the emotional aftershock that had so affected me. But Zelda shared my genes and my heritage. If she was asking, surely I should answer. I thought of our other “big talks” and it dawned on me: there must be a book!
I found myriad lists of recommended titles put out by Jewish organisations, critics, and publishers. I read an essay by a Holocaust scholar who reviewed children’s books to find the best for her own kids; in the end, she determined they were all too imaginative or too dark. She decided not to have the talk at all. What to do?
That night, I found my daughter watching her nightly movie, usually Parent Trap or Trolls. Tonight, however: The Sound of Music. The stupid war was everywhere. I had three kids. I’d been a parent for almost a decade. Surely, I’d absorbed enough. I didn’t need a book. Here was a real-time situation, the perfect opportunity for conversation.
I was going in.
Zelda pressed pause to get a snack. Stay mechanical, truthful, positive.
“Do you know this is the same war that I write about in my book?”
“Yeah. It’s about the Germans.“
“Right. There was German political party, called the Nazis. Part of their mission was to destroy the Jews. They hated Jews,” I blurted.
Zelda looked at me like I was crazy. “Why?” she asked. Why did Nazis hate Jews? Of course, it was not just the horrific torture that was hard to explain, but this.
“That’s a complicated question. Why do people hate? Sometimes it’s easier to blame other people instead of looking at ourselves,” I fumbled. “One answer is that the Jews were blamed for causing the country’s problems.”
“Like Albert Einstein? That’s why he left Germany.”
“Yes, how did you know about that?“
“Duh. School.”
“Nuns also helped my Bubbe,” I told her as the credits rolled. “Like the von Trapps, she also escaped and lived. You are named Zelda for my grandmother.”
Suddenly, I remembered something from the sex-ed seminar that I’d buried until now. You might not be the first to tell your child about sex, and you certainly wouldn’t be the last. You didn’t need to have a big talk with them, but instead, a thousand little talks. The point was to show your child that you were available for discussion, that you wouldn’t hide the truth or evade hazard, and that their questions wouldn’t rattle you. The point was to invite them to ask, to listen to their cues.
I opened my mouth but could see she’d had enough. She reached for the remote and returned to the film that I hadn’t watched in years. Why hadn’t I remembered the Nazi hunt scene at the end? Could Zelda tolerate it? Thankfully, the movie quickly turned to the living hills, helping to relax her. Or maybe me.
“Nuns also helped my Bubbe,” I told her as the credits rolled. “Like the von Trapps, she also escaped and lived. You are named Zelda for my grandmother.”
“Me?” she looked at me for a long moment. Something had gone in. I glanced around us at my apartment strewn with dolls and octopus teethers, plasticine stains peeking out from under mountains of laundry, no end in sight. I would not always be able to protect Zelda. Parenting, of course, was teaching a child to protect themselves. I nodded. “You come from strength.”