I learned that Mr. Lindenblatt was dying when I was in London this past November on business. I had awoken from a dream that his daughter Ilana, who is one of my oldest friends, was engaged. I called her up and asked if there was something I didn’t know, because I inherited a witchy quality from my mother: I occasionally have dreams about people and it turns out that they’re predictive or at least thematically correct. She laughed sadly and told me she wasn’t engaged, no, but that her father was dying and that perhaps the thing I had sensed across the ocean was her sadness. He has cancer, she said. He was receiving a palliative chemotherapy treatment, and the doctors didn’t have a guess as to how long he would live: weeks or months. Nobody really knew for sure, but the end was inevitable. And inevitabilities? In this story, they are everywhere.
I hung up the phone, and I thought about Mr. Lindenblatt — his first name was Jehuda, pronounced Yehuda, though it feels seditious to even say the first name of a childhood friend’s father. I thought about how he was a runner, back when it was just called jogging; how he drank rice milk before alternative milks were the style. How he would walk through the house in his running shorts and no shirt, which absolutely none of the other dads did; how he thanklessly and happily took on the burden of driving Ilana and me both ways to our losing basketball games and our even losinger play rehearsals (we were in “Brigadoon” together, don’t ask) when my mother was pregnant with my youngest sister; how he taught me to say, “Hello, how are you?” in his native Hungarian, which has proved useful in my life twice so far; how he walked around on Shabbat with a walkie-talkie because, in addition to working at his family’s camera store in Midtown, he volunteered for the Jewish ambulance service in Manhattan Beach, near their home.
And I thought about the fact that Mr. Lindenblatt survived the Holocaust. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, in the surrounding neighborhoods, too, it seemed as if everyone was a survivor. We all had the Holocaust in our past to varying degrees. We knew whose fathers were Holocaust survivors and whose grandmothers had numbers on their arms and whose aunts never made it out of the ghetto, all discussed as part of our Holocaust education at the yeshiva high school that Ilana and I attended in Queens.
And let me tell you: On the matter of the Holocaust, we were educated. I need to disclose to you that yes, I am hyperbolic and that I know that hyperbole combined with the way the brain rounds down when it has been trying to make a point for too many years is deadly, but here it is anyway: In my most bitter moments, in times when I realize how much of my foundational education was given over to the war and how little was given over to, say, gym or art or the other humanities that would have helped me in life or at the very least in work meetings, I say I went to a Holocaust high school, a magnet school for Jewish death studies. I say my school taught us masters-level World War II history and also just enough math and science to pass the New York State Regents exams. I’m joking, but am I? I left high school having read “Macbeth” not once but Elie Wiesel’s “Night” three times over the course of my education. I can probably autocomplete any sentence from Anne Frank’s diary if you start me off with three words. I have forgotten more about the Holocaust than I ever knew about the American Revolution.
(Again, I’m mostly hyperbolic here; lots of people hated their high schools and even more people of my generation have aged up to find that their formal education let them down in some crucial way or another. There were other yeshivas that were more focused on their students’ prospects for success, and a few of my classmates became doctors and lawyers. Hey, maybe it was a fine high school and I was just a terrible student, which I absolutely was; I did fail several classes and had to take something called Business Math twice. But I recently joked to a group of fellow alumnae that one of the best parts of “Hamilton” for me was not knowing how it would end, and nobody didn’t know what I was talking about.)
It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized that there was an official Holocaust Remembrance Day, because it always felt just like a rolling, year-round thing. And it kind of was: There was Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, yes; but also Yom HaShoah, in the spring; and, in November, the commemoration of Kristallnacht, which is the event that is acknowledged as the official beginning of the Holocaust, the night that the windows of Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues were smashed by Nazis while the German authorities looked on without intervening. It was also later than any of us would like to acknowledge that I realized “Nazi hunting,” a field I believe I had the natural talents to dominate, might be an industry in decline. (I was not a good enough math student to have considered that all the Nazis would be dead by now.)
The Holocaust was the water in which we swam, invisible to us but there we were, sopping wet. I remembered a poem that Ilana wrote for school when she was 10, in response to an assignment that asked her to occupy the point of view of a child in the Holocaust. Her poem was called “Death,” and it began with the lines: I feel death coming/and so do the people around me. It ended with its narrator’s hearing the footsteps of Nazis, being grabbed by the arm, tied up and pushed against a wall and shot. It was signed “Ilana Lindenblatt, Age 10,” and her parents enlarged it, framed it and hung it in the living room.
Anyway. Years later, years after I would crash the Lindenblatts’ Shabbat dinners or show up in my car to take Ilana to the local diner, years after dancing at his daughters’ weddings and serving as a bridesmaid in one of them, I became a writer, and Mr. Lindenblatt began asking Ilana to ask me to tell his story of survival during the Holocaust in any of the magazines or newspapers I wrote for. He took pride in telling his story, in making sure he fulfilled what he felt was the obligation of all Holocaust survivors, which was to remind the world what had happened to the Jews.
Ilana knew it was a long shot but felt obligated to pass on the request — it was her father, after all. I would decline and make my excuses: It’s not good to write about your friends, for one thing. For another, it’s not the kind of article I do. I would tell her about all the people who are good at ghostwriting memoirs, Holocaust ones in particular, even, and say I was happy to share a name or make an introduction. And all of that was true, but none of it was why I said no. I said no because, by then, I was all Holocausted out.
I can’t say what my precise breaking point was, vis-à-vis the Holocaust, but here’s a story I think about from that time: I went to see “Schindler’s List” on its opening weekend at a theater in Tel Aviv, near where I was spending my gap year. Afterward, I overheard some tattooed Holocaust survivors casually compare the conditions conveyed in the movies with the conditions they remembered. (“They weren’t skinny enough,” one said.) And there was something about that moment, its excruciating discomfort, following three hours and 15 minutes of horror-enrichment, that I began to wonder: What am I doing here? Don’t I know enough about this? Doesn’t further engagement with the Holocaust threaten to deform me? Aren’t I deformed enough by it already? What sort of inertia of inevitability brought me along to “Schindler’s List”? Was this what counted for escape velocity, crossing oceans to get away from Brooklyn, only to end up right where my mother wanted me to be, which was a student at an Israeli university using my recreation time to watch Holocaust movies? I realized, suddenly, that there was no future in which I would know enough Holocaust to move on from it. What the education was asking of me was to not move on. Not ever.
And just like that, I thought: Never again. No, I would survive my education and try to live like a real American, to enjoy the life that liberation had granted me, to see what that was like.
And I did. I attended college, where I placed out of language with all the Hebrew I knew and didn’t take one Jewish-history class. I drank Coca-Cola and ate hot dogs and went to the movies and the beach and fell in love and dreamed of my unlimited future. I became a writer and turned down most of the Jewish assignments, daring anyone to tell me that it was my obligation to write about anything I didn’t want to write about. I never saw a Holocaust movie again, because no matter how much they were called “Triumphant!” they are not so triumphant that they take place in a world where the Holocaust didn’t happen and exactly how triumphant can you be inside the Holocaust? Not very! I was sent on stories to Europe, to Budapest even, to the very square mile where the Lindenblatts fought for their survival. I wasn’t writing about any of the atrocities that happened in that city; I didn’t visit any of their six memorials to the Holocaust. I was writing about Antonio Banderas; we ate at the Four Seasons. I walked along the Danube. I had done it. I had survived the harrowing past and its equally toxic undertow, which had consumed so many of the people around me.
Now, all these years later, after I hung up with Ilana, I walked around Covent Garden, unable to sleep, a panic welling inside me. I had not told Mr. Lindenblatt’s story, the thing he asked me for forever, and now he was dying. All the Holocaust survivors were dying. All the Holocaust survivors were dying, and at home in New York, spray-painted swastikas had been showing up all over town, and my nephews had stopped wearing their yarmulkes. Yes, all the Holocaust survivors were dying, and we were locked in debates over whether a salute given by a newly installed government official was a Nazi dog-whistle or a Nazi Nazi-whistle or maybe just an awkward wave or a weird shout-out to his buds.
What would become of stories like Mr. Lindenblatt’s if the generation of mine that was supposed to inherit them had taken the privilege that came with another generation’s survival and decided not to listen? What would happen to these stories when there was no one left to tell them? Mr. Lindenblatt was 87 that night I called Ilana from London, so, as I said, even if not for the cancer: inevitabilities. I called her back the next day and asked if maybe now was a good time for me to write her father’s story.
So here it is, an old Jewish story about the Holocaust and a man who somehow survived the pernicious, organized and intentional genocide of the Jews. But right behind it, just two generations later, is another story, one about the children and grandchildren who have been so malformed by the stories that are their lineage that some of them made just as eager work of running from it, only to find themselves, same as anything you run from, having to deal with it anyway.
I’ll understand if you don’t want to read it.
The Holocaust arrived in Budapest in 1944, where it stayed for a comparatively short nine months. Mr. Lindenblatt remembers the day he saw the train arrive at the station decked out with swastika flags “and all kinds of fancy things.” It was March 19. He was 6, and he lived near the train station. Suddenly, all around, there were posters that announced that Jews over the age of 7 had to start wearing yellow stars.
The Jews had a good life in Budapest, or what counts for a good life for Jews in Europe around that time. There were some hate crimes, yes, and a quota system for allowing Jews into universities, and sure, there were the random incidents like targeted beatings in the street and at school that allowed him to grow up understanding that Jews were generally and more or less universally loathed, but it was nothing compared with what they were hearing about in the rest of Europe. The Jews of Budapest lived in the tension of this-is-how-it-has-always-been, so old and ongoing has antisemitism been, and this is the answer no one seems to understand to “But why didn’t you leave?”
Mr. Lindenblatt had two brothers; he would have one more after the war ended. They were sent to a Jewish school. Their grandfather on their mother’s side had been a rabbi. Mr. Lindenblatt’s father was a cheese wholesaler, and he did well; he had a horse and carriage to make deliveries. His mother was religious but made the arts a priority, too. She went to the theater, and she treasured her copy of a play called “The Tragedy of Man,” by Imre Madách. It was December when I visited Mr. Lindenblatt, and he had prepared for me this very copy and directed Ilana to give it to me. He asked me to read the last line out loud, so I did. It read, “The lord says, oh man, strive on, strive on, have faith and trust.”
“That was my mother’s motto,” he said from the couch in the living room of the house in Manhattan Beach, in Brooklyn, where he raised his family and where they continue to live now. He was still tall and lanky, what my grandmother would have called, in Yiddish, a lange lokshen: a “long noodle” — though he’d gone from thin to too skinny. But his illness hadn’t affected his smileyness nor had it diminished his cheer. He wore a baseball cap and the coat that was part of the uniform of the Jewish ambulance service, where he volunteered as an E.M.T. for the last 40 years, until his failing health finally slowed him down.
He wanted me to take the book and read it. He wanted me to understand everything. Around him were artifacts he collected over the years. Magazines and photocopies that discuss, or even just mention, what happened in Budapest. A book he sent home with me called “Daily Life During the Holocaust,” which sat unopened on my desk while I worked on this article because no thank you. A cardboard box that was literally marked “Holocaust.”
He had been telling his story for years. He told it to people he visited on E.M.T. calls. He went into schools and synagogues, was recorded for YouTubes and in TikToks. What did he survive for if not to tell the story of what happened to him, a story that six million people did not live to tell? He spoke eagerly, each small anecdote from that time well honed from frequent retelling. Each story was told like a miracle, the way any survivor’s story is told — the exquisite set of coincidences and acts of heroism and kindness that allowed him to be retelling it to me today from the safety of his perch in America.
On Mr. Lindenblatt’s 7th birthday, his mother took him to the bakery for chestnut purée with whipped cream — a Hungarian delicacy — same as she always did. But this year, by the time they were finished, it was past the new curfew that had been levied on the town’s Jews. She told him to take off his yellow star, hide it under his coat and follow her to the front of the train, where they would pretend they weren’t Jews. It made no sense to him. He loved that Jewish star. He was so proud to be Jewish. He listened to his mother, though. She was clever, his mother; she was always figuring out how to live in the worsening reality of Budapest.
But as it goes in every Holocaust story, worsening quickly got worse. It became harder to violate curfew. Mr. Lindenblatt’s father was taken to a forced-labor camp, Mr. Lindenblatt’s mother was left to fend for the family and 7-year old Mr. Lindenblatt was now the man of the house. Then one day, an order came. Every woman from the age of 16 to 56 had to report to the train station. His mother went to get her green winter coat to take some money from her pocket and leave it for them, but when it was time to put on the coat and go, she took one look at her sons and realized she couldn’t leave them. She put away her coat, and Mr. Lindenblatt looked out the window. He saw women walking, he said. They were being led to the Danube by teenagers with rifles. Once they were at the river, they would be tied up, five per group. The Hungarian Nazis would shoot one or two and then push the entire group into the river to let the current take them as the living drowned, attached to the dead.
The Nazis began knocking on doors and rounding up Jews to send down the Danube. One day, as they approached, Mr. Lindenblatt’s mother, frantic, told him: “You know how to daven. Say the Avinu Malkenu.” The Avinu Malkenu is the holiest prayer in Jewish liturgy, a prayer for God’s mercy recited on high holidays. Mr. Lindenblatt began to recite the prayer — and the Germans stopped their rounds that day at the house just short of the Lindenblatts’.
Months went by. The Lindenblatts moved to Mr. Lindenblatt’s grandmother’s house in what eventually became the Jewish ghetto in Budapest. Troops of Hungarian Nazis, called the Arrow Cross, continued to go house to house, sending Jews off to concentration camps or the more immediate death of the Danube. Once again, as they approached the door, Mr. Lindenblatt’s mother beseeched her son to recite the Avinu Malkenu. He did, he said it with all his heart, and they stopped again, again just short of their door.
Air-raid sirens would ring out. There was an underground bomb shelter that allowed Jews, but only in a section that was covered, absurdly, by a glass roof. Each night, Mr. Lindenblatt would watch a panorama of planes flying overhead and the bombs they were dropping. He could still see it now, as he talked about it; he was there again, and it was easy to see what he looked like as a child, his eyes lit up as he watched the light show.
In November, Mr. Lindenblatt’s mother got word to his father in the labor camp that the family was in trouble at home, and so he bribed some guards and sneaked out one night. Mr. Lindenblatt’s father arrived at the apartment to find his wife arguing with the Hungarian gentile in charge of the building, who was trying to evict them. Mr. Lindenblatt’s father offered his entire money belt to the man — Mr. Lindenblatt doesn’t know how much money was in there — and said to take it, that he would never ask for it back, to help save his family. But the man put the belt into the kitchen stove and burned it, saying his money was useless and that he would do nothing to help the Lindenblatts. They couldn’t stay, but there was also nowhere to go. Mr. Lindenblatt’s father was due back in the camp, so Mr. Lindenblatt and his mother and brothers were left to figure it out. They headed out into the cold dark night, destined for God knows where.
I was born in 1975, into a world where the people affected by the Holocaust seemed very old to me and the war seemed a very long time ago. But now I’m almost 50, and I realize that I am just about as old as my grandparents were when I was born and that the period between my birth and the Holocaust is roughly the same as between now and the Challenger explosion. I am not an old lady, and the Challenger tragedy still seems awfully recent to me. What it must have been like to try to explain all these things to children who simply had lucked out by being born when they were born. How I should have understood that I was hearing recent history; how I should have understood that a lifetime ago is not actually a very long period of time.
Those who survived left Europe, for the most part. They fled to Israel, to South Africa, to Australia, to America. They became congressmen and industrial designers. They composed operas and pioneered electronic music. They won the Nobel Prizes for Peace and for Literature and Economics; they won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They were best-selling authors and celebrated pianists. They helped legalize abortion. They won Oscars. They were therapists and doctors, teachers and factory workers. My maternal grandparents — let me just remember my own family here for a minute — were named Joseph and Raya Turko. I was given my Hebrew middle name, Leah, after Joseph’s sister, who was killed in the Lodz ghetto; my mother is named after his mother, Rochel, who shared her daughter’s fate. My grandmother Raya was on the last train out of Kyiv before the Babi Yar massacre, the largest killing spree the Nazis carried out, murdering 33,771 people over two days. My grandfather fled Lodz to Bukhara, where he met my grandmother’s mother, who hired him to sell ice cream, of all things, on the black market. When the Communists caught him, they sent him to a work camp in Siberia. He got out, married his employer’s daughter, had my mother and my aunt, and emigrated to Israel in 1950 and then to America in 1962. Here, my grandfather was a housepainter. My grandmother was an architect, which was what she had studied in Kyiv before the war. Their children had children, and they were devoted, excellent grandparents. They bought a dinette store called Sam the Chrome King, at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Eastern Parkway. It’s something else now, but the Sam the Chrome King sign was still under the new sign, last I checked.
But that’s all I know. In my family, we never spoke about the war. The war was an assassin that stood over us, threatening to shoot if we looked it in the eye. But it was there. It was there when my grandmother wouldn’t leave any food on the table and combined all the remaining liquids into one glass and drank them. It was there when my grandfather told me he didn’t believe in God, because what kind of God would allow a war like that to happen? In those moments, I glimpsed into the window of their suffering and saw a universe of pain with no floor or ceiling. Some survivors, like Mr. Lindenblatt, made it their mission to make sure the world knew what happened to them. My family lived at the opposite end of the spectrum, which is no moral failing of theirs, but it probably is why I spent so long not even knowing to identify myself as from a survivor family. (This is apparently a common point of view, though it is a bad one, according to people who know better. My family being murdered during and as a result of the Holocaust makes the people in my family who made it out survivors; often, while I was writing this article, I would hear about people who don’t identify as survivors because they hid in barns or forests for weeks. “You ate from a pig’s trough?” someone said to me while I was writing this story. “You’re a survivor.”)
So what now? My grandparents are gone. So are all their friends. What is the obligation of the people who came after — those who survive the survivors — who carry the story, who carry the residual trauma and haunted memories of their families? The people I grew up among were either what’s known as 2G, the generation born to Holocaust survivors, or 3G, their grandchildren. Ilana is 2G on both sides; I’m 3G on my mother’s side (my father’s parents were born in America). As survivors dwindle, it’s left to us to process what happened, what the legacy of the Holocaust should be, or grapple with what it is.
And we do. Or some of us do. Whereas a few notable survivors were somehow able to give us searing accounts of their experience immediately afterward — Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi — it was left to the 2G to truly understand the impact of those stories. Now the Holocaust’s legacy lies in haunted 3G hands. Read Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated.” Watch Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg’s limited series, “The Patient,” where a kidnapped psychiatrist dreams of Viktor Frankl in a concentration-camp barracks. See Joshua Harmon’s riveting play, “Prayer for the French Republic,” which grapples with the rise in antisemitism in France today, two generations after the Holocaust. Visit the website for “If You Heard What I Heard,” a video series in which 3G grandchildren recount their grandparents’ stories of the Holocaust. See the throngs of 3G protesters who condemn what they see as the weaponization of the Holocaust to justify the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, but also the thousands of 3G who have moved newly toward a Zionism that they didn’t identify with before Oct. 7, 2023. See how even those of us who vowed to not let the Holocaust dictate how our lives went were just playing chicken with it. Once again, I ask: How did I end up writing this story?!
And then there are about a hundred iterations of Anne Frank’s diary, including what I would categorize as fan fiction, from children’s books to literary fiction. (My favorite of those is “The Ghost Writer,” by Philip Roth, which imagines that Anne Frank survived Auschwitz and is now hiding in the Berkshires.) There was a book on best-seller lists a few years back, a romance, called “The Tattooist of Auschwitz,” which, no way, thank you very much. (Yes, I do know that “The Brutalist” doesn’t have actual Holocaust scenes, and I know it’s supposed to be great, but when I heard the title for the first time, I heard “The Brutalest” and I thought, Finally! Someone is telling it as it is!) (All this said, I would watch “The Debt” any day of the week.) In my screening of Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar-winning 3G film about cousins visiting Poland on a Holocaust tour, “A Real Pain,” which sets questions about what kind of pain matters against the backdrop of a Holocaust tour, when the cousins arrived for a tour of the concentration camp their grandmother was imprisoned in, an old couple seated in front of us stood up and walked out. What I think when I see that is that I’m not sure any of us really survived the Holocaust.
The gold standard of Holocaust education has always been, of course, the personal, lived-experience testimony from the mouth of a Holocaust survivor directly to an attentive listener — mostly in an auditorium of students or to visitors of a Holocaust museum. There are still roughly 220,000 survivors, and their median age is 87, according to the Claims Conference, the nonprofit organization that negotiates and distributes funds to Holocaust survivors and the social-service agencies that support them worldwide. Of the surviving survivors, the largest population live in Israel. There are only around 35,000 remaining in the United States and fewer than 15,000 in New York. All of a sudden, the post-survivor era is upon us.
This crisis has been on the horizon for a long time, but what is the best approach for replicating the experience of talking to a survivor? Meaning, what is the next-best thing? In 2014, the USC Shoah Foundation, the Spielberg-founded organization that has recorded more than 60,000 firsthand testimonies of Holocaust survivors, worked with a few partners to pilot a program called “Dimensions in Testimony.” Visitors use an interactive screen to ask a cross-section of those survivors questions about their time during the war and receive a prerecorded answer. Thanks to advancing technology, the computer can map the question to one of the many the survivor answered during his or her interview with the foundation.
The first person to participate was a man named Pinchas Gutter, who, as a child, hid in a bunker during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising before he was deported to Majdanek and then other camps. During the pandemic, the foundation put “Dimensions in Testimony” online, and you can find Pinchas there now, sitting in a chair against a black background, blinking, smiling, waiting for your questions. “Hello,” reads the display. “Let’s have a chat.”
Me: “Do you have a tattoo?”
Pinchas: “I do not have a tattoo because, in Majdanek, they did not have tattoos. They actually put numbers underneath your tag. I had a red tag with a ‘p’ in it, and underneath on a white piece of cloth was my number.”
Then, last summer, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan partnered with Shoah and USC Libraries to record the testimonies of 10 survivors who are frequent speakers for the museum. All these years later, further advances in technology now allowed for the questions to use nongenerative artificial intelligence to map not just to the most pertinent answer but also to the most pertinent answer by the most appropriate answerer. They call it “Survivor Stories.”
The premise works because researchers realized that people visiting the museum and listening to testimonies tend to ask the same 100 questions over and over, without much variation. Joshua Mack, senior vice president of marketing at the museum, invited me to try the technology out before it was publicly available. The display is an oblong rectangle, like a standard full-length mirror. I asked a question …
Me: “What was the Holocaust like?”
… and a woman named Bronia Brandman appeared on the screen. In a Brooklyn-inflected Eastern European accent that was as familiar to me as my own voice, she replied: “The major premise of the Holocaust was to dehumanize the human, the Jewish race, to elevate the German race, and they did it with brutality, which was unprecedented in human history.”
Me: “Are those numbers on your arm?”
Brandman: “I have a tattoo, and I’m glad to show it. There is … my number is 52643 with a triangle, tattooed triangle on the bottom. The tattoo indicates that I am a Jew and available for the gas chamber.”
Me: “What did they feed you in the camp?”
Brandman: “Breakfast was green hot water, and then we had to leave the barrack and assemble for roll call. Roll call was five deep, and while we are standing in roll call, in every kind of weather, in rags, we were being selected for the gas chamber, the most feeble ones first. And when selected for the gas chamber, we were housed in Block 25, where they no longer clothed you, no longer fed you, and the rats were eating you up alive, and the screams coming out of there went to high heaven, and then, I don’t remember getting lunch. I remember getting supper, which was a bowl of soup. How you prayed that you’d get it from the middle of the barrel and not the top. The top was pure water. You didn’t want to know what was swimming in it, and you gulped it down instantly.”
I returned to the group of 10, and this time Mack asked them a general question.
Mack: “Do you remember when the war ended?”
At that, a black-haired woman named Alice Ginsburg appeared on the screen.
Ginsburg: “My physical state, I looked like someone who went through starvation. My mental state was wonderful. I was a human being again. It was wonderful. It felt good. I was a human being again.”
Mack then led me through some questions that I wouldn’t have thought to ask, ones he remembered from the interviews. He asked a man named Mark Schonwetter a direct question: “When did you learn that your father had died?” The answer was a heartbreaking story in which his mother sees his father’s shoes on another man’s feet and learns that the man helped to dig a mass grave and was rewarded for his work with one item of clothing from the victims, and that’s when he learned that his father had died.
At the museum, I sat, nodding thoughtfully and writing in my notebook as I listened to Schonwetter’s answer, like a complete professional. What I wrote that day, if you look in my notebook, is this: I WANT TO DIE.
The Lindenblatts knew there was danger everywhere in the night, out there on their own. They stayed on their guard. Arrow Cross officers patrolled, checking papers, suspicious police officers making sure there were no Jews where they weren’t supposed to be when they weren’t supposed to be there. After a few near disasters, the Lindenblatts arrived at the Glass House, a glass factory owned by a man named Arthur Weiss and under the protection of the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz.
The factory, which had long since ceased operations and was known to forge identification papers, was filled with Jews. The Lindenblatts slept on the floor. Everything they touched gave them fiberglass splinters.
Then they were forced to move again. They paid their way into a Red Cross orphanage in a former bakery. There, Mr. Lindenblatt slept in a bunk bed with his mother and three brothers. The two boys sleeping above them had chickenpox, and in the night, they urinated in bed, and it dripped down onto the Lindenblatts.
And they starved. Mr. Lindenblatt’s mother gave a farmer her wedding ring in exchange for a roll of pig fat. She cut it into three pieces and gave one to each of her sons, telling them they must eat it. It was the first time in their lives they’d ever eaten treyf.
The place was freezing and packed. One of Mr. Lindenblatt’s cousins had a piece of soap in the shelter. Mr. Lindenblatt thought the soap looked delicious. He would stand on his bed and beg and cry for it. When he finally went to bed, he dreamed of eating the soap, and in those dreams, bubbles came out of his mouth.
When they ran out of money, they were forced to leave. They ended up at a Swiss protective house, an apartment building where Mr. Lindenblatt’s grandmother also was staying. And then one day, the Russians came through with guns and flashlights. They’d fought the Nazis. The war was over. The Lindenblatts were free.
The Germans left Hungary, and the Russians took over. Communism wasn’t as bad as Nazi occupation, but it wasn’t great. The Lindenblatts rebuilt the cheese wholesale business, now selling a million other things — chicken, milk, eggs, meat, handkerchiefs — but people were no longer permitted to have private businesses. The Communists took their keys and ran them out of their own store. Little Mr. Lindenblatt was regularly beaten up at school for being Jewish and got into trouble for not attending on Saturdays.
The Hungarian Revolution came in 1956. Soon after that, he escaped: first to Austria, then to Israel, and then to America, where his parents and brothers were waiting for him. He came and worked in his brother Robert’s camera shop, met Miriam, who worked for Robert as a girl Friday and would become our Mr. Lindenblatt’s wife. She was also Hungarian. Her mother was at Auschwitz and her father in a forced-labor camp. Mrs. Lindenblatt’s father had nine siblings and her mother had four. Both lost their parents and all but one of their siblings. Mrs. Lindenblatt was so happy to marry another Hungarian. Who else would understand what her family had been through? Who would share the burden of the anxiety of knowing what kind of evil is out there? Who would agree that the children should have passports just about as soon as they were taken out of the nursery at the hospital?
The Lindenblatts sent their daughters to Jewish schools. They went to synagogue each week, kept a kosher home. This was where Ilana one day came home with the poem she wrote about death via a Nazi firing squad. All these years later, when I visited her, I saw it again. I said to her: “See? This is the exact thing I object to. Look at you, 10 years old, being asked to imagine a girl’s death via firing squad! Look at how they framed it!” And she said, “No, they framed it because they were proud of me,” and I said: “Exactly! They were proud of your death poem!”
But she shook her head and laughed a little and said she didn’t really understand what I was talking about, and now that I’m writing it, now that I’ve been doing this for a few months, honestly, neither do I.
“Survivor Stories” was set to debut to the public on Jan. 27, which is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The Museum of Jewish Heritage holds an annual gathering of survivors on that day, and this year, the 80th anniversary, would host a simulcast of the live ceremony from Poland, followed by a demonstration of the technology. There were 200 or so survivors gathered, as well as some of their children and spouses and home-health aides. It was a good crowd, but in a few years, there won’t be enough people left to fill the room, which is not even the largest room in the museum.
Bronia Brandman was there. We talked about her time recording her interview, and as she was describing it to me, I learned that she had been sent to the gas chamber seven separate times, and, at the last minute, each time, had evaded it. I had missed this in my interrogation of the “Survivor Stories.” It’s another one of those questions you wouldn’t think to ask.
The simulcast began. In Poland, the ceremony was taking place at the actual gates of the concentration camp. It was attended by fewer than 50 survivors and a handful of world leaders (ours was not in attendance). The audience in Manhattan sat in rapt attention. A man named Boris Vinokur held a framed painting he made of a Nazi crematory, the smoke coming out of it filled with music notes and science and math equations, all the potential contributions to society that the martyrs of the Holocaust might have made, had they not been lost. On the back was a poem he’d written called “Never Again.”
“A terrible crime and a worldwide shame, the Jews have been burned in oven flame,” it went. “Why this happened? Whom to blame? Let’s repeat: Never again! Never again!”
During a pause between speakers, I asked a man sitting near me what had brought him here, but instead of telling me that story, he told me his whole story, which was perhaps the same thing. His name is Eugene Ginter, and as a child he had gone on what he called “a tour of the different hotels,” spending time in the Plaszow ghetto and then the Plaszow concentration camp, then Gross-Rosen, then Brünnlitz, then Auschwitz-Birkenau, and then was liberated in Auschwitz I, the original camp.
He had been separated from his mother but was able to stay with his father for much of his imprisonment. At Gross-Rosen, he was stripped naked and made to sit with his naked father on the ground, among hundreds of others. Guards shaved their hair into a reverse mohawk, just to humiliate them, he said, just to dehumanize them. He was subjected to a cavity search. They were given a hot shower, then made to run through the snow to see who would get pneumonia and be sent to the gas chamber immediately. He told me how it took two weeks to get to Auschwitz-Birkenau from Krakow in the cattle car he was put into, though it’s only a one-hour drive, as the crow flies. On the way, his father took a diamond he’d secreted and traded it to a guard for two bottles of vodka and told Eugene to drink it because it would kill the typhus that was going around the camp, which, if he caught it, would also get him sent to the gas chamber. He was 5 years old.
He was taken on a long slow march to the main Auschwitz camp, and whoever was in the back of the line would be shot, so he kept running up to be at the front of the line. When finally he was liberated, he was taken to a hospital back in Krakow. Later, he was sent to an orphanage, where parents would come looking for their displaced children. He was sitting on the top floor, his legs dangling out the window with some of the other boys, when someone came in to tell him his mother was downstairs but —
We had to stop talking because there were some speakers at the event, and the president of the museum was going to make a speech, and that was fine by me because I had sunk into what was a now familiar speechlessness, one that never changes in the face of the distressing glimpse of what humanity is capable of, of what a person is asked to live with, of how it changes them forever. It is this speechlessness, or maybe just the blessed limits of my imagination, or the blessed limits of my abilities as an interviewer, that stops me from knowing how to ask questions that will yield stories like this.
That is the problem with the Holocaust — though, of course, not its main problem, which was that it was the Holocaust. The problem is that you could grow up thinking about it all the time and still not even be able to imagine how bad it was. There is no bottom to the depths of cruelty and depravity that you can learn about if you just ask the right question of the kind, calm man sitting next to you, but you have had such a privileged life that you don’t even know which questions to ask. And the questions I can formulate are so rude and raw that they threaten to make life just a little more awful than it is right now for someone who has, frankly, been put through quite enough and does not have to sit for my demoralizing and morbid and even lurid curiosity. Besides, how could any survivor give me a satisfying answer to: How do you live knowing that people are capable of this?
Or: Do you ever wonder what it means about you or God or fate or coincidence that you were sent there seven times and spared each time?
Or: How can you bear to know the measure of all that this world contains? How do you live in a world where you were in a concentration camp while your cousin was on the Wonder Wheel?
But also: What was the point of all of this Holocaust education, if, while you are still alive, a survey by the Claims Conference found that 15 percent of American adults under 30 believe the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust is “greatly exaggerated,” and that 24 percent believe that fewer than two million Jews were killed during the war, and 48 percent of all American adults surveyed could not name one of the concentration camps or ghettos or other of the more than 44,000 killing sites that the Nazis used to torture and murder Jews?
Is there any rational way to explain why, from 2018 to 2023, right here in New York State, where the largest number of Jews outside of Israel live, hate crimes against Jews rose by 89 percent, so that in 2023 they made up 44 percent of all hate crimes?
And did you see the swastika they spray-painted on the Romemu synagogue on the Upper West Side? Or “DIE JEW” on a random wall in Riverside Park? And did you hear that someone threw a brick through the glass door of the kosher pizza place on the East Side? Do you think they know that when they do that we consider, based on our education and what we know about history, that it’s the smashing of the glass of a Jewish business that turned the basic ongoing antisemitism into the actual Holocaust?
And did I tell you that my son was called a kike on the basketball court in Riverside Park? Did I tell you my other son went to Times Square with a friend and had a caricature done, just because they were goofing around, and the picture that was made for them had their faces distorted into those antisemitic cartoons of the 1930s, with hook noses and beady eyes, laughing and carrying bags of money while the twin towers burned in the background? Do you know they paid for it because they were in such shock, and when my son came home and handed it to me and said, “I think something happened,” I tried so hard to diminish it? Can I tell you how I stared at it for an hour, trying to think of whatever plausible thing it could be other than what it was because the tradition just as long as the one where people hate Jews is the one where Jews try to find a reason to think there’s no way the thing that just happened to them happened?
And what is it about me that needs to ameliorate or mitigate the sharp, upward, not-gray spike in antisemitism, to think of it as something paranoid people make too big of a deal out of, as if to defend ourselves is embarrassing and tacky? What is it in me that needs me to diminish what is in front of me? Is never again really now? Is it now? Is now when I’m supposed to leave? But OK, if yes, OK but where to?
And though I do want antisemitism to be punished and banished, how am I supposed to feel comforted by an administration that seems to be invoking it to fight a culture war that has nothing to do with Jews, while at the same time warmly embracing not one but two guys who recently did the ol’ “Sieg heil” in front of large crowds? Is the actual longest Jewish tradition that we get scapegoated even by the people who are pretending to save us?
And is there any way the world can experience economic or political turmoil without deciding to lay it at the feet of the Jews? And why am I sitting here at a catered event when I maybe should be running through the streets, screaming that the danger is here, that it’s happening, that it’s over for us? That we lived through this golden age and nobody ever warns you when a golden age is over, nobody will agree upon the metrics that declare it so?
And how about me? How am I supposed to live? That’s my real question, maybe my only one. Am I supposed to enjoy the freedom that your survival and my grandparents’ survival has afforded me? Was I supposed to have more than these two children in response to the Holocaust, to replace myself and my husband and then replenish the supply of Jewish souls on this earth because the six million stories that were burned in ovens are real and more recent than I realized? Am I supposed to have done more than live and fall in love and have a career and raise my kids and go to the movies and travel and do karaoke and read novels and sometimes watch an entire season of a TV show in one day and sometimes go to a museum and sometimes ride the Central Park loop on a Citi Bike with my children? Was I supposed to do more than walk around unafraid and think to stop sometimes and tilt my head up toward the sun?
And what do you think it means that last night I dreamed I was at Auschwitz, bodies piling up all around me, and I was doing a radio show, but I wasn’t sure if I was doing it to entertain the inmates or to work for the Nazis? Was it even being broadcast to the world? How have I fallen into this trap again, a trap I knew well to avoid and have been successfully doing so for decades?
And: Does a life have to be meaningful? Can’t it just be a life?
And why can’t I bring myself to ask you any of these questions? Even though you’ve made it so easy to talk to you, even though you sit there, blinking warmly, patiently welcoming my questions — even though I know you’ve been through so much worse than my dumb questions? Is it because I can’t bear any of the answers?
See? This is what I meant by inevitabilities. It was inevitable that I would end up once again so enmeshed in the Holocaust that these questions would haunt me so much that just this morning I woke up thinking about Hitler, wondering almost casually about his paintings. (What was his medium? Oils or watercolor?) It was inevitable to end up here, distraught and angry over a bubbling state of hatred and denial and dismissal that I cannot change (nor understand even) and somehow must withstand. It was even inevitable that I would be so resistant to this article that by the time I thought to write it, the lessons of my youth — those poor people who lectured me about never forgetting the Holocaust, and whom I kicked in the teeth by explaining that my own survival was contingent on never remembering — would be borne out. It was inevitable that I would live to understand that I once upon a time had the privilege to say that I was tired of the Holocaust, I was over it, I didn’t want to hear about it.
And of course there is the biggest inevitability, the only one I had control over — that I somehow ended up in a room full of Holocaust survivors, trying to hold in my head a shard of the amount of the pain that existed there. I am sorry for this. I am sorry to my grandparents for not asking more, or reassuring them, even though they never asked me to. I am sorry that I’m mean about my high school when they were just trying to make sure I understood. I am sorry I didn’t freeze in awe. I am sorry I haven’t been to Poland. I am sorry for the time on the summer program I went to in Israel that I faked being sick so I wouldn’t have to go to Yad Vashem, though I am somehow even sorrier that I went years later. I am sorry I leave the room for Yizkor, the memorial prayer, at Yom Kippur and stand in the hall and talk to people until someone hushes us, and I go back inside when it is mercifully finished. I am sorry to Mr. Lindenblatt for not telling his story sooner. But, I have to be honest, I’m also sorry for telling it. I woke up from that Auschwitz dream and understood that not telling this story has been a failure, but not a bigger one than trying to tell it. There is no version of this story that can honestly interrogate what it needs to, here in 2025, and I’m at the end now, but it doesn’t feel complete; it feels like a betrayal of everything and everyone.
The last speaker finished, and I turned back to Eugene Ginter. “So what happened?” I asked him urgently, even though I was so so so afraid of the answer. “Was it your mother downstairs?”
His mother, he explained, had been liberated from a camp in Czechoslovakia. She’d been the youngest of nine from such a loving family, and each of her siblings had been murdered. She was at Brünnlitz and had been on Schindler’s list — I can see her name on the list, if I want — and there she was, suffering from extreme melancholia because her siblings were gone and her husband and child were God knows where. And someone told her that they saw her son in Krakow and “she took off like a shot,” he said, walking, hitchhiking, not stopping to eat until she arrived at Krakow. She looked up and she saw him, she saw her Eugene, right there on the top floor, his legs hanging out the window, and she didn’t say his name because she didn’t want him to accidentally jump and hurt himself. So she sent a boy upstairs to tell him that his mother was there. And Eugene said to the boy, “Get lost!” because it had happened a few times that someone was looking for a redheaded boy and said his mother was downstairs and he would get there and it was someone else’s mother and you can just imagine how those mothers reacted when they saw that Eugene wasn’t their son.
But this time it was different. This time it was her! He came downstairs, and they were reunited — they were reunited!!! — can you imagine it? Can you imagine the moment?
And he has the nicest face and the sweetest way about him, and before I can hear how he came to New York and settled in Riverdale, where he became an engineer, and then he retired and became an A.P. physics teacher, but also before he can finish telling me how the smell of hair singed on a stove takes him right back to the camps — we’re interrupted again, because a children’s choir from the Hebrew Public charter schools mounted the stage.
The children sang a Hebrew song, one I know well. I was once on a stage like that, singing to a group of Holocaust survivors, back when I was in third or fourth grade, that very same song; so were my children when they were that age. “Listen my brothers,” goes its translation. “I’m still alive.” It continues on about hope and survival in the face of destruction. The chorus goes: “Alive! Alive! Alive! Yes, I’m still alive. This is the song my grandfather sang yesterday to my father, and today I sing it, too.” God, that song gets me every time.
Mr. Lindenblatt returned to Budapest in 2000. He tried to return in 1970, when he and Mrs. Lindenblatt visited Europe, but the night before they went, his dreams were so bad that he woke up screaming, and she canceled the trip. But in 2000, he decided to go. Mr. Lindenblatt wore his yarmulke. A man passing by said to his companion in Hungarian, “Look at that dirty Jew,” and Mr. Lindenblatt, tall and athletic, turned to him and he said, “What did you just say?” And the man cowered and said, “I wasn’t talking about you.”
He volunteered for the Jewish ambulance service, because it felt good to help his people when he’d grown up feeling so helpless about what was happening to the Jews around him. (Ilana told me that on 9/11, he ran to St. Vincent’s to volunteer as an E.M.T.) He attended synagogue every week. He wore a yarmulke all the time, because of what an act of defiance it still was to him. Religion, if you think about it, he said, is mostly meshugas. He did it to remind himself and the world that he was allowed to, because it’s a fist in the face to the people who tried to kill him and eradicate his people. His family was his revenge against Hitler. As was his marriage. As were his daughters. As were his grandchildren. As was his home, the same one he lived in and was never asked to leave.
“I survived the Holocaust,” he told me. “I survived the Hungarian revolution. I survived 9/11 and a lot of things between. And this is my last stand, though, last to try to survive. So, I’m not giving up.”
But then, in January, Ilana called me to tell me her father’s decline had become more rapid, and I went to visit him one last time, to read him this article, in case he didn’t live to see it published.
The house was filled when I got there. The men from the ambulance service came in and out, visiting all day and night, making sure the Lindenblatts had every hospital bed and chair-assist they needed. He was now confined to a bed, and he could barely open his eyes to greet me, but he did, with that smile.
The men from the ambulance told me stories about him. There are hundreds of volunteers in the Flatbush region but for a long time, they told me, there was only Mr. Lindenblatt in Manhattan Beach. He took every call there. Everyone knew him. Some people, when they were in distress, called his house directly. They only wanted to be treated by him. The Russians in the area loved him. He was “strong like an ox,” one of his fellow volunteers told me, and “his patient care was special.”
The men asked Mr. Lindenblatt for a blessing, but he wouldn’t give it. Who is he to give a blessing? he asked. He’s just a man who has striven, who had faith, who had trusted. That’s what was asked of him. It’s what he believed is asked of us all.
Everyone cleared out, and I read Mr. Lindenblatt this article. For a while, we weren’t sure if he could still hear me — his eyes were closed — but he was smiling the whole time. When I finished I told him I was sorry I was late in telling it. He shook his head and said the word “perfect.” Less than a week later, he died.
Mr. Lindenblatt was buried the next day. It seemed as if all of Brooklyn and most of Queens and anyone who came over from Hungary was in the funeral home, sharing memories of how he lived to help his community, how he loved his family, how in the end, he didn’t know how to do anything but survive, which was why death was so hard for him to accept. When it was time to go to the cemetery, the legion of volunteer E.M.T.s carried his coffin to one of the ambulances and, with sirens blaring, led the motorcade to New Jersey, where his body was finally laid to rest. His coffin, a pine box, was placed in the ground, and, as is the tradition, we took turns shoveling dirt onto it until the hole was filled.
But that last day I saw him, before I left his house, he asked me one last time if I needed to know anything else. I didn’t. I told him I had no more questions. No, all I had left was my awe at what he survived, what a privilege it was to hear his story and how lucky I was to know him.
Read by Gabra Zackman
Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck
Engineered by Ted Blaisdell
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a features writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in New York. More about Taffy Brodesser-Akner
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