March / april 2006:

Oprah, the holocaust, and me
A survivor’s granddaughter on the Shoah’s modern day relevance.

Essay by Erica Davis | Photo Illustration by Alex Burmenko


My grandpa, a cigar-smoking, Jewish mechanic vital and strong well into his 70s, had a spinal operation a few weeks ago. The procedure, for which he is now receiving physical therapy, left him in a wheelchair.

I called Detroit from my Upper West Side Manhattan apartment to see how he was doing. “Grandma is taking good care of me,” he said with his thick accent, sounding uncharacteristically listless and dull. I pictured him lying on his big couch, weak and immobile. “Do your physical therapy and get strong soon,” I admonished, and said I loved him, and hung up.

I know he will be okay. My grandpa is invincible, or at least that’s how I always saw him. Zygie Allweiss was 13 when the first silver bomb shells landed in his rural southeast Polish town. By the time he was 19, he had escaped to America, but without his eight brothers and sisters, mother and father, who weren’t as lucky. Talk about a bad adolescence.

He survived those few years in Poland on his cunning, wit, and physical strength. He lived in the forest for months, and he was hidden in a barn by kind Christian farmers. At one point, after being shoved into a Nazi wagon bound for a concentration camp, he dove off the moving wagon as it turned a corner.

In 1947 he gained entry to the United States, and since he knew how to fix cars, he went to Detroit and opened his own garage. Grandpa wooed New York-born grandma, and they quickly had five children, one of which is my mother.

I live in a time when pop culture is, at least for the moment, protecting the Holocaust’s memory. In January Oprah chose Elie Wiesel’s Night as her new, now dubious, book club selection. “These 120 pages I’m about to tell you about should be required reading for all humanity,” she told her studio audience. Last month she traveled with Wiesel to visit Auschwitz. In an accompanying high school essay contest, she posed the question to millions of young people, “Why is Elie Wiesel’s book relevant today?”

When I was very young, grandpa wasn’t so open about his experience, thinking people weren’t interested in hearing the nightmarish stories. He talked about his childhood when he drank, and then only indirectly. On Passover, he sometimes cried out, Haggadah in hand, in the middle of the service, “You think there’s a God? After everything that happened to us, you think there’s a God?!”

At eight years old I stared at my sobbing grandfather, questions racing through my mind. How could I help him? Who hurt him? I wondered, but was afraid to ask. In my family we were all afraid that his anguish, if truly unleashed, would destroy him, along with his wife, children, and grandchildren.

As the oldest of those grandchildren, I felt a special kinship with him. One afternoon, I might have been 19, I dared to ask. That’s when our relationship changed forever.

We leaned against his dusty car in the circular driveway of his beautiful home that he earned after fifty years of labor in this country. The sky was bright. He puffed on his ever-present cigar and I sucked on a few Marlboros.

He spoke haltingly about his sisters and mother, about growing up in Poland, about hiding. We cried together, and to this day the clarity and connection of that moment was one of the best experiences of my life.

After grandpa and I had our heart to heart, he was different — now he couldn’t stop talking about it. The memories came in fits and starts, and not always in the right order. But the more he talked the more normal it became, and the less painful it was for all of us in the family. He started speaking to high school students regularly at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The students listened, they asked questions, they wrote him letters, and he keeps them. I think letting out his pain made him a happier person.

My feelings about him are ambivalent though. It’s been a few years since our first talk, and nowadays I sometimes get impatient when he won’t shut up about Poland. Like when I walk in his home for a holiday get-together, and he runs to the front door waving the latest newspaper article about Poland’s acknowledgement of the Holocaust, with the fervor of someone holding the map to a buried treasure. “Come here, look at this,” he says. I dutifully look, but not always with a receptive heart. Why can’t he move on? Why can’t he just get over it? I think to myself, feeling guilty.

The truth is he lived through the Holocaust between the formative ages of 13 and 19, and therefore he will never in his lifetime get over it. And I won’t either. Though World War II happened more than 30 years before I was born, I find its imprint on my psyche as if I had been right there along with him.

In a diluted version of survivor’s guilt, I feel that I am an extension of my grandfather, and of my ancestors in Poland who never got the chances I had. What if he hadn’t jumped off that truck and escaped from the Nazis, I sometimes wonder. I would never have been born.

I know my grandpa, my friend, isn’t really invincible and he won’t be around forever. Despite my ambivalence I plan to speak up and report his experience loudly and well into the future.

I have a response to Oprah’s essay contest, one to which I know grandpa would back me up: Elie Wiesel’s Night will always be relevant because it helps countless millions remember what human nature can be like in worst-case scenarios, and it serves as ammunition against those who would try to destroy its memory.



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