This is not a book review per se as nothing I can write is adequate. Before commenting, this background information:
After reading (in college and later in my career republishing) The Psychology of Dictatorship by Gustav Gilbert (he was the head of my psychology department), and then as an adult reading Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance as well as the Diary of Anne Frank (and later visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam with Ann), I had, until this time, avoided Holocaust literature and films. There are other reasons as well.
As a child I found my father’s personal photograph collection from his days as a Signal Corps photographer during WW II. Among them were scenes from a concentration camp which led to thoughts, nightmares, which I couldn’t really discuss with my father as my access to those files in our basement was forbidden. He also never talked about the war, something he just wanted to forget. I think those photos were from a satellite camp of Buchenwald, one not far from Cologne and the Rhine River where he was active during the closing months of the War. They ultimately disappeared; either he or my mother disposed of them. What remained of his war years was a detailed scrap book of primary sources which I gave to the WW II Museum in New Orleans after his death in 1984.
Gilbert was the prison psychologist at the Nuremberg Trial and the author of the Nuremberg Diary. But his documentation in The Psychology of Dictatorship of how Rudolf Franz Hoess, who was the Colonel in charge of Auschwitz, described with scientific precision, and with some pride how efficiently they could “dispose of” some 10,000 people per day was unforgettable and horrifying.
When I read Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance I had to prop tissues under my glasses to read those sections pertaining to the Ghettos that were temporary holding pens of Jews on their way to extermination camps. The conditions of starvation and exposure simply resulted in fewer prisoners having to be transported to the death camps. Wouk’s fictional characters made that horrid existence personal.
The normalization of genocide and the indescribable cruelty made me avoid such literature and now I feel, in these times in particular, guilty, and in preparation of seeing Palm Beach Dramaworks’ The Messenger, I felt compelled to read Georgia Gabor’s memoir, My Destiny. It is the work of a brilliant and passionate survivor of the Holocaust.
The driving force behind commissioning the play is PBD’s Producing Artistic Director Bill Hayes. I owe him a debt of gratitude for leading me to Gabor’s story, to allow me, after all these years, to face these ugly facts and to make me and anyone who sees the play, a “messenger.” The play was written by the recently appointed Dramaworks' Resident Playwright, Jenny Connell Davis. Silence is complicity and it is not an option, especially now in our chaotic world where hate can be found anywhere and everywhere and where there seems to be a slow slide into the unthinkable: fascism in America.
During WW II most Americans hardly believed that civilized German culture could possibly engage in genocide. The United States government was more aware of the extent of it, but failed to do much. Deep antisemitism was well entrenched here as well. And today one only has to look at the reaction on some college campuses to Israel trying to defend itself from Hamas terrorism to see it still.
But I am straying from the terrifying story of Georgia Gabor, her cunning ability to survive when there seemed to be no hope (as there were none for her entire family who died in concentration camps), and to witness atrocities, be subjected to unthinkable living conditions and the constant anxiety of being on the run, escaping the Nazis twice, sometimes posing as one to get by, all before she turned 16.
It is a high wire story, sickening in exposing man’s inhumanity to man.
Then there are several moments when everything seemed to be turning in her favor, such as when she and friends rejoiced hearing the Russians were pushing the Germans out of Hungary, surely they will save the Jews who managed to survive those years in bombed out buildings in unspeakable conditions. But the Russians raped and pillaged and Gabor was on the run again.
She planned to go to Palestine with a Zionist group, but it was again a dangerous attempt, the likelihood she would be shot and even if she made it, she would not be able to pursue the education she wanted, and would become a laborer or farmer for the rest of her life. Meanwhile the thought of life under communism was unthinkable to her.
She lived in orphanages and befriended a woman from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration who after a labyrinth of obstacles finally was able to find a place for her in a US Congress passed bill that allowed 500 carefully selected orphan children to go to the US, becoming wards of the government until they turned 21, dispersing them in state and charitable agencies for foster care.
Imagine how her heart leapt at this opportunity, and when she first saw the Statue of Liberty she finally felt safe. But that would be a nice ending for “the movie.” Real life interceded, more terrible living conditions and finally two failed marriages to abusive men, losing custody of her two children, but finding education as her way out of a hell hole of a life (she was a brilliant mathematician) and finally resolving to be a teacher so she could gain custody of her children, find and marry the childhood friend she loved in Budapest, and secure a teaching position.
Again, if that was only the end of the story and indeed My Destiny, published in 1981, concludes with her happy marriage. But after that she was subjected to virulent antisemitism and harassment, and her life was again miserable because she told her story. She was fired from her teaching job, sued the school system, and would die only two years later. This LA Times article, ‘A Long Lesson in Hate : Holocaust Survivor Sues School District Over Harassment,’ summarizes the consequences of telling the inconvenient truth. The world premiere of the play, which opens on Dec. 8, focuses on Gabor’s story but interacting with three different generations (1967, 1993, and 2020) all with their own reactions to her and their own stories of hate and complicity. The audience is left to connect the dots.
