Holocaust

The Holocaust enters the novel both as a named historical catastrophe and as one strand in Rabo Karabekian’s meditation on survival, family memory, and the representation of war. Its presence connects Circe Berman’s account of inherited trauma to the many displaced people depicted in Rabo’s immense painting of a valley at the war’s end; the painting turns an overwhelming historical aftermath into a multitude of individual stories.

The Holocaust in a Story of Inherited Trauma

Circe Berman explains that her novel The Underground brings together three girls—a Black girl, a Jewish girl, and a Japanese girl—who feel drawn to one another before they understand why. Each has a parent or grandparent who survived a human-made catastrophe. The Jewish girl descends from a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust; the other girls’ family histories reach back to the massacre of Ibos in Nigeria and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Their shared inheritance is not a direct memory of the events, but the idea, passed down by survivors without deliberate instruction, that the wicked are alive and the good are dead.

The novel within the novel gives the Holocaust a place in a deliberately comparative account of historical violence without making the catastrophes interchangeable. Rabo is struck by the title The Underground, while his initial account of the book emphasizes the girls’ unexplained affinity and the family histories that later clarify it. The Holocaust thus appears not only as a past event but as part of a transmission between generations: descendants inherit an emotional map of the world shaped by a catastrophe they did not witness.

Family Survival and Memory

Rabo’s own family history is rooted in the mass killing of Armenians under the Turkish Empire. His mother survived by pretending to be dead among the victims; his father escaped by hiding in a privy at the schoolhouse where he taught. Rabo recounts these as his parents’ histories, not as the Holocaust, and distinguishes their circumstances from the later Nazi catastrophe. The family story nevertheless helps explain why conversations about mass killing and survival carry such personal force for him.

When Circe suggests that Rabo’s father suffered from Survivor’s Syndrome, Rabo says his father was ashamed that he had survived when his friends and relatives had died—and ashamed, too, that Rabo had survived. Rabo resists treating his father’s response as a simple diagnosis: he calls him upsetting, says that remembering him hurts, and then says he has forgiven him many times. The exchange shows how historical violence persists within family relations, where survival can be entangled with shame, resentment, and attempts at forgiveness.

Rabo contrasts his father’s experience with his mother’s, arguing that she had greater grounds for survivor guilt because she was caught in the killing itself and survived by lying among the dead. The memory is mediated through what Rabo has been told and what he later recalls, rather than presented as his own eyewitness testimony. His account makes that distinction important: the family’s past reaches him through inherited stories, while the act of recounting those stories gives them a renewed place in the present.

Rabo’s Wartime Survival

Rabo also survived the war in Europe. While serving with an Army Engineers camouflage unit in Luxembourg, he was captured and lost his left eye. He remembers a white German tank and soldiers crossing a snow-covered meadow, but says he does not remember being hit. Unconscious when captured, he was kept under morphine until he awoke in a German military hospital in a church across the border. His wound healed quickly, and he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.

Rabo insists that he, too, has a claim to Survivor’s Syndrome, but Circe points out that he had described little pain and a rapid recovery. When she asks whether he believes himself a good person in a world where almost all other good people are dead, he answers no. Her distinction separates the physical fact of his survival and injury from the particular emotional condition she is discussing. Rabo’s wartime experience matters, but it does not simply replicate either his father’s response or the inherited trauma explored in The Underground.

The Valley and Its Survivors

Rabo recalls that after the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, guards marched him and hundreds of captured officers out of a prison camp before disappearing. The prisoners awoke on the rim of a green valley, near the border that Rabo identifies as lying between East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Below them were thousands of people brought there from concentration camps, factories where they had been enslaved, ordinary prisons, and asylums. Rabo’s account also includes civilians who had fled the Russian, American, and British fronts, as well as German soldiers whose weapons remained functional but who were waiting to surrender.

He retells this scene as an Old Soldier’s Anecdote, recalling the march, the night outdoors, and the guards’ disappearance at sunrise. The valley is not presented as a simple scene of liberation: people from different systems of confinement and from opposing sides of the war have been left together in a landscape whose immediate future is uncertain. Rabo’s recollection gathers these groups into one aftermath without erasing their different positions—as prisoners of war, concentration-camp survivors, enslaved laborers, civilians, released prisoners, or former combatants.

The Painting as a Collective Record

Rabo’s large painting translates the valley into an image crowded with survivors. He estimates that an average of ten clearly drawn Second World War survivors occupy every square foot. Figures distant enough to look like specks can be inspected through magnifying glasses in the barn and identified as concentration-camp victims, slave laborers, prisoners of war, soldiers from German units, local families, or people released from asylums. Each figure has a war story; Rabo says he invented a story and then painted the person to whom it happened.

The painting’s scale makes individual histories both numerous and difficult to hold in mind. Rabo initially offered to tell visitors the story behind any figure, but stopped because doing so exhausted him; he now directs visitors to the barn and invites them to make up their own stories. In this way, the painting does not claim to be a single survivor’s complete testimony. It gives viewers a dense field of imagined individual lives, including victims of the Holocaust, within a historical gathering far larger than one witness could narrate.

A date inscribed in tiny characters on a German ammunition box within the painting anchors that imagined scene: May 8, 1945, the day Rabo identifies as the end of the war in Europe. The date joins the painting to his own recollection of the valley while remaining only one detail among many in its crowded composition. The Holocaust’s place in the work is therefore neither isolated nor incidental: it is part of the many histories of persecution, captivity, displacement, and survival that Rabo’s image brings into view.