Auschwitz

Auschwitz enters the narrative through Bubby’s account of familial loss rather than as a place Devorah visits. It is where Bubby’s relations were murdered in the gas chambers during the Holocaust; the scale of that absence is conveyed through a yearly candle-lighting ritual, a family she rarely discusses, and photographs that Devorah keeps hidden in a drawer. The place’s significance lies in how its history continues to shape family memory across generations.

Auschwitz in Bubby’s History

Bubby lost her family in the war: while she labored in the factories of Bergen-Belsen, her relations were murdered at Auschwitz. She was near death from typhus when liberation came. The account places these experiences side by side without making them interchangeable: Auschwitz names the site of her family’s deaths, while Bergen-Belsen is where Bubby herself endured forced labor and illness.

The names and ages of the dead make the loss specific. Bubby lights a yahrzeit candle for each relative, from baby Mindel to fourteen-year-old Chaim. Yet she almost never speaks about her family. At family gatherings, other stories may be repeated while hers remains largely unheard; the narrative makes that imbalance part of the way the past is transmitted.

Ritual, Silence, and Photographs

Devorah encounters the dead through black-and-white portraits of Bubby’s sisters and brothers, parents, and grandparents. She keeps the photographs wrapped in a paper towel in her top drawer and takes them out only when she feels strong enough. The image of the two-year-old baby is especially difficult for her to reconcile with the fact of the child’s death. Looking at the faces, Devorah cries, then puts the photographs away before her silent sobs become wails.

The drawer becomes a private place where a history seldom discussed can be approached, though not without pain. Devorah does not want to remind Bubby of the family she lost, so she keeps her own grief largely unspoken too. The photographs thus pass memory to the next generation while also showing the limits placed on its telling.

Inherited Memory

Devorah’s knowledge of Auschwitz is not eyewitness knowledge; it comes through Bubby’s rare stories, the candle-lighting, and the family portraits. Bubby’s enduring grief is visible even when she does not narrate it. When she speaks about the Holocaust and the Zionists, tears gather in her eyes, and Devorah believes her testimony. The narrative therefore presents remembrance as both intimate and contested: the child receives a family history through fragments, silences, and the expressions of the person who survived it.

Auschwitz remains consequential beyond the account of the murders themselves. For Devorah, the photographed faces are not an abstract record of the past but the faces of her ancestors, whose absence she struggles to comprehend. The place persists in the present through the work of remembering—and through the difficulty of speaking about what was lost.