Never Again

by Frances Temme 11.2023

My earliest memory of childhood TV is vividly etched in my brain. No “Bonanza,” “Leave It to Beaver,” or “Father Knows Best” for me. On Sunday evenings, at six, we, as a family, would watch the CBS show, “The Twentieth Century.” The opening salvo of an enormous rock, Prudential Insurance Company’s logo (I didn’t know until years later that the logo paid homage to the tenacity and strength of the Rock of Gibraltar); Walter Cronkite’s deep baritone; and an orchestral march excited and drew me in. The producers knew what they were doing.

I learned a lot of 20th century history at Cronkite’s knee, but I also first grew aware of what a dreadful place the world could be. The most telling and wretched image of that show for me were the frames of a chute, like so many steep sliding boards of my childhood playgrounds, only human bones rattled down that chute, the bones of victims of the Holocaust. I was horrified, did not know what to make of it. Other images appeared on the screen: grotesquely emaciated bodies, living skeletons really; piles of bodies clothed in those pajama-like striped uniforms; roomfuls of eyeglasses and prosthetics and shoes. I asked my parents lots of questions and they answered—I went to bed unsettled and afraid.

The following summer I faced personally the physical reality of that awful history. As a child, I spent my summers with my maternal grandparents in Philadelphia in a neighborhood of Poles, Italians, Irish, and Jews. I made daily trips around the corner to the Jewish bakery and the Jewish green grocery, and two storefront synagogues were situated on the block behind my grandparents’ house. I watched toothless old men in their yarmulkes sitting in front of their synagogues on folding chairs, smoking and talking. It was very mysterious. And very exciting. I felt as if I had been transported from my suburban world of splitlevels and cul-de-sacs to a foreign country—the people were more interesting, more varied, more exotic. Produce hucksters still sold their wares from the back of a horse-drawn cart so the stink of the horse manure mixed with the scents from Lipton’s Bakery. It was nothing like home.

Every summer, my grandmother sewed me a stunning wardrobe of clothes, all based on the featured items in the August edition of “Seventeen.” I was spoiled without recognizing it. My grandmother, an accomplished seamstress, shopped for patterns and fabrics at Moshe’s Fabrics. Moshe spoke a heavily accented English which enchanted me. He and his wife were lovely—gentle, kind, welcoming—and they knew everything about the fabrics they sold. I learned so much from them: how to drape a fabric to feel its hand, how to crush a fabric to see how it would respond to wrinkling, how to calculate the amount of fabric needed based on pattern, stripe, or plaid.

One hot and humid Philadelphia day, Moshe had rolled up his sleeves and was unwinding a bolt of fabric for our inspection when I noticed a line of numbers tattooed onto his inner forearm. My great uncles all had tattoos so I was used to seeing ink on flesh, although those I was familiar with were hearts or women’s names or battleships from World War II; I had never seen a row of numbers. I asked their meaning and Moshe explained they were his from his time in a concentration camp in Poland. My mind exploded—the images from the show I had watched on TV and the immediacy of that tattoo bowled me over. I cried on the walk home. My grandfather took me to the local library and I read what a ten-year old could read about the Holocaust, but the book that really defined that gruesome period for me was “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Anne Frank made the Holocaust alive and real for me in the same way that Moshe’s tattoo had clarified that grim history. Approximately Anne’s age, I could understand her crush on Peter and her fascination with her body and the complexity of adolescence; what I could not fathom was the extraordinary fear that pervaded her life. My world was small and safe—Anne had literally been captured in a critical moment in the world’s history. We are profoundly privileged to be able to share her witness to the unimaginable.

Decades later, I was able to visit Auschwitz and see those sights firsthand. I stood in the gas chamber; I wandered through the barracks that featured rooms of shoes, every kind of footwear imaginable, from the softest leather of infant booties to steel-toed work boots to elegant high heels; rooms of artificial legs and arms and back braces; an entire room of eyeglasses. I was particularly overwhelmed by that last encounter because I’ve been near-sighted for most of my life so I know how disorienting it is to be without glasses.  I pondered all the ways that the Nazis strove to rid Jews of their humanity—by assigning tattooed numbers instead of names, by taking away prosthetics that made movement possible, by stealing the spectacle that allowed people to see clearly. Every inkling of horror that I first felt watching bones collide down that chute, peering at Moshe’s tattoo, listening to Anne’s fear—all those horrors materialized and were confirmed as I made my way through the labyrinthine maze of Auschwitz.

The world said, “Never Again,” but that may not be holding firm. Watching the horrors of October 7 should awaken us all to the real meaning of never again. Too much of the coverage of that awful day has been clouded by extremists on both the right and the left. We must never confuse the suffering of the Palestinian people and the need for two states to camouflage Hamas’ relentless desire to rid the world of Israel and, more broadly, the Jewish people. Few people in the 1930s could either imagine the horrors of Hitler’s regime or believe that it could be implemented. Even when American citizens knew, we chose to turn our backs to protect ourselves–and, oh, lest we forget, many Americans embraced Hitler’s ideology. In 1939, The Daily Princetonian polled its students to determine “the greatest living person.” Ninety-three votes were given to Hitler, twenty-seven to Einstein, and fifteen to Neville Chamberlain. The Fuhrer won.

We need to do a better job of teaching history–books that make students uncomfortable shouldn’t be banned. Some political movements are evil–we should be allowed to say that. Moral equivalency is a fallacy. Teaching children to read widely, to analyze, to feel, to be open to others is necessary to keep our democracy functioning and to maintain a world order that says, “Never Again” and means it. Those images from my childhood haunt me to this very day. And I am grateful for them.