My Personal Experiences and Learning Opportunities

¶ … fifteen, my parents took my brother and me to Hungary. The trip was initially for grandpa, but he suffered a stroke only six months before we were scheduled to leave and it turned out that his relative incapacitation made it impossible for him to fully appreciate what he was seeing or doing. Yet I read his stroke as a grave sign. I believed then that grandpa could not handle the trauma of reliving his childhood, and wished nothing more than to numb his pain.

He had never talked about his past, and showed no interested in reliving it. Going to Hungary was my father's idea, and it was during this trip that I learned the most about myself, my family, and more importantly, about my role in the world. Hungary was where my grandparents were born, but instead of feeling nostalgic for their homeland, they never spoke about it as if they had grown up in a prison.

I do not believe they identified with being Hungarian as much as they identified with being Jewish, and saw themselves as being forcibly nomadic, living the lives like those of the Roma people beside them. They never spent more than a few generations in one village before they were forced out or shunned, due to one pogrom or another or the passing whims of the town leaders. I learned all this not from my grandparents; that would have been unforeseeable as they loathed talking about their past.

Instead, I made it my duty to read about the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe in libraries and on the Internet. The trip my family took to Hungary inspired me to explore issues related to identity and human history. My father viewed the trip as an "enriching cultural experience," as he put it. He believed that the children needed to know where they came from, and he also knew that Budapest and other Hungarian cities were supposed to be polished up since the war.

Now hubs of tourism, Hungarian cities drew travelers weary of the worn European capitals like Rome and Paris. Budapest still feels fresh for many people, and it did for all of us except for my poor grandfather who did not seem remotely happy to be on our journey. It occurred to me later that my dad never understood how my grandfather felt; he assumed that the stroke was why his father failed to speak or seemed not to register what was going on around him. I knew.

Maybe not at the time, but about a year after we went, I reflected on the experience and it came to me: grandpa wanted to forget. And I now believe it is my duty to respect his wishes. Traumatic experiences scar human beings for life. Often those scars are passed down from generation to generation. People like my grandfather carried the scars of anti-Semitism around him for years, never talking about their pain for fear that people would either not understand or probe too deeply into the source.

I always figured that my grandfather was a reticent man and did not like talking about anything, let alone himself. Only after learning about the complexities of identity formation, about sociology, and particularly about modern history and the Holocaust, did I realize that my grandfather was simply numbing himself to the pain by remaining silent. My grandmother had died many years prior, and even she who talked a lot otherwise, never liked to speak about what they experienced. If she had also come with us on our family vacation, I.