Page 53 - Print 21 Magazine Sep-Oct 2020

Print Values
writer/editor from the publishing team of 20 people assembled over the past 15 years of the project. Over seven two-and-a-half-hour sessions the narrative emerges. While 80
per cent are Holocaust survivor accounts, there are other stories from the Jewish community, from South Africa, Shanghai, and Baghdad, along with many Australian voices too. The definition of Holocaust survivor has broadened in recent times. For many years, child survivors, those who were very young when the Nazis came to power, never considered themselves as part of the demographic. Now there’s a child-survivor group.
“There used to be a hierarchy. You were only a survivor if you were in the camps. Basically, the definition has been extended to anyone who was affected by the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945, wherever you were in Nazi- controlled territory. There are people who were forced to leave Germany and came to Australia in 1938. They went through Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass). There were people who went to Shanghai as refugees and were confined in the Shanghai ghetto. The definition has extended enormously,” Wasilewsky said.
Keeping the past alive
One of the most successful initiatives of Community Stories is the creation of books for children. The launch of
children’s books, many illustrated, has provided another way to engage the young with the reality of what happened. These are sometimes adapted from existing narratives, while others are commissioned as original volumes aimed at younger audiences. The popular book I Met
a Survivor is part of this series, showcasing joyous photographs of very young children with the much older Holocaust survivors. It is another initiative aimed at teaching the very important lessons of this period to a new demographic.
As the number of Holocaust survivors decline, children of survivors are playing an increasing role. They are producing narratives about their search for lost family members, indeed entire lost families. Wasilewsky has first- hand experience of the difficulties in discovering the fate of family members. She tells of looking for her maternal grandmother’s family that did not leave Poland to join their daughter in South Africa. Skilled and equipped to deal with historical details she was unable to discover even the family’s name in Polish records, so thorough is the obliteration of their identity.
For many years, the actuality of the Holocaust was downplayed, but it was ever-present among
the survivors even if they did not publicly talk about it. While it’s
Sydney Jewish Museum in Darlinghurst
a common understanding that survivors never told their children about their experiences, Wasilewsky maintains that it’s wrong to claim they didn’t speak about it at all.
“It’s a truism they didn’t talk about
it. They often didn’t talk about it to their children, or publicly, until the late 1980s or early 1990s, but they always spoke among themselves, with their friends. They may have decided not to tell their children in order to protect them, or other people because they needed to get on with their lives when they came to Australia. Australians were not particularly interested in hearing their stories; in the same way many of us are not interested in hearing refugee stories now. People are just not interested full stop. They were not then, and they’re not now.” It’s only since the Holocaust entered mainstream cultural history at the start of the century has there been an opening up to spread the history far and wide.
“The Holocaust has taken on a
life of its own. It’s more researched than any other period. Because it’s so unimaginable and unfathomable, the horror of it seems to engage people more than anything else. Since the 1990s it’s been represented in film, in books, theatre, in art, in all sorts of ways. It’s become a cultural trope.”
Printed books matter
Print plays an important role in preserving the stories. Almost
every book is printed at the author’s expense, usually in runs of between 200 and 500 copies. In recent times the print work has gone to The
Book Printing Company on the Central Coast (see box story). While Community Stories also records audio interviews, the permanence of print resonates with the writers and with the mission of the group.
“In my view it’s very important. I like the idea of them being printed.
I worry if they were all digital they’d just be lost in the ether. Originally, we used to print more cheaply, but now we do it with very much better quality. It means these books remain in the home, physically on the bookshelf for the family. Even if they don’t read them now because they’re not interested in their mother’s story, when she goes, they will be.”
Recording the Holocaust is an ongoing theme in Wasilewsky’s life. The mother of three wrote a thesis for her Masters on Jewish behaviour during the Holocaust.
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