cineSOURCE magazine

Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie
by Doniphan Blair

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Author Doniphan Blair filming his mother Tonia in Birkenau camp, during the making of 'Our Holocaust Vacation', a PBS-screened documentary co-created with his brother Nicholas. photo: N. Blair

This essay first appeared in the new book, "Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption" published by Austin Macauley. Composed of autobiographical stories by Blair's mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, it provides a fresh look on how people of goodwill, notably a romantic, loving teenage girl, survived WWII.

OURS WAS A FAMILY OF THREE
filmmakers and one Holocaust survivor, my mother Tonia, which obviously meant we had to make a movie about her. The time finally came in August 1997 when my younger brother Nicholas, his new wife Tania, our father Vachel, a retired cinematographer, and my sixteen-year-old daughter Irena as well as my mother and I boarded a plane to Poland. Midflight, my brother fiddled with his new video camera, the small size of which we hoped would help us tell a more intimate story, and I gave the family some directions.

“Just be yourselves,” I said, little imagining what making a Holocaust movie might mean personally, artistically, metaphysically even, or in terms of factual discovery about the Holocaust but also Darwin's theory of evolution.

A decade of editing later, that twenty-two-day trip became "Our Holocaust Vacation", an eighty-three-minute documentary shown over 500 times on Public Broadcast Service stations. It features my mother recalling her experiences, at or near where they occurred, our reactions — particularly my daughter’s, who is the same age in the film as her grandmother was in the middle of the war — and a family fight. Worried that audiences were tiring of “survivor return” stories, we added a half-dozen performance pieces, like the family walking through a German town wearing Jewish stars, which precipitated that fight, or the family handing out loaves of bread on a town square in the Czech Republic. (See the film or trailer here.)

"Our Holocaust Vacation" was well received by viewers, according to their letters and emails — only one anti-Semitic comment on the film’s trailer on YouTube — but not so much Jewish film festivals, regular festivals or Holocaust survivor gatherings. This may have been due to its title, which suggested Nazis in need of a vacation from the Holocaust, according to the staff at the Cleveland International Film Festival. It could have been because my mother flirted with a German soldier, which is taboo in many circles. Then there was the story itself, a concern I shared.

How my mother lost her family at fourteen and endured Auschwitz is heart-breaking, and she relates it with verve, sometimes spitting out her words, but it involved little I considered heroic. She hid some children but only for an afternoon; she didn’t join the resistance or commit any sabotage; she was severely beaten but only once.

It took me years of studying my mother’s experiences, filming her recounting them, and reviewing the footage to finally realize that hers, too, was a hero’s journey. Working as a nurse in the Lodz ghetto with almost no medicine and little food, helping her friends and preserving not only her humanity but her female, even feminine, spirit in the middle of a masculine world at war was, in fact, a Herculean achievement.

The Blair family visits the memorial at Birkenau. photo: T. Prybyskli-Blair

Regardless of cinematic success, making "Our Holocaust Vacation" was cathartic for the family. Such a trip will be traumatic, warned some of my mother’s survivor friends, but she found recalling her experiences where they happened while the center of the family’s attention to be therapeutic, enjoyable even.

My daughter, on the other hand, was not overjoyed to be stuck with her family for so long. Still, she ended up learning and expressing a surprising amount. “Having a camera stuck in your face interrupts flow, dude,” she complained on a couple of occasions but making the movie eventually did inspire her. Indeed, it compelled us all to action, to express ourselves as best we could, and to make extraordinary requests of each other and the people we met, which also facilitated field research.

As we gathered the footage which became "Our Holocaust Vacation", we unearthed insights, facts, and documents crucial to our family history, history in general and, I have come to believe, hard science. Some of our discoveries we could not find a place for in the film; some we did not recognize until after the film was finished; others were immediately obvious.

When Antoni Róg, the mayor of Mszana Dolna, a town in southern Poland, gave us a handwritten list bearing over eight hundred names, including those of my grandmother Miriam, my aunt Irena, and my uncle Salek, my mother cried out — a loud, uncontrollable gasp.

Walking into Birkenau’s main building, the one with the train tracks running through it, that warm night in August, barely lit by a crescent moon, I had little idea what to expect. The sleepy guard waved us through nonchalantly, my brother, my daughter, then myself, but I flashed I was frog-marching them into the actual death camp. As we stepped out of the main building, the camp’s rows of long, low barracks faded into the dark ominously, to say the least.

We could get jumped by Polish skinheads was my first thought, so I snapped open my pocketknife and grabbed my daughter’s hand, to reassure her but also keep her close. We started fifty yards from the main building, my daughter peering through a barbed-wire fence, me raking her with a battery-powered light, my brother filming what we thought could become a provocative cutaway or an artistic montage.

Gradually growing accustomed, we wandered among the barracks, entered one and asked my daughter to climb onto the top of a two-tiered, rough-hewn bunk. When she obliged and I closed the barn-like door, so my brother could film it opening to reveal her on that tear-stained wood, I felt I was locking her in a charnel house. Those few seconds of pitch-black darkness and thick, musty smell were enough to last us both a lifetime.

We soldiered on, filmmakers fulfilling their shot list. Next up: the crematoria, a half-mile back into the bowels of Birkenau and far beyond the guard’s earshot. We walked in silence, my brother and daughter undoubtedly as fraught as me. When we filmed her sitting in the rubble of the destroyed gas chamber, looking around, staring blankly, I assumed I was scarring her for life.

Irena Blair, in a scene from 'Our Holocaust Vacation', filmed at in Birkenau. photo: N. Blair

Hiking back to the main building, however, I had time to reflect. Polish hooligans, good Catholics all, would probably be reluctant to enter Birkenau during the day and more so at night. On two earlier visits, I had seen almost no vandalism or graffiti. The ghosts they would fear were our relatives, I realized, and, while they might have cause for alarm, we didn’t. If spirits exist, I rationalized, they would know we were here to honor them; if they didn’t, we were just paying our respects, regardless of the hour.

In that light, Birkenau came to feel like my place, a Jewish place, a good place to contemplate life and love as well as death and the destruction of civilization, especially in the quiet of the night.

Returning to my worries about my daughter, I hoped she would come to appreciate this adventure as a way to engage the ineffable, the extreme, the totally terrorizing. Growing up in the 1960s, I learned only a vague outline of the Holocaust from my mother and eavesdropping on adult conversations and nothing from the largely Jewish, private high school I attended, which left a massive, mysterious wound. The reverse would be healthier for my daughter, I hoped.

“The trip helped me to feel close to my family, my dead one, and my alive one,” my daughter said about a week later, in an on-camera interview. Years later, she talked about that night specifically, “I felt something, a presence, but I wasn’t afraid. They were family, and I was with you and Uncle.”

Walking back from the crematoria, I also envisioned a white-domed building across the road from Birkenau or perhaps from Auschwitz, Birkenau’s work camp, which is a mile away and houses the museum and visitors’ center. Such a building, with a large, white and unadorned hall, would be a good place for post-camp contemplation or prayer, or meetings of ecumenical or world leaders. Even if it didn’t become an icon of world peace, such a building would be an appropriate architectural response to all that gray barbed wire, barracks, and ash.

My own Holocaust studies had started fourteen years earlier with an actual vision, one of the few of my life. Until that time, which was when I was almost thirty, I had not read a single book, not even Anne Frank’s diary, nor had I viewed many movies, although I did feel informed enough to speak on the subject and would sometimes harangue people mercilessly. The Holocaust was a vast kingdom of crime, which killed almost half my family, severely injured my mother, and bequeathed me a sense of suffering but, aside from its burdensomeness, concerned me little.

Hence my surprise when I was meditating one sunny afternoon and saw, in the corner of my mind, what seemed like an electrical storm but with black lightning instead of white. What could that be? I wondered. “Your relatives,” a voice inside of me said.

Within days, I was driving to the Holocaust Library of Northern California, on 14th Avenue in San Francisco, and within months to Washington, D.C. with my family to attend an international gathering of 20,000 survivors in April 1983. For about a decade, my family became a de facto Holocaust study group fed by the avalanche of books and films, which started around 1980, many of which we saw together or read in tandem. Once, when driving around with my family and a high school chum, Stephen White, he exclaimed, “Is that all you ever talk about, the Holocaust?”

Sketch of a Contemplation Building proposed for the Auschwitz camp in Poland by Doniphan Blair. Illo: D. Blair

My mother joined a group of child survivors and grew comfortable recounting her experiences. I got involved with children of survivors and began collecting books: scholarly, bestseller, vanity, anything I could lay my hands on. Reading or talking about the Holocaust was comforting, oddly enough, a welcome relief from the anger and tension, which I only just realized I had been keeping concealed and bottled up.

But thinking about it is one thing and being there another. Flying to Poland on my first trip, a year before we made the movie, I had a moment of panic. What if being in Auschwitz is categorically different from hearing about it from my mother or reading about it or seeing it in a movie?

Poland is both a normal nation — vibrant, ever-striving, recently right-wing-veering — and one big graveyard. In addition to Birkenau, there were five more German death camps, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, Bełżec, and Sobibor, hundreds of “regular” camps and thousands of a “small” mass graves. Pull off the road almost anywhere in Poland, throw a stone and you will probably hit a memorial to one. Touring those sites can be depressing, panic attack-triggering, a shamanic death ritual even, even for a typical tourist, whom you will sometimes see sitting in the shade of a camp structure, sobbing uncontrollably while a guide pats their back.

To avoid such ignominy, young Israelis often perform their Auschwitz pilgrimage draped in their national flag. The sight of them, almost always men, running through the camp, blue-and-white capes fluttering across the gray, while a group of Christians prays loudly next to the main building, say, is striking, totemic, almost sacramental.

The Holocaust was history’s biggest forbidden experiment I came to believe. Hence, within all that brutality, destruction, and death, something meaningful had to be hidden which might serve as a modest recompense, something more profound than “Never again” or “Make love not war.” But am I smart or strong enough to uncover or endure those terrible truths, I worried until that night in Birkenau, walking with my brother and daughter.

It was 4:30 in the morning by the time we got back to the small hotel on the outskirts of Oświęcim, the Polish village for which Auschwitz is the Germanized name. My father, mother, and sister-in-law were still up, I was surprised to find, the women in states of high anxiety. It’s not easy to sleep, evidently, when your son, granddaughter, or husband is wandering around a death camp in the middle of the night.

We rose early and boarded a train west, following the same route my mother did in late September 1944. Next stop: Freiberg, a university town near the medieval, eastern German city of Dresden where she was a slave laborer in an airplane factory. In the hotel room the next morning, I took out a scissors, needles, a spool of thread, and a piece of yellow cloth.

“What are those for?” asked my sister-in-law.

“First, we’ll sew six stars, one for each of us and for one each of the six million,” I said, stating the obvious. “I got the measurements from an actual star at Berkeley’s Jewish Museum,” I added by way of explanation before dropping the bombshell. “Then we’ll put them on and walk through Freiberg,” which took my sister-in-law visibly aback.

Some of the Blairs wearing Jewish start, in a performance piece for the film 'Our Holocaust Vacation' in Freiberg, Germany. photo: N. Blair

The family enjoyed cutting and sewing the stars, an arts-and-crafts break from their death camp tour. But wearing them while walking around Germany would be a challenge for anyone, and springing it unannounced to get their unadulterated reaction naturally increased stress. My sister-in-law feared not only being attacked by neo-Nazis, of whom there were many in eastern Germany — one of their main towns, Chemnitz, was twenty miles away — but simply strangers staring. My daughter didn’t like being told what to do or wear, especially by her father and a large religious icon. When my father weighed in with, “It seems like a civics lesson for the people of Freiberg,” we were in a full-blown family argument.

My daughter and sister-in-law were just being themselves, of course, exactly as I had recommended on the plane to Poland. But my brother and I were, too, since we really wanted that shot. My brother would be filming, leaving five of us, but that was how the inmates were marched, five abreast. Indeed, the family walking with stars would nicely illustrate how my mother and 250 fellow slave laborers were marched twice a day between the barracks at the edge of Freiberg and the airplane factory near its center. We argued for almost two hours, my brother filming throughout until he handed me the camera, entered the scene, and attempted to convince my daughter to don her star.

“The Argument” and “The Walking with Stars” scenes were hard days on the "Our Holocaust Vacation" shoot. Months later, they became a nightmare for my brother who edited the film. Nevertheless, after many rough cuts, he fashioned a portrait of a family dealing with a difficult disagreement, ever so slightly like what so many families endured during the war. The two scenes even combined into what could have been a poignant climax if rain hadn’t compelled us to put away our camera.

About halfway through the walk, with just my mother, my father, my brother, and me wearing our stars, the socked-in skies over Freiberg began to sprinkle. As the drops grew, we sought shelter in a covered area near the road which happened to be in a graveyard. It also happened to be Sunday. As we carried on arguing, Germans darted through the drizzle or walked slowly with umbrellas, bearing bouquets of flowers to pay respects to their dead, undoubtedly including some Nazis.

“Please put on your star,” my brother begged his wife as an older couple walked by shooting him an admonitory glance, “Just one quick shot — please!”

“It would not be true to myself or to the movie,” my sister-in-law said, fighting back tears. “It would not be right because of my fears and the fact that I’m not Jewish. But I will keep walking with you in solidarity with the women — and with you!”

My father, also not Jewish, stood by silently, stoically, chagrined at the spectacle of a public argument, in a graveyard no less. But he continued to wear his star and accept his family’s and the movie’s unique needs. Somewhere in there, my daughter put on her star, using a safety pin. When the rain stopped and we resumed walking and filming, she took my hand, which became the scene’s last shot.

My mother wore her star without complaint, although she, too, expressed fears of neo-Nazis. She was probably comforted by having three six-foot-plus men in attendance, but she was also dedicated to making the movie. Indeed, she readily followed our more difficult directions, like lying down on a sidewalk in Lodz to show how she had been kicked down by a German soldier, or again in Birkenau to show how she spent a night on the ground, naked, in a pile of bodies. She said nothing about following our directions, however, to her daughter-in-law or granddaughter.

Stationmaster Antonin Pavlick (left, 1892-1960) and restauranteur Antonin Wirth (rt, 1901-1976), who defied the Nazis to feed Jewish inmates in April, 1945, in Pilsen, Czech Republic. photos: courtesy Wirth Family

For me, wearing a Jewish star in Germany brought it to life. Instead of the large stone or wooden Stars of David in synagogues or the small gold ones worn around the neck, that yellow cloth star became my star. I wore it until we left Germany two days later and would have liked to have continued, given the reactions of the Germans.

Walking in downtown Freiberg, a parked car appeared to be an aquarium full of tropical fish until they morphed into teenagers, crawling over each other to see the guy wearing a Jewish star. A large garden restaurant became a human sea after I passed through, waves of people popping up their heads to stare or comment furtively. I was mollified the next day, however, by a burly, working-class guy who walked out of a bar, noticed me and my star, looked me in the eye, and nodded slowly.

The day after “The Walking with Stars” scene, we filmed my mother in the basement of the ruined factory where she once worked. She told us about the air gun she used to put rivets into the wings of fighter planes, the loud and dusty conditions, her “master,” a decent German with a glass eye, and the Dutch “free” forced laborer who rolled her an apple across the factory floor, the first fruit she tasted in years. But the highlight was the pilot.

Romance and sex are not discussed much in the context of the Holocaust, especially that involving Germans. “We don’t support films about fraternizing with the enemy,” I was informed by the man from a Jewish funding group when I mentioned that chapter of my mother’s story.

But romantic issues are often of interest to young women, and my mother’s teenage years correspond almost exactly to World War II. She had already told us many anecdotes: going to the ghetto cemetery with boys, or with girls to talk about boys; the parents of one boy serving them a meager meal but with candles and a dessert flavored with coffee grinds, so they could experience a date once in their lives; meeting a young man named Stefan in the cattle cars, as the Lodz ghetto was being liquidated, and falling in love on the way to Auschwitz.

The Stefan story, which my mother told for the film as we rode in a regular train from Lodz to Oświęcim, was surreal, romantic, heartrending. But it was eclipsed by the pilot story.

“His work station was about thirty yards away,” my mother recalls in the film, her voice softening. He was about twenty years old, a member of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, and his training apparently included a few weeks working on airplanes.

A day or two after the pilot arrived, my mother continues, he called out to her master, “Send her over because something fell into the wing,” which he could not reach with his large hands. Soon the pilot was becoming quite clumsy and calling for my mother often, almost daily, and flirting, discreetly.

“Hey, what a wonderful war, isn’t it a great war?” he exclaimed one time, my mother recounts in the film. “‘Everyone is burned, burned — your mother, your father, your sister, your brother! Isn’t it a wonderful war?’ He didn’t talk so loud. He was looking away from me.”

“He even did a little dance,” she added off-camera, moving her feet and grinning at the absurdity. How else do you come on to a Jewish hottie in a concentration camp, I thought. “I had a crush on him,” she told us, in another interview.

The pilot brought her a gift once, which he hid in one of their dropped-tool spots: silk stockings. Utterly useless, since you cannot eat them, concentration camp inmates do not wear them, and discovery could mean death, silk stockings were the most romantic present a young man could give a young woman at that time. Evidently, the pilot wanted my mother to know exactly how he felt.

Good Samaritans bring food to starving Jewish inmates, Pilsen, Czech Republic, April, 1945. illo: D. Blair

Then there was the extra-long air raid. Instead of scurrying down to the basement bomb shelter with the other Germans, the pilot hid and joined my mother at the large factory window. They embraced, him holding her gently from behind, no kissing, although embracing was still a crime punishable by death, my mother notes in the film. Out the window, they were entertained by a fantastic pyrotechnical display: an entire city on fire. It was February 13th, 1945. Fifty miles away the American and British air forces were firebombing Dresden to hell.

“I feel very sad now,” my mother whispers in the film, “I feel like crying. I don’t know if it is for the lost time, the lost youth, for the pilot.” It was the only time on our twenty-two-day trip my mother cracked a tear.

I had heard the pilot story a few times before but hardly at this level of detail or emotion. Why would recalling the pilot be more moving than last seeing her family? I wondered, or standing naked in Birkenau, being poked with a stick by Mengele, or being beaten by the Unterscharfuhrer, Freiberg’s commanding officer? As usual, it took me a few years to figure out.

Survivors generally attribute their emergence from the maelstrom to luck, influenced to a degree by the determination needed to withstand such a dog-eat-dog world. The more I examined my mother’s experience, however, as a timid teenager afraid to speak up, let alone struggle for every scrap of food or spot on line, the more I saw something else. Her survival seemed to be about romantic dreams, both hers and those helping her, not only young men but often enough.

My mother was part of a cohort of young adults, the reproductive remnant of Lodz’s 130-year-old Jewish community, which the leader of the ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, swore he would do anything to preserve. While he directed his Jewish police to brutally suppress dissent, to rip children from their parents’ arms, and to drive the elderly under blows to the deportation trains, he strove mightily to keep alive the teenagers and twenty-somethings until the end of August 1944 when the Lodz ghetto, the last of the Nazis’ large ghettos, was liquidated.

My mother sat on Rumkowski’s lap once, a troubling image, since he ran an orphanage before the war and was a known pedophile. As the youngest nurse on the hospital ward he was visiting, and rather comely, my mother must have been a picture of innocence and beauty amidst the annihilation of the Jewish people.

And that became her survival strategy. My mother and her girlfriends would finger-comb their hair and pinch their cheeks to make them rosy. In the camps, she folded and slept on her tattered dress to make it appear ironed; she sacrificed an occasional cup of watery, ersatz coffee to wash her face; and she fashioned a bra from a strip of cloth to hold her ample bosom, maintaining not just her dignity but her femaleness.

The pilot’s recognition of my mother not only as a human being but a woman worthy of ironic banter across their gulf in status and under the threat of death obviously touched her deeply. Perhaps the pilot proved love would survive the Holocaust, even among the perpetrators, and that she was worthy of it, even from a perpetrator. Perhaps returning to the airplane factory with her beloved husband, children, grandchild, and daughter-in-law honored the romantic quest the pilot had so valiantly kept aloft.

The next day, we boarded a train south to Pilsen, Czech Republic, home to the famous beer, where my mother’s cattle car had been sidetracked for three days near the end of the war. Jammed one on top of each other with no food or water, the one thousand women started to whimper, call out, expire.

After one night of such sepulchral lament, the stationmaster, Antonin Pavlicek, decided he had to do something. Enlisting a friend who owned a nearby restaurant, they gathered ingredients and assistants and cooked about a ton of soup and bread.

The family with the good Samaritans and their family members, (lf-rt) Vachel Blair, Yarka Sourkova, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, Jiri Sourkova, Vera, Vera's husband, Nick Blair, Irena Blair and Tania Prybylski-Blair, at the memorial to the Jewish women who died in the Pilsen train yard. photo: D. Blair

“It was the most wonderful food I ever ate in my life,” my mother told the mayor of Pilsen, Vdenék Prosek, as she presented him the first loaf in our performance piece, “The Bread Giveaway.”

My mother liked to tell my brother and me about the occasional positive events during the war, so I had heard this story many times. Indeed, when I was around thirteen, I remember thinking, I have to go to Pilsen someday and hand out soup and bread.

Soup seemed unwieldy so I got Roman, the lovely man helping us from the Pilsen-America Foundation, to recommend a bakery. There I ordered 225 loaves of bread packaged with a note which honored the Czechs and included a drawing of them handing out the food. We advertised “The Bread Giveaway” in local newspapers and on the radio, adding an appeal for information about the good Samaritans. Two showed up, Yarka Sourkova, whose father, Antonin Wirth, owned the restaurant, and Vera, her best friend since high school, who had also helped deliver the food.

“The Bread Giveaway” became the moment of reprieve all Holocaust films should feature at least once. My sister-in-law joined in joyfully, smiling at strangers and giving them bread. My daughter began a mad handing out of loaves with a “Thank you very much,” for which she learned the Czech, to all passersby. My mother talked openly and at length with the mayor, the people of Pilsen, of whom there were about a hundred, and the dozen reporters, mostly local but a few national.

“They gave me more than bread,” my mother told a woman radio reporter, “They gave me the spirit and the hope. Maybe there is still goodness in life, maybe there are other good people — not only evil and bad.”

The next day, Yarka, and her son, Jiri, who owned a van, took us all to the train yards on the outskirts of Pilsen. As Yarka recounted her experience of the event and we visited a memorial to the women who died during those three days, the fun faded from “The Bread Giveaway.” While the pilot was a daring, young man acting romantically in secret, the Czechs were average citizens expressing goodwill in public. Why they risked their lives during a total war when millions did nothing and thousands were shot for much less perplexed me. Yet, here they were: Yarka and Vera.

As Yarka and Vera became comprehensible, the Germans who permitted the food delivery turned unfathomable. Pavlicek and Wirth had bribed the officers with bottles of cognac, but is that all it took to interrupt the Holocaust? The soldiers at the train had stopped the kids pushing the wheelbarrows but insisted that they themselves would feed the starving women. Not believing them, Pavlicek stood his ground. From inside the cattle car, my mother was amazed to hear Pavlicek arguing with the Germans, given how they had cowed so many people for so long. Finally relenting, the soldiers slid open the cattle car’s large doors and Yarka, Vera, and their friends threaded their way in, passing out bowls of warm soup and chunks of fresh bread to all one thousand women.

This confused me. I had assumed the Nazis would want to win their war against the Jews at all cost, given they had already besmirched the German name with so many atrocities and lost the war on its two other fronts. If allowed to live, one thousand Jewish women could obviously birth a Jewish town. There was also the obvious evolutionary fact that if you subject people to such brutal treatment but keep selecting the healthiest among them, who go on to survive and reproduce, you will have bred a super-Jew. Instead of allowing the Jewish women a life-sustaining meal, why didn’t the Germans set up machine guns, drive them to the middle of the train yard and mow them down? This absence of bloodlust amid so much mass murder became my main Holocaust mystery for a few years until I finally heard, echoing down the generations, what the pilot was trying to tell me.

Germans are famous record keepers. In the course of six years of totalitarian rule and two years of total war, the Nazis researched mass murder and became its experts. Starting with machine guns and ditches, they soon graduated to “gas trucks,” which piped engine exhaust into the rear compartment, and in 1941 reached their masterpiece, the gas chamber. Using Zyklon-B gas, they could kill up to a thousand people in about fifteen minutes, disposing of the corpses conveniently in the nearby crematoria. Linked to rail lines and using slave labor, such industrialized slaughter not only saved time, money, and manpower, it solved a little known snag in their scheme to exterminate the Jews.

Tonia Rotkopf Blair, as a nurse taking care of children in Laganetska Hospital, Lodz, Poland, circa 1944. photo: Henryk Ross, Lodz Department of Statistics

It is not that hard to convince young men, particularly those indoctrinated since childhood in the Hitler Youth, to kill old people: simply explain that they are members of an “illegal group” and “useless eaters” and give the order. Nor was it that much more difficult to get such young men to murder middle-aged women if they had been starved and stripped of all dignity. Middle-aged or young men, meanwhile, could be enemy combatants, the slaughter of whom no explanation was necessary, while children would suffer grievously under total war conditions and may as well be put out of their misery.

It is hard, very hard, however, to get young men to murder young women, even “enemy women,” especially if they are good or innocent looking, qualities which carry special premiums on putrid battlefields. The proximity of so much death, in fact, increases opportunities to save life or foster grace if only occasionally or momentarily, which means wars are awash in inchoate dreams, especially among unconsummated youth. As it happens, the first poets of Europe’s powerful Romantic Movement were German. While their ideas were perverted by Wagner, Hitler, and others, their romantic ideals were not so easily obfuscated.

Indeed, when ordered to murder young women, many young German men would have preferred to flirt, fornicate, even marry. “Battlefield marriages” transpire surprisingly often in war but are rarely reported due to taboos against breaking tribal rank. Such unions happened in the camps, in a few instances, and in the ghettos but more so in hiding or on the death marches, where Jewish women were more accessible.

“A German from the factory who was in love with [a] girl had followed our column, and under the cover of darkness had snatched her quietly away,” Gerda Weissmann Klein writes in All But My Life (1957). Despite being beaten, Klein and her fellow death marchers did not divulge how that couple — the grandma and grandpa of what is probably now a large clan — got together and escaped. Whether that couple even told their own children is doubtful, the stigma being so severe.

Some of my mother’s guards were also susceptible to bouts of romanticism. Whenever you have a thousand young women in one place, some are bound to be pregnant and a few coming to term, as was the case in the Pilsen train yards. Within minutes of meeting Yarka in the town square, she blurted out one of her fondest memories from that time: a baby girl was born in a cattle car, completely healthy, a story my mother also told. Birth is a vivid symbol of life, especially in a land drowning in death, and even the German guards, especially the women, were not immune to its appeal. Indeed, they laughed and shouted the good news to their comrades.

After the war, my mother crossed the ruins of Eastern Europe, sometimes hitchhiking, and was not raped by Russian soldiers, who were notorious for that atrocity. Raping enemy women is a well-known spoil of war, considered fun by many soldiers, but raping victim women is not.

The German women suffered immeasurably, especially the young and good-looking, some enduring multiple attacks daily for weeks, even months, which is almost unimaginably traumatizing. Nevertheless, in an article in Germany’s Stern magazine around 1995, a German woman, who had been raped and impregnated by a Russian, said something like, “After so much death, I was happy to have a child and new life.”

As critical as killing is to war, particularly a war of attrition like World War II or a genocide like the Holocaust, some respect for life must be retained simply for societies to operate. After a war, humanity re-emerges, not in everyone — the sadists and suicides are legion — but a sufficient majority. While the eliminationist strategy of the Nazis suggested a massacre would be mandatory at Pilsen, the officers knew full well that if they forced their soldiers to pierce those Jewish women full of holes, until their blood ran like a river in that train yard, it could destroy their ability to become the healthy husbands, fathers, and citizens Germany would need for its own rebirth.

Tonia Blair during her first return to Auschwitz/Birkenau, with her husband in 1980. photo: Vachel Blair

The gas chamber was invented, therefore, to serve as a prophylactic, to protect the butcher from the abattoir, a distancing needed most by young men forced to murder young women. Hence, even during the German army’s chaotic collapse at the end of the war, as they raced troop trains full of adolescent and elderly conscripts into the maw of the Soviet and Western Allies’ armies, they were desperately trying to ship one thousand Jewish women 250 miles from Freiberg, Germany, to Linz, Austria, where Mauthausen concentration camp was still operating a single, small gas chamber.

Over the years, the good Samaritans of Pilsen expanded in my mind from a seemingly random miracle to something natural, inspired by human nature and achieved by regular people. Even the German soldiers who allowed the Jewish women to be fed crossed over to my column marked “good.” When this happened, I found the redemptive morsel for which I had long been searching. To my surprise, it involved Darwinism, a concept often bandied about by Nazis.

Indeed, Darwin’s theory of evolution was the main modern idea the Nazis used to rationalize their conquest of vast swaths of territory, their murder of millions of people, and their extermination of the Jews. After a decade of reading their references, it dawned on me I should review Darwin myself, and I located a used copy of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in a dilapidated bookstore in Oakland, California. First published in 1859, my reprint was from 1941, the first year of the Holocaust, suggesting the publisher had come to the same conclusion I had. On the Origin of Species can be overwhelming in its detail, but my edition also included Darwin’s second treatise, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), so when I got bogged down in the former, I skipped ahead to the latter.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection concerns killing or its avoidance and how excelling at those tasks drives evolution. Often simplified as “survival of the fittest,” it simply means the obvious truism: successful things tend to continue. In this case, successful individuals, genes, or groups (geneticists differ on exactly which or in what combination) pass beneficial traits to their descendants using the mechanism of D.N.A., which was discovered a century after Darwin, but more importantly through sex.

Sex has been recognized as central to the life cycle since prehistoric times, but Darwin elevated it to evolution’s second principle, sexual selection. From choosing a mate, hence the name, to copulation and nurturing offspring, until they are mature enough to repeat the process, sexual selection governs reproduction.

But “evolution is natural selection,” nothing more or less, according to Richard Dawkins, one of the premier evolutionary theorists of our day, in the opening pages of his bestseller, The Selfish Gene (1976). Of special interest to Dawkins is how natural selection drives altruism, notably a mother’s dedication to her children, which appears to contradict the survival principle. Nonetheless, he waits until the end of his book to mention Darwin’s second theory and then only in passing. This is because evolutionary theorists classify sexual selection as a subset of natural selection, even though they will occasionally note that success in the latter is irrelevant without accomplishment in the former. Indeed, no matter how successful or domineering an individual or group may be, if it doesn’t pass its D.N.A. to the next generation, it is nothing, evolutionarily speaking.

Evolution is one of the top two or three theorems of all science, yet its details are still being discovered and disputed, and not just by religious fundamentalists. Darwin waited decades to publish On the Origin of Species, until the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace corroborated his findings, to avoid committing a catastrophic scientific error or irresponsibly injuring the Christian sensibilities of his beloved wife, Emma. He waited another twelve years to publish The Descent of Man and held off to its last chapters — probably further than most Nazis read — to mention how completely sexual selection affects human romance, marriage, and birth.

Epigenetics, a field identified by geneticists in the 1940s, but which came of age in the 1990s, covers how genes turn on and off in response to the environment. This recalls the discredited theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, circa 1800, who postulated that giraffes got their long necks by stretching to eat leaves higher in the trees and passed that trait to their offspring. Food scarcity would be an epigenetic trigger and giraffe necks obviously evolved due to environmental pressures, but could there be another factor? What if giraffes were sexually attracted to Modigliani-like necks?

Tonia and Doniphan at the memorial for the 960 buried in a mass grave in Mzsana Dolna, Poland, where are also buried Tonia mother Miriam, sister Irena and brother Salek, in 1997. photo: Vachel Blair

Evolution’s big picture becomes clear when we look at the peacock, as Darwin does in The Descent of Man. While the peahen is little more than an overgrown pigeon, her mate is endowed with the animal kingdom’s most regal tail. Classified as a secondary sexual characteristic, its fantastic size and colors evolved over the eons by virtue of the peahen’s preference for fancy feathers, which turns out to be surprisingly strong. When the two peahens Darwin was observing were moved to a new farm and abstained from mating with the new farm’s peacocks, he was shocked. Why would a healthy female forgo reproduction for one entire season? Doesn’t that contradict natural selection?

Moreover, why would peacocks even have such exaggerated tails? It makes them easier to hunt by inhibiting escape through flight, for which show feathers are not suited, or on the ground, where they provide a convenient handle for grabbing. Darwin discovered, documented, and believed in sexual selection, which Wallace rejected out of hand, but he failed to fathom its full power.

In fact, having an enormous, psychedelic tail is a fantastic asset for both the peacocks, since the peahens like it, and the peahens themselves. Indeed, such a tail makes it easier for her to evaluate his health and age at a distance, without risking unwanted attention, and to decide whether to fornicate or flee. Since Darwin’s peahens preferred the cocks at their former farm, they hid at the new farm, leaving the new cocks to less discerning hens. The survival cost of fancy feathers is more than offset by the evolutionary benefits of choosey sexual selection at which peahens came to excel, probably more than any species on earth — except humans. We, too, are obsessed with beauty, reproduction, and romance, sometimes to the detriment of simple survival, as the pilot proved with his gift of silk stockings.

World War II, I came to believe, was a referendum on Darwinism and not simply which side was stronger. The fact that the Nazis proclaimed themselves determined Darwinists but didn’t force their soldiers to finish off my mother, or every last Jewish woman they had in their clutches, even though a rudimentary understanding of evolution indicates they must, means that they, too, realized sexual selection beats natural selection over the long term.

Aside from contradicting Dawkins and most neo-Darwinists, sexual selection’s supremacy has implications across many fields and arguments, notably the nurture- nature dialectic, which is the modern version of fate versus free will. Nurture-nature has become even more involved of late, given spectacular developments in genome sequencing, gene splicing, twin studies, gender identification, and more, all of which have produced oodles of data. Nevertheless, as many evolutionary theorists have noted, genetics proposes and the environment — or epigenetics or, when it comes to humans, culture — disposes. In this light, Darwinism will need a new summary, “evolution is natural and sexual selection,” or perhaps even “survival of the lovingest.”

My grandparents loved each other and their children dearly. My mother reveled in their love and observed similar in her community, read about it in literature and saw it on the silver screen, which provided a certain psychological stability and helped her to become a romantic Polish beauty as well as to survive the war. Despite the horror of the Holocaust and the harshness of its legacy, my mother was very loving to my brother and me, noticeably more than many of my friends’ mothers were to them.

Conversely, almost all major Nazis — Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and those are only the Hs — were brutalized by their fathers whom they came to hate, consciously or subconsciously, and felt abandoned by their mothers, who failed to protect them, a critical point pioneered by Alice Miller in For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1983). Growing up with Jewish neighbors, classmates, or even friends, as most Germans did in the early twentieth century, they could easily compare their own brutal upbringings to life in more loving families. This absence-of-affection trauma also pertains to many depressed or easy-to-anger people with seemingly decent parents or from privileged backgrounds who, nonetheless, feel they were not loved enough.

After about a decade accruing my findings, I outlined them to my mother. She laughed in my face. “What are you now, a Ph.D. in evolution?” she quipped.

While my mother remained a romantic — indeed, late in life, she wrote this collection of poignant and tragic but still-believing-in-love stories — she also became quite snarky. She would often crack wise or take the piss out of people, which could put off acquaintances, friends, even family members, especially grandchildren. Generations of Jews had used dark humor to maintain their wits in the face of the unspeakable, I would try to explain. In fact, that was the style of her “camp boyfriend,” the pilot; and now she had enough power and status to fully enjoy such kidding around. It was a healthy antidote, I concluded, to her childhood as the quiet sibling of an outgoing older sister, her teenage years under the Nazi jackboot, and her marriage to a tall, garrulous, and gentile American.

As if those three factors were not enough, my mother worked for almost three decades as the secretary for Harvey Hornstein, a nationally known social organizational psychologist, at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Hornstein specialized in psychological violence in the workplace and authored a number of books on the subject, notably Brutal Bosses (1996). As it happened, Hornstein himself was a brutal boss who would demean, criticize, or verbally attack my mother, sometimes on a weekly or even daily basis. She didn’t mention this at home, however, for the obvious reason that one, two, or all three of her immediate relatives would have immediately marched to her office and confronted Hornstein. Rather, she learned how to stand up to him in her own way, contradicting him as needed, or enjoying a good laugh at his expense with her co-workers.

Doniphan and mother Tonia in front of the stairs to her family's one room apartment in Lodz, Poland. photo: N. Blair

The last day of the "Our Holocaust Vacation" shoot found us in the foothills of the Austrian Alps, among the massive stone walls and buildings of Mauthausen concentration camp, which is where my mother was liberated by the Americans on May 5th, 1945. The weather was dark and rainy, but our mood was light. After filming one last, heartfelt testimonial, which my mother dutifully delivered, we repaired to a restaurant in the nearby town to enjoy a delicious meal and our favorite discussion, now featuring the insights of my sixteen-year-old daughter. She even took on her grandfather in the classic Holocaust studies debate, “Did the Nazis know they were being evil, or was genocide part of their morality?”, advocating for the latter. Kvelling at her granddaughter’s newfound knowledge, my mother looked on admiringly while enjoying a thick slice of warm strudel.

The film concludes with the sexual selection that inevitably follows natural selection: my mother’s journey halfway around the world to New York City where she met and fell in love with my father. A few nights after we finished shooting, something related transpired between my brother and sister-in-law. While enjoying a belated honeymoon in Budapest, Hungary, where my sister-in-law’s mother grew up, they conceived a son. They named him Stefan, for the young man my mother fell in love with on the train to Auschwitz.

The efforts of Stefan, the pilot, the Czech good Samaritans, my mother, and many others may seem small in the ocean of atrocity that was the Holocaust, but it was enough to keep the spirit of love alive. Slow to react, gather allies, and marshal its forces, love and sexual selection only beat hate and natural selection gradually, over time, person by person. But triumph they inevitably do as indicated by the survival of kindness and the fecundity of life.

“Some good things came from the Holocaust,” I told my mother once, during a phone call around 1995.

“Like what?” she demanded.

“Without the Holocaust, you probably would have continued to live in Poland and would not have come to the United States and met my father,” I explained.

“So what?” she retorted, “You would have still been your father’s son.”

Alas, that is not how the universe, not to mention sexual selection, reproduction, or love, work.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Nov 10, 2021 - 06:25 PM