Dreaming the Holocaust

There’s nothing like Holocaust dreams to ensure uneasy slumber. I know a recent graduate who wrote her senior thesis on art by Holocaust survivors. She interviewed several. Like most seniors, she was extremely relieved when she turned in the paper, but mostly because its completion promised an end to the Holocaust nightmares it had brought on — frequent, vivid and horrific.

One recent restless night, I was at a train station in the middle of blackened Europe, with my family, hiding out. The platforms on either side of the tracks were lined with storage rooms, about 8′ x 8′, and my family was in one of them. It was cold. My father was elsewhere, trying to get information that would keep us safe. The Nazis were expected any moment – including Hitler himself – they were going to inspect the rooms one by one. The door was locked. The inspectors hadn’t arrived yet, but in my dream, I envisioned the knob rattling from the outside and a gruff decision being made to return to our door at the end of the rounds. I also envisioned guns raised, prepped to pepper the wooden door with bullets sure to kill everything and everyone inside. Coal-darkened, shivering, anxious, I decided to leave the cell in search of my father…

That’s all I remember, but I continued to drift in and out of sleep, dropping and picking up the thread of the story, whose remainder escapes me.

The only dream I can remember from childhood was a Holocaust-related nightmare. In my small attic room with pink-heart wallpaper and pink wall-to-wall carpeting, I woke up terrorized.

My recent dream was characterized more by nagging anxiety than by terror (perhaps because I was aware it was just a dream), but in the morning, I couldn’t for the life of me think what had brought it on. I’d watched Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds a few weeks prior, obviously the source of some of the dream’s imagery, but had there been a more recent trigger?

Back at work the next day, I continued working on a post for an international law blog that I’d started the previous evening. Aha. An Appeals Court in the U.S. rules that it does not have jurisdiction in a lawsuit brought against the Vatican Bank by Holocaust survivors. One trigger, which reminded me of others:

The previous day, a friend spoke about her Netflix-generated recommendation list, and how it had been permanently affected by a trip to Germany a while back, before which she had sought a quick history lesson from a range of WWII films.

I had also read in the New Yorker‘s Talk of the Town section a blurb on the failure to find an adequate name for the first decade of the 21st century. One quickly-discarded suggestion was ‘the era of 9/11.’ As typically happens when I read or hear mention of 9/11, an image of two planes striking two towers and flames and people jumping to their deaths flashes through my mind. Quickly followed by the thought of all the people who lost people, and all the people suffering from 9/11-related medical conditions. Then comes a very genuine disbelief: I can’t believe it actually happened. I can’t believe it actually happened here, during my lifetime. And another, which follows seamlessly: I can’t believe the Holocaust actually happened. Only 65 years ago. All this happens very quickly. And then it’s my stop and I get off the subway, and I haven’t finished reading the page-long article in the Talk of the Town, and I stop thinking about 9/11 and the Holocaust, but I guess my brain doesn’t.

So Inglourious Basterds aside, within the span of a normal average run-of-the-mill day, I’d thought about the Holocaust on three separate occasions, without even realizing consciously at the end of the day, that I’d thought about it at all. Maybe ‘Never Forget’ is implicit – you may forget, but your brain won’t.

But if dreams are what the PBS Nova documentary I recently watched say they are, during non-REM sleep, they’re an attempt to problem solve in one’s present/current waking life, and during REM sleep, they’re an attempt to problem solve in fictitious scenarios that you anticipate having to deal with in the future. Obviously the dreams need not be representational, but is another Holocaust really such a stretch? (Think 9/11, Iran, Al Qaeda). Was I practicing for what the future may bring?

A few words on Inglourious Basterds. I think all the Jews watching that film thought: 1. A Jew would never have made this movie. 2. But if feels kinda good to watch it.

I’ll add: 3. How do I get my Holocaust dreams to feel like that? 4. I bet some ridiculously ignorant people left that movie thinking that’s how it all went down.