Terezín

During a five dollar a minute phone conversation with my father the other night, I asked him if he had heard of Terezín, an eighteenth century fortress town turned into a prison/ghetto/concentration camp by the Nazis and just a short drive outside of Prague. He replied, “Of course I’ve heard of terrorism.” I laughed and corrected him, but once the conversation was over, I began to think: How far off from terrorism were the atrocities that occurred on the grounds of Terezín? Ever since our group left that town, I’ve had this strange weight in my brain knowing that what I saw was not a recreation. It was the home of tens of thousands of very real people, forced into terrible and unimaginably inhumane conditions for the extent of the entire Second World War. And for many, it was their final resting place. Growing up, I had seen the documentaries, listened to numerous interviews, and even heard Eli Weisel speak at the Fox Theatre in Saint Louis on surviving the Holocaust. But until Terezín, until I stepped foot onto the grounds myself and walked through the ghetto and stood inside those walls, the Holocaust was something terrible that happened far away in a foreign land. Being there made everything real for me, and by the end of the tour, I was emotionally exhausted and barely able to function.

We weren’t five minutes away from the town before big black storm clouds crawled across the sky and put a downpour on the countryside. It was about this time I began to think to myself: Who has the right to write a Holocaust story? Poet Stephen Dunn wrote in his creative essay, “Truth: A Memoir,” that stories which are not our own can easily be appropriated and subsequently altered as if they were. Essentially, that is the way of many fiction writers, but where do you draw the line? The world lost more than ten million people during the Holocaust. If a fictionalized account of a life in a concentration camp or a ghetto was released, how much credibility would readers give to it? The subject matter is most often reserved for non-fiction and memoirs told by survivors and close relatives of those who did not make it. I am not Jewish, I took no part in the tragedies of World War II, and neither did any of my family members; we were happily settled in America. So what right do I have to approach a Holocaust story? Isn’t the real thing compelling enough? I am aware that material of such sensitive nature is the easiest to get wrong, but I would like to use my writing as a way of paying respect. And the only way to ever truly answer my own questions is to gather up my courage (and my research) and try.