More Than a Survivor
By Deborah H. Sussman
The plaque in front of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
When I was 13 years old, I went with my parents and my twin brothers, who are two years younger than me, on a family vacation to Europe.
The trip was a kind of homecoming for my father, who was born in Berlin in 1928. We didn’t visit Berlin, but we did travel to Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp in northern Germany where he spent almost two years of his adolescence.
We also went to the Anne Frank House, in Amsterdam, the city in which my father and his parents were living when the Nazis sent them to Belsen. Thanks to Ecuadoran passports that my grandmother managed to procure just before the family was rounded up, my father and his parents were traded out of Belsen in January of 1945 for German prisoners of war. Anne Frank died there two months later.
My father’s parents were friendly with Anne Frank’s parents in Amsterdam. My father knew Anne, although only in passing—she was a year behind him at school. I have started her famous diary multiple times and been unable to go on. I glimpse my father in it, and I lose my father in it, and I can’t stand either.
At Belsen, where most of the structures had been burned to the ground after liberation, we walked past neatly mowed grassy expanses marked by headstones indicating mass graves. At Anne Frank’s house, I remember only the experience of being shown the Franks’ hiding space, a life behind a life.
“We stood before a glass case that contained artifacts from the concentration camp, including one battered red metal bowl. “I had a bowl like that,” he said flatly.”
What I don’t remember is my father’s reaction to either. I wish I had been paying attention to him and to what being in those places must have been like for him. But I was wrapped up in trying to understand, in both cases, what had happened there and how. It didn’t make sense to me, no matter how closely I looked at the bright green grass of Belsen or the faded wallpaper in Amsterdam.
My memory of going to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with my father almost 20 years later, shortly after the museum opened, is clearer.
Rational conversation was my father’s preferred modus operandi and his defense against the irrational; normally in a museum, especially one devoted to history, he would have been pointing things out and putting them in context, but he was uncharacteristically quiet. In this place, he was the subject. There was no way to explain it.
At the end of the tour we came to the room in the museum that displayed footage of camps being liberated, including Belsen. I felt my father next to me. I wanted to protect him but I knew I could not. We stood before a glass case that contained artifacts from the concentration camp, including one battered red metal bowl. Then we walked away.
“I had a bowl like that,” he said flatly.
Once, when I told a young woman that my father had gone to school with Anne Frank, her eyes got wide and she blurted out, “He was so lucky!”
When my father died, the rabbi who was to conduct the funeral service visited my parents’ home to learn about who my father was because he didn’t know him. (My father was religiously agnostic and didn’t belong to a synagogue.) We, the four remaining Sussmans, outlined my father’s life for the rabbi, told him in broad strokes about the kind of man and husband and father he was, about the many languages he spoke, the music he loved, about his work for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in the early 1960s.
We told the rabbi he did not want to be summed up as a survivor. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t talk about his experiences growing up, we explained; he’d written about them, and beautifully. It’s that they were only one part of who he was, and he didn’t want to be reduced to that. Yes, the rabbi said. He understood.
At the service, the rabbi said, “Peter Sussman did not want to be defined as a survivor.” He paused, then added, “But he was a survivor of that tragedy.”
“My father’s bar mitzvah took place in 1941, in a synagogue in Amsterdam defaced by anti-Semitic slogans and swastikas.”
The rabbi went on to talk about the remarkable Torah scroll sitting in the ark behind him, about how he had managed to acquire it from Eastern Europe for his synagogue, about how that Torah had survived the war, about how special and important it was because it had survived.
I sat in the front row, in my dark dress, holding my breath. It felt to me like my father’s life and death had become part of an advertisement.
Once, a few years before he died, my father was invited to attend a traveling exhibition about Anne Frank’s life at a museum in Denver, the city where he and my mother lived, and noticed some significant historical inaccuracies. He wrote to the organizers of the exhibition to correct the errors and explain why getting the facts right was so important. In return, he received a form letter asking for donations to support the group that had organized the exhibition.
My father’s bar mitzvah took place in 1941, in a synagogue in Amsterdam defaced by anti-Semitic slogans and swastikas.
My brothers and I didn’t have bar or bat mitzvahs; I made sure that my own daughter did. I did it for my father, and for myself. And I did it for my child, to link her to her grandfather, who died before she was born. I did it because shortly before his death, when my father was looking back at his life, he wondered aloud whether he’d given his children enough of a Jewish education—beyond an understanding of his experiences in the Holocaust.
My father believed life without children was incomplete. I wish he could have met his granddaughter, Anna Michael, who is named in his memory (his middle name was Michael). Like him, she is smart and funny, and deeply empathetic, with a keen sense of injustice. It’s been almost a decade since she stood before the congregation and recited her Torah portion, uttering the same Hebrew prayers my father would have in 1941; I am still nourished by how much I sensed my father with us in that moment and by the pride I know he would have felt, both as a Jew who survived Hitler and as a grandfather. It gave me hope that my daughter might be able to grasp who her grandfather was, both because of and in spite of what he went through.
“I want to go on living after my death,” Anne Frank wrote. And she does, in all the readers who are moved by the words in her diary, even today.
“I hold dear… the memory of how content my father was to be back in Holland and speaking Dutch again.”
For me, she also lives on as the bright girl who was a year behind my father at school in Amsterdam, a city that both Anne and my father, German Jews in exile, loved as their own, and as a gifted writer who should have had decades more to tell the world many other stories instead of being reduced to one.
Maybe it’s a shift in perspective afforded me by the experience of raising my own child, or just wisdom engendered by time. But today what I hold dear of that family vacation in Europe when I was 13—more than the visit to the concentration camp where my father was imprisoned and Anne Frank died—is the memory of how content my father was to be back in Holland and speaking Dutch again.
I recognize, after years of searching, that there are no answers in the blurry snapshots I took at Belsen. Instead what I focus on from that trip is the pleasure my father took in sharing the food of his childhood with his own children—chocolate sprinkles the Dutch call hagelslag, hard coffee candies known as hopjes, honey cake called ontbijtkoek, these lilting guttural words like pieces of an incantation with the power to open a door to my father’s life before the world knew him as a survivor.
Peter Sussman in Amsterdam, approximately 9 or 10 years old, before the Nazi invasion. “That bicycle,” he wrote in a letter to his own children, “gave me more pleasure and a greater sense of freedom than any car ever did in later years.”
Deborah H. Sussman is a writer and editor whose work has been published by The Washington Post and Art in America. Based in Tempe, Arizona, she has taught writing at the University of Virginia, Phoenix College and Arizona State University, and co-teaches the workshop Mothers Who Write through Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix.