Episode #9
Judy Batalion: Trauma Moves Through Generations — But So Does Strength
This episode is generously sponsored by Gail and Dennis Roth in loving memory of Gail's parents, Frances and Meyer Weisman who were both born in Czechoslovakia. Frances survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Meyer endured various hard labor camps. They were thrilled to arrive in New York in 1949, to begin a new life together. New York Times bestselling author Judy Batalion grew up in a house in Montreal that was filled to the brim: her mother and grandmother had suffered from compulsive hoarding. It could in part be attributed to years they spent as nomads, fleeing from the impact of the Holocaust. "One of the metaphoric poetic real reasons that I instinctively feel with my mother was that her stuff was security. It was safety. She literally formed barricades around her with stuff. She was holding on to something." In this conversation with Rabbi Jeff Salkin, Judy Batalion pieces together what she knows of her grandparents' survival and her mother's childhood. She also discusses her own lifelong anxiety along with her interpretation of her father's belief that anxious people were the ones who survived the Holocaust. As a young adult, Judy left home for Harvard and then London, deliberately escaping that landscape and building the opposite kind of life: minimalist, orderly, white-walled. She became an art historian working in the British museum world, as far from her family's history as she could get. Years later, she found herself writing three books about exactly the world she had left behind. Judy Batalion is a New York Times bestselling author of award-winning nonfiction and fiction. She is the author of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, for which Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners has optioned the film rights, and White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between, optioned by Warner Brothers for development as a television series titled Cluttered. Her latest novel, The Last Woman of Warsaw, is a story of friendship, love, and home set in Warsaw on the eve of World War II. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue, among other publications. She earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard and a PhD from the University of London, and has worked as a museum curator, a university lecturer, and a stand-up comic. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she grew up in Montreal and now lives in New York City with her husband and three children. Transcript: [00:00:08:02 - 00:00:19:11] This episode of To Be Continued is sponsored by Gail and Dennis Roth in loving memory of Gail's parents, Frances and Meyer Weisman who were both born in Czechoslovakia. [00:00:20:21 - 00:00:41:11] Frances survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Meyer endured various hard labor camps. They were thrilled to arrive in New York in 1949, to begin a new life together. Welcome to To Be Continued..., Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. [00:00:43:05 - 00:00:51:08] In this podcast, we explore how the Holocaust continues to shape the lives of the children and grandchildren of survivors. [00:00:52:26 - 00:01:10:03] Our conversations begin with stories of survival, but beyond those experiences to examine the profound impact the Holocaust has had on the generations that followed, their identities, their relationships, their choices, and their sense of responsibility. [00:01:11:17 - 00:01:16:26] Jewish tradition teaches us the importance of l'dor v'dor, from generation to generation. [00:01:18:10 - 00:01:26:20] Each generation receives a story, but also has the opportunity to interpret it and to give that story new meaning. [00:01:28:15 - 00:01:38:20] Through conversations with descendants of survivors, we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience, asking how did those memories form you? [00:01:39:28 - 00:01:46:29] How did resilience shape the person you became, and what legacy will you leave for those who come after you? [00:01:48:11 - 00:01:56:02] My guest today is Judy Batalion, a New York Times bestselling author of award-winning nonfiction and fiction. [00:01:57:11 - 00:02:03:04] Her work has brought powerful stories of Jewish courage and resistance to readers around the world. [00:02:04:05 - 00:02:26:03] Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue, among other publications. She earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard and a PhD from the University of London, and she has worked as a museum curator and university lecturer. Today, Judy lives in New York City with her husband and her three children. [00:02:27:25 - 00:02:42:10] As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Judy grew up in Montreal with her parents, her younger brother, and the house that was overflowing with the possessions her mother struggled to part with. [00:02:43:22 - 00:03:04:24] Her family was shaped by the experiences of her maternal grandparents, Holocaust survivors who endured displacement and hardship before rebuilding their lives. Like many children and grandchildren of survivors, Judy inherited not only their history, but also the questions that come with growing up in the shadow of that history. [00:03:06:25 - 00:03:08:15] That journey has informed her writing. [00:03:09:20 - 00:03:21:06] She is the author of White Walls, A Memoir about Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess In Between, which Warner Brothers has optioned for development as a television series called "Cluttered". [00:03:22:12 - 00:03:45:14] She also wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Light of Days, the untold story of women resistance fighters in Hitler's ghettos, for which Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners has optioned the film rights. And now her newest novel is The Last Woman of Warsaw, a story of friendship, love, and home set in Warsaw on the eve of World War II. [00:03:46:24 - 00:03:57:13] Judy Batalion's work spans history, memoir, and fiction, but at the heart of it all is a question that feels especially relevant to our conversation today. [00:03:58:25 - 00:04:55:02] How does the past continue to shape us? Judy, welcome to TO BE CONTINUED..., and it's really a privilege to have you with us. Well, thank you so much for inviting me to be here today, and thank you for that very gracious introduction. Thank you. Well, it's well earned. I should tell you, by the way, that I absolutely loved your book, The Light of Days, and it's a really compelling, compelling read, and I can't wait for it to reach a wider audience because it so deserves that. Fingers crossed. Yes, thank you so much. Stardom being what it is. Let's start this way. I'd like to begin with the story of the generation that came before you. Your family has deep roots in Poland, and your paternal grandparents' journey is an extraordinary one. It goes from Poland to Siberia, their return, the birth of your mother during that journey. [00:04:56:06 - 00:04:57:17] Would you tell us that story? [00:04:59:17 - 00:05:43:16] Sure. You know, I always feel like I need to preface my own story by saying, you know, I've spent now 19 years professionally researching and writing about the Holocaust, and yet my own personal story is still very vague. There's so many ruptures in my own family narrative, but I will share with you what I know, or at least what family lore has been. My maternal grandparents, Bubbe and Zadye, they were living in Warsaw in the late 30s when the Nazis occupied Warsaw. They were in their mid- and late-20s. They were married. [00:05:45:18 - 00:06:00:22] The story from my grandmother is that she had seven siblings, and of all of them, she looked the least Jewish. She was most able to pass as a Christian Pole. [00:06:02:11 - 00:06:17:11] Early on in the war, there were lines for food rations. Food was hard to retrieve food, and it was my grandmother who would go out and get food for not just my grandfather, but her siblings, her parents. [00:06:18:14 - 00:07:08:06] She was sort of the one that went outside, and she would tell that during her time waiting in those lines, she heard stories. She heard Nazis asking Polish Poles where Jews live, what addresses are, what names, they list names and addresses. And she heard her neighbors, she heard, as she told them, her neighbors turn on them and report names. And this is what she felt was her moment where she knew this was, she was doomed, and they had to leave Warsaw. There was something very frightening in that for her. And several of her siblings did leave, not all of them. Her parents stayed with her three younger sisters. [00:07:09:07 - 00:07:14:19] They were all eventually brutally murdered, I believe at Treblinka. [00:07:16:02 - 00:08:11:01] But my grandmother and her husband, my grandfather, they left. They, early on in the war, and my grandfather had a brother who lived in eastern Poland, and so they decided to go east, which is ultimately the decision that saved them. They went to my grandfather's brother's town, and there was fighting at the time, and there's fighting between the Russian soldiers and the Germans. And my grandfather and his brother got caught in crossfire. I believe it was a Russian shot. And my grandfather was very, very short, and the bullet grazed his neck, and it hit his brother who was standing behind him in the heart. And his brother was killed immediately. And I know this story because my grandfather had a scar on his neck, and I had asked him as a child what it was from. [00:08:12:02 - 00:08:36:05] And it was from this bullet that had killed his brother. My grandparents decided to continue fleeing east. This is where the story gets confusing to me. My grandmother would tell me bits and pieces. I was very close with her, but it never always, it never seemed to add up to the full narrative. But there was some bit about riding or hiding in a truck with fruit. [00:08:37:18 - 00:09:19:06] There was a story about hiding in a convent where they'd been taken in. I remember hearing about swimming across a river as part of an escape. And I also remember hearing a story about a Nazi who turned a blind eye and let them pass. And they eventually made it to the Russian border and crossed into Russia, and along with many of the Jews who made that crossing, they were forced into Siberia. They were sent up to Siberia and forced to work in work camps in Siberia. [00:09:20:16 - 00:09:24:24] I know very little about those camps. I know very little about what they went through. [00:09:26:04 - 00:09:31:22] The only anecdote I ever recall my grandfather telling me was that they had to eat horses. [00:09:34:16 - 00:10:10:11] They left, those camps. I think, I'm not even sure when, but they went on a, I don't know, journey, which only recently did I look at a map and it didn't even, they went extremely far east. They went to Kyrgyzstan. I only, again, I only recently realized how far east that was. And my grant, they stayed there for a little bit. My grandfather was, I found some photo before my mother died. I asked what this was. She said it was my grandfather working as a mechanic in Kyrgyzstan. [00:10:11:18 - 00:10:46:29] And my mother was born there in 1945 while they were stopped temporarily in Kyrgyzstan. And then they continued on the route and it came back to Poland where they lived. Jews were resettled into Western Poland. They lived in Wroclaw for a few years, trying to build a life there and seeing if anyone survived, if any of their many siblings had survived the war, trying to put their lives back together. [00:10:48:19 - 00:12:55:24] And I believe my grandfather was uncomfortable with the political life in Poland, with the communism. He was afraid. And they ended up in '49 leaving Poland, and moving to Israel where they stayed in, my mother tells story. I mean, they were, they had nothing. They were basically refugees and they stayed in a chicken coop. And my mother would tell a story about the chickens would peck at her toes at night. And they were displaced people and they lived in these camps for some time. And then eventually in the early 50s, they came to Canada where my grandmother's sister, one of her sisters had survived and was living in Montreal, and helped my grandmother come over to Montreal. What do you know about your mother's childhood, drawing up as the daughter of two Holocaust survivors? And how did that impact to shape the home that you grew up in? I mean, my mother's childhood was very nomadic. They lived in Western Poland for some time. I believe my grandfather had work there and they survived there. But it was, I always talk about my mother's childhood, as she was a refugee before knowing what a home was. She was born while they were on the run in Kyrgyzstan. They came back through all the way to Poland. They lived there for a couple of years. My grandmother actually had another child who died shortly after childbirth. And that was very traumatic for the whole family and for my grandmother and for my mother. And then they moved again to Israel and they moved to Canada. So, before she was six years old, she lived in, I mean, four continents. And I think that that instability and nomadism and being born into such a difficult and traumatic [00:12:57:15 - 00:13:09:14] moment certainly had its impact on her and successively on me. What do you remember most about the way that she loved and protected and raised you? [00:13:10:24 - 00:13:21:04] My mother? Yeah. Oh, my mother. That's a very moving question. My mother really loved me. [00:13:24:05 - 00:13:49:09] My mother really is very absorbed. She loved art, art of all forms, writing, literature. She wrote poetry. She was an amazing, a draftsman, draftsperson. She drew. She was an artist. She really had a very artistic temperament...theater, TV, any kind of fiction narrative story. [00:13:50:16 - 00:17:47:25] And I really think she, she passionately shared that with me. And we really connected through literature, through stories, through fiction, through most of our lives, starting when I was young. She would read Amelia Bedelia books to me and we would analyze the puns and then she would teach me how to make my own puns and how to play with language all the way through. Even as an adult, she would call me, we would have long discussions about television shows, and the choices the characters were making. She was very moved by art and we connected through that as well. You've written rather openly about your anxiety. Looking back, where do you think it comes from? And how does it relate to what your father often said, that anxious people were the ones that left? They were survivors. Well, I don't know...if you could explain my anxiety, that would be great. I'm not sure I know exactly where my anxiety comes from. Probably comes from many places, like most things--genetics, environment, catalysts. I am a very anxious person. It's something I've struggled with my whole life. Yes, my father used to say that anxious people were the ones who ran and survived. And I think that idea lives in me. I think I inherited this notion, not consciously, but that anxiety serves a purpose. Anxiety saves you. Hyper-awareness saves you. You need to be aware of what's going on. And the worst-case scenario can happen. And that's sort of in my blood. And I think that causes a lot of my anxieties, is this almost a burden of awareness and keeping eyes open. And there's no delusions that everything's going to be great. No one ever, that's not an idea I grew up with. It's all going to be okay. I don't know if that answers your question. Well, it certainly begins to, but let's go to food. All right. For many Holocaust survivors, food became more than food. It represented security. And many children and grandchildren remember that they were taught never to waste food and always to have enough. In your memoir, "White Walls", you are remarkably candid about your grandmother's and your mother's compulsive hoarding. As you try to understand it over the years, did you come to see those patterns as rooted in that same sense of scarcity and security, or did you come to understand them as something different altogether? Yeah, that's a great question. I, okay, so I've given hour-long lectures on this subject, so I'm trying to think about how to be succinct and interesting in a very short period. Okay. So first of all, let me say the research...there's no studies that I ever found that said many Holocaust survivors suffer from hoarding disorder or their offspring suffers from hoarding disorder in a greater prevalence than other populations. However, I would say anecdotally, when I've spoken to audiences across the country about hoarding disorder and Holocaust trauma, and I've had many, many people reach out to me to say that they lived a similar experience, that there were members of their survivor families who were also [00:17:50:21 - 00:18:02:27] pathological hoarders and compulsive hoarders. I did find one. Judy, I will say I know at least three children of survivors who are hoarders. [00:18:04:16 - 00:19:15:09] Any talk I gave, I would be inundated afterwards with people coming up to me to personally tell me stories. However, even when I spoke outside Jewish communities, many people told me their stories too. So, but certainly within Jewish communities, I heard many, many stories from survivor families. I did find one data point or research study that talked about how children who had nomadic childhoods often went on, had a higher prevalence of suffering from hoarding disorder later in life. So that's certainly something my mother had. She really, as I said, lived in four continents before she was six years old. So that is...According...it's genetic, it's environmental, it's set off by some kind of traumatic catalyst. And it's a very complicated disorder that often is accompanied or comorbid with other psychological and psychiatric conditions from depression, anxiety, paranoia, suspicious behavior, social isolation, addiction. And hoarding disorder comprises [00:19:16:25 - 00:21:42:09] intensive attachment to objects, also for some people and need to continually acquire objects. And for others and many, it's also a disorganization with the objects. So, there's all three components. And so, there are many different understandings, explanations, reasons that someone might suffer from a hoarding disorder, which is partially why it's so hard to treat, really. But I would say, as you were asking, one of the maybe metaphoric poetic real reasons that I instinctively feel with my mother was that her stuff was security. It was safety. It was she literally formed barricades around her with stuff. She was holding on to something. She was, you know, there was also, as I was saying before, this hyper awareness, she kept newspapers, and this is common with hoarding disorder. And I wanted to ask her, why do you need all the news? Why do you print out websites and keep stashes of the web? And she didn't want to miss anything. She didn't want to miss any information. She couldn't miss anything. There was such a need to cull and contain the information to make sure everything was assessed, everything was seen. And these barriers, these barricades, I really do think provided her with almost a security blanket, a literal sense of physical security. And in fact, I think that's why, you know, when you see these reality television shows hoarding disorder, which by the way, is how most people know about hoarding disorder, it's through reality TV, through, you know, people come in and they try to get rid of all the stuff. That's the worst thing, because the stuff is the security. It's not the problem. It's the solution for people who suffer from hoarding disorder to some people and to some degree. And so, getting rid of that is worse. And that's what I felt with my mother. While your relationship with your mother is a dominant st
