Holocaust Humor

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"It's an attempt to use humor as a jarring, dissonant device. People are uneasy; they don't know what to do with it," says Alan Berger, author of Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (SUNY Press, 1997) and Judaic studies professor at Florida Atlantic University. He says 2G witnesses will shape how the Holocaust is commemorated in the future. "It's an enormous risk to deal with it in this way," he adds. "And one of the risks is that instead of teaching . . . and urging people to study more, you turn them off. But that is to miss the essence of the humor."

Finding humor in the Holocaust sounds blasphemous, but to an insider it can seem natural. "Few outsiders understand the survivor sensibility," writes Sonia Pilcer, whose unpublished book, The Holocaust Kid, depicts a woman so obsessed with her parents' past that she imagines herself going into a gas chamber. "It is profoundly and terrifyingly cynical about human nature. Yet funny. The humor is definitely dark."

Some 250,000 2Gers in the United States comprise the sole legacy of 75,000 Nazi camp survivors who eventually settled in America. Sons and daughters of partisans who lived in the Polish woods, Hungary's ghettos, and hidden attics from Vilna to Chernovitz, they were born in the cold discomfort of European displacedñpersons camps or in Toronto and New York suburbs. Their parents gave them names to commemorate the deadññChaim, Vera, Shmuel, names that stood outóor bland American-sounding names that blended easily: Lisa, Mark.

In the early 1970s, researchers began studying the effects of the Holocaust on the Second Generation. In 1979, Helen Epstein, the daughter of two survivors, published Children of the Holocaust (Penguin), which documented the pain and anger felt by children of survivors and inspired many to join support groups. They met to share stories about obsessions with food, fantasies of gas coming out of shower nozzles, and complaints about overprotective parents. Psychologists say these children live under a shadow.

In the camps there was laughter. Hannelore Eisinger remembers toiling in the potato field at Westerbork, in Holland. She and her friends invented elaborate recipes or told jokes; it was laugh or cry, she says. Today, she laughs with her daughter, telling how a Nazi officer caught her husband stealing potatoes, then raised his finger to his lips; he had been stealing food, too.

Established before the war as a refugee camp for Jews fleeing Germany, Westerbork was converted into a transit camp, from which Nazis shipped Jews east to concentration camps. The original refugees became camp bureaucrats; their life was hard, but not impossible. Almost every day, famous German Jewish actors staged shows; one song from their Westerbork Serenade became a wartime hit in Holland, according to David Natale, who has written a one-man show based on the camp cabaret.

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