Holocaust Humor

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At home in Forest Hills, New York, more than 50 years later, Eisinger has the same smile as the young woman showing her legs in a photo of the Westerbork chorus line. Performing kept her alive, Eisinger says. Of the tens of thousands who passed through the camps to their deaths, she was among 900 who survived.

Steve Lipman spent 20 years collecting stories like Eisinger's and Jewish war jokes for his book, Laughter in Hell (Jason Aronson, 1993). "No target, including God himself and his prophets, was immune. Starvation, disease, beatings, murder, propaganda, and every form of persecution were grist for the victims' joke mill," Lipman writes. Even the walk to the gas chamber: Two Jews are about to enter the Auschwitz gas chamber. One turns to the SS guard to make a last request for a glass of water. "Sha, Moshe," says his friend. "Don't make a fuss."

Israeli children of survivors collect Holocaust jokes as a hobby, notes Tamar Fox, who wrote Inherited Memories: Israeli Children of Holocaust Survivors (Cassel Academic, 1999). "Mostly, they are a kind of ethnic joke, whose self-irony aims at deflating, rather than destroying," she writes. In a telephone interview, Fox quietly recounts jokes she told as a child, afraid her 7-year-old son might overhear. "Why did Hitler commit suicide? Because he got the gas bill." Or, "What's the difference between a loaf of bread and a Jew? A loaf of bread doesn't scream when you put it in the oven."

"At the time it was the need to shock," she continues. "I don't think I was a wicked child. It seemed like the only way available to tackle something scary. For me, at home, it was easier to discuss sex than the Holocaust."

"Fun!" Moshe Waldoks spits, imitating the accented fury of a survivor. "You're making fun of our suffering?! What do you know about vat vee vent through!" Into the silence ripped by Waldoks' scripted fury, Lisa Lipkin drops an answer: "We're not making fun of what you went through. We're making fun of what we're going through now."

Waldoks' father rarely talked about life before the war; his mother cried out loud. "Ma, stop. Get over it," he recalls telling her. Waldoks faced a choice: laugh a lot or cry a lot. The two lie close to each other on the emotional spectrumññsobs and guffaws even sound alike, he says. He decided laughing was better.

Lipkin's mother survived a labor camp in Lithuania. Her father was the Brooklyn-born son of Russian immigrants. "My mother's Auschwitz; my father's pogrom," she jokes. But beneath the surface of her happy childhood was a dark secret that no one talked about.

Lipkin began as a storyteller, performing historical re-creations for the Museum of the History of New York. She joined a 2G group for 10 therapy sessions that turned into two years and inspired her one-woman show What Mother Never Told Me: Reminiscences of a Child of a Holocaust Survivor. The show, which sprinkled humor like sugar on the bitter stories of her childhood, traveled the synagogue circuit from Florida to Vermont, but she soon realized that audiences "wanted more barbed wire," Lipkin says. "During the four years that I did the show, I saw that Jews don't want to move forward. They're stuck in the past."

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