III. The incendiary finding

Four years after she died, when I was in middle school, I found out what made my grandmother a foreigner. I went to Washington, D.C., two weeks after 9/11, the first week planes started flying once more. It was a tense trip, to say the least. An elderly and blatently demential woman stood up during take off, and I thought the flight attendant was going to body slam her and have the air marshal arrest her. She kept saying, “Where’s the toilet?,” and my first thought was that “toilet” must be the watchword for the latest geriatric branch of the White Al Qaeda. That’s how paranoid we were. All I could picture for the rest of the flight was a conspiring retirement home, planning to take over a plane of young people and crash it into the Spring Break side of Florida, a moribund message that Florida belongs to the decrepit Jews and alligators, and that silly young hooligans better stay the fuck away. Then I pictured the elderly woman saying “fuck” and spent the rest of the flight giggling (it was middle school, after all).

(Photo credit: Kang Hyo-jin's "Twilight Gangsters")

Anyway, we got to D.C. without any heists, geriatric or otherwise, and proceeded to the Holocaust Museum. As any person must experience in such a place—especially a Jew—I found my heart suddenly swollen and throbbing, as if severly infected. It hurt to press on it. It hurt not to press on it. My eyes watered and eventually I sobbed. I scratched at my arms. Beat my ribcage. Intertwined my fingers until the knuckles ran white. I didn’t poop for days.

After I thought I could not see anymore, my spirit completely and thoroughly drained, I saw an exhibit called “Flight and Rescue.” It featured all these Polish Jews who escaped the Nazis by running to Lithuania, crossing Russia and then, from Russia, taking a boat to Kobe, Japan. And guess whose picture was in the exhibit? Grandma Zell’s. That was the first time I really understood that grandma was from Poland, and that in Poland she had seven brothers and sisters, two parents, four grandparents, and innumerable aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. I immediately regretted that I never talked to her about it.

Visa photos of my grandparents, Bernard
and Rochelle Zell

After the exhibit, I called my mother to tell her Grandma was a feature in the museum. Mom had no idea. Grandma would do stuff like that – sponsor an entire exhibit, or get interviewed for a Holocaust memorial archive – and never once mention it to anyone. Maybe she didn’t want us to know about her past. Maybe she wanted us to know, but thought we wouldn’t care. Or maybe she thought that not letting us know would make us care more, which it did. Like with my birth or my twenty-first birthday party, I hate not knowing what happened, especially if it involves me, even tangentially. This was my family history – the history of the person closest to me in childhood – and I had no idea until teenhood the gravity of her past, of what the Holocaust truly meant to her, her husband and her children.

I decided it was time I found out.