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This week on the NYR Daily: What a son learned about how his father survived the Holocaust
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On the NYR Daily this week On Friday, we published Allen Hershkowitz?s ?,? his remarkable and
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On the NYR Daily this week
On Friday, we published Allen Hershkowitz’s “[Finding My Father’s Auschwitz File](,” his remarkable and moving account of discovering that the concentration camp’s archives held unsuspected details of his father’s incarceration there. Merely to find a survivor’s extant file is unusual enough because the Nazis destroyed most of the records before they fled the Soviet Red Army, but Leon Hershkowitz’s papers showed that he’d survived more than a year and a half in Auschwitz, longer than any other survivor the archivists had yet encountered. The file also explained how Leon had ended up in American-occupied territory, meeting Allen’s mother, Helen, herself a survivor of Dachau, in a Displaced Persons camp, and eventually emigrating to the United States.
On Sunday, Allen Hershkowitz is taking part in a reading and inter-denominational discussion based on this story that [the Sheen Center]( is hosting in downtown Manhattan to mark the International Holocaust Day of Remembrance, which falls on January 27. Allen grew up in Brooklyn, very conscious of his parents’ burden of trauma as Holocaust survivors, even though they themselves spoke of it little. “As a boy, I tried to heal them, to make them laugh, to make them proud. But they could not heal,” he told me this week. “They persevered, they survived, but… some wounds do not heal.”
One can imagine, at least, their pride in Allen, who became an environmental scientist. “As a child of refugees, not socialized the way much of America seemed to be, I found refuge in math and in scientific facts.” He worked for a number of years at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and now advises major sports organizations on minimizing their environmental impacts—including the New York Yankees. His sheer drive and positive energy are manifest—talking to him, it’s hard to believe he grew up under such a shadow. Even so, Allen had to steel himself to visit Auschwitz to learn more about how his gentle but taciturn father had survived the death camp.
Photo by J. Henry Fair
“It gnawed at me for many, many years that I had not made that trip, and as it approached my father’s hundredth birthday anniversary, I felt I had to go,” he said, “so somehow I marshaled the strength to go.” He finally went in 2011, and much of this account he wrote contemporaneously and then put aside, thinking of it as a memoir to share with family—until recently, when he was motivated to restart work on it: “With the recent intolerant rhetoric, the rise of racism, Charlottesville, the rise in anti-Semitism, and no leadership from our president to turn this around, I felt it was important for me to get my story out.”
From what he says and writes, one feels the weight of responsibility he has always shouldered, but he is also conscious of his good fortune. “As a boy, it was hard to have them as parents, they were so sad so often,” he said. “As a man, I realize what a blessing their history has given me, the perspective I have that whatever struggle I face, it ain’t Auschwitz.”
That realization has propelled his career as an environmental campaigner in science, just as it pushed him to complete his father’s story: “My folks didn’t survive concentration camps so that I would withdraw into my own private world or just focus on making another dime. Their history has taught me that I have to be a healer in every way possible, to promote love.”
In our newsletter of January 12, about James Kirchick, the Daily author, most recently, of “[The Long War Against a Gay ‘Cure’](,” a couple of correspondents took exception to our description of Kirchick’s hero and mentor, Christopher Hitchens, as having undergone a “conversion” to the “neoconservative right.” The right to reply here goes to Jonathan Greenberg, Chair of the English Department at Montclair University, who wrote:
“While it’s true that Hitchens supported the American-led invasion of Iraq, he never underwent the kind of change in political allegiance that characterized the original neocons—people like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz… It is true that in his misguided support for the Iraq war he aligned himself with Cheney, Rumsfeld and other neocons, but even here his underlying principle was a pragmatic humanitarian interventionism—however misplaced—that is compatible with internationalist (i.e., non-isolationist) thinking on the left. To call Hitchens a neocon is both inaccurate and unjust.”
For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And let us know what you think: send your comments to Lucy McKeon and me at daily@nybooks.com; we do write back.
Matt Seaton
Editor, NYR Daily
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