How could I even think of defining myself as a Holocaust survivor? This dreaded term which evoked horror and anxiety beyond anyone's imagination had nothing to do with me personally. That would show a lack of respect for those who had survived the death camps. Shared by all, regardless of age, ethnicity or education was the visual image of the survivors. Hardly avoidable were the emaciated shadows that we were shown moving through the mountains of dead bodies in the liberated concentration camps. It was difficult distinguishing the dead from the living, if not for the slow hesitant movements of the survivors. These people became known as Holocaust survivors and their images have been embedded in our minds and hearts.

I had allowed the war experience, the escape to Sweden, and the dark cloud of the Holocaust that hung over my entire adolescence, to be ignored. I started realizing that I had accepted my repressed memories as if they were a natural part of my childhood, just like night and day, food and drink, my parents and my entire being. I had spent my life in quiet acceptance that we had gaps in the family tree left behind by family members who were murdered. Until I revisited my memories, I had never connected my fear of darkness or immediate sense of distress upon hearing a loud siren, to my war-time childhood. I needed to uncover what else from my past had remained undetected and repressed.

This process of discovery would take some time. I came to realize that deep inside I had always been a child of the Holocaust.

The first step in this process of self-discovery was to interview the few persons from the war generation in my family and close friends who were still alive in Norway, this being 2002, in an attempt to create the basis for my puzzle. I explored their stories as the vague memories from my childhood. I came to realize that the reason I had ignored the Holocaust as a part of my life and identity so far, was that it constituted such a major part of who I am that I overlooked it as being a separate experience. Finally, I concluded that I had earned the right to the title Holocaust survivor. My family's escape to Sweden saved us all from immediate annihilation.

When I agreed to submit my story for the book project, the organizers were excited to have a participant from a Scandinavian country among the sixty contributors they contacted.

As the date of publication of the book of the Holocaust survivors' stories became closer, the publisher's representative called me expressing regret that they did not have space for my story. She explained, and then repeated, that there were too many authors, a shortage of space, that she was "so sorry." Finally she stated that which came across as the main reason why my chapter was eliminated: "After all Norway was a very small country with a very small Jewish population." I was shocked. Perhaps her purpose in explaining the criteria for the elimination was intended to make me feel better. However, it had an enormously negative psychological effect. Her "innocent" statement set off a powerful and lasting reaction within me.

Did Norway's small population and fewer Jews than other European countries make the suffering and tragedy of its Jews less important? Wasn't the Nazi vigor in the arrests and deportation of the limited number of Jews in Norway proof that Hitler planned to eradicate Jews everywhere? Wouldn't the inclusion of a story of Norway's Jews in a volume about the Holocaust illustrate exactly how far reaching the Final Solution had been? Whether the number of victims was six million or 771, as in Norway, weren't the individual losses-and stories of survival-equally important? It was at that moment-when I interpreted the representative's apparent implication that the lives of the limited number of Norwegian Jews to be of less importance than the remaining victims and survivors of the Holocaust-that I knew I needed to have my story heard. The process of becoming an activist had commenced.

To be continued

Excerpt from the Chapter

The Silence

"We're going to pick potatoes." That's what I was told. But it wasn't true. We were going to freedom. We were Jews running away from the Nazis, the Gestapo and the German soldiers carrying out their orders. We children were not told the truth-no doubt for our protection-because escaping was a matter of life and death and any childish revelation of the truth might have endangered our lives. But after we reached Sweden and even later when the war was over, we were not told the truth. We were "protected" by a wall of silence, by the unspoken words our parents chose not to utter to us about the Holocaust and our relatives who disappeared.

All I remember hearing and absorbing was that the Germans were bad people who were out to hurt us. But my parents did not speak much about the Germans once we had reached safety. They said nothing to us. We only talked about every day issues, as if everything was fine, as if we had decided to go to live in Sweden by choice. At least that is the way it seemed to me.

As my parents, like other Jewish adults, struggled with their own ghosts while trying to heal their emotional wounds, they neglected their parental responsibilities. Instead of explaining the Holocaust in language we children could understand and which might possibly reassure and help us, they covered us with a veil of silence.

We, too, needed to understand what had happened. Where were the uncles and aunts who did not return? Where were the playmates that had not gone "to pick potatoes"? Why were they arrested? Why did they not return? Where was God? I have no recollection of anyone ever trying to help me make sense of this.

Instead of interpreting the Holocaust to the children, the grown-ups gave us silence, leaving us to our own devices to understand the war experience. This lack of information became a second layer of that veil-unresolved and unexplained. It was parallel, perhaps, to the way too many children are taught about sex. Facts come haphazardly without context. Feelings become a mystery.

To be continued