Elmer Marmorstein is the younger son of Lajos and Ibolya Marmorstein. Born in Középlak in 1930, Elmer grew up first in the peaceful 1930s and then in the tumultuous 1940s. The family was well-off and relatively assimilated. He was thirteen when Hungarian Jews were taken from their homes, held in ghettos, and deported to Auschwitz.
The first thing we know about Elmer is that he arrived at Auschwitz with at least one piece of crucial knowledge. Typically any one under fourteen would have been sent directly to the gas chambers, but Elmer somehow found this out because when he arrived at Auschwitz, he knew to lie about his birth year. To avoid certain death, and for the duration of his time in the camps, he gave his birth year as 1929, not 1930. Just imagining a thirteen year old having to lie like this to save his life is heart wrenching, and it doesn’t even begin to touch the horrors he would have survived.
Like all the Marmorstein’s, Elmer left very little record of his experience, but we can learn something about Elmer’s experience because some of the Holocaust’s most notable memoirists came from the same region as he did and were deported to Auschwitz at about the same time as he was. Elie Wiesel came from Sighet, about 125 miles from Kolozsvár. It was a deeply Chassidic community that couldn’t have been more different from Elmer’s bourgeois upbringing, but they were at some of the same camps at some of the same times. Wiesel’s testimony—and life’s work–is among the most famous, but there’s also a remarkable recent addition to the literature of the era that also can tell us about Elmer’s experience, Edith Eger’s The Choice. In particular, Eger and Elmer were both liberated, near-death from typhoid, from Mauthausen. It was a camp not so very far from my Boss relatives—my mother’s German family—lived, and it was liberated on May 5, 1945.
None of the Marmorstein survivors spoke about their experience on the record (or, as far as I know, off the record, either). But I did find one obscure video on Youtube. It’s an interview conducted with Elmer in 1995, when he was sixty-five years old. But before you think I’ve saved the best for last, let me assure you: I haven’t. The video is painful to watch, short on detail but chock full of cringe-worthy moments. It speaks volumes about the way holocaust is talked about among late 20th century American Jews, but it has very little to say about the experience itself. Where organizations like Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation and documentary efforts made by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or Israel’s Yad Vashem signal important efforts to collect testimonies and enshrine memory in indelible archives, this is literally a high school project hijacked by a dad with an agenda. Nonetheless, we do get a glimpse into fragments of Elmer’s experience. More importantly–and more movingly–we get a taste of Elmer’s worldview, a worldview that is shared across the Marmorstein family.
Whenever I watch this video, I feel ungenerous. The interviewers are decent people who mean well. The AP history student is just a kid. His father is desperate to communicate his strongly-held beliefs and values. Yet the experience of watching them is unbearable. Father and son constantly interrupt each other and talk over Elmer. They lead the witness and barely let him get a word in edgewise. They don’t intend to be patronizing, but it often comes off as if the father is lecturing poor Elmer, who looks increasingly uncomfortable and exasperated by the process. The father just can’t help himself: he’s the kind of guy who can recommend Schindler’s List to an Auschwitz survivor without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, even offering to loan him his VCR so he can watch it.
The video is minimally informative–what the viewer sees is a picture of Elmer’s way of thinking; in many ways, his process of answering is more revealing than his answers themselves. When asked whether he experienced antisemitism growing up, Elmer responds quickly, “Oh, always.” Then he does something that he’ll do repeatedly throughout the interview, something that to me seems so quintessentially Marmorstein: he pauses and equivocates, shrugging, considering two competing ways of responding. On the one hand, he wants to call out the wretched locals who never liked the Jews and who were likely thrilled to see them go. On the other hand, was it really that bad? He grew up in a prosperous family, but he had learned the hard way to keep his expectations low. So he qualifies his answer: “Jews were tolerated at times and persecuted many times,” he says, showing more perspective than could possibly be expected. “Sometimes it wasn’t too bad. Sometimes…” He pauses, as if remembering what he’s being asked about and where it all ended up, and concludes, “In the end, of course, it turned out to be the worst time of all.”
His interviewers are hungry for details, and when Elmer won’t satisfy their hunger, the well-read father begins recommending books to Elmer, three in all, some of them autographed. Elmer is patient through it all, but declines the books. When he’s asked his opinion about something, he responds with a skepticism that reminds me of my father. Schindler? “Well, I had no dealings with him during that time.” Elmer always speaks from his own experience first, but adds a gentle suggestion not to believe the hype: “He needed some help and kind of worked it out to the benefit of both some of the inmates and himself.” If he equivocates about Schindler, he’s not much for the hype around the holocaust’s most famous authors, either. When asked about Elie Weisel, he says, “Well, he’s doing what he feels he ought to do. Some people want to be active and some people not active.”
Elmer has clearly chosen the latter, much to his interviewers’ disappointment. They continue to probe for heroism and resistance. Did he participate in any secret religious observance, “No. No. There’s no prayer books, no tallit. Everything was confiscated.” Did anyone ever try to escape? “Not from that camp.” Were guard dogs ever set on inmates? “I had no personal experience.” Was he aware of the notorious medical experiments? “I was not involved in that,” he said. Then, as if he felt the need to account for the limits of his experience, he reminds them that “Really there was no such thing as a camp newsletter.”
Undaunted, his interviewers continue. “Was it a pretty bleak and pretty joyless existence?” “Well…” He doesn’t offer anything more to such an obvious question, but later he describes the basics of his experience. “You’re just like a machine, robot, you move along, get up in the morning, go do the work, eat, drink whatever they give you, and [keep] going for another night.” And later, in the same vein, “It’s something that is beyond anybody’s control. It was just survival. You dodged a bullet here, you dodged a bullet there, and go on to the next step, and hopefully you…” His voice trails off, lost to the past, until he remembers where his thoughts were going, “Rumors were flying that they bombed this area, they bombed that area, and maybe we’re getting close to the end of the war and that was the hope.” In the valley between “hopefully you” and “rumors were flying,” a darkness flashes across his face, a split-second dissociation, the experience of a fifty year old despair. Only rumors of the end of the war bring him back.
As for his actual experience, Elmer said they were kept in the ghetto in Kolozsvar for about three weeks. Like a lot of areas designated as ghettos in that region, it wasn’t a neighborhood or a residence but an abandoned brickyard, where Jews were held in deplorable conditions and frequently beaten and tortured before deportation. From there, he was deported to Birkenau, which he describes as “a complex near Auschwitz” and “a staging point.” There, he says he worked as a “maintenance man,” “pulling wagons, hauling garbage,” and doing other random work.
When they asked about the guards, the question is specifically about the veracity of the portrayal of sadistic guards in Shindler’s List. Once again, Elmer doesn’t bite, but rather offers a nuanced portrayal, remembered after more than fifty years:
Interviewer: Were any soldiers especially cruel? Like in Schindler’s List they were.
Elmer: Some were, some weren’t….Actually the guards were half young SS men, and some of the old Wehrmacht, which was the old army. You could tell a difference, one enjoyed being cruel, the other one was kind of sorry, you know, they’d shrug their shoulders.
Interviewer: So the Wehrmacht were more humane than the young SS.
Elmer: [nods] That’s correct.
Fifty one years before a sixty-five-year-old Elmer tells the story on video, a shrug had passed between fourteen-year-old Elmer Marmorstein and a Wehrmacht concentration camp guard, as if they had both found themselves in a madness over which they themselves had no control. It told me something about Elmer that he was able to differentiate individuals and diverse responses. Some of his attentiveness to the guards’ disposition was certainly a survival mechanism, but there’s an almost superhuman empathy in his portrayal of Wehrmacht guards being “kind of sorry.”
It’s as if he could feel some kinship with the Wehrmacht soldier, as if they could share a brief flicker of humanity and ask, in a simple shrug, how the hell did we end up here. They might have been on opposite sides and their physical fate couldn’t have been more different, but both had found themselves in a madness over which they themselves had no control. Of course there can be no moral equivalence between concentration camp inmate and guard, and there is no comparison between their suffering. It’s easy to feel rage at that guard–how dare he deny his complicity in the cruelty and injustice that surrounds him? What can it possibly mean that he’s “kind of sorry”? Yet even Elmer hasn’t lost his capacity to empathize with him.
Who of us hasn’t felt their helplessness at the cruelty and injustice that surround us? Climate change? Black Lives Matter? War in Ukraine? Refugees at the border? What can I do? What side am I on, really? Could my own urge to judge the guard reflect my own shameful awareness that under the right circumstances, I could be on either side of the equation: prisoner or guard, victim or perpetrator?
Ultimately, in this project, could imagining both sides–Elmer’s and his guard’s; my Marmorstein family and my German family–help me understand both parts of myself. Could it be the only honest alternative to embracing one side while denying the other? Some would say that if I mourn Nazi and Jew alike, it will lead to some abyss of moral relativism, but perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps it’s only by mourning both that I learn to offer more than a shrug of my shoulders in response to the suffering of the other.
* * *
After nearly a year at Auschwitz, Elmer was transferred to Mauthausen, where he describes falling ill and lying abandoned in the back of the barracks, days from death, when American troops liberated the camp on May 5th, 1945. From there, he made his way back to Kolozsvár for a year, and then to Vienna, and, finally, Cleveland.
I have to be grateful for the video–and for people like the video makers, who dared do what the rest of us didn’t. Their truths–from the obnoxious to the heartfelt–tell us something about our truths, too. I’m curious about holocaust survivors, and I’d be lying if I didn’t bring my own opinions about how they tell their story. I can’t project all of my own uncomfortable curiosity on them: I have to own my desire for heroes and my own gratification that Elmer was my kind of survivor (tastefully understated, neither boastful nor ideologue), not theirs. In my own way, I have as much at stake in this story (and all the others I’m retelling) as the interviewers do.
In the end, Elmer declined to play the witness role in the annals of holocaust testimony. He left that to others. He didn’t view history as a competition between stories, but as fact. He seems to wonder why the focus on endless witness testimonies when the forensic evidence itself offers an open-and-shut case. When asked about holocaust education, his response is simple: he demands the recognition of the simple fact of it all. In the stories, everyone’s experience of the facts differs, but for Elmer, the existence of the holocaust remains, beyond dispute or debate. It’s the unequivocal bedrock of truth underneath Elmer’s equivocations: “It’s a fact that it happened,” he concludes, “It’s not a myth. It’s not a story.”
**
Fifty years before, Elmer had caught the eye of some Wehrmacht soldier who had shrugged his shoulders, as if to say how the hell did we end up here, as if they had both found themselves in a madness over which they themselves had no control. Of course there can be no moral equivalence between concentration camp inmate and guard, and there is no comparison between their suffering. It’s easy to feel rage at that guard–how dare he deny his complicity in the cruelty and injustice that surrounds him? What can it possibly mean that he’s “kind of sorry”?
Yet even Elmer hasn’t lost his capacity to empathize with him. Who hasn’t felt their helplessness at the cruelty and injustice that surround us? Climate change? War in Ukraine? Refugees at the border? What can I do? What side am I on, really? Could my own urge to judge the guard reflect my own shameful awareness that under the right circumstances, I could be on either side of the equation: prisoner or guard, victim or perpetrator?
Could imagining both sides–Elmer’s and his guard’s; my Marmorstein family and my German family–help me understand both parts of myself, rather than embracing one and denying the other? Some would say that if I mourn Nazi and Jew alike, it will lead to some abyss of moral relativism, but perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps it’s only by mourning both that I learn to offer more than a shrug of my shoulders in response to the suffering of the other.
Jack-August 