Interview with Alison Curry
- Alison Curry is currently a Ph.D. student at UNC-Chapel Hill doing research on Jewish cemeteries. Alison shared with us the process of tracing her Jewish family’s genealogy, the role of food in her family, as well as her knowledge about the Holocaust, among a plethora of other useful information and engaging stories. We encourage our site visitors to approach this interview with this in mind: we would like to suggest that subtle, seemingly innocuous details–such as name changes, altering a family recipe, or even “minor” misinformation about the Holocaust–can have dramatic implications and be tethered to incredibly complex lived realities. This was very often the case when exploring the Lurcy Archive. Very rarely would we be presented with something blatantly telling or enlightening. Typically, we would have to sift through to find the barest, most covert details and harp on them before extrapolating and tying it to a greater, more visible narrative. Throughout this interview–and throughout our whole site–we encourage you: pay attention to the small stuff.
A: So where should we start?
H: Well, I have specific questions, but I mostly just wanted to hear you tell your story. Genealogy seems like a very linear word and concept—tracing the last name of your mother and her mother and her mother ad infinitum—but I know that it’s far more complex than that, that you’ve probably taken a lot of detours and side roads and dead ends…
A: Yeah, absolutely. As I’m explaining, are there specific things you want me to speak to?
H: If guiding questions are helpful, I will definitely have some pop-up along the way, but truthfully I wanted it to be open to you to tell us you want to tell it so that you can naturally include what you find most relevant, interesting, and important.
A: Absolutely, I’m fine with that.
H: I’m really just here to listen.
A: So, I’m Jewish on my mother’s side. My father’s side is not Jewish, but my mother’s father and my mother’s mother came from what is today Poland. When they were there, it was Russia as Poland was partitioned quite a few times and between the 19th century and the end of WWI Poland did not really exist. So, our journey to figure this out started with my grandmother, and my mother became curious and asked questions about her family. We didn’t know very much but we knew they came from Poland. My mother’s mother’s father was the one who came from Poland, and he didn’t like talking about anything before his life so we knew very little. He died in the 80s so he hasn’t been around for us to ask questions. We asked questions to my nanna and she had very little information.
We went to Ellis Island when I was very young and we sat on one of the computers there and did some searches for her family and we found a manifest from the ship that they came over on, so this told us a couple of things but it was a little misconstrued at the time; it gave us an interesting spelling of their last name. We know from oral history that they had changed their name. My grandmother’s maiden name was Goodfader, and we knew that wasn’t the original name. Goodfader is the Americanized name that they took on, but when we found the manifest it was spelled “Gutweider” which is a pretty Germanic spelling so we were kind of surprised, and for ten years my mom did research based on this spelling and found nothing because it wasn’t the right spelling of their last name. I started researching Poland as in undergrad and I started researching Polish Jewish history and I went on a memory tour essentially of Poland and a woman that was on the trip with me was head of Jewish genealogy in Poland, and I told her my family is from Poland but we haven’t been able to find anything on them, and she said “tell me what you think the spelling of their last name is and I’ll do some work for you,” so based off of what she found, she said that this is actually the spelling of the name: Gutwajde. It’s a very Polish spelling, it looks very different. I’ve been able to trace their ancestry in Poland back to the 1790s which is pretty remarkable considering there are so few Jewish documents left in Poland, most of them were destroyed during the war and multiple wars. My great-grandfather, my mother’s mother’s father was born in a Polish town called Ciechanów in 1902. He had 7-8 siblings, his name when he was born was Moishe, and he would’ve been Moishe Gutwajde. They ended up leaving in 1917 and that was the manifest we found from Ellis Island. From what the people at Ellis Island told us, their ship was the last to leave Europe during WWI—I don’t know if that’s true, it’s a bit of oral history, but it is compelling to think about how they were able to do this during the first World War especially being as 1917 was kind of later in the war. We don’t know why they left, my great-grandfather would say, “I don’t want to talk about Poland, there was nothing there for me in Poland,” and I assume it’s for these same reasons why other Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe: economic struggles, Antisemitism, violence. So, Moishe’s father and mother and siblings left and settled in Boston and took the name Goodfader, I don’t know when, it seems there may have been relatives who already lived in the US who had already taken that name. This is also interesting: he had a cousin that went to England and he changed his name to Goodfellow, so we have a couple of other people in the world who are Goodfellows but we’re all from the same family tree. My mother used to tell me that Moishe changed his name to Morris Goodfader. He was pretty young—fifteen, I think. He became an apprentice for a jeweler and became a successful jeweler himself. I think his family was pretty well off even in Poland so I don’t know if the economic struggle was as much a part of this. There is an address on the manifest of a relative that was still in Poland and when my mom and I visited this town, it was the downtown part of this town, the main square which I think would indicate some prominence in the town, some relative wealth and financial security, and the fact that they were on a ship’s manifest indicates that they had some amount of money. Most people on these ships would have been third class and didn’t have their names recorded. My family was on the second class register I believe, which indicates that they were at least enough well off that they got their names written down. So, the actual process of immigration is why we have had this incorrect last name for so long because when they were taking these records it was just someone taking your last name and they’d just write down whatever they heard, which is why we had this very Germanic spelling for so long and why it took so long to find anything out about them. They ended up in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and lived all in the same house together. My grandmother grew up in this pretty good-sized house, but it was generations of people living there: aunts, uncles, cousins, my nanna’s grandmother who only spoke Yiddish, and so my nanna had to learn Yiddish to speak with her grandmother who never learned English and was kind of trapped in that house.
When I was writing up my answers to your questions, and the whole time I’ve been in this class, I’ve been thinking about how we don’t really have any objects from this diaspora, nothing from this migration, and I don’t know why things weren’t saved. It might have something to do with my great-grandfather’s perspective that “Poland had nothing for us” and undergoing Americanization and being a part of American life, but we have very few things saved beyond my grandmother. We have some of her things now. She is still alive but has bad dementia. We have a lot of her stuff—my mother has one of her menorahs and I don’t know where that’s from, there’s no tracing it. The one thing that has been transmitted from Eastern Europe is food. My family has amazing cooks, and we still make all of these recipes that were my grandmother’s grandmother’s recipes that she would cook in Winthrop, Massachusetts and my grandmother would watch her, and we still have these recipes and they’re hard because at some point my nanna wrote them down and they have the measurements but don’t tell what you need to do when. My nanna’s cousin remembers my nanna writing these down because my nanna knew how to make them, she wasn’t worried about forgetting how to make them, she had been making them her whole life, she was just concerned with getting down the amounts. So, we’ve been frustrated trying to make her recipes because there’s always something missing. She would watch her mother and grandmother cook and be scribbling down what they were adding. When we go to Poland and eat Polish food, it’s the same food my nanna used to make and my mother makes, so that’s one way I feel things have been passed down.
We do know in this Gutwajde family most of the branches of that tree ended up immigrating—two to the UK, one in our recent research stayed in Poland and was killed in the Holocaust; we discovered this family in 2018, there was a register of them living in a town in 1939 which pretty much tells us what happened to them, and it’s been very rewarding to find them because no one has remembered this family for a long time and only one member of that immediate family survived and I’ve been trying to find more information about her. She died in 1994 but she made it to Canada after the war and I’ve been trying to find more about her because we don’t know how she survived if her whole family didn’t.
My mother’s father’s side came to the US a lot earlier—they came in the 1880s. Where her father was from in Poland is like forty minutes from where her mother’s side is from. They were a hop skip and a jump away from each other but not at the same time period. They came in the 1880s and very quickly became established in Brooklyn, New York, and I know less about them but last year went to a Jewish cemetery in Queens which is an amazingly huge cemetery and we found a bunch of their graves there. Their last name is Konecke, and they didn’t change this. In Polish it would have been for men Konecki and women it would’ve been Konecka, so they didn’t change their name, there are other Koneckes in other parts of the country who spell it with a ‘y’ at the end and we’re probably related to them because it’s not a common last name. So, we were able to find their graves at this cemetery, and eventually, my grandfather’s family moved to Newark, NJ. The 1880s, which was a big wave of Jewish immigration, and the other side in 1917 which is kind of the second wave of Jewish immigration. That’s the basic story.
H: That is pretty amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all of that, I feel very honored. I have a few little questions first: I wanted to know, what were some of the recipes that your grandmother would make?
A: So, my grandmother was always responsible for the matzah ball soup at Passover, and I have a funny story about the matzah ball soup that relates to this recipe issue. So, my grandmother would always make the matzah balls and they were amazing and perfect every time but as she got older and her dementia started hitting, she couldn’t really cook anymore, so my mom said she would take over doing the matzah ball soup. We started making it and it was never the same; the matzah balls were hard super and dense in the middle. We were following the recipe but could not figure it out because she didn’t take specific enough notes, so we had to adjust it a little bit. We did like three years in a row where we tested out different recipes. I don’t know if you know Barefoot Contessa, but she’s a Jewish woman and we tried her recipe and tried to see if it was similar, so now I have this recipe saved in my notes that’s my nanna’s recipe with a couple of tweaks, and it reminds me of my nanna’s recipe so it’s good enough for me.
My grandmother would also make stuffed cabbage, in Polish it’s called golabki, and it’s also a really interesting recipe—it calls for gingersnaps broken over the top of the dish, and my mom doesn’t remember this or remember my nanna or her mother doing that, but we looked it up and it’s a very common Eastern European thing to add gingersnaps. My nanna was an amazing cook.
She had this group of friends, like five couples who were very close as they got older and every Sunday they would host a five-course meal together with these couples and they would each bring the appetizer or salad or entrée or dessert and they would look up recipes from all over the world and recently my mom found this scrapbook my nanna had made of all of their menus, and they had like French night and Moroccan nights. Food is really important in my family, and I know my mom is such a good cook because my nanna was and she cared about cooking and she put a lot of effort into being a good cook, and she was an incredibly bright person. She was the only female math student in her college in the 1940s, and she ended up being an accountant, she worked on Wall Street for a bit, so she was super bright, and it’s not like she didn’t work. She stopped working as she was raising four children, but she would do this cooking, and we have all of these recipes. We make her brownie recipe, literally the best brownies I’ve ever had. I almost won’t eat other people’s brownies because our families’ are just too good. We have this recipe container just stuffed with old recipe cards. Hopefully, it doesn’t ever get lost because it’s full of treasures.
Pictured above is Alison's great-grandfather, Morris Goodfader (Moishe Gutwajde), and his wife Lillian (nee Fisher). This picture is from 1930, thirteen years after Morris left Poland. They couple got married in 1929.
H: That’s amazing. I’ve never tried golabki but I somehow have a craving for it. So, I know you mentioned you’re doing Ph.D. work on Jewish cemeteries and you’ve been doing a lot of work in this field in general—to what degree does doing this kind of work have to do with reclaiming, cultivating, or maintaining a sense of personal identity? What does it mean for your own identity? It certainly sounds like there’s an element of wanting to reclaim an identity that’s been lost and that’s been a part of your family, but also coming to terms with the fact that “the matzah ball soup is never going to be the same,” the names change, that to a certain extent we can’t ever fully reclaim what has been lost. So, I’m wondering, in those moments where full reclamation isn’t possible, how do you fill the gaps? How do you finish the story? What new elements of your own identity serve to fill those gaps and finish the story?
A: That’s a great question. I’ve always considered myself Jewish, but I was never raised in a religiously Jewish household. When my mother was young, my grandmother and grandfather went to a conservative temple, and as she got older they started going to a reform temple, so it became less religious as she got older, and I was never raised with the religious side of Judaism. For me, it’s always been what I consider to be a cultural or traditional side. To me, my Judaism is my family, and I have a very close family on my mom’s side. She has three siblings, and my cousins and I were all in Maryland together for my entire growing up, so I have five cousins who are basically siblings, and we’re not the most Jewish family ever but we have celebrated Hannukah and Passover, we use Yiddish terms pretty frequently, and we eat a lot of Jewish food, and there are stereotypically Jewish things we do automatically, so to me my Judaism has been my family, but it’s also been, as you said, an attempt to remember Jewish history, that’s been my way of reconciling with a lack of identity because I don’t look Jewish, you wouldn’t assume I’m Jewish based off of my last name, etc. and doing this Jewish history work to me has enabled me to maintain a connection to Judaism. And as we’ve talked about in class, Judaism is complicated, I mean there are different levels of identity and connection, but history is important to Judaism as well, ya know there are calls to remember consistently throughout the Hebrew Bible, in our own history we remember our suffering and important moments through our history, to me in many ways my studies have been a way to discover both my ancestral family and my deeper ties to Judaism, but also to connect to Jewish history which I do think is an important part of Judaism in ways it might not be for other religions, so it is a complicated relationship.
A lot of Jews feel this, it’s kind of “bad Jew syndrome” like I didn’t go to Hebrew school, I don’t know Hebrew…I want to learn Hebrew, I haven’t had the opportunity, I don’t think about completing mitzvah all the time, I don’t follow the laws of the Torah, I’ve never separated my meat and my dairy, there are a lot of things I don’t do, I don’t really follow Shabbat, there’s a lot I don’t do that’s a part of being Jewish, so there’s always this feeling of being a bad or lesser Jew, to me that’s not really important, but it is something I fight with a lot, and I think a lot of the way I’ve fought with it is by learning Jewish history by understanding Jewish history and the Holocaust as well and then by going into education. There’s a Jewish concept called tikkun olam which basically means to repair the world, and a simple way of understanding it is we should do what we can to make the world the best place for everyone, and I think it’s a beautiful Jewish sentiment, and I think in some ways understanding Jewish history and communicating that to others and spreading this through education is tikkun olam, and that’s the way I’ve tried to see it, like if I can learn enough about my own family as well as Jewish history in general and contribute to Jewish history in a way, I am participating in some of these Jewish actions, that I don’t necessarily have to change a part of my life or my rituals.
You’re right it is about my identity in a lot of ways and I have attempted to reclaim an identity that may not automatically be ascribed to me but it also provides me a little bit of safety, like if I can be more accurate about Jewish history and I know what I’m talking about and combat ignorance which can be damaging, it connects me more to this group. So, it’s super complicated. I think any Jew you ask about identity and what makes them Jewish they’ll have a hard time answering it except for people who are very religiously Jewish. I think people who are culturally or traditionally Jewish have a hard time answering that, and a lot of it is my family, being connected to this small group of people, contemporary living people, ya know I don’t know the people who immigrated from Poland, I never met them, my great-grandfather would probably hate that I do this research and would hate that I’ve been to Poland three times, but it has been a way to attempt to reassert my identity through learning really, which is very Jewish. Even in the way I was raised by my mom, she always raised me to ask questions, to be analytical and critical to not just accept what’s around you, and if you think about what Jews do, what they do is and have done throughout the centuries is they’ve been critical, we’ve questioned the Bible and Talmudic texts and tried to come up with different answers for them, and I think there’s something really implicitly beautiful about that, and I was raised with this value that I believe to be inherently Jewish but I didn’t recognize it as Jewish until I learned more about Judaism until I took classes about Biblical Judaism, that’s when I was first like man, my mom has been preparing me for this my whole life by telling me how to be, to try to do good things for the world, so it’s been kind of an inherent part of my upbringing through my mom but I don’t even know if she would know that, like if she knew explicitly that she was doing that I think it’s been very implicit. I don’t know if that answered your question…
H: Yeah, no absolutely, that was perfect and beautiful…
A: Yeah, it’s complicated but I think you’re absolutely right to point that out, that I attempt to connect to myself further, that it has been through history and my studies, and I question all the time, I do feel…because I don’t know Hebrew I feel very left out whether from Jewish communities or just from the identity itself, so my next step in my Ph.D. is to start learning Hebrew, and I wonder how will I feel after I’ve done that, will it still be like “oh I’m not Jewish enough” or will I feel like “hey I did what Jews are supposed to do.” I don’t know, it will be very interesting once I get to that point. Yeah, the Hebrew thing is hard. I wish my mom had sent me to Hebrew school. She didn’t want to force me and I probably would’ve hated it, but now I need it so I wish I had it.
H: What I hear you saying, and correct me if I’m wrong, and I don’t know that this is the right word, but I hear a sense of obligation or… this community-supporting initiative or drive. Even though you say you’re not doing things that more traditional conservative Jews do, it does sound like there’s been a desire to find your own niche where Alison Curry can give what Alison Curry can give to this community. As you say, you may not be following rituals a certain way or doing what is traditional, but it does feel like there’s a certain…loyalty, that’s the word, loyalty to this family that’s not just your immediate family, but maybe a greater family or greater community. Is that accurate?
A: I think the primary way I think about that is in wanting to go into education and share about Jewish history and teach others and help people learn about it. Doing that does make me feel more connected to a wider Jewish community. Yeah, loyalty is interesting, I don’t know what term it would be. Not that you’re saying this, but it was never pushed on me to go this route. From when I was very young, I was raised primarily with the Holocaust. My mom really wanted me to learn about the Holocaust, so I was reading books about the Holocaust when I was six and I went to the Holocaust museum in DC when I was ten, so a core part of my upbringing revolved around an understanding that “we need to learn about this horrible thing that happened to people like you and we need to share it with others so it doesn’t happen again.” That’s kind of the traditional line around the Holocaust: “never again” (even though it has happened again). We like to say “never again” and that’s kind of become a sentiment of American Jews primarily but Israeli Jews as well, so I was raised in that realm less so than Jewish history, but when I was in undergrad I studied archaeology and history, and I realized I was tailoring research papers to the Holocaust, and then it was this sense that I can’t understand the Holocaust without understanding Jewish history, without understanding the loss of this people, ya know what was actually lost during the Holocaust. So, it came out of first a very planned thing by my mom and it was part of her goal as a parent to teach me about this. My cousins didn’t get this, this was my mom specifically, and it evolved much more into a personal curiosity, so while I have been primarily studying the Holocaust for a long time, my goal now is not just to study the destruction of the Jewish people but to understand the totality of that loss by understanding who they were before that. That’s been a recent goal, and I think that connects to what you’re saying this yearning or this loyalty that I do feel.
I feel we don’t learn about the Holocaust correctly in many ways, but too that we have left off the important thing which is that these Jews were part of these established communities and had thriving relationships with these communities despite Antisemitism and instances of violence, we had thriving communities all over the world before the Holocaust and that aspect of it has been forgotten really by Holocaust education. By an attempt to assert the Holocaust we have left the Jewish life out of it, so that’s been more of my recent goals with studying history is to understand what Jewish life was like in the past and I think it can tell us about Jewish life now, especially looking at questions like “what did the Holocaust change?” How is Jewish life today impacted by the Holocaust? Not understanding that lived history is problematic, I think. So, it came out of a very pointed, purposeful goal of my mother and then it turned into genuine interest and feeling like I couldn’t understand the Holocaust without that prior knowledge, and out of it has come more of a connection to the Jewish past as well and to my own Judaism and identity in a way. Not everyone’s experience is the same, but mine is an American Jewish 21st-century story, ya know a lot of us are raised the same way, we’re raised with the Holocaust, it’s a reality in our lives as children and that impacts you for the rest of your life. I’ve taken it in, not a necessarily different route, but in wanting to look at history before that does connect it to my Jewish present. I feel like it’s very real for how I want to be as a person today, how I want to be as a Jewish person, how I want to be as someone who cares a lot about the society we live in; I care a lot about politics, I care a lot about what happens to other people all because I was raised with that in a general way but also raised with this instance in which people didn’t care about other people and allowed something really bad to happen so it contributes to my Jewish present in a lot of ways as well.
H: I’m interested in your perspective in general—you mentioned that you don’t think that we teach the Holocaust well, that there are things that are missing, and my next natural question is could you speak more to that? I’m very curious about what you believe is missing. If and when you start teaching, what needs to be done differently, and for what reasons? Is it perpetuating harmful stereotypes and Antisemitism, or is it something more subtle than that?
A: The one thing that drives me crazy about the way we as a society have come to understand the Holocaust is that we’ve come to understand it through the lens of Auschwitz, even what we know about Auschwitz in a general sense is not correct, and part of this is understandable, it comes out of a history of understanding the event of the Holocaust in the initial years after the war in which all we had were survivors who wanted to tell their story and there wasn’t many of them. It took many decades to piece together what happened into a narrative and with that came ebbs and flows; people initially saw Auschwitz as a big Nazi machine that ran like a machine and was systematic and it wasn’t always so. There are always changes to how people see history, but part of the problem was that most of the initial survivors actually came from Auschwitz and started to tell their stories so all we knew for a long time was that, but there’s more to understand about the Holocaust than just Auschwitz, and I think it’s problematic for a few reasons.
So, I’ll point out first that I think it’s important that we understand and teach that the camps were not the start of the genocide. Concentration camps actually started in Germany in the 30s and were not part of a mass killing operation. The genocide actually started with groups of Nazi action squads moving East through occupied Poland and they would just take Jews from towns and kill them in massacres. It started in the East (and by East I mean Eastern Europe) with the Einsatzgruppen murders that were somewhat planned but were not systematic. We don’t have records of who died; all of a sudden, these groups were wiped off the map. So, the genocide didn’t start with the concentration camps, not even the death camps, it really started with the extermination process in the East in these mostly random massacres that happened.
It’s also important to realize and start teaching that there were different types of camps. Auschwitz is actually not the best type of camp to reference if you’re trying to teach about a camp, because Auschwitz was actually three different types of camps all put into one, and it was a unique thing, no other camp existed just like Auschwitz. The closest was Majdanek—it had a labor camp, a prisoner of war camp, and a death camp. So, Auschwitz was actually not the norm. A lot of people died there, more than anywhere else, we think, but the killing process at Auschwitz took much more time. There were other death camps where almost as many people were killed in a span of six months rather than four years, so we have these other spaces where mass numbers of people were killed, but the problem is that we kind of understand it through this idea we have of Auschwitz and it’s just not accurate. Most people don’t learn exactly what happened at Auschwitz. We think that every Holocaust survivor is going to have a tattoo, that’s no true, that only happened at Auschwitz at a certain period of time. Not every Holocaust survivor has records of what happened to them. The Nazis often did take records, and often very meticulous ones, but it was not true for most places. We don’t know the names or anything about the 750,000 Jews that were killed at the Bełżec death camp. So, there are quite a few things that I like to point out that were different about the Holocaust than what we’re normally taught.
I like to point out the position of Poland—and I feel a connection to Poland since my family is from there—but Poland was where the war started. Germany attacked Poland, Germany and the Soviet Union split up Poland again, and then eventually Germany attacked the Soviet Union and Poland didn’t exist for a long time, but all of this mass killing all the death camps took place where Poland is today, so when we talk about the Holocaust as genocide, we need to talk about Poland and we need to talk about Ukraine, which was also where most of these massacres happened, so we need to look to the East more. I think that the implications of this would not necessarily change the world in any way, but I think it contributes to Holocaust misinformation which can then lead to Holocaust denial. There are a lot of people who believe Elie Wiesel did not survive the Holocaust because he claims to have had a tattoo and then there are pictures where he doesn’t have one, so if you believe that every single Holocaust survivor had a tattoo then maybe you’ll start to believe these instances where people are trying to deny the Holocaust happened.
We also don’t realize the scale of the Holocaust. By solely thinking about concentration camps, by solely thinking about Auschwitz, we really don’t realize that the summer of 1942 is when most people were killed because the opening of a few death camps happened and in a six-month period. Nearly a million people at these sites were killed, and we don’t realize the swiftness with which this happened often. All of this happened within a war that lasted six years, and the Nazi rise to power in 1933 which wasn’t that much earlier, so the implications may not seem that large, but I think misinformation about the Holocaust can lead to Holocaust denial and when we tread that line it gets really uncomfortable and in a really simple sense we miss out on people’s experiences. Most people’s experience was not Auschwitz, most people’s experience was being killed in a random place, many people experienced a ghetto of some sort, but every ghetto was different. By solely looking through the lens of Auschwitz, we’re not understanding the multiplicity of experience or how genocide can happen; it didn’t just happen in a systematic way we’ve been taught, it happened in a much more random and horrifyingly swift way.
So those are a few things I like to nitpick, but it’s important. We see a lot of Auschwitz. On Amazon there was a show called The Hunters about Holocaust survivors who were exacting revenge on Nazis—very not real—but all of them had this experience of Auschwitz, so as a society we see and hear about Auschwitz a lot but it wasn’t the norm for people’s experience.
H: You called it nitpicking, but I don’t think that stuff is small. I think the fact that we tend to generalize is a very big deal, at least to me, and my understanding of history. To me, that is a very valuable perspective. I personally feel very honored and I’m grateful to have learned about that and I’m excited to make this a part of the project so even more people can learn about it. So, in hearing you talk about all of this, I can’t help but draw comparisons to our current cultural moment and concerns you may have and how that may be influencing your decision to start or continue with this research. Could you speak about any red flags you see, how are you interpreting our current cultural moment given the knowledge that you have and the research that you’ve done surrounding the Holocaust?
A: So, I think the most obvious is I am very concerned about our current administration. History doesn’t repeat itself but there are parallels. Humans act on similar behaviors and impulses, but I think that our current administration, at least many of its actions is very similar to the Nazi regime of the late 1920s-early 1930s which is very obviously concerning. The Nazi regime came to power not because a lot of people wanted them to be in power—they came into power with a lot of luck, by barely winning some elections, the president of Germany ends up dying and Hitler ends up gaining all of his power and uses executive orders to do whatever he wants, that’s how we ended up getting close to World War II and the Holocaust, so I’m very concerned about our current administration in that way.
My other thought is that I see a lot of other parallels between how Poland attempts to deal with its Jewish history and its Jewish past and how America attempts to deal with its past of Native American genocide and slavery. Poland did not actively start the Holocaust or genocide but there is a lot of evidence that they collaborated pretty well, that everyday Poles did, and my other area of interest is contemporary Poland and how they choose to deal with their Jewish past, and I do see a lot of similarities and whether there is an attempt to reconcile with the past or not. The current Polish administration is also not great and does not want to reconcile with this history in some ways and I do see a lot of similarities. In general, I think we can attempt to learn about other moments of mass collective trauma that have happened in the world by trying to understand Poland’s collective trauma in World War II and the Holocaust, by trying to understand how they did not deal with it immediately; they were taken over by a communist regime and this has kind of stopped any attempt at reconciling with this past, and I think that we can learn a lot about reconciliation attempts, attempts to remember moments of trauma from the past by analyzing Poland and Poland’s lack of reconciliation and especially because this is such a recent case of bad and traumatic history.
Those are the two things I think about often. Our current administration, I’m very much against them and what they’ve done, because I seek parallels, not because I think he will kill a bunch of people, but when I researched the origins of Nazi Germany, a lot of red flags went off, and it was not because an entire country loved Nazism, they barely squeaked by in elections and a series of unfortunate events happened.
H: Thank you again for doing this, I feel like I have learned so much and your perspective is an incredibly valuable part of our project.
A: I love to chat about this, so it’s no skin off my back.
H: Even if it weren’t for the project, I would have still been very interested in all of this, I learned a lot and I’m very appreciative.
A: Of course, I’m glad to help.
H: I know, I’m excited about it.
A: Thanks Hannah, I’ll see ya in class.
H: Alright, thanks, Alison.
Pictured above is a photo shared by Alison of her great-grandfather's ship manifest. Alison mentioned that it showed the misspelling of their name along with the town from which they were from.