Out of
the Shadows
By Aloma Halter
(April 13) - Film-maker Naomi Gryn, the daughter of Britain's much-loved
Rabbi Hugo Gryn, worked together with him on his memoirs from the
Holocaust and finished writing the book for him after his death.
Naomi Gryn sets her bike against the display window of a bookstore
on London's chic Marylebone High Street. She's waif-like, somewhere
between 18 and 22, studying philosophy of science at the London
School of Economics, and she dreams of becoming a filmmaker, an
author, a broadcaster. Gryn studies the display. The entire window
is taken up with one book, Chasing Shadows. It is a Holocaust memoir
with a difference, begun by her survivor father and completed posthumously
by his daughter.
Published by Viking Penguin, it first appeared in February 2000,
when the libel trial between Holocaust denier David Irving and historian
Deborah Lipstadt was at its height. Now, after five printings and
the book selling out last August, the paperback edition has just
appeared.
From the book's cover, the byline of Gryn's 40-year-old self, the
self who compiled and edited, checked facts and added footnotes
- to material from the 60 boxes of notes and lectures and jottings
and drafts left by her father - looks back at the young Naomi, as
if to say: "You did it, Nao. We did it."
Father and daughter. An exceptional team.
Chasing Shadows is the memoir of Rabbi Hugo Gryn, one of Britain's
best-loved figures, whose popularity reached far beyond Anglo-Jewry.
Upon his death in August 1996, many newspapers called him "the people's
rabbi."
Born in the Carpathian town of Berehovo in 1930 and deported to
Auschwitz at the age of 13, Gryn survived the Holocaust, went on
to the US to train for the rabbinate, and eventually became the
pastoral rabbi of a large congregation, the West London Synagogue,
and flagship of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain.
Besides being widely known for his interfaith work, Gryn was a
frequent guest on TV talk shows and roundtables, and a hugely popular
panelist on The Moral Maze, a BBC radio program which commanded
wide ratings.
Chasing Shadows was an overnight success. The New Statesman hailed
it as "not only an important historical document and engrossing
memoir, but the only convincing case for a belief in God that I
have ever read." The Evening Standard wrote: "This book is an essential
witness to the horrors of the 20th century and also to the resilience
of the human spirit."
Gryn had survived his experiences in the Holocaust with the belief
that the reason he had to "spend much of my time working for better
understanding between religious groups is partly because I know
that you can only be safe and secure in a society that practices
tolerance, cherishes harmony and can celebrate difference."
Naomi Gryn has worked widely in radio and television - as director,
broadcaster, researcher, producer and presenter, and for a number
of years ran her own production company, See More Productions. She
enabled the recounting of her father's story - on film and in print
- bringing it out of the shadows and into the light. And the father
enriched his daughter with his legacy, with a central theme that
has fueled and focused her professional creativity: the exploration
of religious themes and ethical issues.
A glance at the list of Gryn's film productions gives insight into
how important the Jewish perspective has been to her: The Sabbath
Bride; The Star; The Castle & The Butterfly: The history of the
Jews of Prague; The Last Exodus: The flight of the Jews from the
Soviet Union.
Gryn's themes, however, have not been exclusively Jewish, and she's
proud of films made for Thames TV and for Channel 4: Jesus Before
Christ and Xmas In New York.
Without Gryn, knowledge of the early part of her father's life
- a life that touched so many that, upon his death, volunteers had
to be recruited by the family to help open the thousands of letters
of condolence - would not have gained that extra dimension. The
chemistry they shared, even in a family that is exceptionally close,
was special.
Although the filmmaker had been an active ally of her father's
all along, her siblings also supported him in their own ways. Her
older sister, Gaby, bore the name of her father's 10-year old brother,
who was sent to the gas chambers; and their younger sister, Rachelle,
collaborated with Naomi at See More productions. Their brother,
David, began as a painter and completed several haunting portraits
of his father with Holocaust themes.
For the rabbi's 60th birthday, they all clubbed together to buy
him a state-of-the art Sony Walkman so he could record his experiences,
intending for him to write up the tapes and transcripts into a book.
Naomi, the second child, most resembles Gryn, not only physically
but also in terms of personality and psyche. They shared the same
garrulous enjoyment of - and ease in being with - other people;
an irreverent sense of humor; and the same easeful, unstrained creativity.
In 1989 - when the filmmaker was just shy of 30 - she persuaded
her father to return to his hometown, Berehovo - now in Ukraine
- to make a documentary about his childhood.
"When we hit on the title Chasing Shadows," says the younger Gryn,
"it held great resonance for us both. My mission was to give shape
to the swirling shadows of my father's past, which are part of my
shadow also. I think he would have wanted that to be the title of
his book.
"What we wanted to show in this documentary," she continues, "was
in contrast to what has become visual cliches associated with the
Holocaust - the mass graves and the mounds of rotting corpses. My
father and I wanted to give the film's audience a microcosmic peep
into what was destroyed in the Shoah, the life and the culture that
had disappeared forever.
"This was a two-year period when I became integrated with him on
some level," explains Gryn. "We had both been upset at how much
material had to be left on the cutting floor in the course of trimming
down our filming into a 52-minute program for Channel 4. I managed
to obtain for my father a publishing deal with Collins Brown but
he never signed it. It wasn't just because of his amazing workload
and being so busy and pressured; but I think he just couldn't bring
himself relive the horrors of Auschwitz and beyond."
Ironically, it was also sent to Tony Lacey [subsequently Naomi
Gryn's publisher] at Penguin, who passed on it in December 1989.
She describes the chain of events that led to Penguin publishing
the manuscript some nine years later.
"In 1997, about a year and a half after his death, I was packing
up my father's office. There were dozens of desk drawers and filing
cabinets all stuffed with his notes, his lectures, talks, sermons
- anything he'd said or read or thought might come in handy some
day. He'd kept everything. I was cataloging his books and working
through all the papers and documents, trying to create some order
before filing everything into acid-free boxes.
"Behind a pile of ancient bank statements and check-book stubs,
I found a worn orange foolscap folder. Inside was the handwritten
manuscript of a book that my father had begun in October 1951, when
he was a rabbinical student in Cincinnati.
"I understood that this was like finding a very precious home movie,
that this was my father's first attempt to record the tale of his
family's descent into the Nazi inferno. It forms the kernel of the
book. At first, I was afraid and could not bring myself to read
it."
Gryn says that there were many reasons for her decision to begin
work on the manuscript. "First of all, several people had approached
the family with requests to write a biography of my father, but
since he'd begun his own biography, we all felt very strongly that
he should have chance to tell his own story in his own words. Another
factor for me was the element of tribute, of mourning. Working on
this material was a way of working through my own grief. And it
felt appropriate to complete a project we had started together.
"At the time I was setting up a Jewish and Moslem women's dialogue
group and I was negotiating with David Cesarani, at London's Wiener
Library, to use a room there for the group. I happened to mention
to him the interesting material that I had of my father's Holocaust
experiences, and he mentioned it to his agent, who immediately contacted
me, and within a couple of weeks I had a deal with Penguin. By the
summer of 1999 it was already in the proof stage.
"It was a very symbolic moment for me when I was first shown the
cover of the hardback, off-white with gold writing. I immediately
understood - it was just like the gold and off-white tallit that
I'd once bought for him and in which, when he died, I asked he be
wrapped for burial.
"For me, the cover of the book, like that tallit, represented closure
and the final burial of my father."
Gryn transcribed and edited tapes her father had made, adding chapters
compiled from his sermons and talks, tracking down the facts, and
adding footnotes. She explains that she "approached it as if I were
making a film with lots of disparate interviews and archive material
which needed to be woven together as smoothly as possible. It contains
his story; my voice ends with the introduction and then it goes
over to his voice, at which point my involvement is as editor, to
clarify with footnotes."
This writer, growing up in Gryn's congregation and having experienced
him as her bat-mitzva rabbi, can attest to the fact that there was
something quite special about Hugo's voice.
He was a wise, unassuming man with tremendous personal warmth and
caring for his fellow men and it was all in his voice - a rich,
deep, tobacco-stained and heavily accented voice, redolent of Gryn's
Hungarian-Czech background. Actually, his was not the kind of voice
would at first associate with fluent sermons or memorable radio
programs. His sermons tended to be slow and meditative, and he'd
hesitate and stammer, and make up for it with vivid, eloquent gesticulations
and facial expressions. Rather than alienating them, this had the
effect of bringing his listeners closer to him, as the pace forced
them to slow their own thoughts and join Gryn as he set out on his
spiritual, emotional and intellectual voyages.
His listeners were made party to the speaker's process of thinking
and searching; even to his doubts. It was a voice lacking in rhetoric
and oozing with humanity and warmth.
Later, what that voice was able to convey on the radio was that
somehow being deported to Auschwitz and losing one's family could
lead to the beginning of faith and a moral existence, rather than
the end. It gave people hope.
As another of Britain's leading papers, the Observer, said in its
eulogy: "What was it about him that touched a chord in so many people?
At root, it was surely that in an age searching with increasing
desperation for moral guidance, he didn't preach moral authority
- he embodied it."
Because his daughter learned to type at the age of 12, she began
working part-time at 14 to make money during her school vacations.
"In 1978 I was on my way to university, but my father was desperate
for some secretarial help; so I spent the summer working with him,
which is when I got attuned to his filing system," and first got
involved in his work.
Gryn's life is fueled by great enthusiasms and passions. While
she's scathing about the sales director at Penguin, who, this time
last year, in his infinite wisdom, cut the print run of the book
just as it was being excerpted in one of Britain's most popular
weekend papers, The Mail on Sunday, she raves about her wonderful
editor at Penguin, Tony Lacey, "an exceptional, really fantastic
person."
Neither does Gryn mince words about "anyone who disrespects my
father" - such as Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks whom she
describes as: "abominably yellow-bellied." She is referring to Sacks's
actions around the period of Gryn's death when Sacks sought both
to acknowledge a colleague and a rabbi that the rest of Britain
was mourning with such open affection, and yet tried, with a backstabbing
letter, to utterly dissociate himself from anything that smacked
of the Reform Movement.
"But all this," says the younger Gryn cheerfully, is nothing compared
to "my sentiments about some of the bigots and racists who call
themselves rabbis in Israel."
Chasing Shadows appeared at the height of the famous Irving trial
last year. Many newspapers were quick to point to the importance
of the appearance of such a memoir at this particular time; even
the heroine was another Penguin author - Deborah Lipstadt. The Daily
Telegraph, for example, advised: "This book should have as wide
an audience as possible; it highlights the danger of revisionist
accounts of the Holocaust, and throws into relief the reality of
individual suffering in ethnic cleansing."
Gryn comments, "What Irving was gunning for during the trial was
that, scientifically, you couldn't exterminate that number of people
in such a short time. However, the transport from my father's hometown
of Berehovo was well-documented. There are even photographs of it
in the Auschwitz Album."
Gryn produces the album, which is at hand because she's currently
collaborating with the renowned historian Sir Martin Gilbert on
a research project. "I felt that somehow these 'coincidences' were
orchestrated by my father from beyond the grave to give him a chance
to stand in the witness dock and say to Irving: 'Look me in the
eyes and tell me it didn't happen. Tell me that these people killed
didn't include my grandparents and my little brother, Gaby.'"
Gryn didn't talk much about losing his grandparents, his younger
brother, and his father, Geza - who died only a few days after liberation,
after having survived the war together with his son. Nor did he
talk about the separation from his mother for many years.
"He'd answer questions. He'd made a decision: If any of us had
any question, he would never lie, and answer as best as he could.
But in 1978, a significant change took place for him, because that
was the year he first saw Holocaust-denial literature which shocked
him so much that he decided to talk about the Shoah publicly for
a BBC program called In the Light of Experience.
"At that time," says Gryn, "I was in the throes of a splendid teenage
rebellion, and the things I most enjoyed were algebra, smoking pot
and hanging out with grubby guitarists from Glasgow. My father was
hugely relieved when I announced that I wanted to 'go into broadcasting.'
"To encourage this new-found ambition, he invited me to come with
him to this recording and I sat upstairs with the technicians as
he was making the program, and for the first time when it wasn't
just the family around him, heard him relate his experiences of
his family being deported. Little did I guess that 20 years later
I'd be using material from that program to complete the book."
This key anecdote in their lives contains it all: their close relationship;
Gryn finding it easiest to share his experience with his daughter
there, as he later would when they made the film Chasing Shadows;
the fact that she didn't only listen passively, but chose to actively
carry on his message.
Hugo Gryn survived with his father throughout the war. They pretended
to be cousins and the senior Gryn was able to look out for and help
his son in infinite ways. This is a very rare story of survival;
most survivors were left completely alone. But not much is heard
about Gryn's mother, Bella, in the book.
"Her other son, my uncle Gaby," says Naomi, "was taken from her
and sent to the gas chambers and she was sent to do slave labor.
Meanwhile, she didn't know that her older boy and her husband were
together throughout the war. Both my grandmother and father separately
made their way back to Berehovo and met there." Naomi notes that
when her grandmother saw Hugo walking alone from the train station,
she understood that her husband had died.
"And the most courageous thing she ever did was to encourage her
son, my father, to start a new life in the West. So, aged 15, my
father went to Prague to resume his education. The Soviet border
had come down in the autumn of 1945 and it was on New Year's Eve
that my father smuggled his mother into Czechoslovakia and took
her to Karlovy Vary where she had a couple of surviving brothers.
"My father then made his way to England, with the other 'boys'
who were brought over by the Central British Fund, taught English,
given an education and generally helped. Meanwhile his mother remarried
and lived with her new husband in Czechoslovakia.
"Soon, because of Communism, they were cut off in Eastern Europe
and they couldn't see one another for years. Bella was only given
permission to come to England for my parents' wedding in 1957, a
month after they were married and by which time my parents had already
left for America, so there was no point. Later my gracious, gorgeous
mother, Jacqueline Selby, traveled with her own dad to visit Bella
on the way to Hugo's first pulpit, in Bombay."
About the success of the book, Gryn says: "There are such important
issues at stake, particularly about the need [for people] to regard
each other with mutual respect. And rejection can feel like a judgment
about the value of Jewish life. The worst thing that could have
happened would have been if the book had been ignored; if it had
just sunk into oblivion.
"Sometimes, when people express a feeling of saturation with the
subject of the Holocaust, you feel a little despondent, as if they're
too disinterested to hear my father's story. But I'm not entirely
unsympathetic. The Holocaust is difficult 'to sell': It's not sexy,
it's not fun - it's hard. After the book launch, for example, an
Irish Catholic neighbor, who has himself experienced some of the
dire consequences of racism and armed conflict, told me: 'Don't
take this the wrong way, I wish the media would stop talking about
the Holocaust, and that it just became part of the school curriculum
instead...'"
Gryn remarks that Penguin "have been magnificent about supporting
the paperback," and the British newspapers are full of adverts for
Chasing Shadows.
Gryn spent a full year working on the book daily. There wasn't
a particular moment or juncture when she decided to take the Holocaust
"on board," it was simply "because I always enjoyed being with my
father and the things he was involved in always fascinated me. He
was such good fun, that it was worth the risk of the sadness in
order to have the pleasure, I suppose; that's how I came to shoulder
some of his Shoah baggage.
"These days, when a big episode happens, like an earthquake or
fire, or like the Oklahoma bombing, a team of counselors is sent
to debrief the victims, and then need to be 'debriefed' themselves,
relieved of the trauma absorbed from their contact with the victims.
In Shoah families, there are children who help to 'debrief' a parent
or the parents, and who then themselves need debriefing. Well, we
children of survivors have often found creative outlets to debrief
ourselves, which is what happened to me, in a way, with this book;
it was part of the process of healing after the trauma of my father's
death."
Gryn suffered quite a trauma herself in 1994, when she almost died
in a car crash in Israel.
"I'm lucky to have survived, even though the recovery period seemed
to go on forever. But one of the things that most offended me about
this accident was how the insurance company's defense tried to use
the fact of my being the daughter of a survivor to basically say
I must have been unbalanced and unstable before the accident - so
the dumping of this truck-load of oranges on my head and neck had
little to do with the blinding headaches, and the various head and
neck injuries I sustained from the collision!"
The "appalling" term "Second Generation" for children of Holocaust
survivors, "makes me squirm," says Gryn. "Increasingly, people are
looking to the children of the survivors, who are now reaching middle
age, to somehow act as a continuation of their parents' stories.
"The way I see it is that being 'Second Generation' simply means
that we have a duty, inasmuch as we can, to help our parents have
their voice heard - if that's what we feel we should do. But we
weren't there. So it's not at all about us, but about helping and
facilitating our parents."
Growing up in a home as the daughter of a survivor "was normal
because it was our home. But there were some things - like my mother
never boiled cabbage because the smell reminded my father of burning
flesh and gave him bad dreams; or we children never asked him for
the end of 'the story' because we did not want to add to his pain."
In Gryn's book one sees how the "boiled cabbage" smell made its
imprint. He must have been one of the very few people who saw the
inside of the gas chamber at Auschwitz and lived to tell the tale.
This chilling episode is at the core of Chasing Shadows, when Gryn
has wandered off from his father's side as they're waiting to be
assigned work details, and the curious 13-year-old has decided to
explore a weird, windowless and foreboding-looking building that
he at first thought might have been a bakery. He follows a group
of children younger than himself, aged six to nine, inside, and
befriends Karel, a little boy from Theresienstadt.
Gryn is fortunately spotted as being the wrong age by an officious
gas-chamber guard and told to get dressed quickly and "buzz off."
However, he still lingers, curious to see what will happen next:
"The children lined up in twos and the double door opened. A strong
smell came out of the hall beyond. It was a smell I had never experienced
before.
"Sweetish, yet not sweet.
"The hall was lit by electricity and beneath the ceiling ran the
usual metal pipes, but from where I stood, I could not see much
of the interior. The floor. I noticed, was dry.
"The children went in, and Karel waved to me as he entered.
"My dressing, however, was completed and the man who had asked
us in made signs at me towards the front door. The meaning was obvious.
As I passed him he said something like: 'Are you lucky!' As I opened
the front door, the double door behind me was closed by the officer.
Outside, I took a deep breath. I was glad to be out again. It was
inexplicable, but I felt very relieved. It was curious, I thought,
that no soap was given to the children, and only two people were
supervising their showers. When we showered, there had been a whole
army of barbers and other assistants swarming around the place.
Very curious! Going back to the square, I went round the other way.
The wall on the other side had no windows either. There were piles
of clothing and even what seemed to me ashes of burnt clothing.
All the time the chimney smoked. Black smoke came gushing out with
an occasional shot of red flame. It was not so bad during the sunshine,
but at night it looked frightening.
"Back on the square everything seemed normal - that is, if the
word 'normal' could be applied to anything that happened in Auschwitz.
Dad was still talking to the Pole [with whom he had been talking
when Hugo first slipped away], but he looked quite agitated."
The account of the gas chamber experience was not, however, the
most harrowing part of the book for her. The time she "really broke
down was when I downloaded an account from the Internet by Major
Cameron Coffman, one of my father's American liberators, an officer
with the 71st division of the US Army. A decent man from Fort Thomas,
Kentucky, who'd already seen a few years of service and the brutality
of war. But, as he wrote in this eye-witness report: 'The living
and dead evidence of horror and brutality beyond one's imagination
was there, lying and crawling and shuffling, in stinking, ankle-deep
mud and human excrement.'
"I'd already been working with the material for almost a year,
but I found I was shaking and wanted to vomit... Any of those people
starving and crawling about in the filth between the corpses could
have been my father. I got his grandson's permission to reprint
it as an appendix in my father's book."
It wasn't easy for Gryn to deal with living with this material,
with which she had such a close connection, day after day.
"It was quite a dark period for me - a confusion of grief and anger.
At times I felt very distressed. In order to do this project, I
had to extend myself to the personality of my father, and I enmeshed
myself as much as I could in order to sympathize, and then afterwards
it was quite a long process, getting unmeshed, coming back to myself."
One of the reviews at the time, from The Financial Times, said:
"It is a brave act to have made this book happen." Naomi Gryn, and
she alone, made that book happen.
Last month the paperback edition of the book was launched at the
Imperial War Museum in London. "Now that my father's testimony is
in responsible hands, my job is done," says Gryn.
"I chose the Imperial War Museum in London, which houses Britain's
new Holocaust exhibit, for the venue of the launch because my father
figures prominently there - a video made of him giving a short eyewitness
account is one of the handful of survivor videos that is continually
being played... so his presence was very much 'there.' But the next
thing I'm working on - and I'm determined to keep away from the
Holocaust! - is the biography of a 52-carat diamond which was once
worn as a hair ornament by Catherine the Great."
Even if her next project is only half as successful as Chasing
Shadows has been, it's hard to imagine Naomi Gryn being any different
from how she is now - getting around London on her bike, or still
leaning out the window of her colorful, bric-a-brac-filled flat
and cheerfully waving at her neighbors across from the flowerpots.
Neither can one imagine her without that unique, infectious laugh
of hers.
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