I felt it coiled up inside of me, so bottled up that sometimes it caused aches and pains in my legs. I let it out in running and talking, in pounding on the piano, in making things, in school. But there was so much of it. At times, my life seemed to be not my own. Hundreds of people lived through me, lives that had been cut short in the war. My two grandmothers whose names were mine, lived though me. My parents were living through me. They saw in my life the years they had lost in the war and the years they had lost in emigrating to America. My life was not just another life, I thought often when I was a child, it was an assignation. “Every one of you is a miracle.” my mother would say about children of the people she had known in camp. “None of you was supposed to have been born.”
I went looking for children of survivors in the Chicago area, which has a substantial population of Holocaust survivors. Their children are now grown men and women, many of them in their early 40s. I was curious about how they were handling the traumas passed on from generation to generation. What I discovered was not weakness but strength, not neurosis but a passion for justice marked by a grave concern for the future.
“Perished?” he said. “Perished? What kind of a word is ‘perish’? Vegetables perish. People perish in accidents or from natural causes. Perish is not the word here. It dehumanizes what happened. The media likes neat words like ‘perish.’ Please call it what it is–murder!”
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With his accent, full head of dark hair, and flashing eyes, Rizowy could pass as a handsome Latin American aristocrat. He was born in 1949 in Uruguay. His parents, Polish Jews, were liberated by the Allied forces at Auschwitz, later married, and then moved to South America because nothing remained for them in the old country. His mother was the sole survivor on her side of the family; his father had only two siblings left.
Rizowy, his older brother, and his younger sister spent their early years in the hinterlands of Uruguay, in a one-horse town called Serandi Grande, where there was no plumbing or electricity. His father worked as a peddler. The family later moved to Montevideo; young Rizowy had never seen a multistory residence and couldn’t believe that houses could have bathrooms inside.
In 1967, at the age of 18, Rizowy moved to Israel to study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He lived on a kibbutz and earned a degree in political science. At the suggestion of his teachers, he came to the University of Chicago in 1972 and has been here ever since. In keeping with his earlier preoccupations, Rizowy concentrated his study on the use of force and violence in political affairs; his PhD thesis at the U. of C. analyzed the various methods by which citizens of Uruguay dissented from unpopular government policies, even in the face of threats and reprisals. “I found that people have 17,000 or more ways to withdraw support if they want to. Everything from refusing to vote to armed resistance. I was convinced that the old excuse about always having to follow orders just doesn’t hold water. When people cooperate with criminals, they choose to do so.” Still, he restlessly pondered why Germans, Poles, and other European Christians complied so easily with Nazi demands, why there were so few examples of refusal, so many instances of eager collaboration.
Rizowy says for him Judaism has always been more a matter of national identity and “peoplehood” than adherence to a body of doctrines. But his studies and experience have led him to develop some theories about the roots of the Holocaust based on the very different way Jews and Christians view their religious responsibilities (see sidebar). He preaches acceptance, not tolerance, of other views. “Tolerance means you will live at peace with someone whose ideas you don’t accept until you have the opportunity to transform him to your way of thinking. Acceptance means you take people as they are. You don’t judge.”
