There was only one blonde-haired girl in my Jewish day school class.  Her blondeness was a magnet—boys and girls alike followed her around the playground—and her yellow curls granted her a special role in all our games of make-believe.

When we played House, she was the baby.  When we played Jungle, she was the lion cub.  When we played Doctor, she was the attending physician.

And so, it was only natural that when we began to hear whispers of something called “the Holocaust,” which all the sixth graders were learning about, but which we were still too young to learn, that she would play a central part in the new game we started to play.

We were fascinated by the Holocaust initially because it was taboo.  Some kids weren’t even allowed to listen to the speakers or watch the films that our embarrassed, non-Jewish history teacher used to introduce us to the topic.  She would speak in hushed tones and gesture out to the class, as if to say: “But of course, who am I to say?”  Out of school, we passed around books on the subject—Number the Stars and Jacob’s Room, fiction written for older kids—and at recess, we unpacked this new storyline, this new horrifying and amazing truth about the world, like every story we had learned since preschool. 

We played Holocaust. 

Playing Holocaust went something like this:  Sabrina and I, with our dark hair and our willingness to play disfavored roles, were poor Jews, languishing in a secret room hidden beneath the city streets.  We would have died if it were not for Andrea, whom we sent out into the world above, where her blond curls disguised her as a German woman, and she could get food to bring back and feed us before we starved.  

We played our parts with dignity. 

“You must go, Alexis,” I would say to Andrea, who got to pick her own name for the game.  “Even though the Nazis might find us before you return.”

“Without you, we’d starve,” Sabrina would add.  And Andrea would hug us both and then solemnly withdraw into the sunlight above the slide. 

Later that night, lying in bed with a stuffed animal cuddled close, I would continue playing Holocaust, imagining I was a refugee woman with a child to protect as I hid from the Nazis in the fields.  I had very little sense of where I was running to, or what it meant to be a refugee, or how, exactly, all this Nazis-hating-the-Jews business got started.  But I felt very earnestly that my role in the game was to be the quiet, strong woman, protecting the more vulnerable even as I endured the blows of oppression.

Meanwhile, my non-Jewish friends were getting really good at softball.

I can’t remember if one of our elementary-school friends had the guts to play an S.S. officer.  More likely, we all played Jews, each of us imagining the invisible threat of the German officers.  The games were not about being caught or being killed.  They were about daring escapes.  They were about running, hiding, and suffering.  It’s an important distinction: we didn’t play Concentration Camp.  We were interested in the slow decline of human rights—in unfairness, not in death.  We were interested in suffering while others flourished, not in suffering alone.

Playing Holocaust was not really about acting out the story of World War II.  It was about trying out those feelings that, collectively, we felt were ours to feel.  We hadn’t really been there, but we knew.  We understood.  This was just another line in a long history of oppression.  Being a Jew meant being privy to the worst impulses of humankind. 

Of course, the stories of how people died in the Holocaust held a kind of twisted fascination for us.  But in our games, we were much more inclined to act out the stories of survivors. 

Many years later, as a college student, my sister and I went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  Upon entering the museum, each visitor is handed a “passport” that tells the story of someone who lived during the Holocaust.  Some were killed; some lived on.  The cards are handed out randomly, presumably to impress upon visitors the arbitrariness of survival.

The person on my sister’s card survived; the person on my card did not. 

If I had lived during the Holocaust, I would probably have died. 

My sister saw my face and offered to trade.  I traded.

That thought, which I experienced for the first time that day, shattered some romantic notions I had about the Holocaust. 

After all, here was a story of the heights of human sacrifice and human suffering; of coldness and warmth; of the limits of human survival; of star-crossed lovers and love in unlikely places; of a ray of hope shining out of the depths of despair; of the origins of the Jewish State.  Here was a story of “the ultimate.”  And it was all true. 

Standing in the museum, I thought, this was a story about death.  There was nothing romantic or redemptive about death.  The people who had died in the Holocaust had not earned anything for the rest of us.  They had only died, and that was it.

It was a simple, obvious thought.  And it represented a small, but important transition in my thinking.  It pointed to the line between commemorating the lives of the dead, and commemorating the Holocaust.  Between telling the story of the lives of those we have lost, and telling the story of the oppression of the Jewish people.  It snips the narrative in two, and separates life from life.

I only began to think about my relationship to the Holocaust—the way I have been taught about it and struggled to comprehend it from the days that I first played Holocaust in the sandbox to the day I stumbled out of Yad Vashem into the blinding Jerusalem sun to the every-day that I encounter it and choose to discuss it or ignore it—when I began to think more critically about my relationship to Israel.