It was 10 years ago that I traveled to Sobibor, a place that felt like the end of the world. Had the Nazis not turned it into one of their places of mass extermination, the forest in Eastern Poland would be unknown. It will forever be wild to me that insecure and violent men can turn Mother Nature’s idyllic landscapes into historical places of horror. In the 17 months between May 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union were killed in Sobibor. My family—Emily, Josef, and Petr, my great grandmother, great grandfather, and my grandmother’s brother—were three of those victims.
I visited this place in February 2015 when I was 26-years-old and retracing my grandmother’s wartime history around Europe. Sergiusz (my late-husband) drove. We were newly engaged at the time; he had asked me to marry him only a few weeks before during a weekend trip to Italy for my birthday. Sergiusz was my biggest supporter as I would come and go from his Warsaw apartment to the corners of Europe where I sought out strangers who filled in pieces of my family’s war-torn past. He too was curious about what happened to the generations before. Raised Catholic, he had grown into a man who was fascinated by the Jewish community that once lived in his native Poland. I might even argue that he was more interested than I was in the stories of the attempted elimination of European Jewry; this was his home, not mine.
So when it came time to visit Sobibor—a trip I had to take so I could better understand what my grandmother was lucky to avoid—there was no question that he would join me. We drove slowly, taking in the four-hours of sights and sounds basking in the low hanging afternoon light. We drove so far east that we were near the border of Poland, just a few kilometers from Ukraine.
I had a plan to walk what I could of the death camp. I wanted to get the perfect haunting photograph. I could have read about this place and written about it from afar, but I was a photographer. I couldn’t take pictures from home. It was the camera that led me into the world and out of my comfort zone. It forced me to explore.
But, we didn’t stay long. It is one of the only times while working on We Share The Same Sky where I disobeyed my camera and didn’t prioritize a picture. I wanted out. Sobibor scared me. It wasn’t like visiting Auschwitz, the Nazi-Concentration-Camp-turned-tourist-center where I watched teenagers throwing ham and cheese sandwiches back and forth to one another. This place was quiet, and uninhabited except for by a few locals. The history whistled at me through the wind. The snow was viciously loud as it crunched beneath our feet. The few signposts of information, signaling that we indeed made it to our destination, told a story that I already knew.
I so badly didn’t want to be here that we left.
If you want a more extended story of this visit, you can listen to episode 4 of the We Share The Same Sky podcast. If you haven’t already listened to the show, it is recommended to start with episode 1.
My memory of the drive home is only to be trusted a little. Part of me wishes I had recorded our reflections as we found our way back to the highway. I have my diaries of that time; I recorded every day of my life during that year of travel. I can go back to them of course, but sometimes I like to test my memory. I like to reconstruct what I can and see how much I’ve remembered right or wrong. And when I think back to that drive home, there is one memory that stands out: the only thing Sergiusz and I wanted to do was to get back home and watch clips of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
I know that sounds silly, but we desperately wanted and needed to escape into the playfulness of tv. And if I remember correctly (which my diaries corroborate that I do), that is exactly what we did. We went home, put our sweatpants on, poured a drink and watched celebrities partake in lip sync battles. We relaxed into our futon bed and watched people online play games with one another.
Play is a word that has consumed my mind in recent years. My twenties were heavy. I spent those years blending my personal life with my professional life, and filled myself with stories of the Holocaust and the memories of women widowed young. The exploration required to engage in that work saved me at the time. Documenting stories was both a coping mechanism to deal with my own pain, and deeply meaningful; the relationships I built with myself and others during those years remain significant. But as my healing progressed, partnered with the inevitable shift of how I approach my career in my thirties, I’ve found that the weight of the past paired with the weight of the world has demanded something new of me: my mind, my body and my soul are asking for me to play.
What does that mean though? To be an adult who plays?
Last year, I sat in conversation with comedy writer Dion Flynn to discuss this exact question. Dion carries his own heavy past that is infused with family mysteries, addiction and mental health struggles. He is also very uplifting and funny; he is someone who has healed intentionally and plays professionally. As he put it, “Play is like eating. It's like meditation, prayer, sunlight. You know, these essential things… It’s so good for us.”
Listen to Dion Flynn on the ALONG THE SEAM podcast. You can also read the transcript of our conversation here.
Back in 2015, when Sergiusz and I were desperate for the joy of silly tv, Dion was a regular contributor on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and had a recurring bit playing Barack Obama. I didn’t know his name then, but I remember him. Then fast forward many years to 2023 and I met Dion when we were both in a fellowship together at New America. The first thing I learned about him was not that I had seen him on tv, but that he had centered his own career around tackling the darkness of life through levity and comedy. I not only admired this approach, but envied it.
In our conversation for my podcast, I told him my story about Sobibor. I wasn’t intending to as I try quite hard not to be the girl who always brings up the Holocaust. It’s an insecurity of mine that has grown over the years as I’ve become associated with the genocide that wiped out much of my family tree. But it came out and I shared how much it meant to me to have a safe and distracting place to go to escape from my own mind. Through years of reflection, I could understand that it is because of escapes like this that I’ve been able to stay engaged in the hard work required to make some dent of healing in this world.
Dion listened with care and responded in kind. He’s known Fallon for years and shared this:
“There are other late night talk show hosts who are very verbal and partisan and saying important things and clear things and holding people accountable. And there's a big audience for it… There’s something that Jimmy does, and it's a line that he holds where he has decided (even though people criticize it) [that] he's going to hold the ground of being silly and fun and funny and not going too deep or too hard at anything… And I do believe, with my heart, body and soul, that consciously or unconsciously… he's playing the long game, which is [that] things are going to swing back and it will be better to have unified people for all this time than to have divided them.”
The optimism I pulled from this response has been carrying me since we spoke. Just the thought that there is someone out there believing whole-heartedly that the divisiveness we are experiencing around the world today will eventually diminish is so unbelievably hopeful I could cry. Like many, I’m weighed down right now. There are times when the heat of the contemporary news cycle activates me and where the adrenaline of pain has me wound up. But there are a lot of weeks, like this one when I’m writing this, that take me down. I’m in a battle with myself over information: how do I balance being an engaged citizen and a student of history with my deep desire to escape?
This question came up in another fellowship I had around the same time I met Dion. I spent 15-months studying moral leadership with The Witness Institute (run by Ariel Burger who was also on the Along The Seam podcast). We had plenty of conversations about the importance of balance, especially when part of our work is to be aware of the darkness that surrounds us. While we didn’t explicitly refer to it as play, we did refer to it as a form of rest. How do you ease your mind from the pain? For many of us it was television (dating shows have never served such an important role in my life). For some it was puzzles, sports, nature, cooking, or simply staring into the eyes of our pets. Whatever it was though, the point was that to be engaged in “the work” (whatever that is in your world), the only sustainable option was to also have an escape. That has to be a priority. Otherwise you burn out, which I’ve done.
“Do you have a suggestion of any way to be playful?” I asked Dion towards the end of our conversation, knowing that it’s not the easiest state for many of us.
“Yes. Admit to yourself that you need it,” he said. "You have to admit to yourself that you need the thing or you won't do the thing.”
He told me that “explore” is another word to be used when thinking about play, which I had some pushback on. Perhaps it’s my own hangup, but so much of my work life has been guided by a desire to “explore.” I went out to retrace my grandmother’s history as an exploration. That’s what took me to Sobibor. The camera was a tool of exploration. Writing a book was an exploration of my own mind and meaning-making. And while there were and are moments of joy, for the most part exploration has been my path into the darkness.
“I would argue though that explore gets too caught up in productivity and creating something which then takes away some of the playfulness,” I responded to Dion.
“Oh, I agree with you 100%… There's no argument,” he said in response. “But I don't want to lay that on you because I'm trying to lead you to feeling okay about what you're doing so far… I agree with you that there's further you can go, which is the very enlightened state of this is for nothing… You have to be a pioneer to play. An explorer is a pioneer. So I will push back and say that they're very connected. But you're right, I think. And we're in agreement that play goes much further in the fact that it contains the wisdom of non-result…”
“The wisdom of non-result” feels like a revolutionary idea and I’m using that as my answer of what it means to play as an adult.
I think back to my grandmother, Hana, who is never far from my mind. I often start telling her story with the fact that she was the most joyful person I knew and show a picture of her eating fire, a magic trick she would do to wow us grandchildren and anyone else watching. She sometimes wore a pin that said “I’m an OUTRAGEOUS older woman” and would do anything to make us laugh. Her lust for life and need for adventure was palpable in all of her being. And yet, she also carried the first-hand experience of all the history I’ve spent much of my adult life exploring. It was her parents who were killed in Sobibor, not mine.
We so often peer back on the pages of history in effort to not repeat the past. But some history is meant to be a blueprint, and so much of that is in the healing that our ancestors have done. I think about Dion’s perspective on play and repeat to myself, “Play is the very enlightened state of ‘this is for nothing.’” My grandmother knew this. She grew into a woman who had the wisdom of non-result. She understood that it was a vital part of her survival story, as it should be ours.
Once again, your words resonate with haunting beauty and remarkable depth. To cite just one small example:
"The history whistled at me through the wind. The snow was viciously loud as it crunched beneath our feet. The few signposts of information, signaling that we indeed made it to our destination, told a story that I already knew."
Also, I LOVE that photo of your grandmother. #Iconic.