Why Do They Cry?

Many years ago, I saw an extremely well-made documentary on the Holocaust. The film consisted of a series of interviews of Holocaust survivors. If I recall correctly, the interviewer was not on camera.

The film was very well done, but I have a memory of just two specific aspects of it, and both involve crying.

The first. In one interview after another, the survivors were able to speak at length about their horrible ordeals and retain composure. And anyone with any familiarity with the holocaust will know that we are speaking about unspeakably abject circumstances, the likes of which many of us have great difficulty even imagining. But these survivors were able to relate them all and still maintain control of their emotions.

Until they discussed their relatives.

It was remarkable to see these people able to discuss their own travails at length, calmly describing one abhorrent cruelty after another visited upon them -- humiliation, starvation, bitter cold, beatings -- but then, the moment when they would mention a brother or a cousin or a niece, they would stop. Seconds later, a lip would quiver; a chin would tremble, and then, more often than not, they would break down and weep.

Such is the raw emotional power that comes from the love that is based on family ties. Time had, in some sense, healed the deep wounds and scars that these survivors had suffered themselves, but the loss of their beloved family members -- mama, papa, sister, brother, son, daughter -- the pain of these losses still seared their souls, all those many decades later.

Indeed, all of the interviewees wept only when they began to discuss family members.

Except one.

This gentlemen, like the other survivors, was able to maintain his self-possession as he described the barbarities he had suffered. At one point, the interviewer asked him how he was able to survive such unendurable agony. The man paused to think, and then replied that he had had to change himself, to become tougher. And it was this thought -- again, not the actual monstrous events themselves -- that made him break down and weep.

This man was weeping over the loss of what was for him the most precious thing in the universe: himself. For the sake of remaining alive, he had had to make the formidable decision of ceasing to be himself, and instead, becoming a different person -- one with a personality that would be more adaptable to the dire conditions of that place and time.

Only that man himself knows the specifics of the ramifications of this decision. A piece of bread hoarded instead of shared? A deaf ear to a girl's cry? But here was a man who had been forced to knowingly part company with his very self -- the self that he loved. This, above all else, was the loss that he mourned, in some ways the most heartbreaking of all.