Episode 1: Simone The Not So Fearless
Listen to this episode on spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/simone-aliya/episodes/1--Simone-The-Not-So-Fearless-e305dj9
My name is Simone, and I’m from the US but currently living with flamingos in the south of France. Well, actually living with them would be extremely noisy and make podcasting impossible. But, they’re only about twenty minutes away, and seeing them never fails to delight me. I’ll share more about my love for flamingos another time. For now, c’est parti—that means, here we go. I’m going to take the plunge and get started.
I want to begin by dedicating this to my Grandma Helen, a Holocaust survivor who had undiagnosed OCD, specifically the hoarding kind. She didn’t let anybody into her house for twenty years, so we’d pick her up and bring her over to our house when I was a kid. Once, she opened her door wide enough that I saw a bottle of shampoo on the floor, and I remember thinking, “So that’s why Grandma doesn’t want us in her house. She’s embarrassed by the shampoo on her floor.” I was about seven years old. At our house in Boston, we’d sit together, mostly in silence. We held hands, watched “Wheel of Fortune,” ate Junior Mints, drew flowers, and played this card game called King’s Corner with rules she invented. In her Polish accent, she’d say, “Don’t tell nobody nothing.”
I think that, for my Grandma and also my dad, her son, silence was a means of survival. Don’t get me wrong, she was incredibly loving and funny as hell—my dad, too. She did things like attend the annual street fair in Boston in her nightgown, insisting it was a dress. One time, my sister and I were jumping on the couch, and when my parents came home, she said, “I didn’t see anything, and I’m not saying anything, but you’ve gotta tell your kids not to jump on the couch.” She only offered the family a few shards of her war story. It took me years to piece together that she worked in a concentration camp and that, to save her life, she handed her baby to her mother before jumping off a transport train. On a broken leg, she ran through the forest and arrived at a Polish Catholic family’s house, where she hid in the attic for two years and lived on potato peels. My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor too, but I never met him. He was a lot older than my grandmother and died before I was born. I know only that and he was a partisan who hid in the forest, lived underground, fought back against the Nazis, and lost four or five children. He and Grandma met at a refugee camp in Austria, came to the US together, and started a new family. According to my dad, like Grandma, his father never wanted to talk about the war. His dad only spoke Polish and Yiddish anyhow, so it was difficult to communicate with him.
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