My grandfather had a habit that never failed to make us laugh. In his third and final act, Zigi Shipper became a public figure as a result of his commitment to sharing his experience of the Holocaust years with younger generations. He was a beloved figure with a lust for life and became renowned for speaking about his time in Auschwitz without a trace of bitterness.
Perhaps surprisingly, his bitterness was reserved for those survivors he felt were getting the better gigs who, one might argue, hadn’t suffered quite as much as he had. More than once, when watching a remembrance event on television, he would see someone giving a speech and bemoan, “Survivor? Ach, what survivor?! He was on the Kindertransport!”
If our job in memorialising the Holocaust is one of moving past inhumane numbers and towards humanising those involved, then Zigi did a perfect job of being human. Despite having the most optimistic outlook on life, he was still occasionally capable of the kind of petty one upmanship we all engage in from time to time.
By way of illustration, when my sister and her husband were suffering through years of infertility heartbreak, they would encounter others on a similar journey who would be unable to refrain from making comments like, “You’ve only been trying for three years? That’s nothing compared to our six.” They say misery loves company but, more often than not, the hardest moments we endure can turn life into an extended version of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen routine.
Darren Richman
With this in mind, I recently co-wrote a short film and applied for funding from a Jewish foundation.
The setting was a Survivors Centre modelled on the one my grandparents would go to weekly in their twilight years for tea and sympathy surrounded by peers. We threw a college student into the mix who was tasked with writing an essay on hardship and looking to speak to precisely one person who’d had the toughest life.
And thus began the arguments about who had the hardest time in the camps and the definition of a survivor. “Your block faced the south; you got the sun in the afternoons” was a line my grandfather would have loved but not those at the foundation, whose rejection did at least provide me with one belly laugh when I was informed I should go away and speak to some Holocaust survivors.
The line, of course, will vary depending on the person. Mel Brooks has spent a lifetime satirising Hitler but felt that Life Is Beautiful, set in part within the walls of a concentration camp, was in poor taste. It will be springtime for Hitler once again when The Producers returns to the West End later in the year and its creator should relish every moment.
Brooks is a man who literally fought the Nazis and, as he approaches his 99th birthday, shows no signs of giving them a break. Similarly, when he was at an event with fellow survivors and his friend was handed a slice of cake on the small side, my grandfather had earned the right to say, “Give him a bit more, he’ll think he’s back in the camps.”
In my youth, when worrying about everything from exam results to driving tests, I would invariably put on my favourite comedy shows as a means of reassurance. I knew every episode of Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show and The Office in inverse proportion to the amount of girls I knew, but they provided comfort because laughing was and is the ultimate means of escape. Not for nothing was Zigi was one of many survivors who talked about humour being deployed in the camps.
Brooks is a man who literally fought the Nazis and, as he approaches his 99th birthday, shows no signs of giving them a break
Those who survived the Holocaust were not a monolith. Zigi and his friends were invited to an early screening of Life is Beautiful and there were spirited debates about the film between the survivors once the credits had rolled. There was no right or wrong, simply old Jews debating in a tradition that stretches back thousands of years. These were not fragile characters or they would have been unlikely to make it to adulthood, let alone old age.
Zigi reminded people about the evil of the Nazis every day and Mel Brooks does much the same. If comedy really is tragedy plus time then it’s little wonder humour has been an integral aspect of the Jewish character since the days of the Holy Roman Empire. For the chosen people, laughter might not be the best medicine but it remains a pretty close second behind chicken soup.
