Playing Concentration Camp: Childhood Revisited
Photo from Pixabay
Story Number 8: Grapes of Irony Number 3
(Written 7/26/22)
Larry, my brother (seven at the time), and I (eleven at the time) were outside playing as per usual, as this was well before the days of video game-induced juvenile sloth syndrome (VGJSS, Ask your doctor about it!). I remember being outside for most of our playtime, but even inside time was active fort building, zooming toy cars, riding bikes or trikes in our large basement, or making our own concoctions in the kitchen. I liked to make Bisquick coffee cake, which was yummy. The rule about what we made in the kitchen was we could make whatever we wanted, but we had to eat it. Due to lack of any parental supervision during our kitchen time (or any time really) the reality of our endeavors was not consumed by us, because it was not yummy. It was fed to the hungry dogs who were misinformed about what they were being fed and could result in them power-vomiting all over the basement (no bike or trike riding that day!). When my dad (my ex-stepdad, but still my dad) commented with great irritation and frustration about the dogs puking everywhere, Larry and I feigned ignorance and culpability with our bland, noncommittal facial expressions; “Oh, poor dogs. I wonder what happened.” Another way we disposed of one of our “recipes” was to take the large sheets of paper my dad brought home from his work and slathered what appeared to be 1000 Island Dressing (but was NOT) on the paper. Then we proceeded to lean out the windows of the second-story sunroom and paste the papers to the side of the house. Evidence? What Evidence? The mob ain’t got nothing on us!! This feat was never even commented on by our parents, further proof that their knowledge of what we were up to was nil.
On this particular day outside in the front yard, my mom (aka Mama) came outside in a rare check on us and asked us “Whatcha doin’?” in an upbeat tone. What we were doing was hanging our stuffed animals, dolls, and action figures by their necks along the bottom railing of the second story walkway and pretending to roast and burn our inanimate friends over the weber BBQ grill (which was thankfully NOT roiling with fire. Nothing short of a miracle there! Maybe we just couldn’t find the necessary incendiary materials, or we were just satisfied with our very vivid imaginations). Our reply to Mama, in unison, was “Playing concentration camp.” Mama’s reply was a cheery, “Okay! Have fun!” and she reentered the house, back into her oblivion.
So a bit about my mom. I loved her. She was intelligent, creative, had a crazy work ethic as a manager at AT&T, was demonstrative with her love (she gave great hugs) and she loved me unconditionally. And by that I mean she fully accepted me as I was and never made me feel less than in terms of my personhood. But because everyone is a complicated, many-faceted being with baggage, different personality characteristics emerge to captain our person-ships. My mom’s ship was mentally rat-infested as her manifestation of anxiety prevailed and she was plagued by her childhood in an alcoholic, domestic violence, and emotionally abusive home.
Regarding the baggage we all have, some of us have unpacked it and appropriately examined and stored it museum-like as an artifact of our past to be understood in its context, and/or we have used it for its gifts, and/or we have thrown the unuseful bits in the trash where they belong, and some, like my mom, have not. My mom was a collector of fine things, such as antiques and custom-made jewelry, and she kept her baggage like she kept her other collectables, some sitting out proudly to touch and look at everyday and some wrapped and kept in dark places. But she never thought of her collection in any other way than the beautiful amethyst ring, “How pretty! Let me wear it!” or the horrendous abuse she suffered, “How awful!! Let me wear it!” My mom was wracked with anxiety and depression, and then an addiction to Valium, prescribed after severe injury in a car accident, sealed the deal (it was the ‘70s after all and that shit was distributed quicker than a kid can dispense Pez from the mouth of a Disney character!). After the car accident, when I was five and Larry was one, my mom literally locked herself away from us, behind her locked bedroom door, with the shades pulled on all the windows and her headphones and stereo on, lest she see us trying to get her attention or, God forbid, hear us knocking on the bedroom door. My parents divorced a few years later, but my mom would pick me up from my biological father and step-mother’s house and take me to visit Larry and my dad. It was during one of these visits that we played concentration camp.
As an adult, looking back, the correct response from Mama could have been any of these choices: “WHAT did you say!?” “HOW do you know about concentration camps?” “WHAT do you know about concentration camps?” “Tell me, why are you playing this?” “I think we need to go in the house and have a talk. Don’t worry you’re not in trouble.”
That none of these choices was her response, I think it is safe to say, shows that she did not even hear us. Or see us for that matter. We had dolls and stuffed animals and action figures strewn about, dangling by their necks, clearly being hanged and also pretending to roast them over the thankfully unlit weber. If the words uttered by her seven and eleven year olds, “We are playing concentration camp,” didn’t stop her in her tracks, then what we were demonstrating with our play sure as hell should have! Even without the concentration camp reference, what we were doing to our toys indicated something not right was going on with us. I think anything we said would have gone unheard by her: “Shootin’ a porn with Barbie and GI Joe,” “Cookie monster kidnapped Raggedy Ann and has her in the basement of his garbage can,” “Grover is ax murdering my Woodsy the Owl,” “Playing Manson family and Animal is the cult leader.” I have only recently come to the realization, through much time spent processing, that my mom was a great person, but generally a shitty mother.
My dad was a practicing alcoholic at this time. For the unfamiliar, that term in social services and recovery means that he was still drinking, not that he was practicing learning how to drink alcohol. No, he was beyond the practice phase and even the amateur phase, he was a journeyman for sure, but reaching for the master class. Thankfully my dad was not an abusive alcoholic, but a functional go to work, come home and fix us dinner and then pop Olys and watch TV for the rest of the evening in the family room until he passed out alcoholic.
Between my dad’s focus on work and getting drunk after work and on weekends and Mama’s focus on not focusing it is no wonder that we lacked supervision. Plus this was the 1970s and kids were not bubble wrapped or hovered over nervously like they are now. Just a thought, I do think the parenting style I grew up with could leave us open to being on the back of a milk carton or dead after having fallen over a cliff, and me with a lifetime of seeking someone to notice me and love me in a committed, unconditional way, but I know how to take care of myself and navigate through the world. The bubble wrapped kids (that being anyone under 30) of late are plagued with anxiety (rightfully so) and don’t seem to understand how the world works in a larger context and think working hard, if they work, is an option, because you know, you just show up and get a trophy. I can’t help but wonder how all my time working at Child Protective Services has made me think differently about my childhood, but even without my career (and God it is any wonder I ended up with that career!) I cannot feel anything but stunned when I think about the magnificent lack of supervision we experienced.
To give you even more context, before my parents divorced and for Larry until he was twelve years old, we lived atop Mt. Hamilton at Lick Observatory, a one-hour drive from San Jose. The canyons were deep, the cliffs were very scary and very precipitous, the rocky paths were sharp (just ask Larry’s forehead), and rattlesnakes, mountain lions, centipedes, and scorpions were in residence. As children we could be gone from home for hours, down in those canyons, running wild across the mountain top, or me riding my bike down winding roads with my feet, not my hands, on the handle bars (and these being the days before bike helmets existed, just ask my skull). Larry and I did ponder recently at what point would our parents notice if we didn’t come home? Would each assume the other had taken care of us and put us to bed? Would their depression- or alcohol-induced memory impairment make one day roll into the next and we could be gone for days without them wondering “Hmmm, where are the kids? When is the last time I saw them?”
We weren’t mean kids (despite what you may think about us playing concentration camp--more about that in a second) but we were kids and like all kids the frontal lobes of our brains, that magical place where executive functioning and the ability to reason out good decisions resides, were years away from being fully formed (this does not occur until humans are in their mid to late twenties). We were wild kids, on a mountain top, without parental supervision. And yes, because of the place our parents were in their lives and the way they chose to or not to deal with their own shit, we did suffer emotional neglect (oh, and risked our safety for the all the times my dad drove drunk, which was most of the time….with those perilous cliffs). So because we were kids, unsupervised kids, we were definitely left to our own devices, and being left to our own devices and having active imaginations and the mountain at our disposal, our play was a bit on the wild and different side.
The two-story house I mentioned already was high up on a hill and the “backyard” was a very tall cliff with the main road to the observatory skirting around and far below it. In the winter Larry and I would throw snow balls at cars from the prominence of the cliff and we were so high up and so hidden, the drivers could not see us; it was just sudden snow balls hurling from the heavens at them. In the summer, we would drag the hose (multiple hoses, so some planning and work there) all the way down to the prominence and spray water into the open windows of the cars passing through. Thinking of this now terrifies me. I can’t imagine what it was like to be unexpectedly pelted by snow balls from up high or worse yet, that drivers were directly sprayed with the hose—no one expects that while driving up a mountain road!! And that particular corner where there was a tall wall of rocks on one side and a sheer cliff on the other side (at least there were guard rails!), well, the shock of being pelted or sprayed really could have caused people to go careening off the cliff to their deaths! Yes, we did that, but we were children who should have been supervised so that we did not engage in this type of “play.” Yes, we should “have known better,” but again, with that lack of frontal lobe development, this is why children need supervision and for their parents to be emotionally present. And what we were doing was not malicious or because we hated people. I think the creativity of the endeavor and the stealthiness of it appealed to us. But we could have killed someone.
Speaking of killing, I also would hang Larry off the side of the cliff on the very steep driveway that led to our house. Again, this was aimed at the poor, unsuspecting people driving by. As cars were about to come around the bend Larry would climb down the cliff and I would lean over and grab his hand or his shirt so it looked like severe injury or his demise was perilously close. Some people just kept driving but some did stop, abruptly, which then prompted Larry to climb back up the cliff, as we were laughing, and then we would run off. A few drivers yelled at us. Yes, we were shits. I have no idea why we targeted people driving by. Maybe even momentary attention from an adult was what we were seeking. And if Mama failed to notice our spectacular display of needing her attention, then maybe another adult might notice us if we pushed our attention seeking behaviors to the max by involving risky behavior, which could involve their death or our own. Hey, kids want attention. What can I say?
Another bizarre favorite of ours was me pushing Larry in this ridiculously large stroller Mama must have found in her antique shopping; I imagine this contraption being something that could have been used in a sanitorium. Please forgive us our childness. But to again distract drivers from their trip up the road to the observatory, I would push Larry in this stroller down the steep driveway and Larry, God pardon us, would pretend to be someone with a developmental disability in the stereotypical, unidimensional way ignorant people portray such individuals. And we did get all the looks of the human emotional continuum: sadness, horror, pity, WTF. And once we got a look, then we would crack up and then get another type of look from the drivers, “Little assholes!!”
Our creativity knew no end. We discovered that by “borrowing” the sifter from the kitchen, we could sift dirt to the finest powder, which then made the most excellent, ersatz cat turds. We toiled over perfecting the best fake cat turds, sharing rolling techniques and deftly manipulating our finger pads and finger tips to produce the most accurate of details; round here, ass-crimped there, the art nouveau flair of the pointy tip at an end—we were masters. Our craftsmanship was much rewarded when my dad came home for lunch and we quite convincingly and with much precision laid the fraudulent turds on the hood of his car, and on the car seat (as he left the windows rolled down—all the blame goes to him there). Then we lay in wait in the bushes for at least ten minutes for our dad to reappear from the house so he could return to work (ten minutes is an eternity for children, so kudos to us for such patience). And our artisanship and our forbearance paid off! Our dad approached his car as we waited silently and tensely in the bushes for the moment he would discover the offense we had committed. My dad clearly had his mind on other things, but when he reached the car and his glance caught the protuberances on the hood, his eyes came into sharp focus, his mouth pinched, his breath caught in his chest, and annoyance spread across his face. “Godammit,” he muttered, and he about-faced to return to the house. This sent us into quiet titters of delight, for we did not want to be discovered hiding in the bushes, where we remained when my dad returned to the scene of the crime armed with a huge wad a paper towels and 409. After carefully removing the offending turds from the hood of the car he thought he was in the free and clear, only to have his hopes of returning to work on time dashed when he witnessed the turds on the driver seat, which further inflamed his ire. He grabbed the turds in the thick wad of paper towels, so convincing was our artistry he clearly did not want cat shit on his hands, and tossed them away and he continued to swear under his breath as he scrubbed furiously at his seat with the 409. As my dad drove off back to work and to a bad start to his afternoon, Larry and I were cackling likes hyenas and rolling in the bushes, mirthfully celebrating our creative coup.
How exactly did we come to play concentration camp? Well, my step-mother, decided in her usual fashion to “educate” me about the horrors of humanity. We did not watch a documentary or get books from the library (this was the pre-internet days) and have a thoughtful, historical, humanist “here is what you must know about life and how to you feel about this” discussions. No, my step-mother had her own method of disseminating information, which I suspect was more about “let me torture you” than “let me educate you.” She recounted when she was about my age that her guardian would take her to see the newsreels about the horrors of the concentration camps and how much she hated having to watch the newsreels, which apparently is all the more reason to then turn around and traumatize me with the information. Hey, hakuna matada, it’s the fucking circle of life! She told me enough for me to understand that the people in the camps were Jewish (why be well-rounded and tell me of the other 6 million people also ostracize, rounded up and killed? Oh wait, I am the former history teacher, not her). She gave me enough information for me to know what happened in the camps.
Any therapist worth their salt, will tell you that the age a person is traumatized, can trigger a response in them when their own children reach that same age. Hence this is why when I was eight years old my step-mother turned into a fucking emotionally abusive bitch because her parents and sister died when she was eight and she did not process her trauma in a meaningful, productive way, but instead turned her unprocessed angst on me. This coincided with the unfortunate time for me when Mama dumped me with my father and step-mother, not bothering to tell me that she was not coming back. My step-mother also used her rather unconventional teaching methods to tell me why I could not watch TV because she was watching a movie about Sybil (a “true” story about a woman who was severely abused as a child and developed what was then called multiple personality disorder). But then my step-mother did go on to discuss, in detail, with ten-year-old me how part of the abuse involved sticking a button hook for boots in the urethra of the child Sybil by her mother, amongst other lurid details of the abuse. Again, no wonder I became a CPS social worker.
Being the good big sister that I was, on my next visit I had to tell Larry about what I learned of the concentration camps and Hitler. Laugh all you want about an intellectual discussion between children, but I remember quite clearly, sitting on the steps of one of the tiny telescopes at the observatory and discussing this in detail with Larry. Our discussion was one of disgust that humans could do that to each other, Hitler was a really bad man, we really felt bad for the Jews, and this made us sad. This was very upsetting to us and children process their trauma or disturbing things through play. This is a concept known as reenacting and children will take toys and reenact troubling scenes from their lives over and over until they kind of work it out in their minds. This is what Larry and I were doing that day Mama came outside to “check” on us. I will admit Larry and I played the guards in this gruesome scenario and given what I am sharing about our upbringing, I think it is safe to say we were working out more than learning about man’s inhumanity to man in the concentration camps. I opine that we were exerting some form of control, however twisted, over our own out of control lives, being raised by addicted and emotionally neglectful parents. And anger would be a legitimate response on our part to our situation. Anger is a secondary emotion. One experiences anger because of another reason. Our sadness, feeling unseen, not quite sure if we were fully loved, could yes, make us feel anger. And then our anger was represented by the camp guards we played and the imaginary heinous acts we committed on our innocent dolls and actions figures.
An additional interesting note. At age 26 the “little voice” told me I needed to do research on Judaism. I was raised without religion and life as shown to me by the majority-Christian society just never made sense to me. This and many other reasons cause me to feel like an outsider in the world. But within 20 minutes of reading the books on Judaism, I stepped into a new realm of possibility, understanding and homecoming—OMG, I was Jewish and I never knew it!!! I decided to convert and I studied. I was told by a then-80-something year old woman in the congregation (this was in 1993) who discovered I was converting out of conviction and not for marriage, that “You know dear, historically, we have not faired well as a people?” Thank you for that understatement of, well, time immemorial! And thanks for the warning. There is nothing that can keep me from my convictions. About 13 years ago I had my DNA tested. I am 25% Jewish and it comes from Mama. On some level I knew.
Now the thought of kids with Jewish ancestry, even if it was unknown to them, playing concentration camp, puts a different spin on things. I certainly would not want to discount historical or genetic trauma strangely seeping its way in; The Universe, I know, works in mysterious ways! There was clearly a lot going on there. I can only think of our Jewish ancestors looking upon us as we hung, brutalized and “burned” our dolls and stuffed animals and saying,
“Oy vey!! Jesus Christ!! Get these kids some help!”
Then with hope in their eyes they say, “Oh look, here come their mother!!”
And they watch the scene unfold….”Okay! Have a good time, “ Mama says in a disconnected, cheery voice and returns to the house.
The ancestors look at each other, shrug in the ironic way only Jews can, and say, “Well, Larry is going to turn out to be a mensch, and Bunny is going to be a social worker and she will write some very Jewish, very funny shit. Who are we to argue with how God has planned things?”
Who indeed?
1975, Larry’s first day of kindergarten, Mt. Hamilton, CA. Larry, age 5, the author, Bunny, age 9.