Opinion: I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. My students in Germany and I are learning about the power of listening.

Editor’s note: Elizabeth Rosner:The Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening” (Counterpoint, September 2024). The opinions expressed here are her own. Read more opinion pieces on CNN.

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Sometime in late April, the Jewish cemetery in upstate New York where my parents are buried was vandalized. Nearly 100 headstones with Hebrew inscriptions on one or both sides were overturned. This was the kind of attack that took more than a little time and effort. The perpetrators are currently unknown, but the motive is clear to everyone in the nearby Jewish community. Local authorities are investigating, but have not yet called it an anti-Semitic crime.

Recently, CNN reported that about 180 headstones were vandalized at two Jewish cemeteries in Cincinnati. An investigation is underway.

Whatever these acts are called, the alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the country and around the world is both shocking and familiar. You don’t have to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, as I am, to recognize this phenomenon inherited from 1930s Germany. You don’t even have to agree that so-called anti-Zionism is the latest camouflage for anti-Semitism. Commenting on the desecration of cemeteries, a rabbi in my hometown told me he has started using the term “Jew-hatred” in addition to anti-Semitism as a way to “communicate more clearly what the problem is.”

I’ve been thinking about the practice of translation: not just the literal translation from one written language to another, but also figurative translations, expressions that cross even more precariously the gaps of personalities, eras, and even species. I’ve been exploring these various exchanges in my latest book on deep listening, but the theme also came to mind during a recent trip to Germany where I met with graduate students who are researching and translating some of my earlier books.

Many of my writings focus on culture, history, and the intergenerational trauma that can ripple out to the descendants of victims and the descendants of perpetrators. It is gratifying and inspiring to see someone searching for the most effective way to express their thoughts and images in their own language, wrestling with the nuances of precision and clarity. Despite the challenges of a poem that the late poet Robert Frost described as “lost in translation,” these budding translators are weighing their choices with the intention of considering the understanding of German audiences.

The title of my poetry collection, “Gravity,” seems to have limited German synonyms for some of my students, including my professor. They are Schwelcraft It lacks the impressionistic, layered associations of the English version, and instead the German title explores something entirely different, based on another poem in the book, “Beyond These Woods” or “Beyond These Woods.” Jensen is Waldes. This poem, based on a 1902 Gustav Klimt painting, was the first poem I ever read. Buchenwald — “Beech Forest,” the name of the concentration camp where my father was incarcerated as a teenager, was a term used to describe a place as innocent and serene as a beech forest.

After two semesters of immersed in my autobiographical work, my students ask me respectful, probing, and intimate questions: How do I feel now about being forbidden to learn German as a child? What is it like visiting the country after the death of my father, whose birth in Hamburg and imprisonment at Buchenwald shaped much of my complicated heritage? What is it like to hear my poems recited in a vocabulary that I was taught was “the language of murderers?”

With a jumble of different languages ​​and accents, my childhood was a noisy place. To say it was an environment where we didn’t always understand each other would be an understatement. My mother’s native languages ​​were Polish and Russian, but no one in the family spoke a word of either. My parents had Swedish as their secret language – the language of the country they met and fell in love with as post-war refugees. German remained a taboo, so English was the only language we could share. But I will confess that I spent a lot of time yelling to be heard.

In Jewish tradition, the rituals involved in preparing a body for burial are considered to be among the most righteous acts that can never go unrewarded. As a rabbi from my hometown community explained in an outburst of sadness and anger, the desecration of a burial site is the exact opposite of such righteousness, an act that can never be forgiven.

When acts of cruelty are so blatant, it often feels difficult to navigate the conflicting emotions surrounding forgiveness. It’s easy to want to denounce war, criticize the government, and draw attention to injustice. I share many of those objectives. Beginning with my pacifist beliefs at age 8 during the Vietnam War, I have repeatedly denounced American aggression abroad. But even as a child I understood that I would not have been born had General George Patton’s Third Army not successfully liberated Buchenwald in April 1945.

In the aftermath of war, and perhaps one day in place of war itself, we need quiet spaces to pay deeper attention to what is to be understood. Can we find our way through the noise, the screams, the forest? In my collection of poems, there is a poem called “Stones Again.” In it, I write about years of bitter arguments within a family and the struggle for reconciliation. Germany and Israel, after decades of steadfast cooperation, have become the most unlikely of postwar allies. Even more important than speaking and hearing words of forgiveness, I believe we must work together as a human community to restore the headstones in desecrated cemeteries. This, too, will take time and effort over many generations.

For now, I sit quietly with my German translation students, and we listen to even the smallest sounds.