Now forty-one, and an assistant professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Mount Sinai, she specializes in the connection between memory and fear. What was he hiding? Why? How do people even do that?” The last question has, to a large degree, become the focus of her career: Schiller studies the intricate biology of how emotional memories are formed in the brain. “But I grew up with that fear in the background. “It wasn’t so much a conscious thing,” she said. Slowly, over the years, that silence closed in on her. “I grew up wondering which of all the horrifying things we learned about at school the Germans did to him.”
“I long ago concluded that his silence would last forever,” she said. It was an exceptionally bright winter morning, and the sun streaming through the window made her hard to see even from a few feet away. We were sitting in her office, not far from the laboratory she runs at Mount Sinai, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Always nothing.” A wan smile crossed her face. My father was at the kitchen table reading a newspaper, and I asked him to tell me about his memories. “In sixth grade, our teacher asked us to interview someone who survived the Holocaust,” Daniela Schiller said. But Sigmund Schiller never seemed to speak about his time in the camp, not even to his wife. Trauma victims frequently attempt to cordon off their most painful memories.
In 1942, at the age of fifteen, he was captured by the Germans and sent to a labor camp near Tluste, where he managed to survive the war.
Sigmund Schiller’s disregard for Holocaust Remembrance Day is perhaps understandable he spent the first two years of the Second World War in the Horodenka ghetto (at the time in Poland, but now in Ukraine) and the next two hiding in bunkers scattered across the forests of Galicia. “My father doesn’t care about the sirens,” she says. Schiller, who directs the laboratory of affective neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, has lived in New York for nine years, but she was brought up in Rishon LeZion, a few miles south of Tel Aviv. “To ignore those sirens is a complete violation of the norms of our country,” Daniela Schiller told me recently. From the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, the only sounds one hears are sirens. Pedestrians stand in place, drivers pull over to the side of the road, and nobody speaks, sings, eats, or drinks as the nation pays respect to the victims of the Nazi genocide. One morning every spring, for exactly two minutes, Israel comes to a stop.
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