For 40 years, Steve Sisgold felt like he held the Holocaust in his body. When he encountered a survivor, or if channel-surfing brought him to a World War II documentary on television, he became physically ill. His symptoms could include dizziness, shaking, perspiring, shortness of breath and inability to speak.
A former advertising executive and marketing consultant, Sisgold turned to motivational seminars, which he eventually conducted to help people confront their own fears and hang-ups. But, it was not until 1997 that he began to face his own demons.
The former Bay Area resident, now living in Hawaii, will share both his trauma and his healing process with others in an evening presentation on Sunday, Aug. 26, in San Rafael. The centerpiece will be “Holocaust in My Body,” a 38-minute documentary of a “healing journey” he took in 1997 to exorcise the fears that had been plaguing him since childhood.
“I’m not a survivor. I wasn’t there,” Sisgold said last week by phone. “I can’t even pretend to feel what they felt. I’m just a pretty typical Jewish guy who’s experienced some anti-Semitism in my life. I have a lot of feelings about the Holocaust and I didn’t want to hide them anymore.”
Sisgold’s earliest experience with the Holocaust came in 1957 when his mother sent him to the store in their Orthodox neighborhood in Baltimore. There he saw a woman with a number tattooed on her arm. Upset, he ran home (without the groceries) and asked his mother about it. Instead of explaining, she stopped sending him to the store.
“They never talked about it,” he said of his parents. “It was shushed up. I guess, in our society, we don’t want to feel the bad feelings. We’d rather take a pill. But, if you don’t express your feelings they get stored in your body.
“I’m somebody who does self-help work for people and I use the body a lot,” he continued. “I believe the body comes from God.”
And, through his own experiences, he believes in miracles, he added. An older brother died in his crib before Sisgold was born. Some years later, the infant Steve went into convulsions and appeared to be dying in the same way.
“So my mother called the rabbi and he came in and re-named me ‘Chaim,'” he said. “And I got better and, from then on the whole neighborhood called me ‘the miracle baby.’ So, yeah, I believe in miracles.”
His second miracle began in 1997 when he decided to visit Poland, the land of his ancestry, to learn more about the Holocaust experience. “I didn’t go there to make a movie,” he explained. “I just didn’t want to be silent anymore. When you’re silent, nothing changes. “
His decision to go to Poland came after he’d been discussing the Holocaust “in my lectures and meetings, and this psychologist, Gay Hendricks, said ‘What are you going to do about it?'”
When Sisgold revealed that he would go to Poland, Hendricks, a prolific writer of self-help books, said, “I want to go with you.”
The resulting documentary follows the two men on their “transformational” journey. They travel from Berlin, and an emotional meeting with the son of a Nazi officer; to Auschwitz and Birkenau, where Sisgold takes out his rage on a wooden watchtower; to a 500-year-old restored synagogue, where Sisgold says Kaddish for his grandparents. The trip ends in a Polish-Jewish nightclub on a note of hope for the future.
The film, well photographed and accompanied by some plaintive Yiddish songs, is moving — whether you believe in body-centered psychotherapy or not.
“I tried to make it universal,” Sisgold said. “Sure, I’d love to be on ‘Oprah’ someday or have [Steven] Spielberg pick it up but, for now, it’s helping other people and that’s a mitzvah.
“We need not to forget these things and to help ourselves feel a little better about them. This is just me, walking my talk.”