Sometimes you can't find words,
you have a clear French accent...
...and you speak nine languages fluently.
- All with the same accent.
Which one is most natural to you?
I don't have a mother tongue.
We spoke five languages at home.
Which five?
- Polish, Yiddish...
...German, Dutch and French.
I spent 12 years at a Dutch-language
school, but a long time ago.
So sometimes you have to look for words.
- And I also spoke the Antwerp dialect.
I'm half Zeelandic Flemish,
so I'd be able to follow you.
Your parents were Polish Jews.
Both of them survived the Holocaust,
not together but separately.
When did you hear about this
for the first time?
Do you remember this moment?
I remember one moment.
I don't know if it was the first moment.
I was maybe three years old and
I asked my mother about the tatooed number.
She didn't have a number,
but many of her friends did.
She hadn't been in Auschwitz, so she
didn't have one. I asked what it meant.
And then I asked: "Why don't I have
grandparents or other relatives?
I only have one brother.
Where have all my relatives gone?"
So your parents were the only survivors.
- Both from a family of 200 people.
His parents had nine children, hers
seven. They were both the youngest.
What did your mother answer?
I once explained in a YouTube clip...
that my parents had no conception
of child development.
She just said: They were gassed,
they were murdered.
So I said: How? Who did that?
And she said: The Germans, the Nazis.
There was no protection.
She told the story as it was.
To hold someone or look them
in the eyes for one more minute...
becomes a microcosm of being human...
...if you live with death day after day.
And I can't understand this.
I asked my parents for years.
Both were in camps for five years.
My mother spent a year in the woods.
The woods?
- She hid in a forest.
And then she went to a men's camp.
She thought: In a men's camp they may
need someone to cook or do laundry...
and at least then I can wake up
at the same spot each morning.
She stayed at nine different work camps
and my father at fourteen.
They met on liberation day on the road.
They were in adjoining camps
and met there.
They knew one another and were trying
to find people from Czestochowa...
and from the villages around it.
You said you couldn't understand.
What did you mean by that?
How you can go on.
I always asked my mother:
How you resume your life, you mean.
- How you could go on living.
What gave you the motivation
to go on living?
You mean: what keeps you going
in that situation?
Did you ask them?
- Yes. And my mother gave an answer.
I think her answer was: "I thought
someone would be waiting for me.
I thought: If no one's left, I need to be
here to tell it, for no one will believe it."
So she actually told me
what Viktor Frankl later said.
His book was very important to me.
In "Man's Search for Meaning"
Frankl writes:
"We shouldn't search for happiness.
We should search for meaning.
And the meaning comes
through self-transcendence.
To search for something
that's not related to you.
Someone else or something else.
If that's your purpose in life,
you have a reason to go on living."
Those are the ones who survive.
The others often don't.
The first element was chance.
- Yes.
Destiny is also involved.
- That's the part you can't control.
But there's also a part
related to the person.
Some people found a reason
that was larger than themselves.
This became a very important concept
in my work, over all those years.
I think many people are searching
for happiness, especially nowadays.
But you can't search for happiness.
You feel happy...
if you have a great deal of meaning
and purpose in your life.
Fulfilment.
You just mentioned the name
of the town, Czestochowa.
Your parents were from that area.
This is an image from the documentary, Shoah.
These memorial stones
can be found near Treblinka.
And this one bears the name
of that town.
So they met
right after leaving the camp.
Have they... Where did they end up?
Where were they at that moment?
- In Poland, on the road, and...
Those are my parents.
- Tell us what we see here.
We went there. This was our guide.
In 1991 we went to Poland: my brother,
my husband and my parents.
Right after 1989,
after the Berlin Wall had come down.
And each year my father said:
I want to take you to Poland.
I want to show you and tell you.
- Had they never gone back?
They'd been back in '46 and '47...
to see if there was someone left
and to find there was nothing there.
So they ended up in Belgium.
By chance, because my father
had helped someone in the camp...
who was from Belgium and said:
Come to Belgium with me.
They only had a three-month permit.
They continued to be refugees,
illegal refugees, for five more years.
Five years in camps, and five more
years as illegal refugees in Belgium.
They were in hiding all the time.
What was it like for you
to see them in Poland?
I'd never seen my parents like that.
They were always very talkative.
I was lucky to have such parents.
But they mainly told us heroic stories.
And during our time there
I witnessed for the first time...
the things they had kept inside...
about which they couldn't talk
or didn't want to talk...
because they had to go on
with their life. And all this pain...
I always felt their pain, but I
didn't dare to ask them about it.
I feared that if this pain came out,
they would never recover from it.
So everyone protected them against
this incredible pain: don't go there.
Just like he feels it.
So that stood out, among all the other
important memories of this trip.
What made the pain tangible here?
- There was simply a word.
Czestochowa also included villages.
At some point my father said:
Everyone's gone. Everyone's gone.
And then... That's it.
It triggered his emotions.
- And mine and everyone's.
I understand Holocaust, another
Holocaust than the Jewish one.
I understand refugees,
other refugees than my parents.
I feel that I live the life
of the modern professional woman.
But there's also a totally different story
within me that's related to something...
When I see the refugees of today...
It's not very hard.
I just need to do this.
You live with various levels
of truth and reality.
How is this possible?
I never live with the idea
that humankind is good.
Neither do I think
that humankind is not good.
I ended up with anger,
as this is what they had.
In Antwerp... I explained while writing
this book why I took up eroticism.
Because I thought:
The people who come to me
to complain about sexual problems...
don't just want sex. They can have sex.
What they want is to feel alive...
and to have vitality
and a connection and a hope...
and a curiosity about themselves
and about the possibilities of life.
In Antwerp I always felt there were two
groups within the Jewish community.
Did you live in a Jewish neighbourhood?
- I spent my first six years in Leuven.
My parents didn't want to meet Jews
after the war.
They wanted to be away from it all.
They were angry with God.
They wanted to rebuild their lives.
Camp survivors first wanted to have
a child, as it showed they were human.
That was your brother.
- He was born in '46.
Then they started rebuilding their lives.
I came twelve years later.
Their life had changed a lot by then.
They were official residents of Belgium.
We had a passport.
My first passport was a UN passport.
I was stateless.
You were referring to two groups.
- And then we moved to Antwerp.
This feeling came later,
not when I was a child.
In our neighbourhood
there was only one other Jewish family.
I lived above the clothing boutique,
spoke the Antwerp dialect...
and wasn't part
of any Jewish community.
Then my mother said:
"We'll send her to the Jewish school.
I want her to know who she is
and where she comes from."
First they thought they would protect me
by not living among Jews.
Then they apparently thought: she
should know from what source she is...
and we'll protect her
by giving her a full identity.
So they switched to a different idea.
And then I saw, later...
that some people hadn't died,
weren't dead, had survived...
and that other people were alive again.
What do you mean by that?
It is one thing not tot be dead...
...but its another thing to be alive.
That's the difference
between my parents and others.
And this applies to everyone
who's experienced trauma.
Some people come out of the trauma
and aren't dead.
But that doesn't mean they're alive.
And other people get over the trauma
and have a new life, a full life.
My parents embarked on a full life.
They didn't opt for not being dead.
They didn't survive to lead a small life.
They made use of every opportunity.
With my couples it's similar.
I see couples who aren't dead.
- But who don't live.
And then I see couples
who live, who are lively.
Most people come to me
because they would like to feel lively.
They want to live.
It doesn't suffice to be not dead.
They hope you'll revive them.
That's eroticism. That's the meaning
of working with the erotic.
So how do you express
your Jewish identity?
Personally?
For me, being Jewish
is an identity of history...
...of belonging, of community, of values...
...of a perspective on the world,
a feeling...
...of texts that I find very important...
...and rituals that shape our lives.
That's what I've taught my children too.
But in a very modern way.
I'm with a pop-up synagogue in New York,
it has no building.
A pop-up synagogue?
God is optional. If you believe, fine.
If you don't, fine.
Artist-friendly, egalitarian,
with a phenomenal Rabbi.
He is the cousin of the Chief Rabbi
in Israel.
That Chief Rabbi is ultra-orthodox...
...while Amichai Lau-Lavie is a gay Rabbi
with a drag persona.
I'm jealous in so many ways right now.
But he goes back to the texts
and then modernizes them.
So tradition and transgression.
That allows me to find something there
for myself, for my family...
...for my children and for the future.
Otherwise, it's all just the past.
Every culture has to develop.
To innovate.
- Yes, and find new meaning...
...while not letting go
of what is most important.
