And so am I. I lost the majority of my family through mass genocide. My grandmother’s first child was gassed to death in front of her eyes just to mock her. She herself became a human lab rat for testing, the drugs eventually causing her death. My grandfather was chased by dogs after having his head cracked open, his only way of surviving was burying himself in snow for several hours. My mother even may have not made if if she was not born in secret and hidden away as hospital workers were poisoning pregnant women to cause miscarriages. Till this day, the remaining survivors in my family who have Alzheimers experience constant flashes to the days they were tortured and without food and water.
With the release of Age of Ultron in less than a week, I felt it was important to discuss the fact that we haven’t seen more criticism of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver’s cultural identities being ripped from their characters, and on top of it having them volunteer as test subjects for a neo-nazi group (Hydra). It is so rare to have had a group of characters with cultural identities that mirrored mine that I felt it was important to comment on it.
Pass it on.
I can’t tell stories about my grandfather’s time in the camps. He didn’t tell them, himself. I know that he lost his entire family. I know that they were barbers, and that is where he learned to cut hair; I still have the scissors he used in his own shop, years later. I know that he wouldn’t let my uncle own a BB gun because his parents had been killed with guns and, after the war, he had killed people with guns, and he didn’t want anything like that in the house. I know that although he was Polish, he spoke German (that was not the only other language he spoke; he had a knack for them), and enjoyed watching American war films where the Nazis were the bad guys and got theirs, and would translate what those fictional-not-fictional enemy soldiers said for my father and his brothers. I know that, while he rarely attended Temple after coming to the U.S., he made sure to go on the high holy days. According to my father, it was not a show of faith; he was not much for faith. It was his way of saying, “fuck you, I’m still here, you couldn’t get rid of me.”
I grew up with the X-men. They were my first comic. Everyone looks for some reflection of themself in media, and I found it in Wanda, in Pietro, in Kitty. It bothers me to see Kitty sidelined in a story that originally centered around her; it bothers me to see that aspect of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver erased. It bothers me that they have been gotten rid of.