Measure of a Man (9 page)

The war came to a close on April 30, 1945, when a broken, desperate Adolf Hitler committed suicide by gunshot in his Berlin bunker. A week later the German army surrendered. I was grateful to be alive but anxious about my future. We all were. Our lives were in limbo. Going “home” was not an option for most. Hatred of Jews remained high. Everything we owned had been seized and stolen. Millions of our relatives had been murdered. I didn’t know what lay in store. I didn’t really care. My singular obsession was living free and finding my phantom family. Nothing would stand in my way.

In May, Czechoslovakia sent officials to Buchenwald to retrieve its citizens. They boarded us on a bus and drove us to Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia.

The Allies and the United Nations had set up displaced persons (DP) camps and other places of refuge throughout Germany, Italy, Austria, and elsewhere to take in the nearly quarter of a million
displaced Jews. There you could sleep, eat, connect with fellow Jews, and receive educational training and relocation support. HIAS (which originally stood for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) also held Jewish gatherings where you always felt safe and welcome.

You can keep a vigilant eye on the DP camps’ survivor lists and photo bulletins
, I thought
. You can check them any time and use the DP camps as a place to land when needed
.
Same goes for HIAS. You can depend on them for help. Why not get well and start looking for my family?

The bus ride from Buchenwald to Prague felt surreal. I stared out the window and watched the German towns and countryside race past my face and recede from my mind. I had to make a mental break. I had to bury the childhood innocence that died an agonizing death in Auschwitz, Buna, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald. I was sixteen. I had seen more death and destruction than a hundred civilian men combined. My father had told me if I survived I must honor our family, not by feeling guilty, but by living life to the fullest. I would not disobey Father. In fact, I did him one better: I signed up to fight the tyranny that had taken my family from me.

We stepped off the bus at Prague and experienced a registration line far different from the ones the Nazis administered. Instead of shaving our heads and stealing our clothes, they gave us medical attention and plenty of civilian food. I had processing papers from the Buchenwald camp but chose not to show them. Instead, I told the registrars I was eighteen years old and wanted to enlist in the Czechoslovakian army. They were unwilling to take me when they saw my weakened condition. But after I had rested and healed in
the local sanitarium for several weeks, I was signed up and shipped off for a couple months of basic training. The army issued me a uniform. The fabric, the styling, the angular military cut and silhouette—I beamed every time I wore it. It made me look and feel like a man, like someone my family would be proud to call their son. I had finally reached that moment of maturity every boy passes through on the way to adulthood when he embraces, not rejects, wearing a suit. You can always tell when a boy has reached manhood by the clothes hanging in his closet.

I liked wearing a suit so much I decided I needed a civilian suit or two of my own. On one occasion our unit was sent on a quick mission to Germany. During the trip we stumbled upon a textile warehouse packed with bolts of fabric. I knew nothing about weave and thread counts, so I chose four large cuts that looked handsome and felt nice between my fingers. When we returned to Czechoslovakia, I took the four pieces of fabric to a tailor in the city. I told him I would give him two cuts of cloth if he would take the other two and make me two suits. He agreed, measured me up, and made me two simple suits. I was building a young man’s beginner wardrobe. For what, I wasn’t sure. But if I’d learned anything in the camps, I’d learned that what you wore could change your life.

The war effort was dying down, and the army discharged me after a few short months of service. They let me keep my uniform. I was proud of that uniform and to have served my country in it. But it proved useful on another level as well. Every time I traveled and wore my uniform, girls noticed it. More importantly, Russian soldiers respected it—not me, but the suit and what it represented.

Following my stint in the Czech army, I felt entrepreneurial and homesick. I wanted to earn my own money, to travel, and to find my family.

I frantically sought news of my family in Budapest and Romania, never giving up hope. I had heard so many horror stories of other families separated in the camps never to see each other again that optimism became nearly impossible.

With an increasingly heavy heart, I searched.

My quest to find my father ended the summer of 1946 in Budapest.

For some reason, I always felt that if I ever found my father alive, it would be in Hungary. I made a special effort to register my father’s name at HIAS gatherings when traveling there. But that ended when I ran into a man named Mendel.

I knew Mendel before the Shoah. He lived near my hometown of Pavlovo. When I stopped at a Hungarian HIAS location, Mendel and I exchanged pleasantries. He then shared the news that changed the trajectory of my life.

“What are you doing here?” asked Mendel.

“Oh, I thought I would check the name lists and photo bulletins,” I said. “I do that everywhere I go. Look, look, look! That’s all I do it seems,” I smiled to mask the hurt.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” he said. The confused look on his face made me uncomfortable.

“My father—I haven’t found him yet. If he’s alive I want to know where he is,” I insisted. Mendel’s apparent obtuseness made me angry. Surely I wasn’t the first survivor he’d spoken to who was looking for a loved one. Mendel’s face grew serious and somber.

“You can stop looking,” he said. “I was there the day the Germans shot him.”

“What?!”

“I’m so sorry to have to be the one to tell you this. I was there. You can stop looking,” he said. He could see that I was about to faint. “Sit down,” he said.

I sat down.

“Your father was a special man. He loved you very much,” said Mendel.

I wept.

“Joseph was in charge of directing a building project. It was a small bridge. I was there on the worksite. We didn’t finish construction on deadline. So the Nazis shot him. I saw it happen,” he said.

I put my face in my hands and cried. My heart hurt—physically
hurt
. Mendel put his hand on my shoulder and tried to console me.

“Maxi, I’m so very sorry,” he said. “But crying isn’t going to bring him back. You have to do what he would have wanted you to do. You have to be a man, make your own way now.”

“What camp were you two in?” I asked Mendel.

“Buchenwald.”

“
Buchenwald?
I was in Buchenwald!” I said frantically. “When did they shoot my father?” Mendel looked away as if he wished I hadn’t asked that question. “I have to know,” I urged. “Please. When?”

“About one week before the liberation,” he said softly.

I buried my face in my hands again. I shut my eyes tight and tears streamed down my forearms. I drew inside myself, consumed by a wave of despair that left me dizzy. At that moment I would have relived the horror of the Death March and the beatings a
hundred times to have five minutes with my father, to tell him how much I loved him. Mendel was still speaking, offering words of counsel, but I had stopped listening. I think I always knew this day would come—that one day I would have to hold my father’s funeral in my heart. But I was unprepared to hear it this way. Knowing the timing made the ache all the deeper.

One
week
from liberation!
I thought.
He came so close. He almost made it!

I don’t remember much about my parting with Mendel or where I went afterward. Just that my first fears were confirmed—I was all alone in the world. The father I loved, the man who gave me everything I needed and taught me honor and integrity, murdered and gone.

Death from illness or an act of nature I could have handled. Not willful murder based on blood and belief. Not a slaying over lineage and faith. The execution’s moral grotesqueness and the loss of my hero ripped a hole in my heart that remains to this day. Sometimes at night when I dream, he comes to me, strong and smiling. He tells me he’s proud of me and loves me. Would that I could live inside those dreams forever.

In a daze, I headed back to Prague, where I could be around survivors who spoke Yiddish and had endured similar horrors. Their presence made me feel a little less broken. My father and mother and siblings would have insisted that I stay strong, so I thought of ways that I could honor their memories and move forward. My time there started to ease the pain—though of course that would never go away—and stoked my entrepreneurial fires. I talked to the other boys and men about their future plans and past businesses. I liked the idea of starting from scratch. I wanted to
build something myself that could produce pride and a profit. An older man at the camp told me he had owned his own store before the Shoah. The easiest way to learn business, he said, was to buy things people want at a good price and then resell them for a little more. “How do you know what people want to buy?” I asked.

“Easy,” he said. “People want whatever they can’t or don’t have.”

The next day I rounded up a half dozen boys my age to launch my foray into the import-export business. “There is no use sitting around and waiting for things to happen,” I said passionately. “We need to make things happen.” I then imparted my deep business knowledge of supply and demand. “We can earn money by giving people the things they want but can’t or don’t have,” I said, as if I were the first person to ever have the idea.

The plan was to buy cigarettes and distribute them to buyers in hard-to-reach cities who would pay a slight premium for our professional delivery services. Then I sweetened my sales pitch. Working in two-man teams, we would split any profits equally among ourselves. We’d travel, meet girls—maybe even find our surviving relatives. “All we need to do is start!” I exclaimed to the group of increasingly excited boys. The pitch worked.

“Where should we start?” one boy asked.

“We should start in Budapest,” I said. “I know the area and some people.” So we rode the train to Budapest, but not on the inside. Because we couldn’t afford tickets, we sneaked aboard and rode the top. For a time, “train hopping” became our primary means of transportation.

Returning to Budapest was bittersweet. I located the nearest HIAS gathering to get the latest update on my family members and
to ask around for any information that would help me locate them. No one knew or had heard anything about them.

I then found the man who had hired me as an auto mechanic in my youth. He remembered and greeted me warmly. He said the girls at the brothel had all moved on. That made me happy. I asked him if I could work a couple days to earn a little cash for our new business venture. He liked the idea and even agreed to introduce me to a few people who might be interested in our services.

That became our routine: Work an odd job for a few days as laborers, earn some capital, and identify a bargain-price vendor. We then made two-man runs by train and resold the cigarettes. After several weeks we had built up a nice little business that allowed us to purchase a ticket and ride
inside
the train instead of on top.

In Budapest I mustered the courage to make a one-day trip to my hometown of Pavlovo. I was nervous about going. Anxious thoughts floated through my mind:
Would my home still be standing? Would the townspeople have information on my family’s whereabouts? Had any of my family members already been by the house to see if I’d returned home in search of them?

When I got to my house, Russians had taken it over. I could not bring myself to knock on the door. I wanted to remember it the way it existed in my heart and mind. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Soviet Communist gear strewn about the place where we had made so many family memories together.

I walked past my home and went to the cemetery where our relatives were buried. I prayed a simple prayer and left. I never wanted to go there ever again. I told myself that I needed to find my family.

Maybe they’re sick and in a hospital somewhere
.
Or maybe they are looking for me and we just haven’t run into one another yet
.

Hope’s grip on me was intense—and futile. But the hope made the living possible, so I used it as an incentive and returned to Budapest to resume making cigarette train runs.

One sales trip to Prague was particularly memorable. One of the boys named Willie and I secured a suitcase of cigarettes and two bottles of vodka. Our plan was to carry them by train to Prague to sell them for a profit. The biggest obstacles we encountered were the Russian soldiers, who were notorious for shaking down easy targets. We sat in a train compartment and placed our bags near our feet, tying the bags to our legs with string to prevent robbers from stealing our inventory when we dozed off. About halfway through the train ride, a uniformed Russian soldier approached us and sat in our compartment. He seemed friendly enough at first, so I gave him some vodka. Within an hour, though, he was drunk and verbally abusive, hurling anti-Semitic slurs at us and threatening to have us imprisoned.

I snapped.

I grabbed his sidearm and hit him over the head with it, knocking him out cold. “Hurry up,” I told Willie. “Help me get his uniform off.”