You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (11 page)

I was sure you’d want to sequester yourself back in your room after that uproar, but I thought I’d suggest more adventure anyway.

“Want to drink that in the lobby?” I asked.

You said yes!

A young woman was cleaning the fish tank, which created a lot of watery sounds. When she finished, a man wearing a tie and dress pants started to vacuum. We couldn’t hear each other over the noise, so we sat quietly. Then, as soon as the peace returned, you said, “Was a woman, 1937. She was pregnant. Then she miscarried, then she got pregnant again, then she had twins. In my city. And everyone got killed.”

What?

It took me a few minutes to fill in the gaps in this story. The woman’s name was Yente. Her family owned the creamery where you hung out so you could see the girl you liked. You got over the girl. But you never forgot the pregnant woman or her twins, who couldn’t have been much older than five when they died. I bet Yente would be happy to know someone remembers her after all these years.

I told you I had to leave.

“Do you want me to walk you back?”

“Nah, I’ll stay here a little,” you said.

That meant you felt strong enough to get to your floor by lunchtime all by yourself. Maybe the extra drugs
were
helping

Maybe I avoided becoming a bat mitzvah for the same reason you now avoid synagogue. If I don’t join them, my immature subconscious may have reasoned, I won’t get killed with them.

I’ve been skeptical about Judaism for as long as I can remember. I used to want to drop out, as if it were a softball team, or violin lessons. I took the word
chosen
literally. We are the chosen people and everyone hates us. Who would choose that?

Obviously, I was confused about the concept of
chosen
. Later, I learned that the legend says we don’t get to choose, but that God chose us. That sounded nice, being chosen. But what were the perks? Did we get special presents? Did we get to live better lives than everyone else? Umm, no. It turns out that God chose us to set an example for the rest
of the world. But an example of what? Enduring slaughter? How much everyone hates the teacher’s pet?

In my prepubescent magical-thinking stage, it seemed insane to voluntarily check the Jewish box. Almost as crazy as admitting that you were a Jew to the Nazis. Why, I wondered naively, had the Jews been so honest back then? Why didn’t they hold up their hands at the very beginning—way before they had to sew the stars onto their coats—and say, “No, no—you’ve made a mistake. I’m not Jewish!”

It could have played out like this when the Nazis came knocking.

Instead, we got this:

I know this is ridiculous reasoning that will get me into a lot of trouble with the serious believers. I also know that most Jews couldn’t lie about their religion. They lived in small communities; they’d outed themselves generations earlier. And though many Jews did run, hide, fight, and conceal their identities, you explained to me one day why so many had obeyed the rules instead.

I would ask you really dumb questions during our official interviews at Vera’s kitchen table. Or rather, really American questions. Why didn’t you tell someone when you were being beaten up? Why didn’t you ask for a reason when they told you to move to the ghetto? They are the kind of questions so many of us have asked:
Why did you take it? Why didn’t you fight back?

“Who you gonna tell?” you said. “You tell the army? They take a gun and shoot you on the spot.”

Even if men had tried to fight back, you said, they wouldn’t have accomplished more than killing a few Germans. The Nazis were much stronger than a bunch of poor Jews.

Besides, anti-Semitism was something to be tolerated, like windy days and itchy socks. Orders to wear yellow armbands and follow curfews didn’t come out of nowhere. They were part of a five-thousand-year-long continuum. No one expected it to get
that
bad.

“Jewish people have a terrible habit,” you explained. “You can take him to hang him. He sees the rope. But still, in his mind, it’s not gonna happen.”

What human could have imagined what happened? At the beginning, it just felt like more of the same. Jews didn’t ask questions, you told me. Jews were used to doing what they were told. Even you’d been used to taking it since childhood.

The Polish boys teased you as you walked down the street.

“Hey, Jew!” they yelled.

“Yid, go back to Palestine,” they hissed.

You pretended you didn’t hear them and kept walking. Or you fooled them into leaving you alone. You weren’t going to get beat up like your younger brother did the time they took his soccer ball.

One summer afternoon as you were heading to an orchard, you felt a rock fly past your face. You turned and saw two Polish boys with fists full of stones, poised to throw again.

“Do you know how to get to that orchard up the road?” you asked, even though you knew the route.

The boys, whether stunned by your audacity or distracted by your request for help, lowered their arms and proceeded to give you directions. You strolled away with flesh and pride intact.

Big balls, my friend, big balls. Is that the secret to your survival?

Another summer you sat down for dinner in the farmhouse where your family worked. You wore a cap, of course, as all Jews did back then. A head covering signifies respect for God.

“I thought if I take the hat off, maybe I was gonna die. That was in our minds when we were kids.”

For non-Jews, wearing a cap in the house was plain rude. The farmer was big on manners.

“Jew, take your hat off,” he ordered.

Again, Mr. Balls, you pretended not to hear. You kept the hat on.

“It wasn’t too bad, real,” you explained, using your version of the word
really
. “It wasn’t like here—people with a knife or somebody with a stick.”

Just words, rocks, and fists. Nothing strong enough to make people quit the team.

But I had hindsight. I figured as long as I stayed ambivalent about being Jewish, I might not get killed by the Nazis the next time they came. But if I joined them, if I embraced my Jewishness, there would be no escape.

Of course I was afraid of Nazis, despite living safely in 1960s suburbia. It probably started with the jittery black-and-white movies they showed in Sunday school, with the scary narrator who didn’t sound like a real man, and the repeated images of backhoes pushing bones into piles. Those led to classic Nazi nightmares. Don’t all Jewish kids have those? In mine, the SS troops goose-stepped through my neighborhood toward my house. They were out to kill my family, the only Jews for miles. Only I could save them, but only if I got home in time to warn them before the Nazis got there. I ran and ran, cutting through backyards while the rows of soldiers stayed on the main roads. They always reached my street before I did, but I always woke up before they got to the front door.

It’s not as if I encountered egregious anti-Semitism during my childhood. It wasn’t too bad, real. My one bad experience happened during sixth grade. A boy threw pennies on the floor in front of me. Then he said something along the lines of:
You Jews love pennies, right? Pick them up!
It was shocking and humiliating and made me feel very unsafe. But karma got him. That year the boys spent much of recess period trying to make each other pass out. I believe the strategy involved breath-holding
and spinning in circles. One day Penny Boy took his turn and fell on the asphalt, face-first. He knocked his teeth through his bottom lip. I wasn’t an eyewitness to the accident, but I was fortunate enough to see him being led down the hall to the nurse’s office. He was crying, as blood (and, hopefully, teeth) dripped down his chin.

But that was it. Maybe nobody bothered me because I grew up in Rhode Island, the birthplace of religious freedom. Roger Williams founded the state after Massachusetts booted him for his belief that people should be able to practice any religion. He welcomed people from all faiths to his new state, an invitation that led to the opening of the first Jewish synagogue in America.

Or maybe people left me alone because they didn’t know I was Jewish. I didn’t look particularly Semitic, with my straight hair and pale, freckly skin, especially before my nose outgrew my face. Or maybe they knew but didn’t care. My hometown of Cranston, Rhode Island, is full of Italian Americans whose culture is like a sister-wife to ours. We all scream at each other a lot and show our love with platters of carb-heavy food. We all value family above mostly everything else. We “all” have dark skin and dark, curly hair. We all leave our places of worship bloated with guilt.

My fantasy as a child was to be an Italian Jew named Toni. Short for Antonia, a name I’d heard on one of my grandmother’s soap operas. At the time, I didn’t even know Italian Jews actually existed. Such a crossbreed seemed too good to be true, like being able to perform witchcraft by twitching your nose. I didn’t know that the word
ghetto
was Italian, and was first used to describe the forced confinement of Jews in Venice. I didn’t know that during the Holocaust, Italy was relatively kind to its Jews, refusing to turn them over to Nazis in many cases, and allowing thousands to escape or hide. Things turned nastier after Germany occupied Italy, but still, an estimated 80 percent of Italy’s Jews survived the war, more than any other European country except Luxembourg.

All I knew was that if I were Toni, the Italian Jew, I could still enjoy the few things I liked about being Jewish—dressing up as Queen
Esther, singing a song called “Zoom Golly Golly” in Sunday school, inhaling all that perfume the ladies wore with their fancy outfits for High Holiday services—but I’d fit into my community.

Ambivalence means “simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action,” according to Webster. Let’s add religion to that list. Due to my deep and classic ambivalence, besides wanting to wash my Jewishness off, I also spent time painting new layers of it on.

My parents never required me to date only Jewish boys, so I didn’t. Yet it was important to me to marry one, so I did. Why, besides loving him personally? So I wouldn’t feel so isolated? Because there’s safety in numbers?

David is much more comfortable being Jewish than I am. His family didn’t eat ham sandwiches and pork chops like mine did. They belonged to a Conservative temple, whose members are less flexible regarding the commandments. So he didn’t fight me when I suggested we start keeping kosher.

I’d had a miscarriage, the first of two. Your wife was infertile, so you know about the death of dreams. They grow with sunshiny recklessness, like dandelions, as soon as the pregnancy test flashes yes. By the time someone is sucking the embryonic carcass out of your womb—and you can hear that vacuum even with the forgetting drugs they give you, which don’t, by the way, let you forget what that sound means—you already have the fantasy kid grown and married. It’s a loss, even if it only thrived in your mind. And when anyone loses anything important, they look for something steady to hold on to. It’s one of the reasons organized religion is still hanging around. I grabbed the railing of Judaism after reading a book of poems and prayers written by female rabbis and other believers. Because the words soothed me, I concluded that becoming more observant would soothe me even more.

During this period, my wealthiest friend from high school married an Israeli at a Newport mansion. They served lobster at the reception, and I didn’t eat one bite of it because I was keeping Kosher that season.

I read about the healing powers of
mikveh
baths, small indoor pools filled at least partly by water that’s “living,” such as rainwater or, even better, a continuous trickle from the Dead Sea. Hitting the
mikveh
is the ultimate in starting-fresh rituals. It’s regularly done by people converting to Judaism, and by Orthodox women after their monthly periods. In both cases, the bath is supposed to purify the bather. Orthodox couples refrain from any physical contact between the first drop of menstrual blood and the
mikveh
dip, implying to me that the husbands consider their wives dirty for being fertile. Orthodox men
mikveh
before the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, and less-observant Jews use it to purify themselves before and after all kinds of situations, such as big birthdays, cancer treatments, and grief.

That was my objective. I figured I’d have better luck conceiving again if I washed off the residue of the lost dream baby. Because our town is so religious, of course I found a
mikveh
right down the street. I called, made an appointment, and started scrubbing. A big rule of
mikveh-
ing is that you’re supposed to be almost inhumanly clean before hopping in, so there’s no barrier between you and the water. Barriers include mascara, fingernail grime, that piece of chicken stuck between your teeth, earwax, and whatever’s clogging your nostrils. To make sure you didn’t miss any toe lint or sleepy seeds, a
mikveh
lady takes a close look at all the nooks. Mine was named Lori.

She was young, though she looked older in her Orthodox garb. A head
shmatte
and giant skirt don’t do a gal any favors, which is the point. Lori was not supposed to be sexually appealing to anyone except her husband.

But she was emotionally appealing to me. She was kind and nonjudgmental throughout the awkward experience. Besides being ignorant about most things Jewish, I was naked. But she coached me through the prayer I had to recite before and after immersing (something to do with thanking God for commanding us to do this), and the technicalities of dipping (no body part can touch the wall or floor or air), and she held up a big white sheet while I got in and out of the water to ease my embarrassment. A few days after, she called to see
how I was doing. She told me she’d been having miscarriages, too. We hit it off.

She invited me to her home for Shabbat lunch, which was extremely ritualized. Water was poured over hands, multiple breads were blessed multiple times. She told me about her husband’s struggle with depression and his quest to make it go away by burrowing under the Torah, which was how they’d become so observant. She even forgave me after I (mistakenly) kissed him good-bye on the cheek, a huge violation of the male/female touching rules. (I’d like to point out that he gave me the cheek when I leaned toward him; how was I supposed to know?)

I thought we were true friends—that despite our differences, we’d stay connected. Then I learned the truth. The whole thing had been a courtship. She’d wanted me to see the light, drink the Kool-Aid, come to the other side. She wanted me to go Hasidic, and when I made it clear that I wasn’t interested, she stopped calling me. It turns out I wasn’t a friend to her; I was a project.

Ironic, isn’t it, that throwing myself closer to observance ricocheted me even further from where I’d started? Lori hurt me. I used that pain to step out of the dance circle and linger at the edges again, where I’d always felt safer.

There were rapes? You never told me this. I found out at the Holocaust Memorial Museum when I listened to one of your townsmen describe your ghetto. He said the Nazis would grab women on the street and drag them into houses and everyone knew what happened. Warfare rapes. Did you know? Were your three younger sisters touched? Maybe that explains why you can barely say their names, and why you always cry when you do. I bet you knew, and that knowledge is preserved inside your mental box of horrors. I know such a box exists because of the way you open and shut its lid. You’ll tell certain stories with length and depth, then you’ll stop. Abruptly.

“Ach,” you respond to a follow-up question after an anecdote, “why you talk?”

And then you wave your hand as if you’re actually swatting the box shut.

But those other people from your town who went through the same acid days as you have revealed how bad it got. They told me, in their taped testimonies, about the rapes.

But that’s the middle of this part of the story. You preferred to tell me about the beginning, when you were still there.

It crept up on you. First you were simply scared of war, like everyone else in Europe. There was bombing in September of 1939. The streets shook, and people taped up their windows and hid together in cellars. They were afraid to come out, but then the Germans conquered Poland and made them. They banged the drum until all three thousand or so Jews—half the town’s population—gathered in the market square. You saw familiar faces atop Nazi uniforms: sugar factory workers who’d been forced to choose sides: SS or bullet. They made you stand there for hours, shooting bullets in the air to enforce quiet while they ransacked the houses and took what they wanted.

Then they rounded up the men and kept them in a church for three days.

Then the farmers posted signs:
DON’T BUY FROM JEWS
.

Then the SS set curfews. Six a.m. to six p.m., the streets must be Jew-free. One day your father came home a few minutes after six because he’d been at the stable, putting the horses away, and they’d beaten him over the head.

Then they made you tie yellow strips of cloth around your biceps, as if to strap down Jewish might, muscle by muscle.

Then they changed the rule to yellow stars sewn on the front and back of clothing, over the heart, like targets, so they could see you coming and going.

Then they made you paint the word
JUDE
on your doors.

Then the Pole in the Nazi uniform kicked you in the coccyx with his boot because you weren’t pushing your wagon down the street
quickly enough, and you didn’t make a sound because you knew that if you did, you’d be taken to the police station and whipped.

Then they arrested all the intellectual Poles and Jews and took them someplace and no one saw them again. And your mother, I’m sure, thanked God she’d never been able to educate her children.

Then they formed a Jewish Council—a
Judenrat—
and a police force. They made the baker, Rosenberg, serve as chairman. The doctor was part of it, plus six other men given no choice but to do harm.

Then they took your homes and forced you into a ghetto. First, it was a relatively civilized resettlement, moving you to certain apartments on certain streets on the swampy side of town.

Then they squeezed you closer together, “like sheep,” you told me.

Then you had to board up the windows that faced the main street so you couldn’t look out.

Then they made you work for free. You cleaned the street and moved rocks around.

Then the German slapped you across the face because you walked past him and took off your hat.

Then the German slapped you across the face because you walked past him and didn’t take off your hat.

Then they shoved more people into the ghetto from surrounding towns, so some two-room apartments housed twenty humans. Like sheep.

Then no one except the Jewish police and officials could leave, unless they were assigned to a work detail. Your uncle was one of them. He was your father’s brother, but he was only five years older than you. He’d been a tailor; then he’d served in the Polish infantry in the mid-thirties, so they took advantage of all his skills. He sewed uniforms for the Germans and enforced their laws as a cop.

Then people got sick. They were malnourished and caught typhus. The doctor set up a makeshift Red Cross where he and some girls tried to cure them.

Then they turned the synagogue into a warehouse and covered the windows with bricks.

Then Rose, the girl you liked so much, sneaked you some bread.

Then they took your uncle and his wife to the cemetery and made them dig their own graves and shot them.

Then they came into your apartment in the middle of the night and woke you up. It was the summer of 1941. You’d been under attack for two years. You’d been penned into the ghetto for one. They took you and Bill into the darkness without giving you time to say good-bye to your parents or your sisters.

Then you left Zychlin.

Then things got really bad.

The tattoos drive the remembering. All those school programs and museums are nothing compared to the power of the tattoos. People see them on wrinkled arms placing soup cans onto grocery checkout belts. They see them on arms making fists in preparation for routine blood tests. They see them and they remember.

Who will remember once your tattoo is gone? When you die, whether today or some other time, that symbol will be buried with you. The numbers will decompose. You will come unmarked.

Eventually, all the tattooed arms will disappear. Then the forgetting will truly commence.

How would the numbers look on my arm? I could get the same tattoo in the same place. 141324. Whenever people asked what it meant, I could tell them about you. Then they’d remember again.
Oh yeah, they killed Jews once
.

And I’d get to keep you skin-close.

Now I know why you tell me this salami story over and over again. It’s the last family story you have. Warped as it is, you must take it out for display whenever you need a reminder of what family felt like.

You and Bill were in a forced labor camp. What were you doing? Building roads? Shoveling coal? Digging fields? All of your “assignments” run together for you, and so, of course, for me, too. But whatever your job at the beginning, you were doing it while suffering from typhus.

We don’t have that disease anymore—at least, not in my world. But I looked it up on my computer so I could try to imagine how you felt. It’s a bacterial disease spread by body lice and fleas and crowds. They used to call it “jail fever” because of its sprint through places where people are sealed together. It causes weeks of body-boiling temperatures, vomiting, diarrhea, rashes, head and body pain, coughing, and stupor, which explains its name. The word
typhus
comes from the ancient Greek term for “smoky,” or “hazy.”

It’s treatable with antibiotics, which they didn’t have for civilians back then, and which they surely wouldn’t have given to you if they had. Without treatment, 10 to 60 percent of patients die.

You felt bad.

Then a package arrived from your mother.

What?

This part of the story always stops me. Packages? What was this, summer camp?

Perhaps the Nazis allowed Jews to use the postal service to keep the charade of normalcy going. Work would make you free and all that.

The package contained food, most notably, salami. You couldn’t eat that. You were too sick to eat anything, and so was Bill.

“He ate the whole thing!” you remember, always chuckling when you get to this part. “My brother, he’d eat anything.”

The food in the package didn’t help you, but the package itself did. It was proof that home still existed. Your mother was feeding you, loving you from afar, sending encouragement tied up in string.
Eat up, boys. We’ll see you soon
. What a laugh you’d all have about Bill and the salami when that day came.

Did you save all of your crazy for me? Because that’s what it felt like. You packed away all of your emotional damage as if it were a book you’d get around to reading someday, then you led a fairly stable life for fifty years. When I came along, you flipped out.

Okay, it wasn’t that direct a consequence. I know aging probably had more to do with your descent than meeting a fellow depression sufferer did. As the decades passed, your emotional defenses broke down like the collagen in your skin. But maybe it helped to know you had someone familiar with the ailment in your life before you fell. I firmly believe that mental illness is a disease of the brain, just like asthma is a disease of the lungs. No one brings it on himself. I even compare mind-related woes to respiratory illnesses. Low-level depression is like a bad cold—sometimes you need medicine, sometimes just time. What I had—postpartum depression—is like pneumonia: acute, but curable with the right course of drugs. Bipolar disease is more like asthma—chronic, but usually controllable if you take the medicine—and schizophrenia is like lung cancer. Catch it early and it might not ruin your life.

I don’t know how to characterize what you have. But I know it involves scarring.

The first time it hit you, in August of 1998, I was surprised. I thought with all your laughter and irreverence that you were this incredibly solid, mentally healthy genocide survivor, a happily-ever-after survivor. But no. Vera called to tell me you were in a hospital on the other side of the city and she needed help getting there to visit you. Somehow you’d gotten yourself admitted to the psychiatric wing. I had no idea you’d been seeing a shrink, but one that you referred to as The Rabbi had been monitoring you, and must have decided you needed inpatient help. You were anxious, Vera told me, and had been screaming in your sleep a lot.

I went with her to the hospital and suggested to the staff that you might be suffering from PTSD. I thought it might be helpful if
someone spoke to you about your Holocaust experience in addition to filling you with medicine, but no one appreciated my input. I was nobody in your life but some lady who drove some other lady to visit you.

After two weeks of subjecting you to craft projects, they sent you home with a prescription for antianxiety pills. I drove you to a couple of appointments with your psychiatrist, but if he offered counseling, you refused it. He may have convinced you to take antidepressants, which would explain the next four years of relative normalcy.