You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (18 page)

The place was such a big deal that it was immortalized by an artist on the walls of your Jewish nursing home. When we first toured this place, you were delighted to see a painted version of yourself in the white counterman’s apron and cap you wore every workday.

The owner, Ben Klingsberg (the first G had died, and he bought out the second one), loved you, and, more important, he trusted you. He gave you the keys to the store and let you make the bank deposits at the end of the day. You’d come in before the pre-daybreak opening to set up. It was on one of those mornings that you cut an onion roll and your hand at the same time, requiring stitches and a week off. It was the only vacation you remember taking.

Then the neighborhood began to change, thanks to an ugly bank and real estate scheme that lured black families to the area and scared off Jews. As the Jews ran away from their new neighbors, they took their deli orders with them. The most famous deli of all closed in 1968.

You were the only employee Klingsberg took when he opened a new restaurant in a fancier part of Boston. Called the Eatwell Cafeteria—way too cutesy a name for a real deli, I think—it catered to office workers and was only open on weekdays. When the businesses supplying those customers moved out of the city, Mr. Klingsberg followed. He took you with him when he opened a place in the suburbs, but it was never anything like the G & G. You sliced your last block of meat when it closed in 1981.

You were supposed to keep the German money in a separate account so the US government wouldn’t touch it. Our country had reasons to feel guilty, too. Not bombing the tracks. Turning the
St. Louis
away. This was our way of trying to make amends.

You earned it
, we said to the survivors
. Enjoy!

The Victims of Nazi Persecution Act of 1994 states that “payments made to individuals because of their status as victims of Nazi persecution shall be disregarded in determining eligibility for, and the amount of, benefits or services to be provided under any federal or federally assisted program which provides benefits or services based, in whole or in part, on need.”

Congressman (and, presumably, nice Jewish boy) Henry Waxman introduced the bill after hearing that one of his survivor constituents was having trouble paying for her subsidized apartment. The government had counted her reparations as regular income when they raised her rent. Now she couldn’t afford it.

“In the aftermath of World War II, the postwar German and Austrian Governments instituted programs of payments to Holocaust survivors,” Waxman said on the House floor. “These payments are not intended to be full and adequate compensation for the Holocaust, as such compensation is impossible. They are instead a penitent gesture to individuals whose whole families were exterminated, who suffered loss of limb or permanent impairment of mental or physical functions, or who endured other terrible hardships. It is unconscionable that these payments should count as regular income or assets, thus diminishing eligibility for aid under entitlement programs of the Government of the United States.”

Besides, he pointed out, there weren’t many of you left. The extra expense to the country wouldn’t last for long.

His fellow Congress folk agreed that taking torture amends wasn’t very nice. The House and Senate passed the bill, and President Clinton signed it into law.

No one told you to celebrate by opening a new bank account.

I’m still not sure you understand the concept of psychosomatic illness, so here’s Webster’s best definition:

“Of, relating to, involving, or concerned with bodily symptoms caused by mental or emotional disturbance.”

It doesn’t mean, as many people believe, that the sickness is imaginary, as in
It’s all in your head
. It means the pain is real, but it originates from your brain rather than from a physical injury or germ. You had been displaying classic symptoms all spring. Something would make you anxious and the anxiety felt like a heart attack, so you’d call 911. Because you uttered those hysteria-inciting words—
chest pain
—the doctors usually kept you for observation. They never found anything out of the ordinary, which frustrated everyone.

“What’s wrong with me?” you asked. You called me from your hospital room. It was your third admission of the spring.

“Maybe it’s stress,” I said.

“You sound like the doctor,” you said angrily.

“Well, we kind of agree on that.”

Click. Dial tone.

You hung up on me.

It wasn’t the first time, though it surprised me whenever you did it. So dramatic! We’ve always bickered, which still delights me. It’s freeing to have a friend like that. I usually try to restore peace so the relationship doesn’t get messy. But I’m not afraid I’ll lose you if I fight back.

“Do I have to go over there?” I asked David.

“Yes,” he said. “You signed up for this. You’re responsible for him. He needs you.”

People have asked what my family thinks of you taking up so much space in my life. I think they expect reports of resentment or annoyance. But that has never happened. David adores you, and often walks around the house doing a perfect imitation of your voice and accent. My kids see you as my project—just something Mom does. And I think they liked to be able to say, when they were learning about the Holocaust in school, “My mom is friends with a
real
survivor.” Basically, they see me as the family do-gooder. Nag, neatnik, and do-gooder.

Still, you’re my gig. So, you hang up and I come running. Isn’t such negative reinforcement supposed to backfire?

Your nurse, who had brightly colored Batman and Spiderman tattoos on his giant biceps, told me the doctor suspected an anxiety problem. They were trying to get you to take antidepressants, but you were resistant.

You were asleep when I entered the room. You had a white facecloth on your forehead, and your striped pajamas were open to reveal electrodes on your chest. Nobody had changed the bloody gauze pad taped to your forearm.

You opened your eyes and gave me a sweet, soft smile. Then you took my hand.

“Listen to me,” you said. “In concentration camp, when a man has a big stomach they say it’s because he ate too much. I know I have this pressure in my chest.”

You were referring to a good-looking Greek man you used to say hello to in Birkenau. One day, you noticed he was bloated from starvation, which killed him a few days later. The guards had insisted he was distended from overeating. You thought the doctors and I were twisting the truth the same way the guards had.

We argued about it some more. You insisted you had nothing to be depressed about, and I tried to explain psychology to you. I’m sure there was some bed-pounding and eye-rolling involved.

“Just take the pills,” I said. “If they don’t help, you can say you were right.”

Your hospital room had a big window that overlooked a factory roof and the town hall. The sky was still blue, but the sun was nudging the horizon. I’d never turned the lights on when I arrived.

“You look nice in the dark,” you said.

A nurse came in and silently checked your blood pressure and pulse rate. I expected us to continue the fight after she left, but instead you ended it. You agreed to take the pills. This time, I took your hand.

“Why are your hands so warm?” you asked. “They’re usually cold.”

The pills either weren’t strong enough to beat down your anxiety or they came too late. You continued to drive yourself and everyone around you crazy. When you were admitted to a hospital, you flirted with the nurses and charmed the doctors. When you went home, you obsessed about your health and called 911. If you were in a hospital bed on a day when your social security or reparation checks were supposed to arrive, you’d hound me to go to your apartment, pick them up, bring them to you to sign, and then drive immediately to the bank to deposit them. If I tried to tell you the checks could wait a few days, you flipped out and yelled at me, which certainly wasn’t helping you recover. You wanted me to pay your bills, too, which required more runs from my house to your house to the hospital to the post office. Eventually, the ladies at the bank suggested I take on power of attorney duties so I could handle your finances. We signed more papers. Now I could take control of your death and your taxes.

A few hospitalizations later, the doctors—and probably the insurance company—decided you belonged back in the loony bin. This time they found you a room in the geriatric psych ward of your usual hospital. It was after dark when they finished the transfer paperwork. They made me walk you to your new wing.

I was relieved because I thought this transfer meant you’d finally get the treatment you needed. Like the last time, they’d patch you up good as new. Then I saw your room.

It was straight out of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:
tiny and starch-white, with furniture made of metal and windows reinforced with chicken wire. The door locked from the outside. It was a cell.

We both started to panic. You didn’t want me to leave, but you were too proud to ask me to stay. I knew you weren’t actually a prisoner and that no one would hurt you, but that room was awful. I wanted to get you back to the floor we’d come from. The nurses behind the secured front desk couldn’t help. It was too late at night to undo a transfer. And for what? You still needed psychiatric treatment. They
told me they’d keep an eye on you and would call if you needed me. I had to believe them.

I helped you get ready for bed, then promised you’d be safe.
Just sleep
, I told you.
I’ll make sure you get out of here in the morning
. When I left, you were sitting on the bed. I’ve never felt like more of a traitor than I did the moment I closed that door. Some best friend, huh?

I didn’t sleep much and went back as soon as I’d dropped the kids at school the next morning. I expected you to be furious with me, but you weren’t. You had made it through the night. You actually seemed okay.

I think you realized before I did that you were in the right place. The psychiatrist assigned to you was a Russian woman who wore hip blue-rimmed glasses. She understood your past, she got the PTSD component, and she was smart enough to prescribe a cocktail of pills that actually did patch you up. She also figured out why you seemed to thrive when you had nurses to answer your calls and aides to bring you trays of food.

“Sometimes it’s just time to let people take care of you,” she said.

She thought you were ready for a nursing home then. But you weren’t.

When you were discharged a couple of weeks later, we met you in the hospital lobby. I had Max with me, and though he was standing next to me instead of cooing from a baby seat, the scene reminded me of the day we’d met five years earlier: the same three people in a lobby, unsure of what would come next.

You want to die in your sleep, but you thought that could be risky.

“Who checks the heart?” you asked me not long ago.

“Huh?”

“The heart. Who checks it?”

“When?”

“At the end. Before they bury.”

Oh, I see. You wanted to make sure they didn’t mix up
asleep
with
dead
and bury you alive by mistake. Throughout all our pre-mortem conversations, I don’t think this had ever come up.

I assured you, I think, that the doctors followed special protocols to prevent the burial of living beings. The funeral home guys, too. And me.

“I will make sure you’re not still alive,” I vowed.

Plato explained the concept of soul mates by having Aristophanes recount a famous myth in his book,
The Symposium
. According to the myth, Zeus split humans in half to keep us from getting uppity. Ever since, we’ve been searching for our other halves so we can feel complete. Most people think of their soul mate as their romantic ideal. I think that’s both narrow-minded and dangerous. I once dated someone who was very similar to me. At first it was wonderful because we love ourselves, right? Then it turned disastrous. Because we were so similar, we made the same mistakes. There was no counterbalance—no one to pull us back by the belt loops when we got too close to the edge. In a pairing of opposites, there’s always someone to see how crazy you’re getting and yank you back.

Put another way, when you’re with someone who’s just like you, you get more of the same. With an opposite, you get all kinds of things you’ve never had before.

Vera is your opposite and David is mine. We’ve compared notes on this. We were in one of those hospitals on one of those summer nights when you were unraveling. I told you I understood how you felt because I’d been anxious for years before postpartum depression forced me to get treated and allowed me to become a recovering nutcase. You hadn’t made peace with your weaknesses yet.

“Nothing bothers Vera,” you said.

“Same with David,” I said.

“Good thing we have them because we’re both nervous.”

You looked at me and laughed. I realized in that moment how similar we are. And so many times since then I’ve known how you will react to something and you’ve known how I feel about another thing. We look at the world in the same cynical way. We laugh at the same things. Does that make us soul mates—two halves of the same person?

Is that why you picked me up—so that during this brief period in both of our lives, we get to feel whole?

I wonder if we would have had so much trouble getting you into this place if The Millionaire was still alive. I like to think that he would have fixed everything with one check—that he would have done the right thing. But I think that about everyone, don’t I? And I’m usually disappointed.

He was married to your wife’s sister, the one who lost the baby. They never had any other kids. I don’t know how he built his tower of money, but I have an idea how he maintained its height. Rich people get rich because they make money, but some stay rich because they keep it. He may have been good at that.