You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (2 page)

Lose one friend and the chest aches for months.

Lose them all and the pain never stops.

Why wasn’t this obvious to the doctors?

I’d regularly float my theory by you when you insisted you needed to go to the hospital or have the nurses check your blood pressure twice an hour because you thought your heart was about to explode.

“Your pain is from your broken heart,” I’d say. But you’d never respond.

Because you knew it was true. But if you accepted that fact—if you admitted that I was right—you’d also have to accept that the pain would never go away.

And now it might not.

By our second coffee date, you were talking about sex. Your stories involved leaving the displaced persons camp where you had lived for four years and working the black market. You got ahold of stockings and exchanged them for sex with German women.

“What about Jewish women?” I asked.

“No, no. You couldn’t do that to them. They were good girls. I wouldn’t take advantage.”

It was revenge sex, the fragile tubes of silk giving the survivors power over the perpetrators. You and your fellow ex-prisoners
essentially turned those young women into prostitutes. But of course, this being you, there was more love than vengeance. You fell for one of those German girls, a pretty blonde named Hermanie who lived on a farm and welcomed you into her warm bed. And at the same time, you pined for one of the Jewish girls back at the barracks. You wouldn’t pursue her, though, because you had no trade for supporting her.

“I had nothing.”

But even fifty years later, you still thought about her sometimes.

“She was cute, skinny,” you said. “She was like you.”

We were sitting in the Jewish Community Center cafe, which was more of a claimed space than a restaurant. Bordered by vending machines, floor-to-ceiling windows looking onto a grassy trap of a courtyard, and iron railings that separated the blond wood tables from the hallway, the cafe was where the mothers gathered after dropping their kids at day care or swimming lessons. I would often sit there staring out the window while preverbal Max sucked on a bottle, both of us wasting time before the excitement of retrieving Carrie from preschool. I was too saturated with anxiety to read, so I’d eavesdrop on the pairs of women leaning into each other with gossip, complaints, companionship. I’ve never minded eating alone, before or since, but I remember thinking it would have been nice not to feel so self-consciously friendless in that place. You cured that.

It must have been a Monday, because we met every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at 10:30 a.m. Even now, years since we broke that pattern, I still get hungry at 10:30, no matter what I’ve eaten for breakfast, or when.

Before we sat down, I told you I needed to pick up Max from the babysitting room. I invited you to join me. You leaned over the gate that kept the toddlers from escaping and waved at Max. He immediately smiled at the man with the hat, though he’d only seen you once in his life. You’d been imprinted.

Settled at the cafe, I drank scalding decaf and spread cream cheese from a foil packet onto a bagel that I shared with Max. You didn’t eat anything.

“My stomach always bad,” you said. “My mother, she send to me and the brother a package in the mail. Had in it salami. I was so sick with the typhus I couldn’t eat a thing. He was sick, too, but he never passed up a meal. He ate it all.”

This memory made you laugh. Most of the ones involving Bill did, probably because his story hasn’t ended yet. When I asked the simplest questions about your sisters—such as what their names were—tears formed. But Bill got full sentences, as did his kids, “one a doctor and one a dentist.” You, forever childless, were so proud of them. And of him, for seizing the American dream.

Max gnawed on his piece of the bagel while we talked, and you smiled and cooed at him. Until he coughed and you suddenly stopped and furrowed your brow.

“Don’t let him eat that,” you said, pointing to his mouthful of bagel. “He’ll choke. Take it out!”

I told you he wouldn’t choke, that babies always cough a little when they’re stuffing their mouths—probably some congenital mechanism designed to slow them down so they’ll live until the next meal. But you got so panicked that I had to swipe the glob of gummed dough out with my finger before we could continue discussing your years of starvation.

You stopped talking when Vera arrived. Though I’d originally pegged her as the uptight one, she turned out to be a surfer dude compared to you: relaxed and gracious. One afternoon that fall, the three of us gathered in our usual spot on an unusual day so you could meet the rest of my family. It was a Sunday, and you dressed as if you were going to church: a crisp, white button-down shirt and black leather shoes instead of your usual windbreaker and sneakers.

You shook David’s hand. Very formal. Very masculine.

“Ah, you got a cutie here,” you said. “If I was thirty years younger, you’d be in trouble.”

You laughed, as if you were kidding.

“I know I would,” David said. “She sees you more than she sees me.”

Vera took out a small camera and sorted us into every possible group pose, including you and me, you and Max, you and Vera encircled by my kids and me. A few weeks later, when I visited her apartment, which was essentially yours, too, I saw that one framed and displayed on a bookshelf. She’d already concluded that we were frame-worthy friends.

Wasn’t it too early?

One morning at the cafe, I was the one who didn’t want to eat. And out of nowhere—as if anything in our relationship was out of nowhere, but stay with me here—you asked, “Are you having a nervous breakdown?”

That freaked me out. I’d never cried in front of you or revealed anything about my temporary wrestling match with sanity. People who’d known me far longer than you had never realized I was struggling. But you knew, even without obvious clues. Maybe that’s why you kept showing up. Have I ever thanked you for that? Those mornings when you gave me pieces of your pain and took pieces of mine were as powerful a cure as thrashing in the pool and sobbing with a shrink.

As my depression lifted, due in part to your consistency, I lost my splintery edges. I returned to smooth and solid, as if I’d been sanded. And with solidity came my old habits. I’m a journalist, so my default in any situation is to look for the story. I thought maybe I’d write an article about you. The idea of you and Vera, two aging immigrants who had found each other, appealed to me. You represented thick branches of the tree of tortured Jews. And like so many other people I’ve met over my many years of reporting—the single straight man with HIV who took me to his doctor’s appointment, the woman I interviewed while sitting on the edge of her homeless-shelter bed, the extraordinarily wealthy lady who started to cry about her dead mother when I’d only come to interview her about interior decorating—I assumed I’d remember you well, but leave you behind anyway. It would have been impossible to imagine that I’d be the one in charge of your death.

I love you because you can’t stop fighting.

You fight your horrific dreams and your worse memories. Your doctors and nurses. Your sister-in-law. Your pants and the belts that are always too big or too small. Men. The old people you claim are “gone with the wind.” The headache you’ve had since before the war. Psychiatry, psychology, and drugs. Me.

I love you because you make me feel like a hero. But you’re the hero. You’re ninety-one years old, and before starting each day you must scoot the image of a man being hanged out of the way.

I love you because you hoard napkins. Because you still flirt. Because you hear everything that’s said and not said in your presence, even though it seems like you’re only listening to yourself complain. Because you know when I need you to come back to this world, and you come. Because you won. Because you picked me. Because you still fight.

Wait. Keep fighting. I’ll be there in three traffic lights.

You weren’t supposed to live to see the beginning of the Holocaust, never mind its end. You weren’t even supposed to survive your first month. Your mother, Zelda, delivered you at home, naturally, on a coarse feather bed with a midwife waiting by her knees. She and your father named you Shmiel Aron. Did she name you after a dead relative, as is the Jewish custom? Or did she choose the names because of what they signified? Shmiel, the Yiddish form of Samuel, means “His name is God.” Aron means “exalted,” but you didn’t look nearly that promising.

“I was sick,” you told me once. “I don’t know what was wrong. Just sick. You know, how a baby isn’t right?”

Your left eye was crossed. If you were as picky an eater then as you are now, you were probably refusing the breast, which would have left you scrawny and weak. Maybe you were fighting a virus or some
congenital disease. But there was little your mother could do. It was 1919. There was no penicillin, no incubator. Babies die, the doctor must have thought; she’ll have another. But Zelda loved her second-born as I love mine, so she did the only other thing available to mothers in her situation: She took you to the rabbi.

It should have been a happy time for Zelda. Her husband adored her, her firstborn was thriving, and her world was at peace. Poland had recently regained its independence and, for that blink of history, the Poles weren’t bothering the Jews. But instead of reveling in the relative calm, she was trying to save a life. I see her wrapping you against the freezing cold and carrying you over cobblestone streets to the synagogue down the road from your house. Did your eyes tell all, even at that age? Did they bend at the corners with fear, an expression I know so well?

The rabbi looked you over and offered a solution. Your first name, Shmiel, would have to go. Maybe he objected because he didn’t want a child named after God to die? Or maybe it had to do with the practice of assigning numbers to Hebrew letters; could the Hebrew spelling of Shmiel add up to something sinister? Who knows. But he subtracted Shmiel and added Matz, which means “gift of God” in Hebrew. So you became Aron Matz, exalted gift of God. And you got better. You would always be the runt of Zelda’s boys, never as muscular or coordinated as your brothers. But you might be the toughest. That name change bought you almost a century of living.

I still believed in them when I wrote that. I believed they were good and powerful and used all their money to make things better.

That’s a lie. I’d always been suspicious of the spending habits of certain large Jewish organizations. Why all that money for trees in Israel when there were hungry kids in America? Why all that money for fancy hospitals in that country when people in my country didn’t have homes? Of course I believe that Israel is important as a symbol of our survival, but it seemed so much more important than America to so many American Jews, especially those with cash to throw around.

It was never a competition in your mind. The day after 9/11, I came to your apartment.

“Zoo baby,” you said, pronouncing “Sue” the only way you knew how. “What did you do to the plane?”

You could joke because you weren’t in shock like those of us who’d grown up believing our Americanness inoculated us against
such unpleasantness. For you, it was just another really bad thing in a lifetime of really bad things. A horror, yes, but one that we’d live through like all the others. You were mainly offended that someone would attack the country that had been so kind to you.

“I knew the best soldiers in the world,” you said. “They feel bad for you.”

Americans saved you. America took you in and gave you another life, though certainly not the life promised in the brochures. Israel rejected you. You’d applied to emigrate, but after the doctors at the displaced persons camp found a spot on your lung, the Promised Land was unpromised to you. You would have given your money to your adopted country instead of Israel if you earned any extra.

At least I had faith that the Jews who kept all that money in the tribe would be there for a Jew in trouble.

Until they weren’t.

Our first encounter with this nursing home was wonderful. That was a few years ago, after the loony bin, when I thought it might be a good idea to check the place out. A nice young social worker took us around. She showed us the atrium and the synagogue and introduced you to some hardy-looking men who spoke Yiddish with you. It looked like a resort, but it was clear to everyone that you didn’t belong there yet because you could still take care of yourself.