You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (21 page)

No one will ever know why Levi’s story ended. But you’re even older, more physically damaged. Why shouldn’t I believe it’s possible for you to take the same way out? Even the research backs me up.

A group of Israeli researchers recently looked at the suicide rates of elderly patients in a psychiatric hospital and found that Holocaust survivors had attempted suicide far more often than the other people—24 percent compared to 8 percent.

“The rate of the risk of attempted suicide among Holocaust survivors was significantly increased,” the researchers reported. “Aging of survivors is frequently associated with depression, reactivation of traumatic syndromes, physical disorders, loss, and psychological distress, possibly increasing the risk of suicide … The growth of the elderly population, of whom many had had traumatic life experiences, emphasizes the need to implement preventive strategies so that suicidal risk may be contained.”
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Remember when you told me that someday you were going to knock on a neighbor’s door, hand him a card with my phone number on it, then go home and overdose?

“I won’t take the pills today,” you said, “but I’m not going to tell you when.”

Shit.

“What about me?” I asked. “If you did that, think of how I’d feel knowing I couldn’t help you?”

I wanted to tell you that you’d be passing me your despair like you passed me your brown paper bag of memories, but that sounded too dramatic. I wanted to remind you of every time you’d called me your best friend. I wanted to beg you to wait until the doctor found the right combination of drugs. Instead, we just yelled over each other.

I didn’t want to commit you, but isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when someone outlines their plan? I knew inpatient treatment may have helped again, but I couldn’t imprison you against your will. I wasn’t equipped to make such a decision. We both needed a psychiatrist.

“I’m eighty-eight years old! I don’t need no shrink!”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Yes you are.”

“Okay, you want to come get me and bring me, I’ll go,” you said.

What? Again with the sudden capitulation? That game was really starting to annoy me.

I made you promise not to kill yourself before I could schedule the appointment.

“Okay, darling. Good-bye.”

Then I sat on my front steps and cried.

“Tell me again why you think you lived?” I asked.

“Luck,” you said.

This is the fourth theory of your survival.

As the Americans approached, thousands of prisoners in the cluster of Dachau camps waited for rescue. The guards surrounding the camps gripped their guns and waited for orders. The whole Nazi operation had been frantically destroying witnesses. They’d marched the healthier inmates away from Dachau. They’d shot people who stumbled. But they still hadn’t murdered those of you they’d deemed unworthy of a death march—those they assumed would die on their own. But you held out until the great day that the candy-bearing soldiers arrived. Luck?

“If it was another day before the Americans came, they might have killed everybody.”

Luck.

Back when you were well, you’d forced a $4,000 check on me.

“I want you to have it before I die,” you said.

I didn’t want it, but I could tell you felt good being able to give it, so I took the check and put it in the bank. I had no intention of spending it until you actually died. You gave the same amount to Vera’s daughter, plus a bigger check to help her pay for Vera’s round-the-clock care.

The money came from your reparations. Though the payments resulted from the incident that had taken away all your pride and power, they ironically became the only source of your pride and power: the power to be generous; the pride of being able to care for someone less fortunate.

The reparations are ironic for another reason, too. The purpose of the payments is to make people’s lives easier, not to further punish them. It didn’t work that way for you.

Later, your giving spirit would bite both of us in the ass.

I told you I didn’t want that check.

The shrink that was covered by your insurance practiced in a big HMO building. I wanted to take you to an expert in old people or Holocaust survivors, but your doctor wouldn’t approve any referrals out of his system.

We waited in a long, narrow room with several people in their fifties and a kid with his mother. Nobody spoke or looked at each other, not even the two of us. We were all playing Let’s Pretend We’re Strangers and No One Will Notice that We’re in a Shrink’s Office. At 4:30, movement and speech ensued. A teenage girl with swollen red eyes popped out of one room and headed straight for the door as the mother and kid hurried to keep up with her. I felt bad that no one offered her the time or space to get her normal face back. Teenagers hate it when they look as if they’ve been crying. People usually stare. Her mother would look at her with that annoying concerned expression. Her brother would stay a little too quiet in the backseat, waiting for her to burst again. They should really have a face-clearing room for the teenagers after therapy.

A man wearing a tie and giant eyeglasses appeared in a back doorway. Three of the women and one older man stood up and followed him through the door. I was impressed with their mastery of the stranger game, considering they’d spend the next hour sharing secrets and crying to each other in group therapy.

A young black woman opened another door and called your name. We followed her in.

“I’m Doctor H.,” she said.

Oh, boy. This was going to be fun. Young, ethnic, woman—exactly the opposite of the old white doctors you usually trusted.

“Be nice,” I whispered firmly into your collar.

Her office was tiny and generic: standard-issue particleboard desk, two cheap metal chairs, a framed poster of a leafless tree in the snow.
Solitude
, it said on the bottom, but it should have said
Despair
for the feeling it imparted. I’d finally gotten you into a shrink’s office and she couldn’t even choose soothing art.

She asked about your physical symptoms. You handed her a purple gift bag that you’d filled with your pill bottles. She pulled each out and put them into categories: heart, stomach, brain. She tried to talk to you, and even offered a smart assessment. Recent losses, like Vera’s departure, might be waking up old losses, like everyone’s departure. But you didn’t want to talk about that.

At the end of the session, she told you to stop drinking caffeinated tea and to double your anxiety pills. Neither strategy helped at all.

The other doctor was better. David found her, the wife of one of his colleagues. She specialized in geriatrics and happened to be the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She agreed to see you for free.

You were in bad shape that day. You felt carsick from the drive into Boston. You refused lunch, leaned against the hallway wall for support as we entered the building, and insisted on waiting in the lobby while I got some coffee. When I returned, you seemed to be in the throes of a major panic attack, full sweat, budding tears, and all. I calmed you down in her waiting room. The furnishings were plain and old; I couldn’t decide if this was intentional, to remind the patients of doctors’ appointments when they were in their prime, or an indication of the value they placed on old patients: Give ’em the junk furniture; what do we care?

After asking questions about your drugs, the doctor told you to remember the following three words:

Hair.

Glasses.

Sweater.

Then she asked you to draw a clock with all the numbers on it.

“I never learned to draw,” you said in a child’s tone.

Your circles were ovals and your first three clocks were too small for us to read, and warped like Picasso’s, but you finally got it right.

“Perfect!” the doctor said.

By this time, you’d transformed from basket case to Mr. Perky Flirt, smiling and laughing as she read your medical records. She explained that some of your problems might have been the result of tiny strokes that caused brain changes, which she’d seen manifest in health obsessions before. It could get worse, she said, but it could also get better if you took baby aspirin and walks. Senior activities and socializing wouldn’t hurt, either.

“This isn’t the only thing that can help you,” she said, holding up the list of medicines you were on.

You agreed to get out more. You even nodded when she told you to try harder for me.

Then she returned to the memory test.

“Can you repeat the words I told you at the beginning of our session?”

“Hay-er,” you said, and I remembered how charming your Yiddish accent sounds to strangers.

Long pause. You tried to remember.
I
tried to remember.

“The glesses.”

You pointed to yours. Another pause.

“The sveh-ter.”

The doctor turned to me.

“He doesn’t have Alzheimer’s.”

“No,” you said. “I got Youngsheimer’s.”

And didn’t that doctor, just like every other woman you’ve charmed, just crack up?

It was a great appointment: supportive, encouraging, kind. Also, useless. The next morning I called to check up on you.

“Zoo,” you said. “I feel very sick. My right side.”

I keep expecting you to abruptly sit up and ask: “You got my papers?”

You arranged and paid for your funeral and gravestone before Bibi died. You’ve given me multiple copies of the prearrangement contract, canceled checks to the funeral home and the monument company, and the sketches that show the wording you want on your marker. But you are terrified that I’ll either lose them or forget to remind the medical authorities.

“In case anything happens—I don’t want you to throw me on the side of the road,” you said.

It’s such a preposterous idea that it sounded like a joke when you first said it. But that night I woke up in the middle of the night and I remembered that that’s exactly what happened to so many people during the Holocaust—their dead bodies were tossed onto the road, left to decay without anything close to a proper Jewish burial. Then I realized what all of the calls to 911 had really been about.

“I thought I was gonna die,” you’d said.

But the dying wasn’t the worst fear, was it? It was the dying alone. It was the side of the road.

I’ve got your papers. I hope I won’t need them yet, but I’ve got them.

You brought up the nursing home first.

“Remember we go there a few weeks ago?”

“You mean a few years ago?”

“Years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“I felt better after that. Maybe I feel better now.”

You wanted to know if you’d be allowed to bring all of your clothes, “or just a couple pair pants.”

All of them, I told you.

“I’ll come see you every week if you go, you know,” I said. “You’re not gonna lose me.”

“A suit, too?”

“You can bring your suit.”

“The rest I put in your basement.”

“Anything you want.”

“They give you pillows there?”

They give you pillows there?
Were you asking if the nursing home is anything like Auschwitz? If you would have to use your shoes as a pillow, the benefit being that they wouldn’t get stolen by other inmates?

“Of course they give you pillows,” I said. “It’s not like the camps, you know.”

You smiled, as if to convince both of us that of course you knew that.

I dug out the welcoming letter the social worker had written after our first nursing home visit all those years earlier. I’ll just call her up, I thought, tell her what’s happening and ask her to book you a room.

But she didn’t work there anymore, so I was told to fill out an application instead. I sent it back with a cover letter explaining your special circumstances:
poor, single, childless survivor seeks soothing end-of-life care
. They responded by requiring more paperwork and passing me off to an intern who tried to set my expectations straight when she told me there were lots of other poor Holocaust survivors who’d managed to navigate the system without skipping the line, so, no, they wouldn’t be giving you extra help. I found this hard to believe. First of all, how many survivors are left in our area? And of those, how many had no children? And of those, how many worked minimum-wage jobs and lived in subsidized housing? I hardly think “lots” was the accurate word.

But policy is policy and bureaucracy is never-changing. Does it surprise you to hear that the intern gave me the wrong information about the required paperwork, costing us another couple of weeks in frustrating phone calls? Or that the kindness of the first social worker had been expunged from your record? It didn’t matter what had happened then; we had to start over. As you entered and exited the ER a few more times, I arranged another tour. On a Friday in November, we were scheduled to take the first step in the process for a second time.

That morning, you called me to cancel. You’d gone a little crazy with the prune juice, spent most of the night on the toilet, and now were too tired. And hopeless.

“How can they help me?” you asked.

“Just let them try!”

I was losing patience with you. I knew you couldn’t help it, but your lack of gumption was grinding me down. I informed you that we were going and you’d better be in the lobby when I drove up to your building.

The social worker at the nursing home shook my hand as if she didn’t want to touch it. I can’t tell you her name, but I can tell you it was ironic. Think: a killer named Angel. Think an obese man named Slim. That’s the idea. She had the skin of someone in her fifties and wore a mini skirt. She was very kind to you.

Before you could view the home’s finery, she said, the people in the finance office wanted to speak to you. They knew from the forms I’d filled out that you had a few thousand dollars in your bank account, most of it from reparations. I told the finance lady that you’d given away some money, including my $4,000 inheritance, which I would gladly return, plus an unknown amount for Vera’s care. She hinted that those gifts might cause a problem with getting Medicaid to pay for your nursing home care, but she wouldn’t know how much of a problem until I brought in five years of your bank statements and got rid of some of your savings. Open a burial account, she said. Pad his prepaid funeral package with extras. Medicaid couldn’t hold that against you.