You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (22 page)

The social worker rolled in a wheelchair for your touring pleasure. She showed us all the places we’d seen before. But while we were
waiting for an elevator, you saw what you really needed in the next chair: Vera.

Big smiles bloomed on your scared, depressed faces. Later, we went to her room on the all-Russian floor. She couldn’t speak to or understand you. It had been a long time since you’d shared a meal, a house key, a bed. Now you sat in separate wheelchairs a yard away from each other. But you bridged all those gaps by reaching your hand toward hers. She reached back and you both leaned forward enough to squeeze each other’s fingers. Before we left, you stroked her soft white hair with your big hand.

That was the first good moment of the day. The second came when the social worker informed us that if you needed a short-term interim bed, they could take you immediately. Either way, you would go on the waiting list for a permanent bed if you wanted.

“Would you like to come here?” she asked, leaning down to your level.

“Yeah,” you said.

The third good moment happened in the nursing home cafeteria. You ate: two pieces of challah, some lettuce and hard-boiled eggs, a bowl of matzo-ball soup, and a glass of milk. And didn’t I kvell, just like all Jewish mothers do.

I wanted to tell the Lady at the Party about our success. Remember her? She was the one who seemed to have my back, to believe, as I did, that you deserved special treatment. She’d called any hassles directed your way a
shanda—
a shame. I’d reached out to her when I was struggling to find agencies to help you stay in your apartment. She didn’t actually help, but she was supportive. Her e-mails contained lines like these: “I am sorry to hear the situation is so bad … Aron is lucky he has you. So is our community.”

I hadn’t really needed more than that until the nursing home paperwork hassles began. When I’d let her know how disappointed I’d been in the response to my letter, she’d put in a call to some Head Honchos. Who knows what these people of power say to each other, but I assumed she asked them, Mob style, to “take care of me.”

They responded with stories that made me look crazy. They had no knowledge of any letter requesting special consideration. As far as they knew, I’d appeared out of nowhere with you and started making demands. In any case, she reported, they’d offered the interim bed, so everything should be settled.

I figured the social worker was behind my newly earned bad reputation. Making me look bad would distract her superiors from noticing that she’d ignored my “help a survivor” plea. When the Honchos entered the picture, she scolded me for involving them. I ended up apologizing to her. Anything to get you back to the place where so many good things had just happened.

On Monday, they took all those lovely moments, scrunched them into a ball like a bad draft of a poem, and threw them into the trash. There would be no bed for you, emergency or otherwise, until you could pay.

Living through the Holocaust, you once told me, was like the pain of having a baby.

“This you don’t forget,” you said.

Ah, but you were wrong. Women
do
forget the pain of childbirth because it ends in joy. Your pain didn’t end. It has affected every minute of your life.

“You can’t stop thinking about it,” you said. “When you’re just plain nobody and an evil person comes and takes everything away from you.”

You looked at me and went on.

“Your dignity.”

It was all a matter of math. It cost $256 a day for the nursing home to house and feed you. You’d never had that kind of money, so you needed to apply for Medicaid. The thing with Medicaid is, they hate
it when people give away money. It makes them suspect that the gift was a strategy to make the giver appear poor and therefore qualify for government aid. The biggest worry is that old people will transfer their money and homes to their kids as soon as they realize they need nursing home care. To prevent such fraud, Medicaid examines all large gifts the applicant has made during the previous five years. Whatever they find can count against qualification. It’s called a denial period: the number of days it takes to make up what you gave away.

You, of course, had given away almost all of your money, which the nursing home people knew would keep Medicaid from covering you for thirty-nine days. When I explained that the money had been payback for your Holocaust years and couldn’t be counted, they corrected me. It couldn’t be counted
if
you’d kept it in a separate account instead of depositing it in the same account as your social security checks. But you didn’t know that. Even your brother, with his life of conventional success and his accomplished progeny, didn’t know that. He’d never kept a separate account, either.

There were options, of course. Apply to Medicaid, then appeal the denial-period decision. Oh, sure, that’d be simple. My unborn grandchildren would probably be dead by the time the issue was resolved, never mind you.

Or, the nursing home people said, you could dig up nearly $10,000 to pay for the thirty-nine days on your own.

“This is the rule,” the social worker told me. “This is the way it works. We don’t give free care.”

That can’t be true
, I thought. What about the
shanda?
What about all those Jewish advocacy groups?

I asked if the nursing home had a scholarship to cover your denial period. They didn’t answer, though one of the Honchos led me to believe it was possible when he wrote: “Our ultimate goal is to help Mr. Lieb, but [we] cannot be expected to be the only party providing the resources to enable his admission to be covered from day one.”

The
only
party. That means they’d be
one
of the parties, right?

I asked friends and acquaintances who volunteered for the largest Jewish fund-raising organization if they could connect me with whomever helped Holocaust survivors, but they only pointed me back to the people who had already proved to be useless. I asked Hakalah, the program funded with reparations money, if they could give you a loan. They didn’t answer, either, but agreed to negotiate with the nursing home. The social worker told them to stay out of it.

I offered to start raising money, but I couldn’t do that until I knew exactly how much you needed. It had taken them a month to figure out your denial period and its cost (something anyone could have calculated after looking at your bank statements for ten minutes), but that still didn’t give me a bottom-line figure because no one would tell me what the nursing home would contribute. They just kept telling me to find the money.

The Lady at the Party, who could have probably paid your way with her parking-meter change, must have gotten nervous. She bowed out and told me to deal with the nursing home director instead.

“This is taking place in his institution, and he needs to sort it out,” she wrote. “I will stay out of it from here. I hope this sorts itself out.”

Sorts
itself
out? What about her? Didn’t she lead me to believe she had my back? Hadn’t she set me up to expect the Survivors’ Special for you? Who should be feeling
shanda
now?

Maybe it got too dirty for her to intervene; people only have so much political capital. Or maybe she believed them when they tried to make me the villain—because now the Honchos were pissed. One accused me of hoarding your money for myself. Another told me to “lower the volume,” and called me “judgmental and self-righteous,” as if it were an insult.

And you just kept getting worse. The same day they revoked the offer of an emergency bed, you didn’t answer my morning phone calls. Two of them. I drove the kids to school, went to the bank to request five years of your statements, then knocked on your door.

“Come in,” you croaked.

I had a moment of relief—maybe you’d just been in the shower—until I saw you sitting in your pajamas, your fly open, the
shmatte
on your
head. Your voice was ragged as you described your night. You were cold at four in the morning, even after pulling on a second blanket, so you called 911. Our town’s ambulance refused to come, so you, ever resourceful, called the fire department in the next town over. They brought you to the ER where they discovered you had low potassium and gave you a prescription for supplements. You cried until I left to fill it.

Two days after that, you called 911 for the last time.

While all this was happening, everyone was busy. The Honchos were in the middle of working out deals to secure $457 million in loans so they could build a new senior living community. They were writing thank-you notes to private donors to the project, including a couple that tossed in $20 million.

The social service agency charged with helping local Holocaust survivors was making sure it spent its budget—which is funded by Nazi paybacks—fairly.

The Lady at the Party was managing a $40 million family foundation.

Business as usual.

Elie Wiesel was probably in town around this time. He teaches at Boston University, so I assume he’s close by at least once a week. I never contacted him for help, though I probably could have.

When Carrie was a few days old, I had my second crazy Holocaust experience. Unlike at Dachau, it wasn’t a vision. Just a powerful feeling of connection. As I held her and fell deeply in love, I thought about all the young Jewish mothers who had done and felt exactly the same. They’d been where I was, but they’d had their gifts taken away: the love, the pride, the actual babies in some cases. I felt so grateful to be me in my time instead of them in theirs.

I decided—now here’s the crazy part—that I wanted to tell someone who’d been there that I wasn’t taking my life for granted; that I knew how blessed I was. I couldn’t write to those dead mothers, but I could send something to Elie Wiesel.

Carrie had gigantic cheeks, and we had a photo of her at about six months old, smiling the cheekiest smile you can imagine. In that photo, she is the opposite of a hungry, frightened baby living under Nazi rule. She is proof that they failed; that happy, healthy Jewish babies were still abundant in the world.

I mailed the photo to Mr. Wiesel with a note expressing my goofy, embarrassing feelings. He wrote back and thanked me for sending “the smile of your child,” and wishing us the best.

I didn’t ask him for help with you and our predicament precisely because he had been so kind back then. I couldn’t have borne it if he’d disappointed me, too.

I had just finished another frustrating meeting with the finance officials, followed by a brief weep in the ladies’ room, when the nursing home synagogue caught my eye.

Okay, God
, I thought,
it’s your turn
.

The synagogue door was closed, but that didn’t mean the room was empty. Sometimes the otherworldly hide in the most obvious places.

I pulled open the door, hoping to find God lounging about so I could ask her to fix everything.

An old man wrapped in a
tallit
sat in one of the seats near the front. He was either sleeping or praying, but he was certainly alone. Not a whiff of God.

I considered sitting far away from him and waiting. Maybe God would show up and plant a solution in my head. Maybe God would explain why I had anything to do with this mess. Maybe something would burst into flames.

Maybe I’m an idiot
, I thought.

I was starting to doubt that there was any bigger meaning, other than the obvious: People can be assholes. You hadn’t been put in my path to teach me something; there was no lesson here. No heartwarming ending that would put all your suffering in perspective. It doesn’t always work that way. There hadn’t been a meaningful ending for your little sisters, had there?

The synagogue looked so peaceful and it had been such a bad day already. But I wasn’t sure about the rules. Maybe I wasn’t allowed in there. The people who ran the place already thought I was a threat. With my luck, they’d accuse me of trespassing, kick me out, and ban me from the building forever. Then how could I help you?

I shut the door and walked away. The man hadn’t stirred the whole time I’d been peering in.

The first time I asked your opinion on why we met, you said it was because I was “there.”

I wasn’t letting you get away with that.

“Why did you talk to Max and me that day?”

“I liked your eyes.”

“What about them?”

I was fishing for something about allure and beauty. Instead, you opened your eyes as wide as you could and darted your eyeballs back and forth to demonstrate.

“My eyes were beady? That’s what you liked?”

“Not
beady
. They were …”

You couldn’t find the right word. The Yiddish description must not translate accurately.

“You looked like trouble.”

I think the folks who were managing your case would have agreed with you.

The kindest people in this part of the story were not Jewish. I hope that’s just a coincidence.

After dozens of medical professionals processed you through the same emergency rooms with the same complaint leading to the same frustrating outcome, one finally looked at you from a different angle.

“We’re admitting him for ‘failure to thrive,’” the nurse named Maryann told me.

Failure to thrive. Just like when you were a newborn and your mother presented you to the rabbi.

That nurse saw that you weren’t eating or drinking. She knew that you couldn’t take care of yourself anymore and were in danger of dying from something other than chest pains. She knew you couldn’t go home again. And she convinced the doctors.