You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (29 page)

Who saved whom?

I gave you a good death, but you gave me a good life.

You gave me value. You got me through the suburban years, the years when I had nothing to do but dissolve while my kids crystallized.

You were part of my life for fourteen years and five months—almost the whole span of my parenting. I went from nearly new mother to nearly finished (full-time) mother with you. When we met I’d been at it for fewer than four years, and now I have fewer than four years of active duty left. You provided a distraction, an intense counterweight to the tedium of motherhood. You gave me drama and a battle to fight and perspective. When things got tough, I remembered that my complaints had nothing on your life. Or your mother’s. You may have even boosted my reputation around the house. Helping you, my kids told me, made them proud. I was doing something that mattered.

You gave me situations where I could shine and crises that made me feel important. You allowed me to be admired by strangers; you dug the kindness and patience from under my prickly surface; and you never made me doubt whether I was a good-enough friend. You picked me to take the ride with you.

You may have kept my marriage strong. When David and I were too busy building careers and human beings to notice each other, when I craved emotional intimacy, you were there. I never had the need to seek out a stranger. David wasn’t threatened by the time and energy I devoted to you, though he admitted he may have been if you’d actually been thirty years younger.

I told a friend about you after you died. We’d been having lunch monthly for a couple of years, but I’d never talked about you. I don’t tell many people about you partly because I don’t even know what to call you—
my friend, my Holocaust survivor, this guy I take care of
—and partly because it usually results in discomfort: mine if they call me a do-gooder, and theirs if the subject of the Holocaust scares them.

But I needed to talk, and this friend is a good listener. She called our story extraordinary.

“I like to think everyone would do the same thing if someone similar came into their life,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said. “But most people don’t have that opportunity. That’s the extraordinary part.”

The question now, as I move into the world without you, is this: What will I do with that value you bestowed on me? Does it stay in that bed in that institution, locked in like a memory, like all the good dead? Or do I fly away with it, fly like you never could, free as a bird, gone with the wind?

I didn’t cry for two months.

Instead, I did useless things to swerve around the grief. I started swimming regularly for the first time since I’d met you, which I suppose was an unconscious attempt to connect with you again. I daydreamed about your bookend—the first boy who’d made me feel special, a kid from Colorado who grew up to spend time as a prisoner and a mental patient, just like you. I guess your type goes for the staid suburban girls.

Then the film of shock peeled away and I could feel again. I didn’t like that. I’d had no idea how much space you’d created. I imagined vacuums drawing you out like a body part—an appendix, a tooth, a fetus—until my insides were painfully clean and empty. Raw. Cored.

After that, tears.

You were the first one in your family to have a proper funeral. I’m proud to tell you that I didn’t fuck it up.

I was so nerved-up, as you’d put it, so worried that I’d get something wrong. You’d picked out the coffin and the grave, but it was up to me to stage-manage. I took half an Ativan in your honor.

The cemetery is hard to find. It’s close to main roads and highways, but also up a street in the middle of nowhere. The perfect place for a murder.

Two funeral home guys in black overcoats were waiting for us by the hearse. My father and stepmother arrived. Vera’s daughter Anne and her husband. A lady from the gift shop whom I didn’t recognize, but who told me you two had planned to run off together if only you’d been a little younger. You used that line on everyone, huh?

Your roommate’s son and daughter-in-law showed up. A lady from the Jewish agency who claimed she’d visited you with a volunteer “semi-regularly” joined us. The male volunteer you’d rejected came, too. He has an appreciative woman client now, but he still respected and remembered you.

Gloria got lost, but I wouldn’t let them start without her. It was sunny out, though still too cold for any of the snow to melt. Some crows were cawing wildly. Did I ever tell you that I believe birds are dead people come back to check on us? I came up with that one after my mother died and birds started to appear everywhere. Now I notice them whenever someone dies. Maybe these feisty crows were your family, or your school friends from Zychlin. I don’t think you were among them. The night before, while we were lying in bed, David said, “If you listen carefully, you can hear an owl.” That owl—you?—hoo-hooed for most of my sleepless night.

Gloria finally showed up with her extremely handsome husband. She looked like a movie star in her big sunglasses, wide-brimmed black hat, and completely coordinated black-and-gold outfit. We made our way to the hole they’d dug for you. Anne, Gloria, and I sat in the chairs they’d set up at its perimeter, and the funeral home guy covered us with wool blankets as if we were going for a carriage ride. Honestly, it was almost that nice.

The rabbi read some Hebrew, which I have to admit I find comforting—as long as I’m not expected to participate. She asked if anyone had stories to tell about you. Anne remembered dancing with you at a wedding. Your roommate’s daughter-in-law told everyone that the
night before you died she overheard you talking to one of the nurses. She was talking about all the things she’d given up so she could lose weight, all the things she couldn’t enjoy anymore.

“What about sex?” you’d asked.

The rabbi liked that. She called it life-affirming. She pointed out that despite your losses, you had used your outgoing nature to build yourself an extended family. There weren’t many of us at your funeral, but we’d all come out of desire, not obligation. Not one of us was a blood relative of yours.

We read the Mourner’s Kaddish, the traditional prayer for the dead, which says nothing about death. Instead, it declares God’s greatness and asks for peace. As in all things Jewish, a bouquet’s worth of theories explain why it’s recited at funerals.

Then we stood by the pile of dirt as the rabbi explained the custom behind using the back of the shovel to scoop it.

“It shows our reluctance to fill the hole,” she said. “Imagine how long it would take to fill this hole if you did it all that way?”

I showed my reluctance by spastically missing the hole and scattering dirt on the artificial turf surrounding it.

After everyone tossed a shovelful onto your coffin, I brushed off your flat, metal grave marker, complete except for the date they would add later. I placed a rock on it. Another Jewish tradition, to show that someone has visited the grave and that the deceased hasn’t been forgotten. The kids added stones, too, and Max took one from the dirt pile and put it in his pocket.

It was Max’s idea to finish the ritual with lunch at your favorite IHOP. On the way, I asked him what he’d learned from all the years of knowing you.

“It’s important to flirt and be nice to people,” your little Maxeleh said.

It was a great funeral, Aron. You would have been so pleased. No side of the road, no piles of bones. Not even tears, at least from me. I was psyched: You got the death you deserved—quick, dignified, maybe painless—and I got to keep my promise.

There were only a couple of wrinkles to the day. The funeral directors and the grave diggers had trouble wheeling the gurney holding your coffin from the hearse up the snowy hill leading to the gravesite. It kept skidding and getting stuck in ruts. None of them could figure out what to do, as if it was their first funeral. Eventually, they decided to go old-school and carry the box by hand.

When they got you to the top, they prepared to lower you into the cement-lined hole. There were planks for the men to stand on as they centered you over the hole, but one of the pieces of wood must have been loose, because a young grave digger lost his balance. He let go of his corner of the coffin, forcing the other three to shift so you wouldn’t get too jostled. He was suspended over the hole for a few moments while everyone stopped moving and breathing, all of us wondering what we’d do if he actually tumbled six feet under.

The other men had to put you down to make sure he was okay, then lift and center you properly. They must have been rattled, because they struggled with that, too.

Once I saw that the grave digger hadn’t been hurt, I got pissed. Clumsiness was threatening the dignity of your burial. Their mishaps messed with your remains. Didn’t they know what your body had been through? Must you be knocked around even in death?

Then I realized that you might have appreciated the spectacle. Maybe you’d enjoy knowing that you were too much for them to handle—that it wasn’t so easy to get you into the ground. Hitler failed. These guys couldn’t bury you.

And neither can I.

The End

David, Carrie, and Max: I love you more than any human beings on Earth.

Dad, Isabel, Andy, Linda, Sam, Meri, Rita, Erik, Sydney, and John: You’re a very close second. Thank you for helping Aron, and for supporting me always.

Alice Martell, who manages to be a fantastic agent and a human being at the same time: I am so lucky to have found you. I’m never letting you go.

Lara Asher, who has edited two of my three books: I am so grateful that Aron brought us back together for this one. To have a smart, dedicated editor who I can talk to and who listens to me is every writer’s dream.

Jeanette Eberhardy, Emilie Haertsch, and Debbie Hagan, my wonderful Goucher writing group: We may be young, but I predict a long, fruitful life. Thank you for all of the spot-on suggestions.

The Berman family: Thank you for taking Aron into your hearts and keeping him there. I couldn’t have handled him without you on both of our sides.

And to all the other good guys: the congregation of Temple Sinai, Sharon, and other generous souls; Rabbi Joseph Meszler; Lance Ackerfeld and JewishGen; Robert Housman; the German Consulate in Boston; Dr. Suzanne Salaman; Dr. Eric Sawitz; Lauren Keefe, NP; Mrs. Cynthia Joseph; Mary Dutton Pluhar; Harold Klingsberg; Barry and Michelle; Paul, Debbie, Michael, Heidi, Andrew, Karen, Noreen, Gene, and everyone else who gave Aron stellar care during his nursing home days.

God: We’ll talk.

Susan Kushner Resnick teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University. Her most recent narrative nonfiction book,
Goodbye Wifes and Daughters
(University of Nebraska Press, cloth 2010, paper 2011), earned her the Best Woman Writer 2011 prize from the High Plains Book Awards. The book also won a gold medal for nonfiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and was a finalist for the Montana Book Award and the Western Writers of America Contemporary Nonfiction Award. Her first book,
Sleepless Days: One Woman’s Journey Through Postpartum Depression
(St. Martin’s Press, cloth 2000, paper 2001), was the first PPD memoir written by an American author. She’s been a journalist for twenty-seven years, reporting most recently for the
Providence Journal
. She’s been published in the
New York Times
magazine, the
Boston Globe, Parents, Utne Reader
, and
Montana Quarterly
, among other publications. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2001, and her work was listed as a notable essay in
The Best American Essays 1999
. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two teenagers.

To see photos of Aron Lieb throughout his life, please go to
www.susankushnerresnick.com
.