You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (4 page)

“You could always see through me,” the man says.

“And I’ve always liked what I’ve seen,” the woman replies.

We wouldn’t be lying if we recited those lines to each other.

My favorite book also follows characters who have found their one special person in the world. I know as a writer I’m supposed to claim that my favorite childhood book was
Little Women
or
Treasure Island
, but no. It was
The Summer of My German Soldier
, a young adult novel by Bette Greene that tells the story of a physically abused Jewish preteen who finds strength through the platonic love of a German POW she hides in her tree house. He is the first person to acknowledge her worth.

“Even if you forget everything else I want you to always remember that you are a person of value, and you have a friend who loved you enough to give you his most valued possession,” he says after handing her his great-grandfather’s ring.

I love these lowbrow pieces of art because I’ve always craved such a connection. Doesn’t everyone want to find the person who heals her loneliness?

My husband understands me more every day of our twenty-one-year marriage. My teenage children seem delighted when I crack my binding and read them new pages of myself. But we all, consciously or not, hide bits of ourselves from our loved ones. Such opacity is not possible with the ones who can see through us.

I tied the paper bib around your neck, embarrassed for us both. You were waiting for dinner. I was waiting for you to return from a trip inside your head. You’ve been disappearing a lot lately.

“This is like a lobster bib!” I said, trying to lure you back with silliness.

“Lobster, slobster,” you said, taking the bait.

“Did you like lobster?”

“No,” you said. “I never had it.”

“If you never had it, how do you know you didn’t like it?”

“She’d have it.”

This is a clue. This is a bonus round on
Jeopardy
.

She’d? She’d?
Alex Trebek is waiting for an answer.
Who is your late wife?

“Your wife ate lobster?” I guess.

“She’d eat an old dog,” you said.

Welcome back.

I’m so proud you made it to ninety-one last month. I was just shooting for ninety, but I guess you’re more ambitious than you pretend to be. But even though you’re super old and have made it clear that you’re ready to die doesn’t mean this is the end. You might be awake and bitching when I get there. This might just be a blip, like all the false alarms Vera has pulled: in and out of the hospital, but always stronger after the crises.

Still. You’ve been asking yourself for a long time what you’re doing here. It’s the eternal question in a survivor’s line of work: Why did I survive? I once knew a rabbi who claimed that most survivors were bad souls who did something immoral—or at least nastily aggressive—that allowed them to prevail while millions around them died. I was already friends with you when he made that comment, and it pissed me off. It wasn’t the only time I’d heard such a statement. Your own social worker once said to me, “He’s very self-centered. That’s how he survived.” But they’re wrong. You, despite your difficult personality, are not bad.

You’ve floated a couple of theories on what enabled your survival. The first is that you were used to starving. The more-comfortable Jews weren’t equipped to go from roasted chickens and honey cakes to starvation. For you, slave rations were close to normal.

On Mondays and Thursdays, your mother shopped at the street market. The farmers’ wives set up carts of eggs, butter, cheese, chickens, ducks, geese, potatoes, and onions. Merchants stood by big bowls of herring, figs, oranges, and lemons—almost all of it too expensive for Zelda. Though your father was a cattle broker, she could rarely
afford standard cuts of beef. Instead, she’d buy meat from the cow’s head or a live carp that she’d transform into gefilte fish or naked bones to simmer into soup. Shabbat dinner, always the most lavish meal of the week, consisted of a bowl of chicken soup with mashed potatoes on the side—just boiled and mashed, you told me, none of the butter or cream like I add—plus horseradish and challah. Sometimes your mother made the dough on Thursday, put it under a quilt to rise, braided it Friday morning, and carried it to the town bakery to bake. Other times, at least according to your memory, she bought the family’s bread at the bakery or accepted a free loaf from the government. But it was never enough.

“Come a holiday, you need four bread on a table,” you told me. “You only have two. What is a couple of slices of bread? Nothing. So a fella like me, I was hungry. Everyone was. Not only in my family. Over there, when you were poor, you were really poor. Here, now, poor is when you haven’t got enough money. Food—everybody got what to eat. You never had a day with nothing to eat, have you?”

Hardly. I don’t know what it’s like to be poor. I grew up smack in the middle of the middle class, with a father who worked for an insurance company and a mother who took part-time social work jobs when I was old enough to heat my own dinner. We ate steak on Fridays, took vacations to Disney World, and kept the heat on high in our three-bedroom ranch house. If you had known me then, you would have thought I was a millionaire. Maybe you would have resented me as you did the privileged Jews in your community—the handful of people who owned most of the town’s homes and businesses (they weren’t allowed to buy land), but who wouldn’t give you “the time of day,” you told me once.

You ate bread with a little butter and tea for breakfast. Tea was big. A special dessert was a glass of tea and a piece of sugar. In the market, your father sometimes bought a big pretzel to eat with his tea. Was that his lunch?

“What lunch? What the hell is lunch?”

You can’t remember what you did while the other kids in school ate in the middle of the day, but your brother Bill can’t forget. He told
me he hid so the other kids wouldn’t see that he had nothing to eat. He was afraid to be teased. I doubt you cared as much what others thought.

But why go home for lunch? It wasn’t the most pleasant place to hang out. You lived in a one-room flat equipped with a small stove that burned coal and wood for heat. Sometimes.

“When I was already maybe eight years old, I didn’t want to go first to bed. You know why? It was cold. I go to bed and my brother comes and puts his cold feet on me. Then I thought I was gonna die! That’s the kind of life it was.”

You knew one girl whose family could afford electricity. You remember light coming from an oil lamp. A few businessmen had telephones and the doctor drove a car. The rest of you walked or rode in horse-drawn wagons. Fresh water came from a pump in the center of town. It took three minutes to get there from your house, but it must have felt much longer with a full bucket stretching your arms.

Your refrigerator was a hole in the floor. Your bed consisted of a wooden frame covered by a sheet, which was filled with fresh straw your parents bought from farmers and covered with another sheet. More sandwich than mattress. The family owned two feather pillows: eight heads, two pillows. There was one down quilt for the boys and one for the girls, which was fine because there were only two beds. You shared with your father and brothers. Your mother and sisters took the other one.

“When I think back, I don’t know how they made the children.”

Then there was the bathroom, which didn’t actually exist. Few people in your town had indoor plumbing, though the wealthy did have keys to private outhouses. You shared yours with the residents of twelve apartments. It was a one-holed brick shack. Some people used the paper that oranges came wrapped in to wipe their bums, but your family couldn’t afford oranges, so I don’t know what you used.

You remembered that when you were little, you’d crouch over the hole so you didn’t have to touch the edges. It must have been scary to go out there at night. Usually, you could use the pail in the house after
dark, or hold it until morning before waking with the taste of smoke in your throat and racing to the outhouse. But nothing made the elimination situation worse than winter.

“God forbid you had a stomachache and it was very cold and snowy and you had to go outside,” you said, laughing.

And to illustrate just how bad the bathroom situation was, how poor you were, and why you may have had a slightly easier time of it as a prisoner than people who’d once lived comfortably, you told me this: The bathrooms at the concentration camp were nicer than the ones at home.

You liked to pretend that the Holocaust was no big deal. That you were over it. That it was just one of the many disappointments we all suffer.

“Say you have a boyfriend what uses you up a little, then lets you go,” you said one day when we were alone. “Don’t you feel sad?”

“Well, yeah,” I admitted.

“You see. That’s what I’m talking about.”

Oh, right. Romantic disappointment is exactly the same as losing everything and being tortured while it happens.

But you couldn’t always fool yourself. Not long after we met, we were on my deck, at my old house, on a Sunday morning. You and your girlfriend Vera had come for brunch. Carrie was running around with two giant zucchinis from our backyard garden. Max was crawling in and out of the slider doorway, his hair curled into soft wings that would be gone with his first haircut. You’d dressed up for us again.

“These pants cost a million dollars,” you told us. “I couldn’t believe it. How much should pants cost?”

“Probably less than a million,” David said.

I acted housewifely, slicing the quiche I’d cooked and filling coffee cups. This must have pleased you. You used to lecture me on keeping a man.

“Listen good,” you said during a coffee date. “A man likes to have a hot meal when he comes home!”

Not that you often did. You worked nights slicing meat. Your wife was asleep when you got home, so you’d cook something bland and dry for yourself.

After I’d cleared the table, we sat under a striped umbrella while the kids played in the sun. It was idyllic.

“I’m reading a book about the children of the Holocaust,” I said. “Kids of people who were there. Like your nephews. It says they have a lot of problems.”

“Nah,” you said, waving your hand at me, a dismissive gesture I’d become familiar with. It meant
Shut up—you’re wrong
.

“Their parents wanted them to be happy all the time,” I continued. “They never let them be normal kids.”

“No, I don’t think so,” you said.

“And they saw their parents sad all the time.”

“What sad? I tell you something. When people come to a new country, they don’t know the language, things are really hard. But pretty soon, they know the language and everything else is okay.”

Ah—so coming to America in 1949 was hard. But nothing before that?

Vera winked at me after you spoke and shook her head.

“That’s not what she means,” she told you.

You continued to protest.

“When someone dies, you’re sad. But then you go on and forget about it.”

Nice powers of denial, sir.

Vera touched your arm. “You have nightmares every night of your life,” she said.

Your face turned pink and you waved her off, too, as if you were angry that she had revealed your secret. Red bloomed on the rims of your eyelids and you reached a finger under your glasses to rub your eyes. You looked down at the million-dollar pants.

“Now I cry,” you said, trying to laugh.

“Don’t cry,” Vera said, her voice more gentle now.

“I don’t know why I start to cry then,” you said, still wiping your eyes. “Why did that make me cry? I’m like my father. He’d look at something and start to cry.”

“You’re a sensitive guy,” I said, and I patted your leg. But I wish I’d hugged you. Neither of us are big huggers, but I should have given you one that morning.

“My parents.

And the girls.

They burned.”

You were perched on the edge of your bed, still waking up from a nap, half in a different world. But you were talking to me, giving me this verse of horror. I reached out with a foolish question—“What girls?”—hoping you’d take my hand and pull me to that other side. I so wanted to see what was there, where you were, what it would feel like to stand in Zychlin or Auschwitz with you. But the question jerked you forward instead. You’d been looking at the floor, then you raised your eyes to me.

“Is it raining out?”

A Canadian study found that Holocaust survivors showed “marked disruptions of sleep and dreaming, intrusive memories, impairment of trust, avoidance of stressors, and heightened vulnerability to various types of age-associated retraumatization.”

An Australian study found that decades after the Holocaust, survivors suffered from depression, anxiety, and physical complaints.

An American study found that “for some Holocaust survivors, impaired sleep and frequent nightmares are considerable problems even forty-five years after liberation.”

And to sum it all up, an Israeli study found that male Holocaust survivors experienced more post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than control subjects.

To which I say: Duh.

Of course you suffer from PTSD. How could you not? You didn’t see a shrink in the displaced persons (DP) camps to flush out all those visions and losses when they were still fresh. You didn’t see a shrink in America as those wounds scarred over and your anxiety, nightmares, and headaches got worse. You didn’t even know you were suffering from a diagnosable problem back then, and neither did your doctors. PTSD wasn’t a term until 1980, when, in response to Vietnam veterans’ symptoms, the experts on psychiatry and suffering realized the phenomenon needed a name. Then they realized that it applied to people like you, too. They did all kinds of repetitive studies on Holocaust survivors: asking questions, swabbing saliva, drawing blood, tallying up the amount of anxiety-related chemicals your kind secreted. They looked at men, women, and children. They compared people who had been in concentration camps with people who had been in hiding. They looked at survivors with cancer and survivors with good jobs. But the bottom line of all the research was essentially the same: Holocaust survivors are prone to PTSD.