You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (7 page)

We sat on a cedar bench in the fall of 2008. The news I brought from the outside world involved Halloween, which naturally reminded you of Purim.

“I used to go trick-or-treat,” you said.

“You did?” This I couldn’t picture. “You dressed up?”

“It was the Jewish trick-or-treat. The one near Passover.”

“Purim?”

“Yeah! Purim!”

Purim, like Halloween, is a vibrant celebration with a dark core. It’s also a great day in Jewish history because it commemorates one of the few times the Jews actually kicked ass. The short version is this: Way back in the 400s BCE, in Persia, Esther was a beautiful Jewish queen, though no one knew she was Jewish except Mordecai, her uncle. Or was he her cousin? Reports vary. (Does our religion have a definitive answer for anything?)

Anyway, Mordecai didn’t hide his Jewishness. He flaunted it by refusing to bow down to Haman, the king’s Jew-hating prime minister (or nobleman—again, it depends on who’s telling the story). This really pissed off Haman. He tattled to the king.

“Can I kill all the Jews?” Haman asked.

“Sure,” the king said.

But before they could get the cattle cars running, Mordecai convinced Esther to come out as a Jew and talk to the king.

“Will you
not
kill all the Jews?” she asked.

“Sure,” the king said.

Okay, it was a little more complicated than that. The king was in a Jew-liking mood because he’d just found out that Mordecai had allegedly saved his life earlier by snitching on some would-be assassins. Haman was in the doghouse for wanting to hang Mordecai after the refusal-to-bow incident. In the end, Haman hanged and the Jews received permission to defend themselves against the anti-Semites Haman had riled up, which resulted in a lot of dead Persians.

Jewish children in your day still celebrated this victory over evil. And those memories made you laugh harder than I have ever seen you laugh.

Back in Zychlin, you and your posse went door to door, singing Yiddish songs for cash on Purim. Since observant Jewish adults are encouraged to drink heartily to celebrate Purim, I assume you kids were unsupervised.

“We went to the rabbi’s house first. He’d give me a nickel. You could make two dollars on a good Purim.”

This memory grabbed the hand of another and pulled it to the surface. Suddenly, you were grinning, and just as suddenly, giggling.

“One day Mendel and I were in back of a house and he knocks on the door and …”

Your words got buried under your laughter. You couldn’t get the story out because you were back there in somebody’s yard, cracking up with your best friend. It took three tries for you to tell me that Mendel had banged his fist on this door and then both of you and some other kids ran away—a classic ding-and-ditch—before the owner opened the door and started to yell. I guess you came back to the door because the man asked who had knocked, and Mendel pointed to one of the other kids, so he got in trouble instead, and it was so funny, so, so funny, that eighty years later your eyes were twinkling and your mouth was turned all the way up like a face in a child’s drawing, and you practically peed your pants from convulsing so hard.

Did that happen on Purim, too? It doesn’t matter. Purim released the memory, let you step back into the light of your childhood.

You weren’t around for your town’s last Purim, though you may have spent that day longing to be home, laughing again with Mendel. You wouldn’t have known how lucky you were to be excluded from the town-wide activities. Because on Purim of 1942, Haman returned.

My favorite love story is yours. You’d just turned seventy-four, but it was the first time you were ever set up on a date. Your late wife’s cousin, Lakey, arranged it after you told her you wanted to meet one of the many Russian women in her building. Your wife had been dead for a year, and you wanted company. But why a Russian woman? You’d always regretted not marrying that Old Country girl you’d met in the displaced persons camp. Was this your way of rectifying that mistake?

Lakey thought of a few candidates. She visited two to make your case. Their friend Vera happened to be visiting, too. The other ladies weren’t interested in you.

“I’ll meet him,” Vera said.

She was seventy-one and had recently arrived in America after years of Soviet oppression. She wanted to meet Americans and learn to speak English well. As a former professor of German, she knew the only way to master a foreign language was to speak it. At the very least, she’d get some practice on your date.

You dressed carefully. I can imagine the outfit: button-down shirt, wool sweater vest, neatly pressed trousers, and shined shoes. Maybe even a tie. The green hat from your brother-in-law, The Millionaire.

You would have driven the Buick Skylark from your old people’s apartment building to hers. Yours was a little nicer, with its indoor gardens and chandeliered dining room. Hers smells of mothballs and stuffed cabbage. It was a long walk down several hallways to her apartment. Finally, you stood outside the door. Number 141.

You loved that. Your first blind date, and the woman’s apartment number is the same as the one on your skin. For fifty years, every time you’d taken off your shirt at night or reached out to adjust your side-view mirror on a summer day, you saw those numbers, plus three more: 141324, the brand the Nazis gave you when they thought you were theirs.

Was it a sign? I like to think so.

“The first times I look at him and thought he won’t come to me next time,” Vera said. “He is younger than me, and so handsome.”

But she was wrong about two of those things. After talking for about an hour, you asked her to go to dinner with you the following week. By the third date, you rarely went a day without seeing her. The first kiss came about a month after you knocked on her door. Shortly after that, you stopped sleeping at your apartment.

You settled into a sweet routine. To McDonald’s for coffee almost every day. To the pancake house every two weeks. Dinners at a famous old-school steakhouse where you ordered fish and she ordered chicken. You shopped at all the local discount stores, where you liked to buy her things: a necklace for no reason at all, a VCR, a bigger mattress. She, in return, gave you a new family. Her children and their children welcomed you into their lives.

The relationship wasn’t perfect, of course. You got cranky and yelled at her sometimes, which her esteemed husband had never done, but you always apologized and she always forgave you. It wasn’t like the vicious fights you’d had with your wife.

“With Vera, I appreciate, she appreciates,” you told me.

“He takes care of me,” she said.

And she takes care of you. Even the person who’s known you the longest noticed that.

“She knows how to handle him,” Bill said. “He’s happy. He’s happier than he was with his wife—one hundred percent happier.”

You and Vera once argued when I was over for a visit. As you both forced those strange hard candies on me, you bickered about when you’d give up your apartment and move permanently to her building. It was a classic girl/boy fight, and you hung on for a while, then gave in suddenly and unexpectedly as you always do. Vera thanked you. You tried to hide your aw-shucks smile.

The most romantic thing about you two is that you connected despite being so different. She is the highly educated daughter of doctors. You are the fifth-grade graduate raised by a woman who couldn’t read. She translates poetry while you watch wrestling. She has great-grandchildren and you have nobody. You have nothing in common except the fact that you both survived the great twentieth-century attempts to snuff out the Jews. I liked that when we first met; you were both living embodiments of Jewish history, symbols of our endurance. I guess you still are, though so much has changed. She is in this building, too, but you don’t see each other much. She’s lost all that English you helped her learn.

Then there was God, theory number two on why you survived.

You’ve speculated that you survived because the Lord above was on your side that day of the potato shipment—and during the entire last year of the war.

You and I both believe in God more than we believe in Judaism. I think that makes us uber minorities.

I run into lots of tribespeople who jump the ritual hurdles of Judaism but think God is a silly concept. There’s even a branch of Judaism called Reconstructionism, whose members embrace Jewish traditions but reject the idea of God as a “being.” I’m the opposite. I think the stories, rules, and rituals are mostly ridiculous, but I have never stopped believing in God, even as my image of her has evolved.

My God used to look like the full-body figure from my parents’ copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
. Both of them were biology majors in college, and their
Gray’s
textbook was one of the coolest items in our house. I would leaf through it regularly, always ending up at the colored cellophane overlays. Placed over the outline of a man, they added bones, muscles, or veins to his shape. The figure had no face or hair, just a form and innards. That’s how I imagined God, except he (God was still a man back then) sat on the moon, posed like Rodin’s
The Thinker
sculpture. If I opened my bedroom shade at night and looked over the tops of the oak trees, I could tell him all my problems and ask for help.

I always thought God was good, and kind, and not scary, so I don’t get the way the crowd ass-kisses God during Jewish services. Why all the praise and thanks, every other page?
You’re great, you’re great, you’re great
, the words declare;
of course you’re our one and only
. The God I believe in isn’t that insecure.

Or powerful. I don’t believe that God answers our prayers anymore, though I throw one out there every now and then as a test. Now I believe she’s impotent to control the world; that she made the humans and gave us free will. This helps me explain why she didn’t stop the Holocaust. According to my version, God doesn’t start or stop anything, but I think she stays with us during those times when we need to pray. She holds our hands and props us up, helping us to keep going. Or she spectates on the good times.

Like when I was watching Carrie run through a dress rehearsal of her bat mitzvah service and felt myself fill up with warm, gooey pride. Carrie was knocking it out of the park. She and the rabbi went through
the prayers on the
bimah
, and I sat in the third row and God hovered on the ceiling. Crazy, right? But without the people and the judgment I perceived coming from them, I felt God’s presence. I thought it was a turning point—that from then on I’d sense her whenever I entered that room and that I’d love the Jewish experience. But I never found her there again. Maybe she doesn’t like crowds.

God looks different to me now, too. She’s developed from an outline with blood vessels to a woman with lots of curls who wears a white toga and has the face of my friend, Abby, who helped people with AIDS in a godlike way before she died much too young. But even with the gender reassignment and abbreviated powers, God is still the same entity who lived outside my window. The same God who might have seen how content I was at age fourteen to wind a string of silver garland around a Christmas tree with my friend’s warm, happy family. The same God who kept me company as I sat outside in the cold sunshine while my playmates confessed their sins in a Catholic church that looked like a giant birthday cake. The same God who you think pushed us together.

One day, I was trying to convince you to let me be your healthcare proxy and you were trying to come up with reasons to refuse. You’d already told me that all you needed was for David and me to visit you if you got sick.

“What if you have a stroke?” I asked.

“So what? I won’t know what’s going on.”

“What if you’re in a coma? They’ll keep you hooked up to machines unless someone tells them not to. Is that what you want?”

I knew you didn’t; you frequently didn’t even want to live while you could walk and talk. I knew I had you there. You said nothing.

And then: “God sent you to me. That’s enough.”

Enough for what?

“The day I met you and little Maxeleh, God was with me. Just like when I go to Birkenau.”

Impressive debate tactic. How was I supposed to compete with that?

I was stunned by your words.
God sent you to me
. Who says something so beautiful in the midst of complaints and irrationality?

God put her hands to her chest. Even she was moved.

Despite losing most of his money, your Zychlin grandfather kept his property and enough cash to give each grandchild five cents when he or she was born.

He gave you so much more.

When you were with him, you weren’t just one of six; you were the only one. So you spent as much time as you could with him. In the winter, you sat with him as he smoked his pipe and listened as Yiddish love songs played from his gramophone. In the summer, the two of you would walk to the town creamery. He would bring his own plate and order a scoop of cottage cheese and a scoop of sour cream, then take them back to his apartment where he’d stir them together and complete the concoction with a sprinkle of scallions. That taste—tart, creamy, oniony—would bring you back to your grandfather’s side for the rest of your life.

You’d have sleepovers with him just as I did with my grandmother. Those were the best, weren’t they? I got to sleep in my grandmother’s bed, with her on one side and the beautiful bottles of perfume that spanned her dresser on the other. Everything was fragrant and orderly in her apartment, which probably explains my attraction to department-store perfume counters. No, I don’t want a sample, I tell the ladies. I just want to feel safe again for a few minutes.

Your slumber parties were just as comforting to you. Sometimes you climbed into bed with your
zayde
, snuggling against him and rubbing his back until you both fell asleep. Then his snoring would wake you up. Knowing you’d never get back to sleep—you’ve always been a light sleeper—you’d run through the dark neighborhoods to your own crowded bed.