At the risk of being overly sentimental, I must say something about my American family, the center of my universe. I cannot think of my husband, Kurt, as a separate human being. From the moment we met, he became an integral part of me. My thoughts and emotions center on him; there has never been a “you and me,” but always “we” and “us.” Our lives are closely interwoven. Of course, we have disagreed on occasion, and he has often chided me about my unrealistic expectations; yet he
has always supported me in all my endeavors. His caring gallantry and sound judgment help me to maintain my equilibrium. He has totally redeemed my trust in him and the love I hold for him.
Our children have been a source of pride and a wellspring of our happiness. It would take reams of paper to describe who they are and what they mean to us, but the memory of just a few of their expressions during their formative years will do. As young children and, later, as adolescents, they listened to my stories and anecdotes about growing up, about my parents, brother, and grandparents.
My mother used to make the first ice cream of the season in honor of my birthday in May. I adored her ice cream, but if the day was a cool one, she would make me wear a scarf before I could swallow my favorite dessert. For my typically American children, this story became a source of endless hilarity. Once, when my birthday fell on an especially cool day in Buffalo, our older daughter, Vivian, wanted to know, “Would Grandma have made you wear a scarf today?”
Our middle child, Leslie, moved me to tears years later by owning up to a recurring daydream during her childhood, a fantasy of finding her grandparents somewhere on the way to school and bringing them home to us.
And our son, Jimmy, revealed his feelings in the course of a discussion that centered on his friends’ grandparents. I asked whether he ever talked to his friends about his grandparents. He responded with a laconic no, and when I pressed him for an explanation, he said simply, “Oh Mom, I didn’t want to brag.”
I am gratified that our parents did not become ghosts that haunted our children’s nightmares; rather, the children still think of them as loving and very human grandparents. Obviously, there was this void in their lives that they sought to fill for their own sake and for ours. At the same time, our parents still serve as role models in whose martyrdom and bravery they could take great pride. Our children have grown into caring adults; they have made good, solid marriages and have presented us with eight cherished grandchildren, thus extending our family to yet another generation.
Once, after years in the United States, I was part of a United Jewish Appeal mission to Amsterdam, where I met a friend of Anne Frank’s, a BBC journalist whose broadcasts were relayed by stations in Belgium and Germany. She asked me to do a program with her, based on my wartime experiences; the interview, I assumed, would be conducted in English. When she asked me to do it in German, I became petrified. To speak German on the radio was something completely out of my province. Hitler, Goebbels, and their cohorts had spoken on the radio, and to me this made it forever theirs. My new friend was quite persuasive, and after much further hesitation I agreed. But the interview turned into a devastating experience. A paralyzing fear gripped me, and the walls of safety that English had built around me came tumbling down. After a short while, I could not go on.
It made me realize how fortunate I had been that Kurt had insisted from the very beginning that for the most part we speak English. That is to say, I could turn to German whenever English failed me, but he would answer me in English until I slowly, spontaneously spoke only in English. My sole regret then–and it persists to this day–was that despite my frantic desire to learn English, I could not shake my accent. Alas, that was never to be, although I would score an occasional, unexpected triumph, such as my encounter with a very Southern lady in Louisiana. After speaking with me for a while, she said, “I always like to hear a Yankee talk.” My elation remains unforgettable.
I also found that language can become a buffer, a filter for emotions, a free zone to which I can safely retreat. Most of my friends were not so fortunate. Many married other survivors who spoke little English, and for years they could not break out of the world of their native tongue. That makes it more difficult to speak of the past, because the memories are apt to turn into the living present.
Some time ago while I was driving, a lilting melody from the radio filled the car. I knew the song and lustily chimed in.
“Im weissen Rössl am Wolfgangsee, da steht das Glück vor der Tiir …
” I could hear my mother’s voice asserting that at the White Horse
Inn on Lake Wolfgang, in Austria, happiness was waiting at the door. I could hear her and see her eyes, lighting up with joy, her lips curved in a smile–until, suddenly, reality set in. Even though I knew that the White Horse Inn had nothing to do with the events of the forties and that the music was written by a Jew, the song instantly lost its carefree lilt. Angrily snapping the radio off, I drove on in gloomy silence.
All I could think was, They have robbed me not only of my youth, of my parents, but also of the comfort of words, of the images of tender, sustaining memory. Despite Bielitz’s status as a Polish town, it still retained some of its former Austrian character during my childhood. Thus, my mother tongue was German. That language certainly has its lyrical beauty, but for me the Nazis succeeded in perverting it into the strident, staccato cadences that implied and expressed ominous threats. It was in those tones that my parents’ terrible death warrant had been decreed. I railed against the injustice of it all, of being orphaned in so many subtle ways.
One good thing came out of it, though. The knowledge that my native tongue became repugnant to me strengthened my resolve to steep myself even more in my new language. It was fascinating to choose words from this seemingly inexhaustible font. I would acquire them in order to express what I needed to say.
Safely ensconced in the new home I had quickly come to know and love, I was caught up in the rhythm of everyday life. Season followed season, as our three children grew up. We rejoiced in watching them develop and applauded their achievements.
While we were still living in Buffalo, I visited Vivian in Arizona, where she had moved with her husband soon after getting married. From there I was to fly to Washington, D.C., to address an important meeting. In a hurry to get to the airport, I hadn’t changed and was wearing old slacks and a blouse spotted with baby formula, which had spilled on me while I fed my baby granddaughter on the way to the plane.
Upon my arrival in the nation’s capital, I tried to retrieve my
luggage, only to discover that it had gone astray, leaving me stranded in my hardly appropriate attire at an exquisite penthouse among elegantly dressed, bejeweled guests. My embarrassment was soon dispelled by a vivid memory of trudging through the snow in the biting cold on the death march during the final months of the war.
The scene recaptured was of a ramshackle house in the twilight; through a window I could see a few people sitting down to supper. I recalled clearly what it had meant to me at that moment: the surge of envy of the unattainable luxury enjoyed by those inside. I remembered the penetrating cold, the hunger and loneliness of that evening. I would have gladly signed away everything that lay in my future had I been allowed to enter that hovel, find shelter by the fire, and sit down to warm food. It came to me: How dare I be embarrassed today by traces of formula from my granddaughter’s bottle? This was a “crisis” which the sharp edge of memory was able to control swiftly.
Another memory had just the opposite effect. Our granddaughter, aged three, was staying with us in Buffalo while her parents were on vacation. I reveled in the delight of having her to myself. It had been a perfect day; we had picked flowers, visited the zoo, baked cookies together. I gave the child a pink bubble bath, relishing her squeals of delight. I dressed her in a ruffled nightgown and put her between sweet-smelling sheets in her mother’s former bed, her stuffed animals all around her. A perfect end to a fun-filled day in Grandma’s house, right down to the bright-white muslin curtains. As was routine, Grandpa read her a book; she kissed him and said nighty-night to her room, her animals, and the moon in her storybook.
A few moments later, I returned to tuck her in. She looked wistful and sad, her eyes filling with tears. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I miss my mommy,” she said softly. “I want my mommy.” “Mommy and Daddy will be back soon,” I managed to reassure her, rocking her in my arms until her lids were drooping. But there, out of the shadows, out of the stillness came the longings, the whispers, the agonizing cries of children I had heard. Anguish and sadness swept over me, drowning me in bitterness. I saw
my grandchild’s eyes flicker, her long lashes against her tanned cheeks. The corners of her lips went up ever so slightly in a smile, but I got no comfort from the image.
Tossing and turning that night, I tried to keep the demons at bay, but found it futile. Finally, I got up, went downstairs, and sat at the window, watching the dawn gradually light the sky. Eventually, the brightness of the morning and the waking child’s chatter made the ghosts retreat into the shadows.
I was fortunate to have had a happy childhood, one that in all probability was not as perfect as I have chosen to remember. But its memory has helped me survive, and I have used it as a beacon to illuminate the darkness of the tragedy that followed, just as I often use the darkness of past despair to show me the blessings which I might otherwise take for granted. As I have grown and matured, I have learned better to understand my parents, to grasp the burden which this period of horror imposed on them. As a teenager living through it, I could not fathom the enormity of the collapse of their world, my world. That is my most bitter regret. I still look to their memory for guidance, even though in my own life I have been granted decades beyond what they had. They are my parents and I will need their approval to the end of my days. By the same token, my children will always be “children,” and the urge to protect them will never diminish.
I had been some years in Buffalo when, on a cold February morning, a miraculous incident brought me into possession of the complete collection of my family photos. They had been found purely by accident by a distant relative who happened to visit Bielitz after the war and by chance encountered a former neighbor of ours who had promised at the time of our forced departure to store our most precious family belongings until our return. Of those valuables, she returned what she ironically considered of no worth, thereby inadvertently saving my irreplaceable and most meaningful treasure. The battered brown box yielded some four hundred photos, which had been insured for ten dollars. They were the familiar snapshots and studio
photos of my parents, grandparents, friends, neighbors, and classmates. Here was a cross section of their lives, salvaged from the abyss: families in all their finery at weddings; young people in hiking gear; men posing elegantly in bowler hats or proudly showing off their World War I Austrian uniforms.
The camera had caught them, gravely staring into the lens or exuding an air of confidence in the future, against the obviously fake backgrounds that were so common in photographers’ studios in those days. The click of the shutter had frozen their images, and I was awestruck to think that I could mentally roll back that film and make them come alive. I could recall their names, remember moments we had shared. I knew much of their beginnings and, in many cases, the time and place of their tragic end. I can only wonder now: Did those faces reflect an age of total illusion?
The loss of my brother is the hardest to bear. The anguished uncertainty of how he died and where his bones rest comes back at the most unexpected times. Even now, at seventy, I still look for my big brother to shield me, to fight my battles for me. Somehow I am still seeking him, in the naive belief that, if only I could find him, he would be able to restore that lost world.
A strange incident occurred which put some balm on that still festering wound. At our final parting, when I was fifteen and my brother nineteen, he asked me to be brave and take care of our parents. My promise to him was my most sacred vow. And during the years that followed, I did the best I could–always, I suppose, in the hope that he would praise me when we next met. How could I have imagined that on a snowy winter’s night many decades later, in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel would express the fulfillment of part of that irrational hope when he took me into his arms and said, “I have waited so long to meet Arthur’s little sister.” As I wept, he stroked my hair and said, “You have been very brave.” He had never met my brother but had read what I wrote about him, and with uncanny sensitivity he had identified with us; thus he gave me the praise I had hoped to hear from my brother.
And then there are other comforting moments, when I meet the few friends who survived the camps with me. We reminisce about the past, without ever forgetting the fulfillment we have found in the present. I am most deeply grateful whenever my friends mention the skits I wrote under the cover of darkness, which for brief moments would make us forget the horror of the reality we were living in. I feel proud and humble at having been granted that privilege and consider it my greatest achievement, even though it may not have been an act of total selflessness. I have learned that when we bring comfort to others, we reassure ourselves, and when we dispel fear, we assuage our own fear as well.