Art of a Jewish Woman (29 page)

The Committee on Research of the Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley importantly funded in part Bridget Connelly’s research in Paris, Nancy, Vilnius, and St. Louis. The St. Louis Public Library, the Missouri Historical Society, and the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
lent their resources. The Bay Area Holocaust Oral Project helped Felice tell her story with six hours of thoughtful, expert interviews. Thank you, Mike Marvins and Laura Kaplan Silver, for rescuing your grandfather’s photographs of Szczuczyn before the war from their diaspora and bringing them back to life.

My appreciation also goes to Russ Ellis who helped me find my voice and pick up my pen, and to Bob Burnett, Ronna Kabatznick, Larry Michalak and my agent Roger Rapoport for their careful reading of early drafts of the manuscript and suggestions. Julie Smith, the publisher of BooksBNimble, also gave invaluable ideas for the final shaping of the manuscript. My sister-in-law Ellen Massie’s work on the Szczuczyn website and her gathering memories and photographs of the village survivors and descendents has been loving and indispensible. Lastly, I gratefully acknowledge Alan Stone and Jose Gutstein for their dedication to keeping the history of the Holocaust alive by translating and editing, respectively, the Szczuczyn Yizkor Memory Book and website.

I have tried to make the biography as historically accurate as possible, but have not been able to completely verify some events, locations, and spellings. They depended on my mother’s memory, and memory can err. The names of all the people are real except for one family name that has been changed in the interest of the family’s privacy.

Appendix

Palestine

The Romans had given the name Palestine to the region during the years they held sway, between 63 B.C. and the 7
^th
Century A.D., when they ceded to the Arabs. It was named after the Philistines who had themselves been vanquished by the Hebrews, or Israelites, a Semitic people who came from Mesopotamia in the east in about 4,000 B.C. They had been led, according to the Bible, by their patriarch, Abraham. Impelled by the force of their belief in one God and the stern moral code Moses transmitted to them, the twelve Hebrew tribes united under King David to control the land. His son, Solomon, built the First Temple for the worship of their God in the 10
^th
Century B.C. in Jerusalem, a city in the territory called Judah which gave rise to the name, the Jews. However, their hegemony lasted only about 200 years before more invasions--Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks--led to the gradual dispersion of the Hebrew tribes, which the Romans completed.

The land is wedged between the Mediterranean Sea on the west and the Jordanian desert on the east. The Lebanon and Syrian mountains are its northern frontier, and the Arabian desert, the Red Sea, and Egypt lie to the south. It is approximately 225 miles north and south, and 60 miles at its broadest, depending on which power in which age is drawing its borders. Tiny and arid with the exception of the verdant Galilee valley and a small coastal plain, it has nonetheless always been coveted--it is the East’s gateway to the Mediterranean, a crossroads between the Eurasian continents and North Africa, and a route for migrating people.

Two more extraordinary men appeared in the region in the next centuries. Jesus, himself a Jew, broke from orthodoxy to preach that everyman could have direct spiritual access to God through faith, kindness and humility. As the new church grew over time, however, a priestly hierarchy arose, like before, to administer the faith. Muhammad, the Muslim prophet, began preaching in Mecca in Arabia in about 610 A.D. He called for spiritual and moral reform and for men to surrender themselves before the will of god, the same god of Abraham that the Jews and Christians revere. His adherents collected his teachings into the Qur’an, believed to be the words of God transmitted to his messenger, Muhammad. Islam is Arabic for submission; one who submits to God is a Muslim. By early in the 8
^th
Century A.D., the followers of Islam were spreading the religion into Palestine, north to Turkey, eastward across North Africa, and the Arabic language was taking root in many of these regions.

According to the Qur’an, Muhammad had a dream of ascending to heaven with the angel Gabriel from the rock in Jerusalem where the Mosque of the Dome of the Rock now stands. During the course of a night he spoke with God and returned to earth to spread his mystical revelation of God’s word. Adjacent to the Dome of the Rock is the Jews’ First Temple; its remnant the Western Wall is the Jews’ holiest site. Jesus was born nearby in Bethlehem and died in Jerusalem, so that city became the heart and soul of the world’s three great monotheistic religions. But though they all share the Golden Rule--treat thy neighbor as thyself--it has not brought peace to the land.

In 1516, the Ottoman Turkish Empire ousted the Arabian Caliphate, and the Ottomans ruled until the end of World War I in 1918. Then it became England’s turn to attempt to govern and administer Palestine, officially the British Mandate of Palestine. They could better protect their access to the Suez Canal and the oil pipeline from Iraq to the Mediterranean port of Haifa this way, they reasoned. Additionally, for some, there was a religious urge to their occupation akin to that of the medieval Crusaders. They could protect the sites of Jesus’ birth and crucifixion for his Second Coming, which would usher in an era of peace for humankind, according to the New Testament. This religious belief made it also important to support the Jews’ return to their ancient land of Israel, because the Bible says they must come back before Jesus will be reborn.

A few Jews had stayed on the land throughout the ages, and a few had migrated back from their diaspora. However in the late 19
^th
Century a movement called Zionism, named for the mount in Jerusalem where King David’s palace stood, arose to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The first International Zionist Congress took place in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland to raise support for migration and resettlement. At the root of the movement was the vision that the Jews would never be safe from the violent attacks and oppression that were their lot in Russia and Poland, and discrimination elsewhere, until they had a land they could call their own. The Zionist leaders gradually prevailed on Britain until it issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It read in part, “His Majesty’s Government views with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of the object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

The Jews believed they had their charter even though the Arabs maintained it was not valid because they had not agreed to it. Immigration began in earnest: In 1880 approximately 2,000 Jews lived in Palestine; by 1914 the Jewish population had risen to about 85,000 out of 700,000. Immigration exploded in the 1930s because of mounting anti-Semitism in Germany and Eastern Europe. In its peak year, 1935, Felice’s year, there were 62,000 new Jewish arrivals. Then the British clamped down on new entries in deference to Arab leaders who saw their people being dispossessed and were fearful of drowning in a wave of new settlers. This clampdown was at the very moment that Hitler was contemplating his death camps and the Jews had their greatest need for a place to which to escape. In 1938 only 10,000 made it in and for the next nine years entry was meager and clandestine.

The struggle between Palestinians and Jews was not just political. From the 1930s on, extremist groups on both sides began using arms and explosives. Militant Jews also attacked the British, seeing them as an obstacle to Jewish nationhood. In 1947 Britain ceded control to the United Nations and outright war between Arabs and Jews began almost immediately. The Jews prevailed and declared the State of Israel in May 1948; the gates to Jewish immigration opened wide.

Europe Between the Wars

When the French, Russian, and American alliance defeated Germany and Austria-Hungary to end World War I, the Versailles peace treaty in 1918 gave birth to the League of Nations. Its mission was to uphold the Rights of Man so that people could determine their own destiny, and to ensure that war never broke out again by replacing the use of force with negotiation. In the aftermath of the war, Poland received back the territories which had been carved from it in the 18
^th
and 19
^th
centuries. The citizens of Russia overthrew their monarch, the Czar, and the communists took over the government with the goal of initiating reforms that would enfranchise the people and improve the life of the impoverished, landless peasants. In Germany and Austria-Hungary, monarchies were also abolished. There was hope that a new age of democratically elected governments would fulfill the enlightened vision of the League of Nations, and that the citizens of European nations would no longer choose militaristic leaders.

Along with democratization the voices and needs of workers began to be heard. Labor unions grew strong, and workers experienced increased job security and improved conditions in the workplace. Socialism’s theory that government ownership of industries and collective worker management of production of goods and delivery of services would best serve society began to be put into practice. In the enlightened age, wealth and power would no longer be concentrated in the hands of a few whose goal was personal profit and who were scarcely accountable to anybody but their immediate circle. The tenor of the times also extended toward ending unfavorable treatment of minorities in the European states, including the Jews. All people were to be given a fair chance to make of themselves what they could.

However, by the end of the 1920s, Europe’s new start faltered in a crisis triggered by America’s Great Depression. It began with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and spread across the Atlantic. Then, as in the great American Recession of 2008, there had been the belief that the value of property would balloon indefinitely. Businesses and families overburdened themselves with loans to live beyond their means in the illusion that the increasing equity in their property would allow them to pay their debts. When prices collapsed, they couldn’t pay off loans and were bankrupt. Banks failed, new credit became unavailable for businesses to restock and retool, the demand for goods dropped, shops closed, and industries laid off millions of workers. In Europe one out of five workers lost their jobs. Droughts in America and Europe further magnified poverty.

Germany was particularly hard hit because the Treaty of Versailles required it to pay large financial reparations to the countries it had invaded in the last war. One quarter of its workforce was unemployed. Civil unrest, declining living standards, and government impotence strengthened extremist, nationalistic agitators who railed at the terms of the treaty that had stripped the German empire of its lands and controlled the size of its army. This created an opportunity for Hitler to assert himself by promising honor and jobs to the people through National Socialism (Nazism). He became head of state in 1933, quickly ended Germany’s experiment with constitutional democracy, unfettered the army, and began to construct the first concentration camps.

Hitler further exploited the human psychological defense mechanism of externalizing blame by demonizing and scapegoating the Jews for Germany’s economic difficulties. In doing this he capitalized on age-old anti-Semitism rooted in the shibboleth that the Jews had killed the son of God. This charge, leveled across time by those who used it for personal gain, had fixed the Jews with the image of unfavorable outsiders in the lands where they settled. Hitler used stereotyping to his advantage to increase prejudice by taking disfavored images of some members of the faith and generalizing them to the entire Jewish population. He attacked other minorities in the same way. They were to blame, he asserted, for Germany’s decline rather than an economic system whose systemic flaws made it vulnerable to cycles of prosperity and scarcity.

Hitler incarnated in his time the prototypical dictator who aggrandizes himself and his nation by centralizing power in his hands and forcibly crushing all opposition. Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain allied with him. Stalin betrayed Russian communism’s early promise by crushing his opponents as forcibly as Hitler.

In the geographic center of Europe, Poland between the wars had a population of approximately 32,000,000 people, and its socialist oriented leader, Pilsudsky, was attempting to modernize the agrarian state with industrialization and redistribution of idle land to peasant field workers. The Jewish population of 3,300,000 in 1935 was the largest of any country in the world, and the parliamentary reforms included legislation to end discrimination against the Jews. In the 1920s, Jews in Poland could feel for the first time the possibility of fully participating in civil and cultural life and no longer being a people apart.

However Polish resistance to change was too great and there were insufficient funds for the reforms Pilsudsky envisioned. His autocratic military background reasserted itself and he eviscerated parliament with a coup in 1926. As the great depression spread, thirty percent of Polish workers were without jobs. By 1935, three army colonels were running the country, and following Germany’s example, they began to enact laws to exclude Jews from the country’s economic life, and starve and drive the Jews and other minorities out of the country. Tax collectors were empowered, for example, to confiscate Jewish peddlers’ horses, tailors’ sewing machines, and bakers’ flour. Laws were passed forbidding Jews to have business licenses in many commercial sectors. Vandalism and personal attacks against Jews were condoned. In 1935 sixty percent of Jewish workers were jobless and a third of the Jewish population was mired in poverty, facing starvation, with children who were too weak to go to school. Approximately 100,000 Jews were emigrating per year by any means possible to any country that would receive them.