Yiddishe Mamas (40 page)

I hope you read between the tears. For it is in courage that we see the character of people when their most precious beliefs—and love—are tested beyond comprehension.

They embody the simple word: “hero.”

Is the Jewish mother different in her acceptance of loss and sacrifice in the face of impending loss?

According to Jonathan Singer, in
Cultural Differences Among Elderly Women in Coping with the Death of an Adult Child,
Jewish mothers often meld personal boundaries, viewing themselves as more mothers than wives. When we lose a loved one, we confront the pain and expect help from others to cope. Non-Jews are more stoic and less likely to share their pain.

Singer found that while the Jewish mothers maintained their attachments, even after death, non-Jews were more able to stop mothering the dead child. Jewish mothers were also more depressed, lonely, and felt less in control of their lives.

Culture and religious ideology was one explanation for this difference. While Christianity believes that this life is a preparation for death and that resurrection brings eternal life, Judaism often focuses on the here and now of this life. More, Jews are culturally more likely to verbalize heightened emotions, whereas non-Jews are more likely to minimize them.

G
racia Nasi, a converso (a secret Jew), whose Christian name was Doña Beatrice de Luna, was born in Lisbon in 1510. She spent her life helping her fellow Jews escape Christian persecution in sixteenth-century Portugal.

Gracia was born into a wealthy and prominent Jewish family. In 1528 she married Francisco Mendes, also a secret Jew, and they had one child, Rayna. The couple amassed great wealth and then used their network to provide escape routes for Jews that were victimized by the Inquisition.

After her husband’s death, Gracia joined her brother-in-law,
Diego, in a highly successful business partnership in Antwerp. When Diego died in 1542, he left her his estate. She was eager to practice Judaism openly, and she did so when she reached Turkey, taking the name Gracia Hannah Nasi.

She created an underground railroad from Portugal allowing hundreds of conversos to leave. When she settled with her daughter in Constantinople, she actively provided for the Jewish community by funding hospitals, synagogues, schools, Hebrew-language printers, and even Jewish scholars and writers. She also confronted Pope Paul IV about his anti-semitic policies. In 1558, she arranged with the Turkish sultan to buy the city of Tiberias with the intention of making it an independent Jewish city-state. This courageous activist died in 1569.

T
he Nazis publicly hanged a mother and her five-year-old daughter. The mother’s crime: She illegally bought an egg for her starving child. The child’s crime: She ate the egg.

Hannah Szenes was a paratrooper, poet, and hero. During World War II, the twenty-three-year-old parachuted behind enemy lines to
warn Hungarian Jews of the Nazi scourge. She followed her mother’s courageous example. As a child, she attended a Protestant girls’ high school. Her mother challenged the discrimination of school tuitions, which were three times higher for Jewish students—and won. Hannah, an ardent Zionist, moved to Palestine. She wrote to her mother, “I am home. … This is where my life’s ambition … binds me. … I am fulfilling a mission.”

In 1943, she enlisted in the British Army and trained in Egypt as a paratrooper—the first woman to do so. When she was captured by the Germans and sent to Budapest, she was tortured. Her mother, also imprisoned, was threatened with torture if Hannah failed to reveal her radio code. Szenes refused. Although her mother was later released, Hannah was executed by firing squad on November 7, 1944, at age twenty-three. She was buried in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

When the Nazis rounded up the Jews of Piotrekow for deportation to the concentration camps, four-year-old Yisroel was slated to go with his mother to Ravensbruck—and probably perish. According to author Tim Boxer, the boy’s mother, Chaya, pushed him away, allowing his older brother to stash him in a duffel bag to Buchenwald where he would have a chance of survival. His mother didn’t, but her son, Yisrael Meir Lau, grew up to become Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi from 1993 to 2003.

The following was written by a Jewish mother who was about to be taken to a concentration camp:

Eventually he was captured. Both mother and son died in the camps.

During August and September of 1942, the Jews of Kowel, Poland, were imprisoned in the synagogue and then 18,000 were executed. They knew they were slated for death and many wrote on the walls in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish, using anything … even their fingernails. Two read:

In studies done on women of the Holocaust, critical differences were found that reflect
gender
differences, biologically and socially.

Rapes, sexual torture, and medical mutilation were performed routinely on women. The Nazis turned the mothers of newborns in the camps into murderers, forcing them to kill their own children, or be killed with them in the ovens.

Women, with traditionally feminine values of cooperating and caring, were more used to social interaction than their male counterparts and formed powerful sisterhoods with their fellow prisoners. They found strength, comfort, support, spiritual sustenance, and solidarity from these relationships. Judy Cohen, who, in her superb 2001 work,
Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism: Women’s Holocaust Narratives,
details these sisterhoods. While women nurtured, the men were more demoralized, continuing their “lone wolf” behavior.

The women, in their prewar roles as homemakers, were also superior organizers and this helped them survive. Whether it was sewing, cleaning, or exchanging recipes to make food stretch, they felt some degree of control and responsibility—even if it was an illusion.

In one example, Judy Cohen describes a group of Belgian women prisoners at Auschwitz that formed an ad hoc insurrectionist organization. Through “connections,” they became attached to the Schuh-Kommando, sorting the shoes of prisoners, a job that allowed them to “organize” shoes for themselves and their friends. These activities, she notes, not only gave them purpose, but also contributed to their sisterhood and bonding, which made their daily lives bearable and helped them survive. In this horrific environment, the simple act of caring required a courage that can only be considered heroic.

In the
Scrolls of Auschwitz,
a manuscript found in the ashes of Auschwitz written by a member of the Sondercommando, surrogate “motherhood” and solidarity is described. One woman would give her bread to her starving friend or do her sick friend’s work.

“While I had typhus, I was bordering on madness,” said one woman. “I was delirious from fever. I once asked for an apple. My friends went and exchanged their bread rations for an apple. Thus, solidarity saved my life—and the lives of other women comrades.”

Rudolf Hoess, Auschwitz commandant, noted in his autobiography where “time and time again” he “witnessed mothers with laughing or crying children [who] went to the gas chambers.” He recalled a young woman who, as she stood at the gas chamber, said: “I deliberately avoided being chosen for labor because I wanted to take care of my children and go through this in full awareness of what was happening. I hope it won’t take long.”

Another tragic scene, described in 1943, tells of the children who were undressing in the anteroom of the gas chamber. When guards tried to hurry them, one eight-year-old girl resisted, crying: “Go away, you Jewish murderer! Don’t put your hand, covered in Jewish blood, on my sweet brother. I am his good mother now and he will die in my arms.”

Today, we mothers worry about the effects a wrong word, a short separation, a TV show, or a rebuke may have on our children. For adults, the atrocities Holocaust survivors witnessed and suffered are incomprehensible … but for children …?

In testimony after testimony, children of the Holocaust describe the gnawing hunger, families screaming and separated, orders to dig graves—for themselves … and seeing their mothers shot right before their eyes.

Eva Heyman was captured and sent to Auschwitz with her grandparents. They were murdered there. This is an excerpt from her diary: