Art of a Jewish Woman (19 page)

The next morning a few of us traveled together to Szczuczyn. There were new trucks on the road and fresh paint on many of the houses. This time we talked with citizens. They were apprehensive but cordial. They must have feared that we would direct anger at them, or that we would claim homes they were living in even though property claims had long been settled. A middle-aged woman showed us the still untouched ruins of Moshe’s granary. The roof had fallen in, and goats chomped the grass that was growing inside the crumbling brick walls. The woman and her husband owned Farberovicz’s old grain mill, where horses still turned the grindstone as they had done in Felice’s time.

She told us that Faberovicz had come back after the war to claim the mill and had sold it to her parents. But something in the sale had not been quite right, she recalled. Farberovicz, she heard, had done something with the taxes that may not have been fully honest. She remembered him just as Felice and Moshe had described him.

The high school principal organized an assembly of the junior and senior classes. The students were eager to make us feel welcome and learn how we were linked to their village. But at moments I stiffened with apprehension when members of our group asked the students if they knew anything from their parents about why their grandparents had done the Nazis’ bidding. I feared that some in the room were about to make condemnations, and force the townspeople to defend their pasts. It didn’t happen. The young people were too young to know much about the war, for their own parents had been born after the war. They were genuinely curious. Others in our group softened the tone of the gathering by telling the students how they were related to the few survivors who had been saved by local families who hid them or left caches of food near the forests where they were hiding. I commented about the beauty of the land and wondered if there would be a reverse migration back some day.

It was a somber occasion. One high school student invited a woman whose mother survived in a cave for three years to come to their home for tea because it had been the survivor’s house sixty-one years earlier. Other townspeople invited visitors from our group inside when they saw them looking at a house. Bridget and I were invited into my mother’s old home on the corner of Church Street and Market Square by the family that lived there now. One street-facing room was now a plain, unadorned, simply functional beauty salon, and the corner room was a little shop with a few books, magazines, and children’s playthings for sale on racks that were half empty. The paint was faded and the wallpaper peeling. I didn’t go inside their private quarters. They said they knew nothing of my mother’s family.

Our last stop was the ruined Jewish cemetery on the edge of Sczuczyn. The Rabbi of Warsaw, a youngish man who had grown up in Chicago, was with us. We were standing amongst the bits of granite headstones poking up through the soil and grass. My brother, who had joined us with his wife for this trip, asked the rabbi, “Can you lead us in a prayer?”

“I can’t because we are not a minyan,” he replied.

Bridget said, “I thought a minyan was ten; we’re fourteen.”

“We are only eight men,” the ultra-conservative rabbi answered. “Only men are counted.”

I felt disgusted by this echo of exclusion, segregation, and rigidity, which my mother despised and which she and her father had tried to rise above. The rigidity was bringing a bitter taste to my mouth that competed in intensity with sorrow for all that had been lost.

When we returned to America, I finally began to research in earnest, gathering books, accounts, documents, and family pictures. A main resource was the Szcuzczyn website,
¹⁸
which excerpted the testimonies the few survivors from the village had given for the
Yizkor Book
—the Holocaust survivors’ memory book—in Israel in the early 1950s. The testimonies were in front of me on the computer screen, and I couldn’t avoid confronting the horror of what happened any longer.

Reading the survivors’ narratives and the letters of impending doom the perished had sent abroad in the weeks before the Nazis invaded cut through me like a knife. I could only stick with it a few paragraphs at a time; then I would say to myself, this is too terrible, I can’t go on. I would put down what I was reading or turn off the computer and walk away. But it kept pulling me back hours or days later to learn still more. I steeled myself, both gripped and repelled by the vision of human nature at its sadistic worst and the death and suffering it had wrought. Having finally opened the book on it, I needed to keep going from one account to another until I had read all of the testimonies.

My mother had this information from her father and sisters and Chaye Golding and other word-of-mouth sources all the time that I was growing up. Now I had it and couldn’t make sense of it. How could people inflict such cruelty on others? How can they still continue to do it in ethnic and religious wars around the world today? It is an enduring enigma, or perhaps better said, the mystery is how to prevent the killing, for we do understand the greed, lust for power, lust for revenge, and envy that lie behind murder.

The
Yizkor Book
and the Szczuczyn website reveal that the village numbered approximately 3,000 Jews and 3,000 Catholics in the mid-1930s. As Moshe had said, the Germans invaded across the nearby East Prussia border in 1939 and started killing village Jews and deporting scores to labor camps. Jews started fleeing. Moshe sent Bela and Berci to Bialystock, the region’s major city. A few weeks later the Russians advanced into Sczuczyn, and the Germans withdrew according to a temporary partition of the territory. The Russians sent scores of Jews with useful skills to Russia and scores more who were deemed bourgeois threats to the Bolshevik Revolution to Siberia. Moshe was sent to teach agronomics at a school in Smolensk.

The next chapter’s details were new to me. In June 1941 the Germans returned, and the killings began in earnest with orders from the Nazi command to liquidate the 2,000 or so remaining Jews in Szczuczyn. Over the next few days, most were herded into groups and shot, hacked or burned to death. If somebody raised a hand to protest or a weapon to resist they were shot on the spot. Some citizens were conscripted into work crews and sent west to factories, and a few of these survived the war. Some ran into the forest and foraged for survival. A few were hidden by neighbors or managed to pass as non-Jewish Poles. Many hundreds were sent to nearby Treblinka, on the Bug River not far from Felice’s family’s summer cottage. The killing center, on a siding off the main Warsaw-Bialystock railroad line, gassed an estimated 900,000 people from 1942 through the end of the war. The Treblinka website says 40 people were alive at the liberation.

Chaye Golding’s postwar letter to Felice, in which she told of being with Bela in Treblinka, was in the Szczuczyn memory book. When she was safe in Holland after the war, she also gave her full story of survival for the memory book. She had been in nearby Grajewo the day the Nazis came, and she fled to the Bialystok ghetto, from which 30,000 Jews were eventually sent to concentration camps. There she hid in a secret bunker below ground. She recalled, “On August 15, 1943, the last campaign began in the ghetto … At various points the young had put up resistance. Their heroic stands were squashed in bloody skirmishes. We descended to our skhron [a secret bunker under an oven]. Instead of the seventeen persons on which we had reckoned, thirty-three came down. There was a shortage of air. Those times were too horrible to recount.”
¹⁹

Other accounts do not spare the details of slow starvation, children and parents giving up and closing their eyes for the last time. Eventually the Germans found the Chaye’s bunker and sent her to Treblinka, where she had the strength to endure.

Moyshe Farbarovicz encountered his erstwhile competitor Moshe Ozerovicz in the ruins of Bialystock just after the war and told him about Bela’s fate. He also wrote his account for the
Yizkor Book
, how he survived with his wife in Siberia after the local communist committee denounced him as a bourgeois threat in 1939. “[The] NKVD [Soviet State Police] ordered us in a sharp tone, ‘We give you 15 minutes to get dressed and pack your things … railroad cars are waiting’ … the grief and worry of the unfortunate parents, women and children who said goodbye to their families was exceptionally great. It was not known what fate would bring. Still every person had the feeling that they would never again see each other alive … Neighbors had thrown thirteen loaves of black bread into the train wagon. The first few days no one paid any heed to the bread. But fifteen days later we were the happiest people because the bread had saved all of us from a sure starvation death.”
²⁰

Fabarovicz wrote after the armistice that he and his wife didn’t want to believe the horrifying reports and decided to return to see for themselves even though they were warned that delinquents were attacking travelers. “Perhaps we would meet someone there, or at least find out what had happened to my friends, family and other Jews … I traveled to Szczuczyn. I met a woman who had converted before the war and married a Christian. She greeted me warmly and asked me to her home. Whatever I needed she would give … she told me in great detail how the disastrous events had come about … The market had from all sides been ruined … Potatoes are growing there … nothing was recognizable.”
²¹

After I finished the hundreds of pages of memory book testimonies, I finally understood what had happened and could talk with my mother directly about it, a conversation she and I had put off for fifty years. She was ninety-two. I asked Felice to tell me how she felt—not just what had happened—when she learned of her mother’s death. She simply recounted Chaye Golding’s letter. After she finished, tears formed and rolled down her cheeks. For a few minutes she looked to me like Michelangelo’s Pieta mourning over Jesus’ dead body, and then she turned away so I wouldn’t see her face.

She composed herself like a flamenco dancer shifting moods with the music in the twinkling of an eye, and turned back to me. Smiling, she said, “Do you know your father was such a kind man?”

I nodded yes.

When it came to sadness or feelings of vulnerability, my mother became silent or changed the subject. Edward’s kindness to Felice had allowed her to live through the Holocaust in comfort and safety, to bring her own father into the house, to send money to get Miriam to Palestine, to provide money for her sisters and their husbands to build homes in Israel. I picked up her cue, and we talked about Edward for a few minutes.

Beauty

During the 1940s and into the beginning of the 1950s, my mother was a full-time housewife, almost always around. As a doctor’s wife, she no longer had to work outside the home. She made a conscious decision to stay close by rather than re-create the parent-child separation that had been her lot when she was born.

Years later, when friends asked what advice she would give about how to raise children, she said, “I didn’t ever in my life neglect them. I told Edward that their education is the most important thing in raising them. The mind can do bad and do wrong. Education is to help control the bad part, both for ourselves and for the world.” This notwithstanding, my parents were quite canny about our schooling. They didn’t overstuff us with extra academic courses, sports, or other forms of “enrichment” outside of what the school offered. They made clear that school was important but didn’t push competition. A retired carpenter in the neighborhood offered Saturday woodworking lessons for children, and my mother enrolled me in them when I was eight. I learned to use hand tools and power tools, draw plans, and execute small projects—probably the single most useful course I ever took. Felice’s hardest decision was whether to enroll her sons in the local Cub Scout den. The uniforms and memory of Hitler’s Brown Shirt youth groups made her bristle with anger, yet she told herself that she was living in a new society and let us go.

Felice was also in a quandary about religion. She had never practiced in her life. My father’s religion was science. A consummate rationalist, he found in science all the answers to natural phenomena he needed; an ethical man, he felt his personal example was sufficient to show his sons the way. Further, not really knowing the implications of what I was complaining about, I told my parents that they were not educating me properly. I said to my mother, “On Monday when the teacher asks us what we did on Sunday, the other students say they went to Sunday school. I have nothing to say except that sometimes I went to the hospital with my father to see his patients.”

These Sunday morning hospital rounds with my father were one of my few opportunities to spend time with him. I became so familiar with the hospital that it was like my backyard. My father proudly introduced me to his patients, who liked and respected him. I listened to them talk and watched him apply the stethoscope to their hearts and lungs. Sometimes, the patient willing, he let me listen through the stethoscope while he explained to the patient and me the condition I was hearing. At home in the evening he would tell more about their lives, personalities, families, misfortunes and successes.

Sometimes when patients had infectious diseases my father settled me into one of the large leather chairs in the doctor’s lounge. There I chatted with the other physicians and could sprawl out—a little kid at ease, unmindful of where I put my feet. Nobody rebuked me about where I put my feet like my mother did at home. Often I hung out in the barber shop, which felt to me like a bastion of masculinity. Shoe polish, aftershave lotion and Brylcreme scented the air. The television was always tuned to the St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball games or to the erstwhile St. Louis Browns, and the African-American barbers knew everything there was to know about sports and male grooming.

But in my innocence and wish to conform to what my peers were doing, I asked to trade this for Sunday school. My mother began to consult with Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman about what her boys needed in the way of moral or religious instruction. He was the rabbi of the Reform congregation Temple Israel, which was three blocks away from our house. When they first met in his study, he asked her, “Are you coming to join our congregation?”