Authors: Marnie Winston-Macauley
Yiddishe Mamas (41 page)
“I
think they heard the baby crying, and that brought them as far as our hiding place. Let the child go, he hasn’t done anything, he’s only a baby!… But the murderer’s heart of stone was not moved. He replied: ‘He’s a baby now, but he’ll grow up to be a Jewish man. That’s why we have to kill him.’”
— From the diary of Donia Rosen, Polish, who was twelve when she hid in the forest after the murder of her family
Don’t They Know the World Stopped Breathing?
And once,
there was a garden,
and a child
and a tree.
And once,
there was a father,
and a mother,
and a dog.
And once,
there was a house,
and a sister,
and a grandma.
And once,
there was a life.
—Anonymous
Donia Rosen survived and immigrated to Israel. In
Forest, My Friend,
she wrote:
“Words fail me, but I must write, I must. I ask you not to forget the deceased. … to build a memorial in our names, a monument reaching up to the heavens, that the entire world might see. Not a monument of marble or stone, but one of good deeds, for I believe with full and perfect faith that only such a monument can promise you and your children a better future.”
In 1940, Sala Garncarz, a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl who lived with her family in Sosnowiec, near Krakow, volunteered to take her sister Raizel’s place when the Nazis ordered her to report to a labor camp for what was to have been a six-week period. The weeks stretched into five years that she spent in seven different camps in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The letters she exchanged with friends and family members became Sala’s lifeline. She collected and saved more than three hundred of these cards and letters, which were on exhibition at the New York Public Library through June 2006. After liberation Sala married American GI Sidney Kirschner and raised a family. The library has published
Letters to Sala,
a companion book to
Letters to Sala: A Young Woman’s Life in Nazi Slave Labor Camps.
The companion book was written by Sala Garncarz’s daughter, Ann Kirschner.
In her book
From Thessaloniki to Auschwitz and Back,
Erika Amariglio from Salonika wrote: “It was pitch dark and huge spotlights pierced the darkness, blinding us.
‘Steigt schnell aus!’
[Climb out at once!], they were blinding us.
‘Schnell! Schnell!’
[Faster! Faster!]—but nobody understood. Stunned by the long journey, stiff, hungry, frightened, desperate, everyone tried to jump out of the railroad cars….
“The cold was terrible, it froze our faces, hands, and feet. We were chilled to the bone. Mothers held their babies tightly in their arms, and the older children clung to their skirts.
“Father, confused and frightened like the rest of us, pushed us to one side. … The Germans shouted out orders: ‘All the children, the elderly, the ill, and the women go to this side.’ That side? There were trucks waiting there. They stopped my father, who was about to push us toward the crowds going to the trucks. The SS-man asked him, ‘Are you and your wife the ones who speak German?’ ‘Yes,’ answered father and added, ‘My children also speak very good German!’
“The SS-man sized us up and asked sullenly, ‘How old are they?’ This time father made us two or three years older. … ‘Wait here until I come back,’ the SS-man told us. People continued to get into the trucks, which, as soon as they were full, drove off. Where were they going? We had no idea!
“How many tragic scenes remain unforgettable in my mind. Mothers whose children were taken away—running after them so that they wouldn’t be separated. Old people calling to children who remained behind. They snatched a young woman’s baby by force and pushed her to the other side. Screams, sobs, farewells. And the smartly dressed SS-men shouting and raging in their midst.
“Suddenly all was silent. Nearly all the people were gone, only a few men and women remained. The SS-men formed them into columns, five abreast, men and women separated. They ordered them, to march:
‘Vorwärts! marsch! schneller! Los!’
[Forward! March! Faster! Get moving!] We heard them shouting until we lost sight of them.
“Only the four of us remained.… There was just us and some SS-men. The silence was overwhelming in the dark night. The spotlights that had turned night into day were switched off.”
Erika Amariglio and her mother survived various camps, and after the Holocaust they managed to find her brother and father, also survivors.
“Today I have seven grandchildren. … For my grandchildren and all the children of the world of any religion, I have written my testimony fifty years later so that they will be able to reply to anyone who dares to deny there was a Holocaust and so that they will always be on guard to make sure that there will never again be another Holocaust: NEVER AGAIN.”
A
DELE’S STORY:
“‘Are you my mother?’ I asked the stranger that tried to hug and kiss me. In 1945, at the age of nine, I was a suspicious and mistrustful survivor of three concentration camps. When the woman came closer, I saw in her eyes the inexplicable mixture of sadness, fear, and love. I recognized those eyes. They belonged to my mother. Suddenly, I was flooded with memories of my sad childhood.
“I remembered how … we boarded the train to Auschwitz. We were saved when the German soldier could not find our names on the list and asked us to leave the train.
“I remembered how the Germans scheduled the resettlement of the men, and my father cut a hole in the ceiling of the barrack and hid for weeks in confined space, on top of the beams.
“I remembered how with trembling hands my mother buttoned my coat and pushed me out of the camp, for my escape to Switzerland. I was six years old at that time. I remembered and cried. But those were tears of joy. I felt like a child again. A normal child with my own mother.”
Yet this was not the end, but another beginning. One that created between mother and child a unique and often painful experience.
“I
always felt like my parents didn’t really want to tell me everything. And sometimes I would read things or look at some pictures from Auschwitz…. I couldn’t look for too long. Sometimes I would go and ask them about what happened. And I would wonder why didn’t they tell me before I asked. I felt like they were keeping things a secret from me.”
—Child of a survivor
A
n old Jewish woman pushed her daughter-in-law under the bed, saying: “You hide, I want to have grandchildren.” She walked out to face the Germans.
Eighteen months later a miracle happened. The formerly barren woman conceived, and entombed in a bunker, gave birth to a baby girl—and they all survived.
We can only imagine that survivors of the Holocaust carry core wounds that never heal. While many have turned their rage into activism and great success, many found that coming back from deliberate madness is something that can’t be completely understood by “outsiders.” When they did “come back,” married, and had children, how could they explain it? Should they explain it? How to relive the horror, the humiliation, to a child with no reference? How to mother—when one’s soul and trust in the world has been shattered?
As a teenager, I became friends with Lily, a new girl in the neighborhood, who was the child of survivors. She was, we believed, a distant cousin. I remember her parents—quiet, afraid. Her mother, in particular, seemed nervous, abrupt, even “unwelcoming.” I was deeply curious, and asked Lily about their experience. All she knew were two things:
First, that her parents escaped from the camps—and now they couldn’t even abide looking at a German shepherd, the dogs used
to find escapees. And the second, how her father and other camp survivors continued to support one male, an old man, who consistently said Hebrew prayers.
Beyond that, all I saw was the sadness—and loneliness.
I made a connection with my own grandmother and mother. Though they “got out” before the escalation of the Holocaust, they, too, left their families, ran in fear, and were detained in Danzig before getting passage to the United States. My grandmother rarely spoke about the details of their sacrifice or struggle—except for a few anecdotes about the old country, and mention of relatives as I pointed them out in scrap books. It was just too painful, and evoked too many memories of loss.
The horrors these survivors suffered have not only affected their lives but also the lives of their children. However, as with all human experience, some of these children, despite the pain and their own outrage over what their parents endured, have also made remarkable contributions.
Scholars who have studied children of survivors have written that many lived around secrets, partial communication, or silence. Even if the silences were motivated by protection, a lot of children were fearful and anxious, not truly “knowing.” In a sense, they too, I believe, felt like outsiders in their own homes.
Witnessing deeply painful feelings and behavior in our parents—without fully knowing what happened—can cause horrific and frightening feelings in a child. Fantasy and speculation about the experience can run amok. “What did my parents do? What did they resort to, in order to survive?” are common questions. And yet, these children were often reluctant to push their parents, feeling both ambivalent and fearful of evoking strong reactions of sadness or depression.
C
HILD OF
S
URVIVOR:
“I remember my mother telling me that she worked sorting dead people’s clothes, and that this was a good job because many people brought food to the camp, and also you could exchange the shoes … for food. But … from her
reaction I felt that she almost felt like it was a crime to have worked there. … She was able to survive because she had access to dead peoples’ things. I got sort of afraid to ask her more questions about it.”
Yet, these children wanted and needed to make sense of what happened to their parents and to the world. It was important to help them develop a personal identity, even if that included a profound sense of personal and social injustice.
C
HILD OF
S
URVIVOR (CRYING):
“When I first realized what my mother went through … the horror of it, the pain, the suffering she experienced, I felt guilty almost. It sort of evoked these maternal feelings in me for my own mother. Even though I wasn’t born yet I felt like I wished I could have protected her, shielded her. Also, I had this feeling of how unfair it was. She was only seventeen years old. I would look at pictures of her brother. He was only twelve years old and he was killed in Treblinka. I never could understand how another human being could do that. And it left me with this feeling of outrage.”
Some children took on the outrage of their parents, but were disappointed they (the parents) weren’t Simon Wiesenthals. Many took on the battle themselves, trying to right this horrific wrong, and some passed the need for retribution onto their own children and grandchildren.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression were higher among offspring of survivors during periods of severe stress. In 1996 Bruce Bower’s article “Trauma Syndrome Trans-verses Generations”
(Science News)
studied eighty Jewish adults who were born to Holocaust survivors and twenty Jewish adults whose parents had not faced Nazi persecution. Twenty-nine percent of the offspring of Holocaust survivors had experienced symptoms of depression and PTSD, as opposed to 0 percent of the control group.
Other studies have found that children of survivors evidenced problems with communication, identity conflicts, and suffer a higher frequency of separation anxiety and guilt.
Those who were children in the camps were often too traumatized, having lost their own parents, to parent their own children without passing along survivor guilt. Some withdrew from their children or deprived themselves to provide everything for them.
Yet … the reverse was also true. Data suggests that some survivors not only managed to resume their lives but were also more successful than other American-born Jews of comparable age. In these survivors, adaptability, initiative, tenacity, along with luck may have accounted for their later success (Dr. Ruth, for example), and these traits may also have been passed on to their children.
In My Grandmother’s Kitchen
by Jackie Ruben
I
am in my grandmother’s kitchen, in apartment 8B on Avenida del Libertador, Buenos Aires. It’s the late 1970s. I’m a child and I sit on that old blue table where my own mom once must have sat at my age to eat, as I will, a feast of “chicken paprikash” with “tarhonya” noodles …
“Mami, where are your parents?”
Something changes … Can my little child memories crystallize?
“They’re dead….” A whisper, “… they were killed….”
She sets her wooden spoon down and stares out the window, her left hand touching her cheek and covering her mouth, as I’ve often seen her do since that first memory, so many years ago.
“Were they killed with a sword?”
No answer… What’s happened here? I’ve never seen my grandmother cry … her bright green-gray eyes become water as I approach her… fearing whatever it is, what the shadow, the terrible thing is …
And she hugs me and whispers in my ear, “No, my
‘muggetcita,’
my little flower, no …”
Holocaust… The word that symbolized my family’s taboo subject. To me, it is a word that encompasses it all, yet will never be enough. It is a word that has followed me throughout my life. It is also the wound of my heart that will never heal. It is, in short, my family legacy—one that, I have sworn to myself, I will pass down to the generations — the most important lesson to teach my kids.
TRANGE AND
W
ONDERFUL
B
EDFELLOWS:
N
ON
-J
EWS
“W
hosoever preserves one life—it is as though he has preserved the entire world.”