You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (10 page)

Maybe it was being used to hard work that helped you to survive. You were already accustomed to long, hungry days on your feet by the time you became a forced laborer. You’d chosen a line of work that made you sweat.

“The thing is, I didn’t like to be a shoemaker and I didn’t like to be a tailor,” you told me. “I like to be like a bird, you know, outside. A bird that flies. I didn’t like to sit and hang down my head. A tailor always has his head down.”

Your older brother became a tailor, leaving the inheritance of the family business to you. At fifteen, you started working with your father as a cattle broker, though you must have apprenticed with him earlier than that. You had to do something after dropping out of school following fifth grade. Early every workday, you’d pull your wagon out from the lot behind the apartment building and walk it to the nearby stable. You’d hitch up the horses and ride down to the farms next to your father.

“You ask if they have a cow or calf to sell. Sometime they have, sometime they don’t have. Sometime you can buy something through the day and sometime you ride a few hours and buy nothing and come home with nothing.”

But there was no food or rest until you finished your farmboy-in-the-city chores. It was your job to milk the family cows, Black and White. It wasn’t easy because they were always moving around, threatening to swat you in the face with their tails or kick over the buckets of milk. You needed to sell that milk, just like you needed to sell the collected livestock at the monthly cattle market.

I’m not sure why, given this experience and your charms, you didn’t go into sales when you arrived in the United States. I suppose it’s hard to become a salesman when you don’t have anything of your own to sell. And when you have that accent and those invisible wounds. At least you continued to work with beef, corned though it was.

Lying here like this does not become you.

Come on, Aron, let’s see some action. Let’s have a day like the one last month, which was more like a hockey fight than a meal. Did you notice how crazy that was? Probably not. Fortunately, I have the play-by-play.

Lieb’s in the attack zone when we arrive.

“Pills!” he’s shouting. “I need the pills!”

He’s showing some aggressive stick handling as he drives the puck toward the goal. It’s four o’clock. The Tylenol and Ativan are in his sights.

“Where is she?” he yells, calling for Nurse Noreen.

All the seats are filled in the dining room tonight, folks. Rink rats in pink cardigans and support hose dot the stands. The players are a rough bunch—not a full set of teeth among them. Lieb is backed by right winger Alan, a man curled in on himself like a larva. He’s weak of body, as if he has a long-standing neurological disease, but sharp of mind, as if he’s not as old as the rest of the team.

Lieb takes a shot on goal.

“Gimme the pills!” he says.

He’s angling for a penalty. But Noreen skates in with the medication.

Do you believe in miracles?

Play continues. There’s a face-off at Lieb’s table. He sends my husband off sides so he can privately instruct me to bring $200 next time I come. Why does he suddenly need this cash? A bad bet? New brain bucket? No. He wants to take the home-ice advantage by giving the staff Christmas tips.

My husband returns. Menus appear. Tablemate Alan reads the offerings for the evening meal: navy bean soup, macaroni and cheese, stewed tomatoes.

“And orange sherbet,” he says, his nose almost touching the paper so he can read it. “That’s ice cream.”

Lieb and Alan stay in the neutral zone discussing why navy bean soup is called navy bean soup. Suddenly, Sherman approaches with a hip check. He comes from behind and taps Alan’s seat with his walker. He wants to sit with Lieb!

“Sherman!” screams Alan. “You don’t do that, Sherman! I’ll shoot you, Sherman!”

Now the gloves are off. Alan points his gnarled knuckle at Sherman, his hand becoming a pistol. He’s high-sticking! He’s cross-checking!

Noreen blows the whistle. Timeout!

An aide glides in to redirect Sherman to another table. He’s tall and possibly blind, a rookie player who meant no harm. Noreen soothes him.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

She’s managed to prevent a line brawl. Surely this roughing means a trip to the penalty box for Alan? But no—Noreen ignores him while he settles himself down with the defense. Lieb watches with admiration. What a turnaround: Alan turns out to be tonight’s power forward.

The navy bean soup arrives. Alan devours his. Aron takes a few tentative slurps, then pushes the bowl away.

“It’s bitter,” he says.

Slap shot.

You don’t celebrate this holiday, at least not outwardly. There are services in your building, of course, and traditional meals before and after the hours of praying, but you refuse to attend. You’ve only stepped into a synagogue twice since I’ve known you, both times for me. Once it wasn’t even a religious occasion—just a bad oldies concert that we both rolled our eyes through.

This is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. It’s the day when we stand up in temple—for a really long time, particularly for those of us wearing high heels—and confess our sins for the year, before apologizing in person to those we’ve really screwed over. Who knows how that turns out for people, but according to my
Gates of Repentance
prayer book, God forgives us for everything, albeit with a wink.

“That’s okay,” God says, cuffing us on the shoulder. “You tried. I’ll forgive you again next year, too.” She knows we’re screw-ups. She knows I can’t stop gossiping.

We’re also supposed to fast for twenty-four hours on this holiest of holy days. Among many Jews who, like me, follow the wobbly rules of Reform Judaism—which is a big buffet of Jewishness from which you can take a giant scoop of fun holidays like Purim, but leave the tray of kosher untouched—there’s always confusion around this ritual. Apparently, the authorities are fuzzy on it, too, so they give multiple explanations:

1. We starve for a day to pay for our sins.
   
2. We starve for a day to remember those who starve all the time.
   
3. We starve for a day to remind ourselves that we possess self-control, which can be dredged up when we’re faced with forbidden temptations throughout the year.
   
4. We starve for a day because we’re supposed to focus on praying, not eating.
   

“For Pete’s sake,” God says. “Can you shut your mouth for one day and pay attention to the book?”

Umm, no. All I could ever think about when I fasted was food. Have you ever watched TV while fasting, God? It’s incredible how many cake-mix commercials run in an afternoon.

I fasted all the time when I was a kid. It was expected, and I was a pleaser who always did what was expected. I never fast anymore. The Jews have suffered enough, I tell people if they ask.

You must have fasted when you were a kid.

You grew up religious, like everyone in Zychlin. It wasn’t some modern, secular place like Munich, where the Jews tried to blend. Everyone in your village followed the Orthodox rules, meaning no work on Sabbath and every obscure holiday. You wore hats indoors and out, kept kosher, and rushed home before sunset each Friday to start resting, as God had. You once told me that an old man banged on the windows at precisely eighteen minutes before sundown to let the women know it was time to light the candles. But how could he bang on everyone’s window at the same time? You must have remembered this wrong. Maybe he banged on a pot within earshot of everyone’s window.

You’re not so into Judaism anymore. The Nazis wrecked it for you.

“They took womens that were pregnant and babies and killed them all. That’s why I won’t go to synagogue.”

I don’t get the connection. Did such horrors happen
in
the synagogue? Or do you think that if the mothers hadn’t identified themselves as Jews by going to synagogue they would have lived?

Of course, I asked you to explain. Of course, you wouldn’t. There is so much I can never know. But you gave similar reasons for shunning Judaism at home, too.

“I used to believe all of it,” you said. “I wouldn’t eat if I wasn’t wearing a hat. You could get killed! But then the Germans come on Rosh Hashanah and make the rabbi wear his
tallis
and pick up garbage and cut off half his beard. I don’t believe it anymore.”

I’d never heard this story from you, but it was familiar from photographs and documentaries: The rabbi with the long beard gets shaved and tortured by the men in the black boots, often on a Jewish
holiday. I’d seen it several times, but often wondered if it really happened that often or if the depictions were reprints of one event. But I know you haven’t been watching Holocaust films or flipping through commemorative books, so it’s clearly one of your own memories. Hurting rabbis must have been a common way for the Nazis to introduce themselves to a village. Humiliate the most sacred member of the community—what a sinisterly effective way to show who’s boss.

I don’t believe in most Jewish customs anymore, either, but I still practice some of them. I host a Break the Fast meal every Yom Kippur. It was a tradition that I’d inherited from cousins after they moved to a condo that didn’t fit the crowd, and we moved to a house that did. All the relatives from my father’s side of the family show up to end their day of starvation with smoked fish, bagels, and sweet pastries. You’ll come to my house for Thanksgiving and even for the Jewish New Year, but not for this.

“It’s dark,” you said the first time I asked. “I don’t like to drive in the dark.”

“I’ll pick you up.”

“Ach, no. There’s wrestling on.”

“Wrestling? You’re gonna watch wrestling on a holiday?”

“It’s Goldberg.”

You are such an ambivalent Jew. You’ve tossed the practice of Judaism, yet you embrace a specific professional wrestler simply because he’s Jewish. Even now, when you’ve given up TV so there’s no wrestling excuse, you still don’t observe Yom Kippur. Then again, what on God’s blood-splattered earth would you have to atone for?

The Lady at the Party was supposed to fix everything. I’d met her before but didn’t learn until later that she was well placed in several prominent Jewish organizations. All I knew as I spoke to her over cocktails was that she was a good listener when I needed to talk to someone about the trouble I was having trying to keep you
safe. I told her about the letter I’d sent to the nursing home, asking them to take you in, and the cold requests for paperwork I received in response.

“That’s ridiculous!” she said. “It would be a
shanda
on the Jewish community if we don’t help this man.”

A
shanda—
the Yiddish word for shame. Exactly what I’d been thinking.

She mentioned that she knew the people who ran the nursing home and that I should call her if I needed help communicating with them.

It was such a nice feeling to believe someone in power had my back. A dangerous feeling, too, because it raised my expectations. If she thought you deserved special treatment, then I was justified in thinking so, too. She gave me permission to hope, which led to all the blunders that followed.

The nursing home smelled like shit.

As usual, you wanted to spend the visit sitting on your plastic chair by the nurses’ station. You’d been feeling sick and complaining about all your ailments again, so you hadn’t left the floor in a while. They’d been adding and subtracting all kinds of drugs, but you still just sat in that chair and fell asleep. I almost always tried to get you to take a walk; then you refused, and I backed down. But that day I matched your stubbornness. We were either relocating or saying good-bye. Though they keep the place extremely clean, the hallway still usually has that unpleasant nursing home odor of decaying human diluted with cloying cleaning products, which I’ve learned to avoid by breathing through my mouth as soon as I enter the building. But even that strategy wasn’t working. Someone’s soiled bedding must have been in a hamper outside one of the rooms.

I got you to sit in the area by the elevators. There’s a padded glider there, the kind I nursed my kids on, and it’s much more comfortable
than the vinyl chairs. Plus, there are always people coming and going, so it’s interesting.

You seemed to adjust to the new scene, so I pushed it.

“Let’s go to the gift shop.”

You used to go every day, and you’d become friendly with the women who run it, but you hadn’t been in a couple of weeks. I was craving peanut M&Ms. Surprisingly, you agreed to this part of the field trip, too. It’s only about fifty winding yards from your room, but this was major progress. You treated me to the M&Ms, then bought fourteen candy bars for bribes. You give candy bars to the aides who make your bed and the nurse who helps you shave and God knows who else. I’ve told you that people will help you without being bribed because it’s their job, and because they actually like you, but you don’t stop. I guess it’s an old Birkenau habit. You must have done a lot of figurative palm greasing to survive.

While I was walking around the gift shop pointing out all the things you could get me for my birthday if you were so inclined (old-lady pins, or tissue-box covers needlepointed with Hebrew letters, for example), I saw that you were getting testy with the clerk. You claimed she had given you the wrong change. I automatically assumed she was right. Why do we do this to old people—just assume you’re idiots? But you’re always right when it comes to numbers. I’ve seen you add multi-digit numbers and figure percentages in your head. I realized you were right about the change before the clerk did, but you were getting very frustrated. So, naturally, you snapped at me. You can be such a baby. But I get it—I’m the safe one. My kids snap at me, too, when they’re angry at someone else. When she finally corrected the error and you calmed down, you bought a hot chocolate, which she doctored with six sugars and five tiny cartons of cream.