You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (8 page)

The bond broke when you were ten. A doctor found cancer inside that good man, and made him comfortable until he died. He was only
fifty-nine years old. It was your first experience with death. You lost the one person who made you feel special. That must have felt like the end of your world. Little did you know that your intro to death would turn out to be your only normal loss. Your best death. The first and last innocent one.

I park the car and run—through the sliding doors, past the front desk, left at the fish tank, right after the gift shop, straight past the art gallery, the elevators, and your empty chair. Down the long hall, last door on the left, bed across from the bathroom, you.

Alone.

Are they fucking kidding me? You’re unconscious, plugged into oxygen, and
alone?

The room looks different—not as yellow as usual. Did they paint? Oh, I see why: The bright light over your bed is on, as if you’re a hospital patient. And there’s a big canister of oxygen on the floor. Everything else is the same as when you went to sleep. An unfurled roll of wild cherry Life Savers sits on your night table next to a plastic cup of water. A shadow of cherry pink from your last sip rings the straw.

Your world has shrunk to half of a room. Remember when we first came and you didn’t seem to belong at all? Everyone else seemed more diminished and addled. You needed to be here, of course—the guns, the pills—but after you moved in, you’d talk about leaving all the time. You wanted to tour your old life: go out for steaks, take a ride to the IHOP, come to my house to look at your summer shoes. You wanted David and your lady friend to join us. But whenever I tried to plan such an outing, you always said you felt too sick. Maybe you knew it would be too hard to come back if you let yourself leave. And the way you look right now, I’m pretty sure steaks are out of the question.

They couldn’t assign someone to sit with you until I came? That was part of the promise—that you wouldn’t die alone. Though I never
specified what time frame dying encompassed, this seems like a critical interlude. But maybe it’s not. Maybe you’re not really dying. Maybe they can tell that this is just an episode of some kind, no matter how nervous the doctor seemed. What do doctors know? Nurses are the ones who run the show.

You’re sleeping with a plastic mask over your nose and mouth. It’s attached to you with a green elastic strap that digs into your cheeks. You’re wearing an undershirt and you’re partially covered by a sheet and a blanket. I pull them up to warm your shoulders.

“I’m here now,” I say, dumping my stuff and pulling the chair close.

It looks like you can’t catch your breath—like you ran too fast for too long.

I reach under the sheet to take your hand. Your smooth white hip is bare, all of you from the waist down, naked. Why did they keep the shirt on you?

Your hand is warm and clammy. Your breaths are fast and sharp and shallow. They seem to take a lot of work.

I should have become a bat mitzvah during this month of this year. I was thirteen, and a member of the first generation of Jewish girls who were expected, rather than allowed, to step up to the ark. Boys, of course, have marked their thirteenth year with a bar mitzvah celebration of some type since around the sixteenth century. Even you had one, though it wasn’t the fancy ordeal it’s become in America. You simply reported to the synagogue on a specific Saturday morning in 1932 and repeated some Torah passages after the rabbi read them. Or so your memory tells you. I suspect that you knew your portion by heart.

This ritual bestows upon hormonally freaked-out teenagers the Jewish equivalent of adult responsibilities. After proving they’re capable of reading from the Torah, they are expected to obey all the commandments and to behave morally like a Jewish grown-up, whatever that means.

I did not become a bat mitzvah, or as we called them back then, bas mitzvahs. It was before the pronunciation authorities changed the way we speak Hebrew. The “s” ending, as in
bas
or
Shabbas
, was too reminiscent of the way European Jews said the words. European Jews, the thinking went, had let themselves get killed. Therefore, the European Jews’ way of pronouncing Hebrew words was wimpy. The “t” ending—
bat, Shabbat
—was Israeli. Israelis were tough. Israelis ended their words with hard consonants. Israelis would have killed back.

But however you want to pronounce it and however you want to say it—the casual and customary “had a bat mitzvah” versus the grammatically correct “became a bat mitzvah”—I didn’t. I am deep into my forties, but in the eyes of the Jewish community, I am still a girl.

Girls of the seventies had equal-with-the-boys ceremonies to mark their coming of age as Jewish adults. No longer scheduled on Friday nights or done without a Torah, this was the real thing. I guess I should have been proud to finally have such an opportunity, but I couldn’t handle it. I have always been terrible at foreign languages. I took five years of public school Spanish, plus two years in college before I could finally speak a few fluent sentences. And even then I had to be drunk to get the verbs right.

I started Hebrew school in fourth grade as most Reform Jewish kids do, but I seemed to be the only one who didn’t catch on. I was okay when we read aloud as a group; all it takes is some mumbling spiked with a few
ch, ch
mucus clears of the throat. But reading aloud by myself was a disaster. I always got it wrong, so the other kids knew I was the dope of the class. This, of course, was humiliating and gave me good reason to fight going to class.
Please, please, please, please, please don’t make me go
, I’d whine. They still made me go. Eventually, the teacher figured out that I knew nothing and suggested a tutor. This opened a series of negotiations between my parents and me. I agreed to work with the tutor if they
please, please, please
wouldn’t make me go back to Hebrew school. They demanded that I finish the first grade of Hebrew with the tutor, but they wouldn’t force me to continue. If I didn’t continue, I couldn’t have a bat mitzvah.

Wow, ten-year-old me thought. God
is
good.

I mean, I didn’t need the money. My parents paid for my food, shelter, clothing, and David Cassidy records, so why slog through what was clearly just a money-making enterprise? I don’t remember hearing an explanation about the important reasons to go through the ritual, but I was a visual learner and had watched my older brother become rich enough to buy his own TV after his multi-partied event. He seemed happy with the exchange—years of suffering for a TV—but no amount of money could inspire me to endure three more years of Hebrew school. I spent the second half of fourth grade meeting weekly at a card table in my family room with the tutor, a young guy with lanky arms and a lanky mustache who was also, improbably, the principal of our religious school. I hated those hours, but at least only one person was witnessing me as the biggest dope in the room. When the year ended, I was poor, but free.

My parents never made me feel bad about it. They were probably so exhausted from the Hebrew school battles that they felt more relief than disappointment. I was a lot of work for them. Ours was a household saturated with the unhappiness of two people who shouldn’t have married each other. I was the charcoal absorbing all that emotional venom. As a result, I became whiney, anxious, needy, and insecure. Hebrew school proved a great outlet for these charming traits.

But part of me wishes they’d forced me to get up on the altar in a lovely dress and recite a few paragraphs of Hebrew. It might have given me some much-needed confidence, and shortened the long list of reasons that I feel like a failed Jew.

I expected disapproval when I told you we’d gotten a puppy. I thought you’d think it was stupid, indulgent, one of those nuisances that Americans trouble themselves with.

Instead, I got reverie.

It turned out that you, like boys from all lands and eras, had had dogs to adore. Dogs you could hug your bad day into. Dogs whose fur hid tears. Dogs who cracked you up.

There was Lika, a soft, white mutt who wandered the streets at will. She swelled up one season, curled into a ball, and delivered puppies. Your parents let you keep one of them. You named him Aps.

“One day, we leave him in the house and go away. He jumps through the window and comes to us, miles away. Just shows up and starts barking.”

Humph. There were dogs. That’s so normal, so undramatic. I never think of the people in the sepia photos letting their dogs in and out of the house.

That was one of the good parts of your childhood. There were others, too. Okay, so you stood on the sidelines while the more-coordinated kids played soccer because you were, in your words, a
schlemiel
—a klutz. And you couldn’t play in the snow because you didn’t have warm-enough clothing. But when spring finally came, you rented bikes. Fifteen cents for fifteen minutes of real happiness, even if you did fall forward and grate your palms once in a while. On Sundays, you and your friends tramped to the woods for picnics sponsored by the Jewish youth organization. And every month, the local Yiddish theater company put on a show in your school building. You couldn’t afford a ticket, but nothing stopped you from creating your own balcony seat on a windowsill with a decent view of the stage. No such complimentary seating existed at the cinema, but a cousin had enough money for a ticket to the weekly Polish movie. You’d watch it through his eyes as he re-created the entire film for all the poor kids.

And your summers—your summers were paradise! It was the poor Polish equivalent of rich American summer camp. For ten weeks your whole family left the city and camped out near an orchard about fifteen miles away. You slept in tents, pooped in ditches, pranced around barefoot, and learned what it felt like to be full. You devoured eggs for breakfast, chicken for dinner, and bowls of milk and potatoes during lunch breaks. That’s right: lunch.

Between meals, you could eat as you worked. You and your siblings climbed trees to pluck fruit. When the bushels got fuller than the trees, your father would pack the harvest into sacks and drive it to Lodz, where merchants bought it, loaded it onto freight trains, and sold it to city folks for good money. Your father earned a percentage of the farmers’ profits. You sometimes went with him and earned a city bagel.

Farm life didn’t make your family rich. You still wore cheap, store-bought clothes that ripped before they got too small (tailor-stitched frocks were only for privileged people). Your parents still argued about money. But at least you got to be a normal, dog-owning kid for a little while.

I started writing imaginary letters to your mother a few years ago. She was the first one in charge of you and I am the last. She brought you into the world and I’m guiding you out. We are both mothers. If our fates had been reversed, I’d want to know what happened to my son.

I wish I’d met your best friend Mendel. I want to watch the film of you playing together every day of your childhood, wandering the streets, going to parties, riding bikes. You clicked as soon as you met as little skullcapped boys in religious school. He was tall, a few months younger than you, and lived a block away. Improbably, his family was even poorer than yours. With eight kids to feed, they couldn’t afford a luxury like public school.

“You had to buy the books, pencils, pens, and this was very expensive,” you said. “And you buy a Polish book to read, was two zlotys, two dollars. With this you could buy food for a whole day.”

It didn’t matter. You became inseparable. Could Mendel have been the reason the kids never teased you or made up mean nicknames because of your crossed eye? There was Shorty and Hunchback
in the gang, but you were always respected. Maybe it didn’t hurt to have a bad boy for protection.