Art of a Jewish Woman (17 page)

Perhaps Barry smiled more because my parents were more relaxed with their second child; perhaps it was because the outcome of the war in favor of the Allies seemed more and more likely by then, unlike at my birth when the
Post Dispatch
headlined, “Decision Is Won, Say Nazis.”

Felice didn’t want to talk out loud about the war or what was happening in Poland during those years, even though there had been no news about her mother and father and brother since Szczuczyn was overrun in 1941, when I was born. She said to me fifty years later, “These were things I didn’t want you to know about. I didn’t want to upset you. I couldn’t speak to you about my predicament, my missing my parents. I just couldn’t dare touch my deep pain and tell my innocent children about it. I feared the worst. I was paralyzed by fear.” Nonetheless, she couldn’t hide all her tears and sadness from me when I was small. I saw the tragic expressions that overcame her face at odd moments. It was the mystery I grew up with.

Nor did my father help me understand it. He was circumspect about mentioning emotionally intense subjects; he left them for my mother. He also traveled a lot for most of the 1940s because, like many doctors, he had an army commission to work in the Veterans Administration hospital system. For a week every month, he donned a khaki uniform with lieutenant insignia and traveled to Fort Leonard Wood and the sites of other military and veterans’ hospitals in the South and Midwest to consult and set up cardiology units.

Finally my grandfather’s arrival and his story of what happened, told to me by my mother in bits and pieces, began to shed light on the mystery of her face.

Moshe Ozerovicz Comes to St. Louis

After Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, Moshe was one of 12 million displaced, uprooted, and homeless people in Europe. The Allies established the International Refugee Organization, which created many displaced persons camps to help nourish back to health and restart the lives of the war’s survivors. A Chicago newspaper report from a displaced persons center near Munich, Germany set in motion the next chapter in Felice’s life.

An intern working with Edward saw the story because he happened to be from Chicago and his parents sent him the hometown newspaper. He caught sight of the word
cardiologist
in an article filed by a Washington, DC reporter interviewing refugees in a camp near Munich. In the article, the reporter described a slight, dignified, middle-aged man named Moshe Ozerovicz who had two daughters in Palestine and one daughter in America, in St. Louis, Missouri. The reporter wrote that Mr. Ozerovicz, who was working as a translator at the center, told him that he was deported from Szczuczyn by the Russians in 1940 into Russia. With the end of the war, he had traveled from Siberia through Russia and across Poland before making contact with the refugee organization, which brought him to Munich.

The article concluded, “Mr. Ozerovicz needs news of his family and would like to be reunited with his daughter in America. He doesn’t know where St. Louis is and he doesn’t know his daughter’s address or married name in America. All he knows is that she is married to a heart specialist. All of his personal papers have been lost.” The resident physician reading the article was a student of Edward’s, and he knew that Dr. Massie had a wife from Poland. He gave the article to Edward, who brought it home.

Several weeks later, in the Spring of 1946, Moshe flew into Lambert St. Louis Airport on a Red Cross charter flight. We stood at a chain link fence on the tarmac outside the terminal building in bright sun that felt exactly the right temperature. The fence was very low, because I could almost see over it, or maybe I was on my father’s shoulders. People started coming down the steps from the plane, and suddenly my mother darted through a gate and ran to her father, and they put their arms around each other.

Then my childhood memory fades because of the language barrier. My grandfather knew no English; my father and I had no way to communicate with him, nor my grandfather with us. My mother’s life was still mostly impenetrable. I was an outsider to the intimacy and quiet conversations my mother and grandfather shared. They were not literally trying to keep a family secret from me, because if I had known what questions to ask, the adults probably would have told me a lot—at least enough to help me understand her past. On the other hand, my mother was still trying to spare me from the Holocaust, so whatever she might have said if I had known what questions to ask would have been selective and sanitized.

Twenty-two years later I finally asked my mother to tell me all she knew about what happened to her family. I was twenty-seven years old, and it was in 1968 during my first year of psychiatric residency at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. A visiting professor from Israel was teaching us a course on family dynamics and family histories and asked our group to tell our own family histories. My story to the class, which was my family’s story, was replete with geography—all the places family members had migrated from and to. I included my own peregrinations from St. Louis to Boston for college, back to St. Louis for medical school, then to New York for residency. It was laced with travels in the American West, Peru, Mexico, and Israel. But there were no emotions connected with my narrative; it was strangely empty of feelings. There was no feeling about the internal migration my family’s and my emotions had taken.

The professor picked this up and said to me afterward, “You are a survivor of the Holocaust.” I was skeptical; he had a concentration camp number tattooed on his wrist, and I thought he was over-generalizing because of the trauma
he
had experienced. Nonetheless his words made me think. In St. Louis on my next vacation I asked my mother to tell me what her father had told her when he arrived in St. Louis.

Felice began, “At the airport he kept saying to me, ‘Fegele, Fegele,’ calling me his little bird over and over again. Tears were running down our faces.” It was the only time she’d seen her father cry. Her face clouded with memory and tears formed in sympathy with her father’s pain. “For three days he poured it out to me nonstop except for naps. He told her me what had happened to him and what he had found out about Mother and Berci.”

Felice grew stalwart again. “First the Germans came in 1939. Then they pulled back and the Russians occupied our village. They began to deport Poles and Jews who they thought could do something they needed done, people they needed. Also anybody that didn’t fit in with the Bolshevik Revolution—the rich, the big names, the intellectuals—they deported to God knows where. In 1940 they got my father and sent him to Smolensk, which is in Russia on the road to Moscow. It wasn’t too bad, he said. It was a large town with an agrarian university, and they wanted him to teach courses on agronomics.

“My mother had joined Berci in Bialystock, where he was in gymnasium. They had rented a room in a house. My father said he was looking for a small apartment to bring Bela and Berci to join him. Then the war started in 1941. Very quickly the Germans recaptured our region and started their Blitzkrieg toward Moscow.

“Smolensk was quickly overrun. Your grandfather hid in the forest. For three nights he crawled on his belly, with many others like him, to get as far away from the fighting as possible. There were German airplanes throwing down bombs from above, and the idea was to get away from the planes.

“Finally your grandfather said that he reached a railroad line and stopped a Russian train going east with wounded soldiers. They let him and the others get on. He made himself known to the Russian authorities, and this time they shipped him to Siberia to Kuybyshev, an agricultural city where there were many grain elevators. They made him a manager of the elevators because that was similar to what he had done in Poland, and the Russian men were at the front. It was difficult work. Every day he had to transfer grain, in burlap sacks, from the elevators to trains and trucks that were taking it to the front to support the war effort. In fact, most of the workers were strong Russian women, because almost all the men had been sent to the army.

“The winters were terrible. It was freezing for days at a time, and there was not enough heat, but my father was fortunate. He made friends with the stationmaster, who had a little cabin with a stove where he could warm up. They didn’t give anybody enough rations, even though all day long they were working with grain. Since everybody was starving, they knew they had to steal grain and make bread with it or add it to their meals. Many of the women also had children to feed. But they couldn’t steal too much, or they would be found out and sanctioned or shot. The guards said that stealing grain was stealing from the war effort, from Mother Russia. Your grandfather was the one in charge of keeping the records, and it became possible for him to let people fill their pockets with grain at the end of each day. This is how they were able to stay alive.”

When the war ended, his friend the station master gave Moshe enough money to take the train back to Poland, and he went to Bialystock to try to find out what had happened to Bella and Berci. He didn’t go to Szczuczyn because people told him it was empty—that there was not a single Jew there, they had all been killed or taken away. He couldn’t face it. When he came to Bialystock it too was devastated with destruction, almost empty. Of approximately 100,000 people before the war, half were Jewish, and they were all gone. The Nazis liquidated the Bialystock ghetto in 1943.”

Felice made a bitter spitting gesture with her mouth. Then she laughed, picked up the tempo and said, “Truth is better than fiction. You could make a movie of Papa’s odyssey that would be better than any novel. In Szczuczyn my father had a man named Moshe Faberovicz who was his competitor in crop exporting and also owned the mill where the grain was ground by two horses turning the wheel. Your grandfather didn’t like Faberovicz much. He had intimated that his business dealings were shady or couldn’t be relied on. Suddenly my father ran into Faberovicz as they were both stumbling in the ruins of Bialystock. He too had come back looking for his family, or at least for news of them.

“Papa saw a man who looked familiar, but he was bent over and looked much older than he should have. They were alone on the street except for the rats. When they got close, your grandfather saw that the man was Faberovicz. The last time he had seen him they were not on speaking terms, but Papa said they threw themselves into each other’s arms for a long time, feeling as if they were alone in the world.

“This was the human spirit. It enabled man to adapt to his circumstances; it gave him the strength to overcome hatred, cruelty and bestiality.

“They found something to sit on and talked. Papa said he needed news of Bela, and Faberovicz said it is a waste of time. She was dead. She went with his family to the gas chambers in Treblinka. They took them a long time ago. Papa cried, but not too much because he had already given her up for dead. That’s how they talked on the rat-infested street.

“Faberovicz said he and his wife survived by giving away everything they had to Poles to hide him. Now he wanted to go to Palestine but didn’t know how to get there because Bialystock was occupied by the Russian army, and they couldn’t help him. The British were not letting anybody go to Palestine. He had no idea what happened to Berci.”

Because Moshe had a daughter in America, the relief workers in Bialystock gave him money to go to the refugee center in the American Zone in Munich. It was in a large industrial building with lines of people from all over Poland and Russia. It was there that he met the reporter from the United States, and they were able to speak in German.

“Of all the people standing in line, the reporter picks out my father. Maybe it was the upright way he carried himself; maybe it was his deep blue eyes and his sandy hair.

“The reporter took him to a canteen for lunch. After he was finished asking him questions, he offered him $20. My father said he didn’t need it. What he needed was something much bigger—a way to make contact with his family. The reporter promised to do what he could.”

From Munich, they sent Moshe to the nearby Landsberg displaced persons camp, where because of his languages he became a kind of an arbitrator helping settle land disputes of refugees coming to claim property. Edward contacted the reporter, and they were able to reach Moshe in Landsberg. Then followed communication with the Red Cross and Felice and her father started exchanging letters and making plans.

The first thing Moshe wanted was for his daughter to send him a package of Czech beer and sausage. She wrote to him that they didn’t have Czech beer and sausage in St. Louis, but they had many other good things.

Felice said, “Before he went to Landsberg, he needed to get a furuncle—a boil on his neck—treated. They told him it was from scurvy caused by the fact that he didn’t get enough food to eat during the war. Because he was still looking for Berci, he decided to detour through Lodz, where the Russians had set up a big military hospital. At the train stations you had to be careful because the Polish teenage boys were looking to torment Jews; if they saw black hair and beards they would come up from behind and pull the hair as if too yank it out by the roots. But my father wore a Russian suit, was fair-haired, and didn’t have long hair, so they must have thought he was Russian. He witnessed them tormenting people and said it was enough to take his heart out.”

Felice asked her father to go on and tell her what happened to Berci. He wanted to avoid it. It was too hard. He tried to cover his face. Then he went on, “At the clinic a young nurse asked me for my name. I said, ‘I am Moses Mayorovicz Ozerovicz, Mayor Ozerovicz.’ She froze on the spot as if struck dumb. She opened her uniform collar to reveal a locket with a thin golden chain. Inside the locket was a picture of Berci.”

“Papa turned away. He didn’t want me to see his tears,” Felice said. “Imagine the chance of his first meeting his competitor in Bialystock, then meeting Berci’s girlfriend.”

My mother said that hearing the extraordinary stories of near-impossible coincidence made her shake. The nurse told Moshe that she and Berci were going to be married. They were both students in Bialystock. When the Nazis got hold of the city Berci joined the Resistance in the forest and the girl joined the Russians as a nurse. A friend sent word to her that Berci survived until the last months of the war when the Nazis caught him and hung him. If he had lived for three more months, they would have gotten married and gone to Russia, where she had been born, to live.