Born Survivors (46 page)

Baby Mark with Sala, Rachel and Ester 1946

Inured to grief, and determined to get on with her life and create a better future for her child, Rachel remained in Munich for four more years. Her son Mark went to school and his first language became German. His mother and aunts spoke Polish only when they didn’t want him to understand. On 19 March 1946, Rachel married again. Sol Orviesky (later shortened to Olsky) was a talented Jewish jeweller she’d known since before the war. He would, she knew, be a good father to her son although for years, she felt guilty at remarrying so soon and sometimes wondered what would happen if Monik suddenly appeared on her doorstep. ‘I married again because it was very hard for a woman and a child who needs a father,’ she said.

Rachel and Mark 1949

Sol, who was forty and from a strict Orthodox family in Pabianice, had been married with a son before the war. A German soldier wrenched his baby from his arms during a round-up and for the rest of his life he blamed himself for not putting up more resistance. Apart from a nephew Henrike, and two brothers who’d fled
to America, he lost every member of his family, including his wife and child, and spent the war in a labour camp processing the belongings of the dead. He weighed less than seventy pounds at liberation, lost all his teeth in his forties, and suffered from serious health problems as a consequence.

It was Sol who helped keep the Abramaczyk sisters and his own family solvent after the war. Working with a German chemist who developed a process for converting European gold bullion into the lower American standard of karat purity, he won a contract to process gold being transferred abroad from German banks. Rachel and her sisters helped run the business, and the Americans seemed happier to do business with Holocaust survivors than with the Germans. They always paid in dollars, as Deutschmarks were virtually worthless, so there was a reasonable living to be made as the city was painstakingly rebuilt around them. They even took in and helped survivors from Pabianice.

Three years after Rachel and Sol were married and as soon as it became legal for them to move to the newly created state of Israel, Rachel – who’d been a Zionist since she was a teenager – persuaded her new husband that they should live there. The family caught the first ship out of Marseille, France, and settled in Petach Tivka near Tel Aviv, where they remained for ten years. Unable to make a living there as a jeweller and gold trader, Sol gave up his trade and worked as a manual labourer in a steel factory.

During the war, Rachel had lost all the photographs of her wedding and of her dead husband Monik. But in Israel she came across an ex-girlfriend of his who had one small picture of him from his student days, and she persuaded the woman to part with it. The photograph remained in her possession all her life and was eventually passed on to her son.

Having vowed to protect Mark until her dying day, Rachel refused to have a second child with Sol in case he favoured it over her miracle baby. Then, although they didn’t speak any English, she moved the family to live in America in 1958 to avoid Mark being
conscripted into the Israeli Army. Sol went back into the jewellery and watchmaking business but suffered a series of heart attacks and died in 1967, aged sixty-one. Rachel worked ‘like a dog’ to keep their business going and ensure that her son wanted for nothing.

In Munich, her little sister Ester had married Abe Freeman, a man from Pabianice who’d been friends with their brother Berek. Abe had spent almost four years in Auschwitz and bore a tattoo. The couple moved to Nashville, Tennessee, after a Jewish aid organisation at a trade fair in Munich assured them that it ‘wasn’t far at all’ from New York. When they arrived there they discovered that Nashville was ‘off the map’, but they were happy and successful there and remained in the country of her liberators for the rest of their lives. They had two daughters, Shirley and Faye, and five grandchildren. Ester died in 2003.

Sala had first met her future husband Henrike (Henry) when they were living in the Pabianice ghetto. He was the nephew of Sol Olsky, Rachel’s second husband. Sala and Henry were also together in Łódź, but from Auschwitz he had been sent to Mauthausen and on to the tunnels of its satellite camp Ebensee, which had one of the highest death rates of any concentration camp. After the war, she looked for him everywhere. ‘I always knew we would be together … He came back and after eight few weeks he said, “Will you marry me?” and I said, “Yes,” and we had sixty-four wonderful years.’ Henry, who had also nearly died of typhus, had an uncle in America who promised to vouch for them, so the couple went to night school in Munich to learn English before moving to New York and then on to Chicago. Later, they relocated to Nashville to be near Ester and Abe. Sala changed her name to the more American Sally; she and Henry had two daughters, Ruth and Deborah, who had three children of their own.

Bala remained in Sweden, married a Polish Jew named Jakob Feder and had two sons, David and Mikael, who between them had four children. She died of breast cancer in 1986 and never spoke of her wartime experiences to her sons, who emigrated to Israel after her death.

Berek left Sweden in 1956 and moved to the United States, where he worked in catering in San Francisco, remaining in the city until his death. He married Holocaust survivor Pola Nirenberg and had two children, Leif and Steven, the latter of whom is a neurosurgeon in Nashville and has four children. Berek first met Rachel’s ‘miracle’ baby when Mark was sixteen and the two became best friends. Between them, the children of the Abramcyzk family who survived the war had nine children and twenty grandchildren. It was, they said, their ‘happy ending’.

As with so many other survivors, the siblings tried to blot out all memories of their barbarous history and rarely spoke about them, because it was ‘too hard’. In the days when talking therapies were relatively new, some of those who lived through the Holocaust suffered from tremendous guilt that they had survived when so many had died. Others sought oblivion through work or alcohol, family or suicide. As survivor Esther Bauer put it, ‘The first twenty years we couldn’t talk about it. For the next twenty years no one wanted to hear about it. Only in the next twenty years did people start asking questions.’

Instead, each dealt privately with the experiences seared into the memory. They coped as best they could with the unwelcome flashbacks brought on by the triggers that were constantly lying in wait. It might be a jackhammer or a car backfiring; a high stone wall or a passing freight train; someone speaking German or the smell of singed hair; a random pile of clothes or the sound of dogs barking. One survivor broke down when his hairdresser produced electric clippers to trim his hair. Others developed paranoia about insects and blowflies. Some had panic attacks in crowded subway trains. All sense of proportion had shifted as the survivors tried to acclimatise themselves to a life without fear.

And yet, somehow they kept going – just as they had in the camps. Sala said, ‘It was enough that we each knew, and it was something we left behind us.’ It took a little persuading, but in August 2010 she accompanied her nephew Mark and other members of their family
to Louisville, Kentucky, for the final reunion of the remaining members of the 11th Armored Division Association, the ‘Thunderbolts’, whose men had liberated Mauthausen and who were now disbanding. Of the more than four hundred attendees there were eighty-one veterans, and a few survivors. After a moving ceremony at the Patton Museum, with young soldiers from Fort Knox on hand to pay tribute, a dinner dance was held at which Forties big-band music was played. Mark said it was all very emotional and that his aunt, who’d never previously attended any memorial event, was ‘deeply moved’. Having met a few of the veterans, Sally said afterwards, ‘The chance of living through that hell was just luck. We were the lucky ones. We made it back. There is nothing more to say.’

Her sister Rachel agreed. ‘It was like winning or losing a lottery,’ she once told her son. ‘We were at the mercy of people who could be kind one minute and unspeakably cruel the next. Some of those who survived prided themselves that they were smarter or stronger and that is how they made it, but there were plenty who died who were even smarter and stronger than they were. The only difference was luck.’

Rachel (left) with siblings Sala, Berek, Bala, and Ester in Israel, 1980s

In spite of her protestations that she had put their experiences behind her, Rachel’s hair turned white in her thirties and she lost almost all of her teeth. Her dentist told her that her growing foetus had commandeered all the calcium in her body and had then taken what was left in her breast milk. The passage of years never extinguished her memories and Rachel was an insomniac for most of her life, as was Sol. Mark would hear them crying out or walking around the house on what were, for them, dark nights of the soul.

He knew where he’d been born from ‘the time I started speaking’, but – surrounded as he was in Israel by the children of other Holocaust survivors – his entry into the world seemed relatively normal. His parents refused to own anything German or drive a German car. Perhaps unsurprisingly, whenever people asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up Mark would reply: ‘Kill as many Germans as I can!’ Rachel would scold him and say, ‘We lost everything and everyone. If we lose our humanity then we will lose the one thing we didn’t have to lose.’ Only in the final years of her life did she admit that the generation responsible for what had happened in Europe was no longer alive.

Whenever Mark asked her about her experiences she would say, ‘There is nothing to learn. It was horrible. The main thing to learn is to protect yourself. If it looks like it’s time to leave, then leave.’ Then she would get upset and tell him, ‘You cannot possibly imagine how bad it was, so it is pointless to try.’ A few weeks later, she’d berate him, ‘Why do you never ask me about what happened in the war?’ She never went back to visit any of the ghettos and camps, or KZ Freiberg, never watched any movies or read books about the Holocaust – apart from
Schindler’s List
, which she declared ‘wasn’t bad’.

Mark, who suffers from multiple allergies including asthma and hay fever, didn’t know that Sol wasn’t his real father until he came across his birth certificate when he was fourteen years old, but his mother and he never really discussed it. ‘Something kicked in with my mother when I was born, she was going to protect me no matter
what … I just assumed my father had died in the war.’ Although his mother became ‘driven’, an ‘unrelenting workaholic’ who pushed him to get an education and make something of himself, he said Sol was ‘a fantastic father’, and both were very proud when he became a respected emergency doctor. Mark and his wife Mary, a Gentile, married in 1969. They have four children and four grandchildren and divide their time in Wisconsin and Arizona.

Like Anka and a lot of women of their generation, Rachel was a great fan of
Gone with the Wind
(a book she’d loved in Poland), and after the war she often quoted Scarlett O’Hara’s cry,
As God is my witness, they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again
. She was determined that she would never again be put in a position where she wasn’t
in control or couldn’t feed her family. She especially made sure that the two men in her life never went hungry and insisted on doing all the cooking and chores even after she had finished a fourteen-hour shift, because that was her ‘prerogative’.