Clara's War (31 page)

LIFE GOES ON

September 1944 to present

T
oday, I'm an 81-year-old woman, living in quiet, leafy, suburban New Jersey. I have a wonderful husband, Sol, and two great adult boys, Philip and Eli and five grandchildren, Micki, Tracy, Brian, Jamie and Mindy. How I wish Mania could have met them. I still miss my sister so much. Not a day goes by that I don't think of her. I wonder what kind of person she would have become, had she only had the chance.

I often look at the photographs, the only thing of value left from the war. The school pictures of my sister and me in our sailorsuit uniforms. Mama and Mania in the Carpathians with tall pines and brisk clouds moving in the background. Mania, Zygush, Zosia and me, little twigs of children trying not to squint in the sun. Aunt Giza in full stage make-up and bright lighting with raccoon eyes from too much kohl. The engagement portraits of Uchka and Hersch Leib, looking like twins. My grandparents looking so severe in their black clothes, so unlike the boisterous couple I remember, laughing often and always talking.

And my few pictures of the Becks. Julia with a smile trying to emerge from her lips. Mr Beck just a few years after the war with his hair turned grey and looking a generation older. Lola swaggering down a street in a Parisian hat. And Ala at 16, just
before the war, a smile on the face that charmed dozens of Nazis and saved our life countless times. It was easy to see why they all fell in love with her. Anyone looking at these pictures who had no knowledge of the Holocaust and the fate of most of them could only draw one conclusion. What a lovely, happy family. There are over 30 of us in the pictures.

There were over 50 of us in the immediate Schwarz/Reizfeld clan. After the war, including Rosa and Manek, who survived in Aktyubinsk, there were eight of us. At a recent wedding in Tel Aviv, the eight had multiplied to over 60. When I think of the Holocaust, I don't think of 6 million lost, I think of the 50 million who never had a chance to be born.

In retrospect, and in rereading my diary, the fact that the eight of my family survived at all seems like a miracle, much more even than it had while I was living through it. There was no logical reason for our survival. It wasn't will alone that had saved us. How many who had had the same had perished? We had been lucky, of course, but it was more than that. How many had been saved time and again by luck, only to perish in the end? You only need to be unlucky one time. When I think of the one thing that we had, and the others didn't, it was the Becks. Everything I have learned about love, honour and courage, I learned from them. After all that they did for us in the bunker, I know that nothing in life is impossible. When I left that bunker over 60 years ago, I felt that my life was no longer mine alone. I knew I would have to lead a life worthy of having been saved.

 

The war ended on 8 May 1945. The Becks had left for southern Poland a month earlier. The Ukrainians had made sure that the Poles would have no future in Zolkiew, and the Russians
were doing nothing to defend them. The Becks had to leave before they were murdered. As soon as the travel ban was lifted, they left on the first train out of town. We all went to the train station to say goodbye. For more than 28 months we had seen each other every day. They had been our lifeline and had become our family. It felt like a part of ourselves was leaving with them, but we knew they had to go. The Polish government had promised them a beautiful farm, which had belonged to one of the six million who had died in the war. We prayed that they would be safe there. How do you say goodbye to someone to whom you owe absolutely everything? I told them how very much I loved them. How much they meant to me. That whatever I would accomplish in my life would be in their honour and in their name. But it would never be enough to repay them.

Over the course of the winter, we knew there was nothing left for us in Zolkiew. The town we loved existed now only as a communal memory. There was no Jewish community left. The Ukrainians were still as anti-Semitic as before. We couldn't practise our religion and were barely making a living. We decided to leave Zolkiew and join Beck. The Patrontasches and the Melmans were already there. As we left Zolkiew by train, in the same cattle cars that had once gone to Belzec and Auschwitz, the hairs on my neck stood on end. Nobody talked about it, but I knew we all were feeling the same thing. None of us looked back as the train left the station.

A letter had finally arrived from Ala. She was alive and living in Krakow. The first thing we did was to give Beck the letter. We hadn't dared send it by the unreliable post lest it get lost. Beck broke down in gratitude, as if we had saved his daughter.

We were all together, but the local economy was still in chaos. There were no opportunities for my father. We had to
move on after only a few months. We went to Liegnitz in Silesia, which bordered Germany. As a result of the Potsdam conference the town had been given back to Poland and 95 per cent of the town's population had been repatriated to Germany. My father was able to take over an oil-press business. The children and I were able to go back to school. After school, the other children would run and greet their mothers calling out, ‘Mama, Mama.' On the first day, Zosia ran out too, calling ‘Mama, Mama' to my mother. She had always called her auntie. But from that day onwards, it was official: my mother was hers too. There are certain moments that stay with a person for ever, and the first time that Zosia called my mother Mama is one of them.

The business was doing well and I was doing well in my studies. Life seemed normal, but we knew it wasn't. With the communist government and the pogroms, we knew there was no future for Jews in Poland. In the winter of early 1946, young men, boys really, from the Bricha, the organization of Warsaw ghetto survivors, Jewish partisans and the Jewish Brigade, which had fought alongside the British Army, came to Liegnitz. They circulated through Eastern Europe encouraging immigration to Palestine. If there had been a Jewish State in 1939, the international community couldn't have turned its back on the extermination of six million Jews. The idea of our own country was intoxicating. They were blunt and told us that it might take years; that we would have to smuggle ourselves across borders; that if we were caught, we might be sent to concentration camps. There was no guarantee that we would reach Palestine. Despite the setbacks, it wasn't hard to convince us to take part. We settled our affairs and in the summer of 1946 found ourselves in the back of an old canvas-topped army truck, singing Zionist songs to keep up our spirits. Zygush was
more than excited. He was on the adventure of his life. When I think back, I was excited as he was. The only one of us who didn't share this spirit was my father. I worried about him. He was no longer the man he had been before the war. I worried that he would never find peace again. Mania's death had robbed him of his joy.

We were dropped off in the middle of a forest on the Polish/Czech border. There was a quota on immigrants from Eastern Europe, so we were told to destroy all our identity papers and anything else that would give us away. We were supposed to be Turkish workers en route for Germany. As I took my diary out of the suitcase, ready to throw it away, my mother stopped me. ‘You'll throw away that diary over my dead body.' She led me into the train station bathroom and we hid half under her clothing and half under mine. We boarded another cattle car and were taken to a displaced-persons camp in Austria near the German border. The saga of the Jews in the displaced-persons camps, where we lingered for years, often behind barbed wire, deserves its own telling, and I hope some author undertakes the task. The world simply didn't know where to put us.

Most of the camps were old factories with large floors that served as our barracks. In every camp we were kept under guard by US or British troops. Each camp was filled with bulletin boards with thousands and thousands of notes requesting information about lost relatives and family. We read every note hoping we might find just one survivor. We met Mr Melman's beautiful distant cousin Inka, who had survived the war in a nunnery. Most of the floors of the camps were made of stone, but there was one wooden floor. We were all longing for normal lives; for everything that had been taken from us. The young men got down on their hands and knees and waxed the floor
using candles, if you can imagine such an effort, just so we would have a proper dance floor.

Sol Kramer asked Inka to dance. He was tall, handsome and charming in the most blunt way. After a couple of dances, Sol whispered to his brother, with whom I had been partnered, ‘Can the fat one dance?' Sol and I danced together and we've never left each other since.

The beginning of our relationship was uncertain. My father asked if I was serious about Sol. I said it didn't make any difference because he was going to America and my mind was made up about Palestine. We hadn't gone through everything to survive the war to be separated from our parents and siblings now.

We had leave to go to another displaced-persons camp near Munich, which was the staging camp for illegal immigration to Palestine. I said goodbye to Sol and we were then smuggled across the Austrian border by the Jewish Brigade…The Bricha devised a clever system to account for all the trafficking. If 20 Jews left the camp for Palestine, the Jewish Brigade would smuggle 20 new Jews into the camps to take the papers of the émigrés who had just left. My mother, father, Zygush, Zosia and I all had identity papers of three different families. I was a Weiss. My mother a Rosenberg and I can't remember my father's name.

Sol, however, was determined to make me his wife. He paid professional smugglers to smuggle him from Austria to Germany to see me. We were in love, but I felt I was lucky still to have parents. I wasn't going to leave them and move to a country 6,000 miles away. Neither Sol nor I would consider not respecting our parents' deepest hopes for us.

His father and my father started corresponding. His father finally said that since he had most of his family with him, Sol
had his blessing to go to Palestine with me. My father asked if I wanted Sol, and we became officially engaged…via mail by our fathers.

The displaced-persons camps were more than a hotbed of romance. There were marriages almost every day. And there was no such thing as linen. There might be one pair of sheets in the entire camp. For their honeymoon, new couples were given the sheets and a private room for the night. This was our honeymoon. I can tell you this, we didn't need the linen. Being alive was honeymoon enough.

After Israel was declared a state, we were able to emigrate just a few months later. We had been writing to the Melmans and the Patrontasches and they emigrated to Israel about the same time as we did. After living in tents for months, all three families found apartments on the same street. It was little Zolkiew and we were back and forth between apartments all the time. We prospered. You could not be a Jew in Israel at that time and not feel you were part of building a nation. It was the perfect antidote to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Every
shtetl
and town formed associations to memorialize their towns. Ours was no exception and we spent years gathering stories and tracking down the fates of all 5,000 of us. My son Philip was born in 1950 and Eli was born in 1954.

Throughout the early 1950s, we kept in touch with the Becks with frequent letters. We included money because we knew how hard it was to make anything in postwar Poland. Beck couldn't tell us how he felt, but I know how much this man, who loved freedom more than he could say, would hate every moment of living under the communists. He had become his true self during the war and his personal rebellion had saved 18 lives. I know he would love the sunshine of Israel and the bright blue Mediterranean. Most of all he would have
enjoyed the cafés where there was always a good argument to be had, as much in his native Polish as in Hebrew. I hated that the Becks were suffering in the grey winter of communism and wished they could have come with us. When we received a kind letter asking us not to send them any more money, we knew it was because it put them in danger, and so for the next 20 years our communication was brief and sporadic. When Julia wrote that Beck had died, we felt that the world had lost one of the 36 righteous. We were devastated.

Manek, Rosa and her family and all my surviving relatives had settled in Israel. We had lived before the war as a pack and had become one again in Israel. When Zygush was grown he joined the air force, and Zosia married when she was a young woman. Sol became a supply officer for the Israeli police force. We were happy in Israel, but there came a time when Sol started to miss his family. We had saved a little money and he went to visit his parents in Brooklyn. When he came back, nothing felt right in Israel any more. He longed for his family. Sol was not a complainer and he had sacrificed ten years of his life, separated from his own family, so that I and my loved ones could heal and start a new life. His selfless love compelled my decision to move to America…It was very hard to leave my family, especially Zygush and Zosia, who had become more than brother and sister. I had helped raise them. They were my own children.

In 1957, we arrived in Brooklyn, New York. Sol went to work, managing one of the grocery stores owned by two generous brothers named Sam and Arie Halpern, both survivors. They hired him even though Sol didn't speak a word of English at the time. Sam married my friend and cousin Giza Landau, who is now called Gladys. I don't know why, but so many of the Gizas and Genias are now ‘Gladys'. No one could ever replace Mania,
but Gladys has tried every day of her life to be the sister I lost. She's the first call I make every day. I love her like a sister.

In 1959, we received a letter from Ala telling us that Julia had died. We mourned her passing and the fact that we weren't able to go to the funeral.

In 1960, when Sol and I saved enough money from working for Sam, we opened a small luncheonette in Brooklyn, five booths and a counter. Sol had been terribly spoiled by his mother and when we were married couldn't even butter his own bread. I asked him, ‘How are we going to run a luncheonette?' He said, ‘I learned the grocery business. You don't think I can learn to run a luncheonette?' Of course he named the luncheonette after himself. I wish I had pictures of him trying to flip the fried eggs. I cooked the food Mama made. I cooked the food my customers loved from before the war. My speciality was
petcha
, jellied calves' feet. My clientele raved about it. It was very hard work to make, but I didn't care. Because the ingredients were so cheap, the profit margin was high. It was the same with pirogis. Flour and potatoes. I loved the luncheonette with its chalkboard menu and the customers who ate their breakfast and lunch and answered the phone for the ‘to go' orders when I was too busy to do so.