Letters From the Lost (36 page)

As you know, I have been living for some time in a Greek fishing village 50 km south of Thessaloniki. I chose my husband quite deliberately for being a non-German and left Germany. Since you are a highly intelligent woman, I need not explain to you the whys and wherefores.

Our daughter, now 17, is totally and from the bottom of her heart a Jew. Not in terms of belief but in terms of values and attitude. She looks a lot like her beloved grandfather and he adored her. She (Rebecca) will graduate from high school next year and we are very proud.

These have been important and unimportant lines from a German-Jewish-Greek heart.

If you like, starting this summer, we will be getting an Internet connection. In the meantime, I would love to get a handwritten letter from you.

You are embraced and thought of by
Your Sonja Weissglas-Zampas from Greece.

I was of course flattered that someone I had met so briefly had thought so highly of me. While Max had made a deep impression on me, I had not thought to be able to offer much to a man who had seen the inferno and been scorched by its flames.

Standing with Max, the man locals refer to as “the only Jew in town,”
in front of the former cemetery of the Jewish community,
an impenetrable fortress with a locked gate to prevent desecration

At the same time, I understood his daughter’s need to reach out to anyone who might help her deal with the loss of a beloved parent. Still, there was something about the letter that continued to puzzle me. Surely Max and Melanie had other friends who knew him better, and surely he had told me little that Melanie herself did not know.

One day, as I struggled to formulate my thoughts before setting them down in German, a light went on. I am Sonja’s only connection to her Jewish roots. Like so many others who rejected God for standing by while the Nazis exterminated those who had sung His praises, Max had rejected all Jewish ties after his experience in the concentration camps. He wanted nothing more to do with religion.

Sonja had been raised with absolutely no connection to anyone or anything Jewish. Her mother Melanie is not Jewish, and all other Jews in her hometown had vanished. The handful who survived the concentration camps chose not to return to Germany.

Sonja had never met another Jew. I am her only thread to a vanished tradition.

Or almost. In her seventeen year-old daughter Rebecca, Sonja claims to see a Jewish soul reborn. What does Sonja know of the Jewish soul? Why did she name her daughter after the great Jewish matriarch? Why does Sonja claim that this child, born and raised fifty kilometres from Thessaloniki has a Jewish heart? What can Sonja know of these matters, and more importantly, why does she care?

Tentatively, I ask a friend. He tells me
“her soul is stirring, that in her father, she has lost an anchor, a wise one who kept her grounded.”
He advises me to share my memories of her father, but to tell her also of my own struggle to find my roots.

And so it has begun, this new dialogue between strangers who have not met. Two women of different generations living on different continents who each sought refuge, the one in a Greek fishing village, the other in urban Canadian anonymity. Two women raised in the safest of places and in the safest of times, yet linked by the shadow of the past. We exchange letters and emails. She shares with me the major events in her life, and I rejoice when Rebecca is admitted to the university or when Melanie writes that she will be going to Greece to be with Sonja. At Rosh Hashanah, I describe to Sonja the sound of the Shofar, the ram’s horn that seems to shake my very soul. I tell her that we dip apples in honey to symbolize a sweet New Year and I explain why we fast on Yom Kippur.

I catch myself using the “we” word and realize with a shock that I now identify as a Jew.

————

Der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Baum
. When an apple falls, it lands near the tree.

I ponder these words as I look back across the span of years. Even though I was not raised a traditional Jew, I always knew of my Jewishness. Now it is my adult children who say the same. What I did not have was not mine to give. And yet, there is much that was transmitted to me that I have passed on, often in surprising ways.

A remarkable sensitivity to minority rights has surfaced in both of my daughters. Each of them has chosen to balance the scales of injustice in her own special way. Each also shares my abiding gratitude for life and its richness. Only recently did I learn that this is a hallmark of Jewishness. From the moment of waking, our tradition teaches us to give thanks for a heart that beats, for lungs that breathe, for plumbing that works, and for all that is not ours to control.

I have learned so much since I first opened my father’s box of letters, I am also putting down roots that draw ever more strongly upon the nutrients of Judaism.

In 2007, for the first time ever, I ventured to hold a Passover Seder in my own home. My parents had never held a Seder. Perhaps it would only have reminded them of all the family members absent from the table. When my daughters were little, my tradition had been to send them on a treasure hunt for Easter eggs. Now, I was inviting them to a lengthy ritual that encompassed retelling the story of our liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt.

To my great delight, they accepted the invitation for themselves and for their partners who each graciously donned a skullcap for the ceremonial evening. Despite the ultra-abbreviated compilation that replaced reading a lengthy traditional Haggadah, it was
My First Passover,
a small hardboard book purchased for my year-old twin grandsons that became prime reading for the adults in my family.

In many ways, perhaps we are all operating at the level of understanding of a year-old child. Once upon a time, especially in my teens and early twenties, I thought I knew so much. Life has been a long process of realizing how little I know, and how shallow are the roots of my strongest opinions.

My life journey feels different now. I do think that at the very least, I am moving in the right direction. Life feels effortless and sometimes it even feels joyful now that I am no longer paddling against the current.

Somehow, alongside of my Jewishness, they live on in me, those family members whose lives were so prematurely interrupted. I have inherited
something of their essence along with their stories. They flow through me, and to some degree, they shape me.

Perhaps that has been the lesson learned, this opening of the channels. Perhaps now, the healing waters can flow through me to lap at new shores. I know that this year, when I looked across the table at my twin grandsons dipping slices of apple into a bowl of honey, a tear fell upon my mother’s white tablecloth.

1
. Abella and Troper,
None Is Too Many,
102.

2.
Koestler,
Promise and Fulfillment,
55-59.

3.
Dirks,
Canada’s Refugee Policy,
58.

4.
Davies,
Antisemitism in Canada,
128.

5.
Shapiro and Weinberg,
Letters From Prague,
39-40.

6.
Abella and Troper,
None Is Too Many,
17.

7.
Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team.
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org.

8
. Wyman,
The Abandonment of the Jews,
5.

9.
Troper, Harold. “New Horizons in a New Land: Jewish Immigration to Canada.” Under the Canadian Jewish Experience: Historical Perspectives. B’nai Brith Institute for International Affairs,
www.bnaibrith.ca/institute/millennium/millenniumO 1.html.

10.
Shapiro and Weinberg,
Letters From Prague,
119.

11.
See the following website for more information on the Danish rescue:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/denmark.html.

12.
For more about Auschwitz and such death marches, read
Night by
Elie Wiesel.

Abella, Irving, and Harold Troper.
None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948.
Toronto: Lester Publishing Limited, 1983.

Berenbaum, Michael.
The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Cohn-Sherbok, Dan.
Anti-Semitism: A History.
Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2002.

Davies, Alan T. (Ed.)
Antisemitism in Canada: History and Interpretation
. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992.

Dirks, Gerald E.
Canada’s Refugee Policy: Indifference or Opportunism?
Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1977.

Foxman, Abraham H.
Never Again?: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism.
New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

Gilbert, Martin.
The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy
. London: Collins, 1986.

Gilbert, Martin.
Never Again: A History of the Holocaust
. New York: Universe Publishing, 2000.

Hecht, Thomas O.
Czech Mate: A Life in Progress.
Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2007.

Koestler, Arthur.
Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1917–1949.
London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1949.

Lipstadt, Deborah E.
Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945.
New York: The Free Press, 1986.

Niewyk, Donald L. (Ed.)
Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival
. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Paris, Erna.
Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History
. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001.

Shapiro, Raya Czerner, and Helga Czerner Weinberg.
Letters From Prague, 1939–1941.
Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1991.

Troper, Harold.
From Immigration to Integration: The Canadian Jewish Experience
, Millennium Edition. Toronto: Institute for International Affairs, B’nai Brith Canada, 2001.

Wittrich, Robert S.
Hitler and the Holocaust
. New York: Random House, 2003.

Wyden, Peter.
The Hitler Virus: The Insidious Legacy of Adolf Hitler.
New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001.

Wyman, David S.
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945
. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

Since receiving her Ph.D in French literature,
Helen Waldstein Wilkes
spent thirty years teaching at every level in Canada and in the U.S. Her research interests include cross-cultural understanding, language acquisition and neurolinguistics. Now retired and living in Vancouver, she is actively examining her own cultural inheritance and its impact.

^I
For Canadian survivors’ memoirs, see for instance Olga Barsony-Verrall,
Missing Pieces: My Life as a Child Survivor of the Holocaust
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007); Tommy Dick,
Getting Out Alive: A Memoir
(Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2007); John Freund,
Spring’s End: A Memoir
(Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2007); Rachel Shtibel,
The Violin
(Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2007); Vera Kovesi,
Terror and Survival: A Family History
(Montreal: Concordia University Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies and The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, 2005); Jack Weiss,
Memories, Dreams, Nightmares: Memoirs of a Holocaust Survivor
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005); Leslie Vertes,
Can You Stop the Wind?: An Autobiography
(Montreal: Concordia Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies and The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, 2001); Helen Rodak-Izso,
The Last Chance to Remember
(Montreal: Concordia University Chair in Canadian Jewish History and The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, 2001); Paula Draper and Richard Menkis (Eds.),
New Perspectives on Canada, the Holocaust and Survivors: Nouvelles Perspectives sur le Canada, la Shoah et ses Survivants
(Montreal: Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, 2000); Perec Zylberberg,
This I Remember
(Montreal: Concordia University Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies and The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, 2000); Sam Smilovic,
Buchenwald 56466
(Montreal: Concordia University Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies and The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, 2000); David Jacobs,
Remember Your Heritage
(Montreal: Concordia University Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies and The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, 2000); Michel Melinicki,
Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel Mielnicki as Told to John Munro with Introduction by Sir Martin Gilbert
(Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2000); Rose Ickovits Weiss Svarts,
Forces of Darkness: Personal Diary of Rose Ickovits Weiss Svarts from 1938 to 1946
(Montreal: Concordia University Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies and The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, 2000);
Memoirs of Holocaust Survivors in Canada
(Montreal: Concordia University Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies and The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, 1999); Lisa Appignanesi,
Losing the Dead
(Toronto:
McArthur, 1999); Joil Alpern,
No One Awaiting Me: Two Brothers Defy Death during the Holocaust in Romania
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2001). These represent a small sample of Canadian Holocaust survivors’ memoirs, and much smaller sample of survivors’ memoirs from all countries. For more on the genre, see Norman Ravvin,
A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory
(Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997).