Such Good Girls (12 page)

University loomed, and Sophie, who by now wanted to choose a career that would allow her to help others, applied to a six-year medical school program. It wasn’t that she was a genius at science—she was a much stronger student in history and languages, and had some noticeable difficulty with physics—but a career in medicine would also provide security, which had been not so much in short supply as utterly missing in their lives so far. A career in medicine had the added benefit of providing Laura, who had studied economics and once set her sights on medicine in a country where even Jewish men were not welcome in the profession, with a vicarious victory. Sophie applied to several schools and was accepted as a scholarship student at two, choosing University College Hospital, which had a strong liberal arts program—and the advantage of having accepted one of Sophie’s best high school friends, Elphis Christopher.

At university one of the first-year students who wanted to be her friend was a Polish woman, but Sophie pretended that she didn’t speak Polish. However little she wanted to be Jewish, she wanted to be Polish even less. She could claim no Jews yet among her friends, and she remained silent in the presence of the occasional anti-Semitic remarks made by friends, on whose casual prejudices the annihilation of the Jews during the war had had little effect. Yet she joined Hillel House, whose members for the most part wore their Judaism very lightly and socially, not like the more observant Jewish students. It bothered her that the Orthodox Jews walked around in yarmulkes. At least, she thought, they should have the decency to confine their kipa-wearing to indoors.

But Hillel soon posed its own difficulties for a girl who had grown up in silent secrecy. There were Israelis at Hillel, argumentative ones who seemed so different from the handsome, hardworking, muscular ones she had envied in the Zionist brochures.

A young English law student named Monty, who was active in Hillel, gradually became Sophie’s first bona fide Jewish friend. He was very smart, very funny, and also very devoted to his younger brother, whom he had taken care of during the war years when their parents had sent them to the safety of the countryside. Nothing serious developed between them, but she had broken the ice; seven years after learning she was Jewish, she could finally let another Jew into her life.

While Sophie made friends, however few, and attended to her own evolving ambitions, her mother was largely alone and increasingly dependent on Sophie’s companionship. Their roles were gradually reversing. There were times her mother wanted to go for a walk, but Sophie now had better things to do. The conflict was growing between what she felt was her duty to her mother and her need for greater independence. There was no conflict, however, over the issue of the importance of Sophie’s achievements. They both felt she had to do well because she had nothing else to fall back on. Her religious conflicts took a backseat to the gospel of success: you had to lead your life constructively and do some good; you had to leave some kind of positive mark, saying that you were here, that you did something and you helped somebody. “My mother pushed me a great deal and was very ambitious for me,” she would recall when she reached her midthirties. “I felt this tremendous pressure to achieve, not to waste time, to bring something to some conclusion. But with time I became convinced of this myself, and I’ve carried it on in a way and I think she was right.”

Medical school represented financial and emotional security. “I would have a profession,” she’d recall, “and in our family it was always considered very important to have a profession in case you had to flee for your life. You’d be able to earn a living somewhere else. Medicine is pretty universal.”

Through a medical school student organization, Sophie traveled to Germany with a group that slept in schools and other people’s modest homes. What made the most impression on her was how well the Germans seemed to be living. When she would think back later on the trip, she couldn’t fathom why on earth she had agreed to go, except that she felt very forgiving at the time. That it might have anything to do with her revulsion at being Jewish seems far-fetched, but she would recall feeling that “whatever had happened during the war had happened.” On her next visit, twenty years later, the numbness had worn off; this time, as she walked down German streets, she looked at men of a certain age and wondered where they had been during the war, and whether one of them had been the man who murdered her father.

Sophie still had trouble accepting the fact that, on the day before her fifth birthday, her father, Daniel Schwarzwald, had been killed by the Germans. During the few years she and her mother shared the Hoenigs’ grim apartment, sometimes she dreamed of her father returning from Russia to save her and her mother, this time from their little ghetto on Belsize Road. Sometimes she could say to herself that the Nazis had killed him; most of the time, though, her father was neither alive nor dead. He just inhabited a different realm—one that was getting farther and farther away, and in which a little girl she used to know, named Zofia Tymejko, awaited his return.

She had only a few possessions from that other world. There was her Christian prayer book, her rosary, and her little bear, Refugee, still wearing the tiny coat that Aunt Putzi—Nusia—had made for him. And there was one other thing that remained from those years in Poland: silence. Time had erected a wall between her and those years, no more passable than the walls of the ghettoes of Lvov or Warsaw or Kraków. She knew that every Jewish refugee she saw in North London had his or her own story, protected by the barbed wire of forgetting, and that for all of them everything was better left unsaid.

The past was their secret. Not once did Sophie talk about the past with her mother. Not once. And they quickly learned to keep it even from themselves.

In 1963, after completing a rotating internship at a couple of suburban London hospitals and falling in love with several specialties, Sophie settled, at least for the time being, on obstetrics and gynecology. With the encouragement of one of her professors, she decided to work in the United States, where there was a shortage of doctors. Her New York cousin-by-marriage Alice Herb (Emil and Rosa’s niece, who had immigrated to America with her family after Kristallnacht) contacted a successful plastic surgeon named Lou Feit, who was able to arrange a permanent visa and get her a job at his hospital, New York Polyclinic Hospital in Manhattan.

Sophie’s mother would have to remain in London where, freed of her original work restrictions, she was hired to teach accounting at a secretarial school. It would be the first time she and Sophie had ever been apart for any length of time. Laura, who had watched most of her own family be destroyed twenty years before, and her sister Putzi move to Canada a dozen years before, would now be separated by an ocean from the little girl, now a twenty-six-year-old doctor, she had single-handedly saved from the fires of the Holocaust. It felt every bit as painful as all the other, and more permanent, losses in her life. But what could she do? Laura knew that Sophie had to leave even this nest.

Shortly before she left London, Sophie was preoccupied with the impending marriage of one of her closest medical school friends, Avril Sillitoe, in an Anglican Church in East Anglia. Sophie was asked to be one of the bridesmaids—the only Jewish one. When told that she would have to kneel during the ceremony, Sophie’s emerging Jewish consciousness surprised her. She told Avril she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had never discussed her split identity with Avril or even discussed her years in Busko-Zdrój—it was simply not a subject that ever came up with anybody—yet kneeling in a church didn’t seem right. Remarkably, Avril didn’t argue, and it was decided that if one of the bridesmaids couldn’t kneel, then none of them would have to kneel.

In May Sophie said her complicated farewell to her mother and flew first to Canada, where she visited Aunt Putzi and her family, who lived comfortably in Montreal. (When Putzi’s last English employers visited the Rozyckis in Montreal on a trip to the United States, they were amazed that their “humble” former domestic now lived in such a lovely home.) On the eve of Sophie’s departure for New York, visa complications arose that kept her in Canada until August. She spent the summer accompanying Putzi, Kazik, and their seven-year-old son, Henry, on trips to Ottawa and Quebec. When her permanent visa finally came through, Sophie arrived at the newly named John F. Kennedy International Airport in a heavy woolen suit, which had been appropriate apparel in chilly Canada, only to be hit by blasts of ninety-degree temperatures the moment she left the terminal and headed to the taxi stand. Since she was long overdue at her new job, she asked the driver to take her directly to the New York Polyclinic in Manhattan, which she had envisioned as a beautiful modern hospital with gorgeous nurses and especially good-looking male doctors. Her heart sank when the cab pulled up on West Fiftieth Street in front of a dilapidated facility that had seen better days, although it still treated the occasional high-profile celebrity patient. In 1926, while in New York promoting Son of the Sheik, Rudolph Valentino had been rushed to Polyclinic for emergency abdominal surgery, only to die soon afterward from peritonitis and pleurisy. And just two summers before Sophie’s arrival, Marilyn Monroe had had gallbladder surgery at Polyclinic while husband Joe DiMaggio paced in the waiting room.

Sophie’s first months were horribly lonely. She did little but work and sleep, commuting to the hospital on West Fiftieth Street from her room in the Belvedere Hotel on West Forty-Eighth by running across an uninviting parking lot next to the old Madison Square Garden.

Back in London, her mother was busy taking courses at Pitman College in typewriting, bookkeeping, secretarial duties, handwriting, and spelling and diction. Before long, she was offered a job as a part-time student-teacher, and then as a part-time teacher of bookkeeping and general commercial studies at six pounds a week. But in her letters to Sophie, she complained that Sophie didn’t write often enough and wasn’t paying her enough attention. She wrote that perhaps she and Sophie would live together again one day.

Her neediness triggered a complex of emotions in Sophie. Although she and her mother had barely mentioned their life in Poland, even to each other, it was dawning on Sophie, now that she was older and had moved away, that her mother had been nothing less than heroic. Sophie still saw herself as a survivor of World War II, not a Jewish survivor of the attempted extermination of her race, a race she was still far from embracing. If Sophie was preoccupied with Jews, it was not with those who had died, but with those who had lived. She understood that no Eastern European Jew had survived the war without a fight, and that her own mother had defied the odds. Others might have been crushed by their losses, paralyzed by their fears, immobilized by shock, but Laura had forged ahead in the midst of ruin. She had stood up more than once to the Nazis who came for them, she had threatened Herr Leming when he tried to take her promised job away from her, and she had insisted on getting her iron back from the Gestapo, but most of all, and despite the lapses into suicidal despair, she had insisted on living.

Whatever resentment Sophie still harbored toward her mother for her necessary part in depriving her of a childhood was now overtaken by an unfamiliar emotion: she felt guilty for all her mother had done for her. Sophie owed her life to her. She wished she could make it up to her mother, who had lost ten years of her life—her thirties—to the war, and then lost several more in servitude to her aunt and uncle. (Sophie’s feelings toward them had been softened by her aunt and uncle’s increasingly affectionate attitude toward her, culminating in their generous, but ghoulish, gift to her on her twenty-first birthday of their dead daughter’s ring.)

Yet in England Sophie had felt increasingly like a ghost floating next to her mother—insubstantial, a vestige of a past she barely understood. However lucky she had been, she was still a casualty of the Final Solution. Her childhood had been erased, her adolescence had been postponed, and adulthood still seemed unattainable. She may have owed her mother her life, but that wasn’t the same thing as having a life. And the painful price of having that, she knew, was to now keep some distance between them.

As lonely as she was, and as much as she knew it would hurt her mother deeply, she sat down one evening in her room at the Belvedere and wrote her to say that things couldn’t be as they had been anymore. She needed to make a clean break. She needed to stand on her own two feet.

By definition, virtually all children who were hidden during the war had been utterly cut off from those hidden elsewhere. There was certainly no mechanism or organization, even by the 1960s, by which these formerly hidden children could learn of one another’s existence. And so Sophie could not know that only a mile south of her new home at the Belvedere Hotel in Manhattan lived Flora Hogman, a year older than Sophie, who had also survived the Holocaust and had also ended up in New York City.

Sophie and Flora wouldn’t meet for another fifteen years, by which time they both would have launched substantial careers that were impressive even for women whose childhoods had not been destroyed by the Nazis. Flora, however, had had to overcome even greater obstacles than Sophie to accomplish anything at all. While Sophie had emerged from the war with at least her mother, Flora had lost everything and everybody.

My first conversation with Flora Hogman took place at her apartment in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. As I stepped out of the elevator onto her floor, I could see a tiny figure standing at the far end of a very long hallway, but even at that distance I could see that she was smiling broadly. This surprised me, for although she had agreed to talk to me about her hidden childhood in wartime France, I had already learned from months of interviewing Sophie how sensitive this ground could be.

Throughout my career, I have been reluctant to delve into other people’s suffering. As a young reporter, I shrank from invading the privacy of strangers with tragic stories to tell. Yet here I was, unpacking my laptop and tape recorder at Flora’s dining room table while she went to the kitchen to get me a glass of seltzer and a plate of her rich homemade chocolate truffles. Flora, a petite and stylishly dressed woman with a charming French accent, had lost everything, even her self, to the Nazis.