Such Good Girls (20 page)

Just the day before, 300 last-minute callers had contacted the organization, only to hear a recording encouraging them, please, to come. They arrived from Europe, Israel, Australia, Canada, and all over the United States, and were joined by twenty of their Gentile rescuers—some of the Righteous Among the Nations—many of them poor Catholic Poles who had been flown in courtesy of the Jewish philanthropist and art collector Ronald Lauder.

Carla Lessing, now in her early sixties, watched in amazement as people lined up to get their name tags and packets. She would have felt even more emotionally overwhelmed if she weren’t distracted now by whether the attendees would know where to go, whether or not there would be enough chairs for everyone, and whether or not all the workshop leaders would show up.

One of those leaders was Dr. Flora Hogman, who knew more about the collective suffering around her than most people in attendance, since she had been one of the first psychologists to study how these hidden children had managed to surmount their traumas to lead functioning lives. Being a psychologist was not what Flora had in mind when she arrived in New York in 1959—she wanted to be like everyone else. She would have liked to be free to be a dancer or an artist, but eventually her history would leave her no alternative but to professionally explore the very depths in which she had come so close to drowning.

To the casual observer, Flora’s life during her first years in New York City looked like a thousand other Bohemian scenarios of the era. Flora had a fifty-dollar-a-month apartment on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. She had a fireplace. She had a cat. She had friends. She had a beret. She roamed the Village’s little streets, dense with brownstones and dotted with cafés, feeling very free and avant-garde. She felt connected again to her mother, who had been a talented artist. She marched—for free speech, against the Vietnam War, for civil rights. She worked as a waitress at a tiny French restaurant, Chez Brigitte, a sliver of a storefront on Greenwich Avenue. The tips were good. Flora learned English there by refusing to speak French.

Of all New York City’s wonders, perhaps the most amazing to her was how many Jews there were. Yet they were not Jews like her—she didn’t feel anyone was like her. Flora was in good company; it was the dawn of the counterculture’s rebellion against conformity, and Greenwich Village was one of its epicenters. In 1960, not far from Flora’s apartment, an off-Broadway show called The Fantastiks opened in a small theater on Sullivan Street. It would run for forty-two years and become famous for one whimsical line that could have been the motto for not only the beatniks and hipster denizens of Greenwich Village, but also for the baby boomers waiting in the wings. Luisa, the show’s ingénue, cries, “Please, God, please, don’t let me be normal!”

But in reality normal was all Flora wanted to be. She looked at her fellow Greenwich Villagers on the street, longing to know how they managed. For all her ostensible competence, Flora felt she didn’t know how to deal with the real world—even the less dangerous one she lived in now—and she had no one to teach her. She didn’t feel she belonged anywhere. She didn’t know whether to go out with Jews or Christians. She was scared of being intimate with anyone because she felt she had nothing to give. Looking back decades later, she would think, I had post-traumatic stress syndrome. That’s what it was.

At the time, though, there was no name for the feeling that her sense of self had been overwhelmed and fractured, and that it was her impossible job to fit the pieces together. She had serious memory problems; there were huge gaps, and her childhood was a fog in which she was still trapped. Something in her was always hiding, paralyzed.

However confused in her personal life, she was quite organized in her work life. When she was hired as a file clerk at the Ford Foundation, she was so good at it that, after six months, her boss offered her a promotion to assistant bookkeeper. She turned it down and instead used her small inheritance from the Hogmans to enroll at New York University to finish college. She felt ignorant. In school in France, history class had only covered French history to 1936. Incredibly she had only a vague idea of the very events in Europe that had killed her mother and almost her. There was so much she didn’t know. Then Flora soon discovered something very interesting about herself: as uneducated as she felt, and as inarticulate as she was about her own feelings, hesitant and fumbling in her soft French accent, she wrote with clarity. When she was called on in class, she sounded clueless, yet when she sat down to write, she often turned in the best paper.

That she finished college, let alone earned a Ph.D. in psychology, was remarkable. By the early 1970s she was working in clinics and hospitals with children—she was, not surprisingly, very sensitive to children—when she decided it was time to take a good look at her own history. But she realized that her path to understanding and integrating her own trauma would have to pass through the experiences of others like her. She decided to study the psychology of other child survivors of the Holocaust.

There was no question in her mind that someone had to do it. That had become clear when she attended a meeting of the New York Psychological Association and heard a paper that portrayed Holocaust survivors as a bunch of basket cases. She was furious. What right did some psychologist who had not lived through the Holocaust himself have to label and dismiss a generation of broken but brave child survivors? For all her problems, Flora was hardly a basket case. She had struggled to learn to live in the world. She was in the process of finding a way, and she could help others too.

Flora proceeded to do something that no one had done before: through Jewish organizations and her network of friends and colleagues, she identified eleven adults who had survived the Holocaust as children, interviewed them at length, and wrote the first psychological paper exploring what coping techniques they had used to survive the war and what techniques they used as adults to overcome problems related to their war experiences.

“I had to make my trauma the subject of my work,” she would recall years later, “because I had to. I couldn’t do anything else. I was very upset about it. I wanted to be like everyone else. I didn’t want to think about the war. I wanted to go to the beach. I wanted to be a pianist. But the only thing I could do was be a psychologist and understand what the hell had happened to me. My history is so complicated, and I always felt everybody else had done better than I.”

No one had thought to do what she had: look at the positive aspects of having survived the Holocaust. Flora presented her findings in 1977 at a conference in Israel called the Second International Conference on Psychological Stress and Adjustment in Time of War and Peace. Her paper, titled no more succinctly, was called “Adaptive Mechanisms of Displaced Jewish Children during World War II and Their Later Adult Adjustment.” She interviewed eight men and three women who had survived the Holocaust as children. In 1939, their ages had ranged from two weeks to eleven years old. Seven came from Eastern Europe, the other four from Western Europe, and they survived in a variety of circumstances, from roaming Ukrainian forests to being hidden in children’s camps to living in Auschwitz. By the war’s end, two had lost both parents and other family members, five had lost one parent, and the other three had lost several relatives.

Flora found that the coping strategies used by all of the children fell into three categories, the first of which she termed “maintenance of some emotional link to their families.” Children in hiding, separated from both parents, maintained their connection by cultivating fantasies about them. The fantasies may have backfired later when they were reunited with their traumatized real parents, but during the war, the fantasies blurred their sense of loss. One of Flora’s subjects, hidden in a French children’s camp, reported that kids bragged about their families and made up stories in which the parents became younger and more beautiful. Absence made them heroic. Sometimes children assumed the role of a missing parent, taking care of the others.

The second mechanism she called, simply, “defiance.” “The children,” she wrote, “may have retained a sense of self by mobilizing their rage constructively,” which took the form of taking any initiative to survive, from actual escape to simply buoying up others’ optimism. One twelve-year-old boy carried a weapon in hiding; another focused on recalling his father’s teachings from the Talmud to support his stoicism in the face of suffering; another, hiding in the forest, practiced long-distance running to prepare for his eventual escape from the Nazis.

Most interesting, however, was the third coping strategy many of her subjects had used: “avoidance of full awareness of traumatic realities.” That is to say, their best friends were suppression and repression. In one case, a boy who discovered his dead brother and father proceeded to tell his mother that they had been taken away to work, and the mother chose to believe him, although she knew that he was lying. Older children reframed their fear and terror as adventures, not unlike what Roberto Benigni’s character did for his young son in the concentration camp in the movie Life Is Beautiful, when he convinces the boy that the camp is actually a game in which the most compliant and inconspicuous contestant will win a tank.

The mechanisms Flora identified—fantasy, defiance, repression—involved strategies essential for surviving a horrifying existence. Flora’s most traumatized subject resorted to every strategy he could. At a Czech work camp, he transformed his fear into curiosity about the guards’ rifles, pestering them with questions. Later, in Russia, when his father and brother were shot, he simply refused to face the fact that they had died. Living later in the forest, he carried his wounded sister to safety, telling Flora, “I became a Tarzan during the war.” Incredibly he then found himself in Auschwitz, subjected to Josef Mengele’s medical experiments, which he tolerated through a combination of prayer, partial identification with his aggressors, and volunteering to help the other children.

Of course getting through the war was one thing, but adult life was another. Conclusions reached on the page by a psychologist, even one who had been a hidden child herself, bore little resemblance to the very painful, long, and messy journeys hidden children were taking in real life. In her paper, Flora touched on all the lifelong repercussions for child survivors that would start to become a more familiar litany fourteen years later at the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II: distrust, shame, memory loss, isolation, anxiety, depression, marital and career instability, and an exaggerated need for safety and control. The survivors who found it easier to adjust were those whose parents survived, or who could recall and “describe harmonious family life before the war.”

In regard to finding meaning in adult life, Flora wrote, accepting their Jewish identity was “the most powerful way to give meaning … to their suffering,” even though acceptance involved reclaiming a heritage survivors had no memory of or had been taught to despise and pity. Similarly, in order to liberate themselves from the passivity of victimhood, survivors needed to overcome their resentment for problems that had been unfairly and harshly imposed on them—a process of taking responsibility for one’s life that confronts all adults, to some degree.

In none of Flora’s cases was there “an account of a loss of interest in living after the war.” Her research had found not basket cases but people desperate to live like others. Trauma did not necessarily just create psychopathology; it could also launch new and stronger identities, not through dwelling on the disasters of the past, but by incorporating them into the conscious narrative of one’s present life. Courage became part of their identity. One important means of integrating the past concerned the search for work that was in some way related to hidden children’s war experiences. Her favorite example was a survivor who had never known his parents and who had spent his adult life in many unhappy jobs until he realized that he had a gift for handling emergency situations. Only when he became the head of a crisis intervention center did he begin to find himself.

So it had been with Flora herself, who turned her own psychological emergency into a study of others like herself, allowing her to clarify her own murky sense of self while helping others do the same. She had found her place in the world.

So when Carla Lessing asked her in the spring of 1991 to lead a workshop at the upcoming gathering called “Who Am I, Christian or Jew?” it hadn’t taken her long to say yes.

SOPHIE’S CHOICES

On the periphery that first night of the Gathering stood another woman in her fifties who had decided only recently to attend, even though she lived just a short train ride away in Great Neck, Long Island. Dr. Sophie Turner-Zaretsky had managed all these years quite well by refusing to peer too intently into the past. She had never been in psychotherapy because she felt that talking about the past would only make it worse.

Sophie arrived in New York in 1963 for her internship at New York Polyclinic. Inspired by a radiologist there, she began a residency in radiation and radiation oncology at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, a hospital that had been founded in 1884 by leaders of New York’s vast Jewish community to treat patients with tuberculosis and other chronic illnesses. Her intelligence and devotion to her work paid off with the position of chief resident. Few people were privy to the original motivation behind the intensity of her drive. Sophie needed to be at the top. As long as she remembered, she had always had to prove herself. She couldn’t count on help from her family, because she didn’t really have one, or her background, which she really didn’t have, either. Colleagues might talk about their old neighborhoods in Brooklyn or the Bronx, or the uncle who had gone into medicine, but what did she have besides her mother? A few forgotten years of being a privileged Jew in Lvov, followed by the murder of her father and almost everyone else in her family, followed by six years as a Jew-hating Catholic schoolgirl, followed by years of confusion and near-poverty.