Such Good Girls (31 page)

Abba seems generally at home with not being at home. “I am still in exile,” he admits. “Neither Israel nor Holland nor the United States is my country.”

As the afternoon dimmed, he told the story of a Sears representative who once came to his house to examine a defective mattress Abba had bought. “As soon as the guy stepped into the house, I knew he was a survivor. Something in the eyes, a certain sadness, a certain dead quality about him. Strong accent. ‘Where’s the mattress?’ he said. Upstairs, he sat on the mattress and said, ‘This is definitely defective, we have to replace it.’ Then I made the stupid mistake of asking him, ‘Were you in the war?’

“So he’s sitting on my bed, the most private place in the house, and he’s telling me this story that is so horrendously awful, terrifying. His wife was shot in front of him, his children were murdered. His parents he never saw again… . I couldn’t wait for him to get out of my house. Suffering doesn’t always bring people together.”

Yet—paradoxically—Abba Lessing mentioned that he’s been keeping a book next to his bed that fascinates him. It’s a painstakingly assembled 1,900-page book of photographs taken in the 1930s and 1940s, of thousands of French Jewish children who all had one thing in common: they would all perish in the Nazi death camps.

A few months later, a high school classmate of mine—one of the cute, social girls from a housing development on the other side of the highway and the best friend of a girl I had dated briefly as a freshman—revealed that, many years before Abba Lessing’s arrival, the Holocaust had been in my hometown all along. I had unknowingly been a single degree of separation from catastrophe, after all. Margie Eis found me on Facebook and, having read a mention of my forthcoming book, told me that her parents were survivors. I hadn’t spoken to her in more than forty years, and I’m not sure I had said that many words to her in the first place.

It turned out that we had lived one subway stop from each other for the last year and a half, so we met for lunch. Had she ever told anybody back then? “No, I was embarrassed. My parents had German accents. They never talked about what happened.” Didn’t anyone ask you about them? “No, my friends knew only that they came from Germany.” Margie didn’t know much more than that herself, but she could sense, as children often do, that there were family secrets. When she was in kindergarten—1954—she was digging in the yard of their house with a large knife she had found in the kitchen—how was she supposed to know it was sterling silver?—when her mother appeared in tears, crying, “No, no, that was my mother’s.” Margie had never met her mother’s mother, or her grandfather. They had sent Margie’s mother to Sweden, her brother to Switzerland, before the war. Margie’s grandparents and numerous relatives perished, leaving behind, among other things, the sterling silver and memories faded from disuse.

The subject hadn’t come up in high school either. The Holocaust—the term was only coming into common use to describe the Final Solution—wouldn’t be in the curriculum for many years. Margie never even talked about it with another girl in our class, Marcia Kramer (who grew up around the corner from me), whose mother had known Margie’s mother in Germany before she immigrated to America in April 1939, leaving the rest of her immediate family there to perish. The mothers were best friends now, living three miles apart, and the two families spent many holidays together, but without the women’s bond, without their very reason for ending up together on Chicago’s North Shore, ever being discussed.

But the unarticulated damage found its way into Margie’s sleep. Starting in sixth grade, she had the same nightmare a few times a year: men in black were coming to her house to kill her family. In her dream, she’d hide in her parents’ closet, then wake up, panicked. The nightmares lasted for six or seven years, through most of high school. I can see her now in her kilt and oversize kilt pin, cardigan, kneesocks and loafers, books pressed against her chest as she passed in a pack of unapproachably pretty girls. If she, who knew nothing of her parents’ past, had such dreams, what were her parents dreaming?

Margie’s father’s journey—about which she would also know nothing until well into adulthood—had been perilous, especially after he arrived in America. In 1936, as a twenty-two-year-old in Frankfurt, Maurice Eis could see which way the wind was blowing for the Jews, and how hard, so he bought a ticket for America but was denied a visa. Two years later, on Kristallnacht, he was rounded up with his father and brother and sent to Dachau, not yet then a death camp, but the daily ration was already thin soup and a piece of bread. After five weeks, he was released, apparently thanks to his mother, who had pleaded his case to the Gestapo—“Sir, my son already has a ticket for America!”—and he was given ten days to get out of Germany. He ended up in Shanghai and sent for his entire family.

By 1941 Maurice Eis was in the United States, but hardly out of harm’s way. By declaring his intention on arrival to become a U.S. citizen, he became eligible for the draft and enlisted in the army, where he trained as a medic. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, his one-year enlistment became permanent. Five months after leaving Shanghai, he was on a troop ship to Scotland in a vintage World War I uniform to fight against the Germans. In four years in Europe, his luck in life held up, and if anyone ever needed it, he did. He landed at Omaha Beach on D-day, an unarmed medic, and survived. The Battle of the Bulge left him unscathed. Back home, weighed down with medals, he became a traveling salesman for the Western Hosiery Company, built a three-bedroom house in Highland Park, and mainly kept his mouth shut about the past until he was in his eighties.

As a young woman, Sophie had been a little jealous of her mother, Laura, who had always been a woman who attracted a lot of attention, while Sophie felt very insecure and tongue-tied. Once Sophie was married and had children, she realized that she had built the kind of life that her mother had been denied.

Laura was in her late sixties before she met the right man. She was introduced to Nathan Olbe through friends from Lvov now living in the Bronx. Nathan had brought most of his Polish family to America before the war and, with his wife, had done well in the evening bag and corset business. He was a widower with a second marriage behind him, already in his seventies, but he had a house in Queens, a large extended family, and a big heart. When Sophie and her family lived in Queens, Nathan would make a babka—he was very proud of his baking—drive into Manhattan to pick up Laura on the Upper West Side, where she continued to live, and then out to Neponsit, where he and Laura would take Sophie’s sons to the beach and give Sophie and David some time to themselves.

Sophie loved Nathan, and loved him for what he gave her mother. Laura began to relax, and Sophie stopped feeling quite so bad that her mother had missed out on a normal life for so many years. By the 1990s, however, when Laura reached her eighties, she was showing signs of diminished cognitive function. Once a bookkeeper, she was frustrated that she could no longer balance her checkbook and had to rely on Nathan and sometimes her younger sister Putzi and brother-in-law Kazik, who came in regularly from Morristown, New Jersey, where they’d moved from Canada in 1975.

As Laura declined, Sophie, who had shied away for so long from dwelling on the past, realized that she was slowly losing her only link to her childhood and the dark history she and her mother shared. On one of her almost daily visits to the nursing home, Sophie implored her mother to tell her about the past.

But Laura had written down as much as she wanted to remember back in the 1970s for her Hunter College class.

“Enough,” she said, waving Sophie away.

Please, Sophie pleaded. What was it like? What was I like?

“I can’t remember. I can’t remember, Mother,” she would say. When Laura was moved into a nursing home, she had begun calling Sophie “Mother,” which only underlined how completely they had now traded places. Where Laura had once drilled Sophie on the catechism, Sophie now pressed her for information Laura could no longer retrieve, or had no desire to. Still, Sophie tried. But she could see that the past was disappearing forever, like a tarnished heirloom dropped overboard, descending slowly into the depths.

Every weekend she’d collect her mother from the nursing home and bring her to her house. One day Laura sat swaddled in a blanket in her wheelchair in Sophie’s backyard in Great Neck. Sophie, sitting next to her, tried one last time.

“Do you think Herr Leming ever suspected?” she asked her.

“No, Mother.”

“When we walked out of the ghetto in 1942, did no one stop us and ask us for our papers or where we were going?”

“No, Mother,” Laura said. “No more. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Laura was crying suddenly. It was heartbreaking. Sophie had never, ever, not once, seen her mother cry.

In 2007 Sophie’s husband, David, died after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He had taught her how to show her love, just as she thought he would. The marriage had lasted thirty-seven years and provided Sophie with a big Jewish family to be part of forever, and David had lived long enough to sing to his two-year-old granddaughter, Emily. Three years later two events exposed yet another layer of the onion that was Sophie’s emotional memory. In quick succession, Sophie’s daughter-in-law Andrea lost her father, a survivor who had left Austria after Kristallnacht, and at the same time her granddaughter Emily (now the sister of a younger brother, Jack) turned five, the age Sophie had been when her father was murdered and she escaped the ghetto with her mother. If she thought she had mourned all she was ever going to mourn, she was wrong. Out of the blue, Sophie was bombarded by some of the memories she had tried to pry out of her mother. For the first time she was able to see herself at that age, and give flesh and feeling to what had been only skeletal recollections. Watching her five-year-old granddaughter, Sophie was overcome with compassion and grief for Selma Schwarzwald and Zofia Tymejko and their impossible journey. She had a hard emotional time with it, but she felt she was saying good-bye at last to the little girl she had been.

And through it all Refugee, the bear, had survived. It was the one toy, the souvenir of the childhood Sophie did not want to remember, yet it defied all her efforts to discard it. When her other memorabilia went into storage, Refugee stayed behind. Sophie never lost track of it as she moved from apartment to apartment in Manhattan, then to Neponsit, Queens, then to Great Neck, Long Island. Refugee sat on a shelf, then on her dresser, then in her dresser drawer, landing finally in a walnut armoire in Great Neck that Sophie had received as a gift from Flora Hogman.

Had she kept it as exhibit A of the past she suppressed and otherwise protected her children from? Or had she held on to it as most of us hold on forever to some emblem of our innocence? Sophie’s sons may not have known many details of their mother’s past in Poland, but they knew Refugee, the bear that had followed their mother since 1944.

The stripes on the little coat Putzi had made for him had faded from blue to pale gray, almost invisible, and Refugee’s plush coat was worn bare in spots, but he and his movable limbs were otherwise in surprisingly good shape. Sophie had once come close to throwing Refugee out in the late 1990s. Her grown sons were helping her do some housecleaning when she came across Refugee in the armoire. She decided it was time to let go of him.

“Absolutely not,” Jeffrey said.

“I’ve had him sixty years,” she said. “Enough’s enough.”

“Leave him alone,” Daniel chimed in.

“What am I going to do with him?”

“The same thing you’ve always done with him,” Jeffrey said. “Find a place for him.”

“But he looks so down and out.” Indeed he did—more than ever. “And some of the plush has worn off.”

“Whose hasn’t?” Jeffrey said. “He’s brought you luck so far, right?”

Of course it wasn’t the bear that brought her luck, but her mother. In addition to being smart, resourceful, and beautiful, Laura Schwarzwald Turner had been lucky, and her luck had been Sophie’s luck. The mothers were the real heroes, Sophie thought. The more she attended meetings at the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women, the more she understood that when conditions were overcome, it was the mothers who overcame them. When the mothers were strong, the daughters were strong too. When the mothers live, the daughters live. When women are educated, the world is a better place. And no one knew this better than Sophie.

Sophie had succeeded in not imposing her childhood on her sons, and the little she’d told them had been burnished into anecdotes about close calls and burned gooses, the stuff of any family’s folklore. But they knew a little, and the bear, she realized, would remind them that she was there, and that she survived it, and that was why they were here, and the grandchildren too. When they would hold Refugee in the future, they would be holding what their mother held as her mother had led her slowly out of hell.

But the new United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had other plans for the bear. The museum was in the process of collecting more than 16,000 objects from survivors of the Holocaust, and in 2002 Sophie donated her crucifix, her catechism, some childhood drawings, and Refugee to the museum.

Then, in 2006, space shuttle Discovery’s commander Mark Polansky, who is half-Jewish, chose a Refugee replica as one of two objects he carried with him on his December 22 mission. Refugee traveled 5,330,398 miles on the almost thirteen-day journey. Facsimiles of Refugee soon became one of the better-selling items in the museum’s gift store, a favorite purchase for the parents of little girls from Wyoming or Delaware or Alabama. The copies are eight inches tall, not three, and the replica’s off-white coat doesn’t bear even the faint marks of the Putzi blouse’s blue stripes. Nor is the bear a Steiff, but an inexpensive, mass-produced version with longer, softer hair. But the eyes—the eyes are uneven, just like Refugee’s.

Fastened to each bear’s paw is a folded tag that reads “My Name Is Refugee” on the outside, and on the inside reads: