You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (14 page)

Your story is so fresh that it burns your throat to speak of it.

You have spit it out in bits, which reminds me how awful it is—both what happened, and what it feels like to remember. You’re a yakker.
When you have a story, you tell it over and over. But you leave so much out of this one. Even if I link together every fact you’ve provided about those ten or so months you spent in Birkenau, I still have only an outline.

They fed you just enough to survive, you said.

“Why kill you if they need you for work?”

At breakfast, there was soup to eat and bread to take for lunch. You’d eat the bread in the morning, so there’d be no lunch. Dinner was more soup with potatoes, never meat.

Once you ate the soup cold and got diarrhea “so terrible I think my intestines gonna come out,” and ended up in the camp hospital. After a day, you noticed dead bodies in the beds, “skinny like a finger.” You thought the guards had given them coffee laced with poison and they’d all died overnight. You hadn’t had any coffee. Though you could barely move, you told them you felt well enough to work again.

“I never grabbed cold soup again.”

You slept in bunkers with beds hinged to the walls, as in submarines, with a thin blanket that never kept you warm and with your wooden-soled shoes under your head like a pillow so no one would steal them. Not that they were great shoes. In the winter, snow stuck to the bottoms and leaked through the tops so you could hardly walk. But if they’d been stolen, you would have been sent to work barefoot.

You walked two miles between Auschwitz and Birkenau every day to work. You had to pass the selection on the way, and saw young men and women without kids on one side, women with children and old people on the other.

“The ones on the first side told they gonna go take a shower. They took all their clothes away and before you look around, ten minutes or so, they were all dead.”

You didn’t look at the waiting faces because you were too afraid of the guards. Everyone knew what was going on, especially the ones who manned the crematoria and got killed so they wouldn’t spread stories. But you couldn’t avoid hearing the music.

“There’d be about ten fellows sitting in front of the gas chamber, playing fiddle and other instruments as if they were going dancing.”

Your job was to sort bundles that had been taken from new arrivals before they were gassed. The bundles contained clothes, which contained food, especially after the Romanian Jews came in 1944. You figured they must not have known how bad the camps were, because “they’d bring food with them—they thought they were going to a fancy place.” You once found salami wrapped in a
tallit
. Then you looked at the sky and saw sparks coming out of the chimneys, “and I knew they burned the people” whose food you had eaten.

You also got food indirectly from the dead because you and others would throw the sorted clothes over the camp fence and the Poles who lived in the neighborhood would toss back bread in exchange.

The female guards were crueler than the men.

“She was holding a vicious dog and threatened to let it attack the Jewish women and children waiting in line,” you told me once, without another detail.

But the Jewish women, who worked on a separate side from the “fellows,” were fine. You didn’t talk to the girls, but you saw them. Their heads were shaved, but as long as they wore their kerchiefs, “they were so nice-looking.”

You knew what they did to others. When the Germans needed blood for their soldiers, a doctor would take ten- and twelve-year-old boys and girls who arrived at Auschwitz and siphon their blood until they died, you told me.

But they hurt you, too.

They pulled your tooth without any painkiller.

They made you watch another hanging. This time, they hanged three Russian soldiers. One of them spit in the Nazi’s face while the rope was around his neck.

They beat you often, Bill said, because you didn’t move fast enough.

They took your sight. One day you reached to pick a green tomato and a guard smacked you over the eye with a stick. Since then, you have only seen light and shapes from that side.

I asked you once if you thought about dying every second you were there.

“No,” you said. “You don’t think.”

And that’s all you ever gave me about Birkenau. I can look in other places to find details about exactly what people like you wore, drank, smelled, saw. But I only want your stories. It’s a gift, maybe, that this is all you remember. Or is it just all you can bear to say out loud?

Gloria just got here. She stopped for a few moments in the hallway to yell at one of the nurses. She can’t believe they didn’t wake you up for breakfast. If they had, instead of letting you “sleep” in, even though they may not have been able to give you different medical treatment, at least they would have been able to make you more comfortable, and sooner. She’s been through this with them before. She knows breakfast is the only meal you eat well, and she makes sure you’re there every weekday. She hates when her colleagues don’t do the same.

She’s wearing the necklace we gave her for Christmas, for the first time. She wants you to see it.

You two have gotten family-close since I hired her to keep you company. You’ve practically invented your own language, like twins. You speak fragmented Yiddish/English and she speaks fragmented Trinidadian/English, and both of you seem to have an aversion to completing sentences. With my curiously bad sense of hearing, sometimes I have no idea what you’re saying to each other.

But I know she’s good for us. She keeps you calm. When they were threatening to send you to the loony floor because you were too needy for your regular nurses, she arrived. She’s kept you calm ever since, though you do get cranky and panicky whenever she leaves. You’d have her around twenty-four hours a day if you could afford it.

I’m grateful because she’s taken the pressure off me. With her filling more of your time, it’s okay for me to visit just once a week.

I can’t tell how old she is—I don’t know anything about her history—but I know she loves you.

Now she’s crying. Now she’s yelling your name and shaking your leg.

“Aron! Aron! Wake up now, Aron!”

Did I ever tell you I was there, forty years and three months after you left? Probably not, because it’s embarrassing. Having any emotions besides pity and rage concerning the Holocaust makes me feel slimy, as if the death of eleven million people is a purse that I’m borrowing for a special night out. It doesn’t belong to me, unless you believe those people who say it belongs to all Jews, which I don’t. I wasn’t personally struck by the Holocaust; I cannot claim its scars. Because my grandparents left Russia and Germany decades before it began and let the strings that tied them to Old Country family members fray, I feel no grief for the blood relatives I surely lost. I have no actual connection to the Holocaust, beyond you, but I’ve always been obsessed with it.

Is it because I’m moody by nature? Or because I read too many novels about kids scraping through the Holocaust when I was young? I loved the poignancy of them, the attempts at revenge, the fact that they made me feel something. The only one I didn’t enjoy, I’m sorry to admit, was
The Diary of Anne Frank
. Her perkiness annoyed me. Didn’t she want to scream all the time? How could she stay so strong and silent at that age? I guess that’s why most people love her: She was heroic in her silence, which I never could have pulled off. I would have whined us out of hiding.

But the abundance of such books doesn’t explain why I was attracted to them. Nor does my upbringing; I certainly didn’t come from a family that force-fed me banquets of Never Again. I stopped reading genocide novels during high school (I believe I was alternating between Kurt Vonnegut and Danielle Steele at that time), but returned to the subject when I took a Holocaust course during my senior year of college. The professor talked about Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, about children of survivors and unbombed railroad tracks. I wolfed down these facts like they were buttered popcorn, but every day as I sat in the lecture hall, I jittered with anxiety attacks. This happened to me, back then, whenever I got emotional. It had something to do with trying not to feel anything and having that strategy backfire. Why risk screaming or crying in public when you can stuff those feelings in a
box, I subconsciously reasoned? But feelings, as I’ve told you a hundred times, find a way to get out anyway. You’d think sweating and shitting my way through the semester would have turned me away from the gruesome facts of your life. Nope. It just made me want more.

After graduating, I visited Europe for the first time. I lugged a giant backpack, though I never slept outside, and traveled with different groups of friends over the course of two months. I hitchhiked from Marcé, France, to Barcelona, Spain, with a girlfriend who kept me calm after we noticed the swastika tattoo on one of our drivers’ arms. I rented a room from a single mom and her teenage daughter in a Jewish Orthodox neighborhood in London. And while my friends were kissing foreign-tongued boys in Greece, I chose to flirt with extermination instead by visiting Dachau.

I was with a guy named Joe. We stayed in a Munich pension that catered to models on assignment. The breakfast tables and hallways were filled with stunning men and homely women, their unpainted faces as plain and angular as all blank canvases. Still, they were glamorous, and though that made me feel dull, being surrounded by them also made me feel safe. None of them were German.

Joe wanted to explore the city one night, but I refused to leave our room. I told him I felt sick because I couldn’t admit that I was too scared to do anything but sleep. I wasn’t even sure what I was afraid of, but I hated Munich. More specifically, I hated looking at the Germans who strolled under the enchanting cuckoo clocks and fed tickets into the turnstiles of the stereotypically clean and efficient subway stations and served us sweet beer and sour cabbage wearing lederhosen. Despite Germany’s professed regret and guilt, I knew that some of these people still hated Jews. The older ones belonged to the generation that nearly wiped us out. How could their kids not absorb that hatred as they grew up?