You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (16 page)

The problem with sex, even for revenge-seeking guys, is that sometimes emotions cross the border. Hermanie Holzei was twenty-one when you met her. She was “a little bit plump, blonde, with freckles on
the face, blue eyes like Germans.” She babysat and cleaned for a couple you knew from Zychlin who’d had a baby in the DP camp. She took you to her family’s small farm. If you brought cigarettes or booze for her father, he’d let you sleep in her bedroom.

“Plenty of Germans were poor after the war and let their daughters do the same thing,” you told me.

You brought her stockings and other nice things, too, but that’s not why she slept with you. You had a connection; you weren’t in love with her, like your older brother had been in love with his wife, but you cared about her. Not enough, though, to take her to America when your paperwork came through five months after you met.

“How can you marry somebody who, if not her father, then her grandfather or uncle, used to kill your family? You can’t marry somebody like that.”

Her mother once warned you not to get her in trouble.

“Don’t do something foolish,” she said in German.

You two were careful (however people managed to be careful in those days), and Hermanie didn’t get pregnant before you left. But I wonder if she may have found out she was pregnant after you were gone. You officially ended the arrangement by mailing back the photographs you’d taken of her. I suspect you neglected to include your new contact information. Imagine the story that would make—learning that you actually had a child in the world. Of course I’ve been trying to find Hermanie, just in case that’s true, and also to ask her what she remembers about you. But it’s not easy with the clues you’ve given me: her first and last names spelled three different ways, the year she was born, a vague memory of the town she lived in (“a ten-minute walk from the Muhldorf station”). But I’ll keep trying.

You claim you’ve never been in love, and that you never regretted leaving Hermanie behind. But Leah—the girl you flirted with when you left Hermanie’s bed—stayed in your mind. You should have married her, you realized later, but at the time your low self-esteem spoke louder than your rickety heart. You had no trade, so, in your mind, nothing to offer that sweet girl.

Nothing, perhaps, was yours. But not nobody.

Finding that man was probably the best thing that happened to you during those years of power and joy.

You knew in your heart that Bill was still living. And you were just as certain that he thought you were dead.

“He knows when they sent me to Birkenau, I can’t still be alive.”

I’m sure you gave your names to the officials trying to plug families back together, but you made the connection before they could. You were yakking with a couple of guys who’d come to Feldafing from a DP camp a couple hours away. You mentioned your brother and they instantly recognized the name of one of their soccer mates.

“He is with us!” they said.

You hopped on a train to go find your little brother. When he saw you, he thought he was seeing a ghost.

“I figured maybe he just got up from the ground and came up to me,” Bill told me.

After you had vanished with the potato shipment, Bill stayed at the coal mine until the war was almost over. He managed to stick with your old friend Mendel the whole time. The Nazis marched them. For two weeks, they starved and froze and stood straight as people dropped dead around them. As the Allies approached, the Nazis forced them into open cattle cars that went back and forth between locations. When the Americans finally liberated them, they sent Bill to a hospital. After three months there, he went to a mainly Polish DP camp. When you found him, he was living in a private apartment with a roommate. You stayed for a day, though he remembers it as a week. He also remembers a slightly different version of how you found him. His involves soccer players meeting you on a train, thinking you looked familiar, and asking if you’d had a brother in the camps. But the
how
of the reunion never mattered, just the reunion itself. For the rest of your time in Europe, you took trains across Germany to visit each other. For the rest of your lives, despite many disagreements, you haven’t let go of each other.

You tried to find the rest of your family, too. The most direct way was to go back home.

You went with Mendel. As the two of you walked across the bridge that led to the city, Mendel asked a man if there were any Jews around. The man told him “there were so many Jews, plenty Jews.” But when you got to Zychlin, there were only four Jewish people remaining. One
of them was a shoemaker who’d married a Polish girl. The other three would come back to Germany with you.

You couldn’t believe they were the only ones left out of the thousands of Jews who’d once lived in Zychlin. You went to the house near the synagogue where your aunt and uncle had lived. The windows in the house and in the synagogue were smashed. You went to the creamery where your first crush had worked. The sign with their name still hung on an outside wall, but the house was closed up tight. You even went down to the cellar where the girl had kept the cottage cheese and the cream, but it was empty. All the Jewish houses were empty.

Your final stop was your family’s last apartment before the ghetto. You knocked on the door of the apartment owned by the lady who had lived across the hall. She was still there. She told you that one day your older brother had knocked on the same door. He was crying and told her that the next day they were all being sent away. Was he looking for refuge? If so, she didn’t give it. She just watched as the Nazis forced her neighbors onto trucks headed for Chelmno.

You left Zychlin. You left Poland. And lucky for me, you left Europe, too.

We have to make appointments to prove you’re still alive. Every year the Germans have mailed one of us—you when you managed your life, me now—an envelope containing a piece of paper titled
Lebensbescheinigung
. That cumbersome word means “Certificate of Life.” The form is very basic. It asks for your name, birth date, marital status, naturalization and social security numbers, and signature, and it asks you to circle some words—“
am Leben ist
/ is alive.” I might not technically have to circle them, but I do because I don’t want them to forget.

The Germans require us to fill out this form so they can continue to pay you back for what they took from you. Not that that’s actually possible.

“If they gave each one a million dollars, it wouldn’t make up for what they did,” you said once.

Amen to that, Brother.

But they won’t take our word for it. We have to get the form notarized. We used to go to the bank, but now I have to make an appointment with a lady in the nursing home’s marketing office. She’s very nice, though she lightly scolded me the one time I didn’t schedule in advance.

This year it was an ordeal to get you to her office, which is right outside your hallway. You’d stopped leaving the hall, and sometimes you refused to leave your room. I worried that even though I told you we were going to visit this lady, you’d be sitting around in your pajamas. It had been a pajama kind of month.

But you were ready for a day of business, blazer and all.

We shuffled down the hall and waited for the notary. There wasn’t any place for you to sit, which was a little inconvenient since you were worn out from the walk, but you leaned against the counter and your walker. The notary took out a box that held her stamp and embossing seal as if they were jewels. This was really quite a ceremony. She watched as you trembled your name onto the paper, then she banged and pressed her fancy tools, and just like that, our government proved to their government that you were still living.

There is a shocking lack of accurate data on US survivors. I wanted to find out how many people who’d been through the worst of the worst, like you, had made it to the age of ninety and beyond. But it was impossible, partly because survivors aren’t divided by severity of treatment (anyone who faced hardship in a Nazi-occupied country qualifies as a survivor), and partly because no one has taken a count in more than ten years.

You wanted to go to Israel, but the spots on your lungs held up the process. While you waited, a relative in America found you. Your great-aunt, sister of your grandmother, sent you an invitation to the States. At about the same time, Hadassah connected you with one of your father’s friends, a man I’ll call Chaim Pitler. That might have even been his name. Or, it could have been Pitl or Pittel, which you’ve also told me. You and the Yiddish transliterations are driving me nuts. This man had moved to Washington, D.C., before the war, and had built up a chain of bakeries. His invitation included a job, so you took it.

“I was told there was so much money in America they were sweeping it up on the street!”

They gave you a smallpox vaccination and sent you to my Promised Land. You puked for seven days on the boat to New York. When you got off, you had a small Hersey bar in one pocket and Pitler’s phone number in the other. The Hadassah people who met you dockside gave you $3 and a train ticket to D.C.

Pitler was supposed to meet you at Union Station, but he wasn’t there. And like so many greenhorns, you had to find someone in the train station who spoke Yiddish and beseech him to call the number on your scrap of paper.

After one night in Pitler’s house, he took you to his main bakery and showed you how to fry and sugar the donuts. He helped you get a social security card. He taught you to use the bus.

The bus rituals were weird. Why, you wondered, did you get to sit in the front of the bus, but the black people had to walk to the back? You’d only been in town for one day. It didn’t seem fair.

Then Pitler suggested you get your own apartment. Maybe he and his young wife, who was closer to your age than his, wanted their privacy back. Or maybe they couldn’t take your screaming at night. You dreamt about your family in the early years, especially your father. You’d be walking together and a soldier would come up behind you, jab a rifle into his back, and order, “Go! Go!” You’d wake up covered in sweat.

You found an apartment above the bakery. The landlord asked you to pay for the rent in advance. You’d never heard of such a system.

“Advance?” you said to Pitler. “What am I, a whore?”

The biggest problem with D.C. was that you couldn’t find people who spoke Yiddish. You were lonely. After a couple of months, you decided to start again. Pitler put you back on the train, this time headed north. Your great-aunt and cousin met you at the train station and brought you to their Massachusetts home, where you officially began to live your version of the American dream.

We’ve established that I’d never win any Mrs. Jewish America competitions, but sometimes I don’t mind going to services. I can make it fun. When the rabbi asks us to pray silently while standing, then sit when we’re done, Max and I have a contest to see who can stand the longest. I have been known to wait out the entire congregation. And I like reading ahead in the prayer book when things get boring. I’ve noticed that when they’re not bossing you around and guilting you, those pages offer some great wisdom. I especially like the Meditations, which are printed before the meat of the services and usually skipped.

I found this line attributed to Holocaust survivor Rabbi Leo Baeck: “When we are approached by a human being demanding his right, we cannot replace definite ethical action by mere vague goodwill.”

And this bit from Deuteronomy: “Do not harden your heart or shut your hand against the poor, your kin.”

And together we say,
Aaaaa-men
.

Helen, the sister you bickered with the most, made it out of Zychlin before the final roundup. They took her for slave labor, just like you and Bill, during the summer of ’41. She was nineteen, the same age my daughter is as I write this. While you picked up rocks and rails, she picked up food she wasn’t allowed to eat. The Nazis sent Zychlin’s able-bodied women to farms and fields. Helen bent and crouched every day as she pulled potatoes out of dirt and twisted tomatoes from vines. Other vegetables, too. Did she sneak a bite now and then, a risk that surely would have resulted in death? Perhaps not. When they brought her to Auschwitz, she stood in the selection line with her friends from home. In a different place and time, girls like them would have been standing in lines waiting for a bouncer to decide if they were well-dressed enough to enter a dance club. Cute girls would help the business thrive. In Auschwitz in 1942, the bouncer decided whether they had enough color in their cheeks and meat on their bones to enter the barracks. Strong girls would help the business thrive.