You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (5 page)

Again: Duh.

There are hundreds of studies confirming this obvious fact, but it seems like the people we run into—the people who should be up on this kind of data—aren’t aware of it. Or they just choose not to address it.

Given what I know now, I’m not surprised by the ignorance and/or apathy. But when we started on our journey to Crazyland, I was continuously flabbergasted.

How many times did I say to someone in a white coat, “I think he has PTSD”?

How many times was my suggestion ignored?

As I got ready to drive to your bedside, I stuffed a different book in my bag. Maybe I’ll read to you today; maybe it’s finally time for the remedy of literature.

Why don’t you ever read? You have all this quiet time and you never pick up a book. Your roommate reads. He wheels himself to the lobby and parks in front of something that looks like a microfilm machine, but is probably some kind of magnifier, and reads newspapers. That big lady in the wheelchair that took up the entire hallway used to read all day long. I never spoke to her, but I admired her because she put on makeup and read every day. That’s how I want to go out.

For a while, I wasn’t sure if you
could
read. When I showed you your town’s
Yizkor
book, you studied the photos—and pointed to yourself in the group shot of survivors—but didn’t even skim the words. Maybe you’d always been illiterate, or you’d just never picked up written English.

I’d sneak you tests once in a while, asking you to read from one of the many documents you filled out for the Germans.

“Looted assets: Two horses. Large wagon. Furniture and belongings.”

Sure enough, you could read. You just chose not to.

One afternoon as we languished on the lobby chairs, someone began to throw dirty words around. Words like
bitch
and
slut
.

The voice was coming from around the corner. At first I thought I was overhearing a conversation, but then I realized the speaker was reading out loud. I excused myself so I could walk by and check out both the reader and the book. The former was a woman in her twenties—most likely a granddaughter. The latter was a biography of punk-rock feminists that called themselves Riot Grrrls. The granddaughter seemed to be in the middle of a chapter about raunchy performances. The grandmother seemed to be dozing.

I wonder if you heard the passages, or if you were too deep into your past to let anything in. The next week she was still at it, reciting more off-color chronicles of girl rebellion. They were racy in a way that both embarrassed and delighted me. You know how I love contrast.
Bitch
and
slut
in a nursing home—what’s better than that? Maybe I should try reading something tantalizing to you. I can see if the book I grabbed on the way out of the house has some dirty parts. If the word
vagina
doesn’t wake you up, things aren’t looking good.

But you’ve always hated when I try to introduce activities. Not long after you moved into the nursing home, I noticed the pile of games and playing cards stacked on some shelves across from the chair you’ve colonized. They were the type of things usually found in bed-and-breakfasts or beach rentals. They looked old, as if no one ever touched them, sort of like the building’s residents. So one day, I figured instead of just sitting there talking about your blood pressure or dead people during our visit, we could pass the time with some recreation. You told me you’d played cards back in Zychlin. Remember—that kid cheated you out of your winnings, the one who later died of some kind of brain injury after his father beat him over the head?

“Hey!” I said. “Wanna play cards?”

“Cards?” you asked, with a face full of revulsion. “Are you drunk today?”

Fine. I guess that meant puzzles were out of the question, too. It also proved that we aren’t a pleasant-pastime type of couple. That’s too balanced for us. We’re both extremists when it comes to conversation—give us something good or be quiet because you’re boring us.

“Did you ever wish you weren’t Jewish?” I asked.

You looked at me as if I was crazy—or still drunk—but then you jumped right into the pool with me.

“I did once,” you said. “When I worked at the deli. I told a man and he started yelling at me.”

I will not yell at you today. I will not ask if you want to play cards. I won’t even read to myself.

Teach us Yiddish words!

We were in the nursing home courtyard. Max was almost a teenager. He was getting bigger as you got smaller. We couldn’t fill a visit with him sitting on your lap and eating borscht anymore, like we did when he was a toddler. At twelve,
you
have to entertain
them
. And I needed you to get fun quick. He was bouncing a ball, which meant he was bored already.

At first you seemed to think my request for Yiddish vocabulary lessons was
meshugge
.
¹

“Come on,” I said. “How would you tell someone off?”

“Ich hobn fant du
.” (I don’t like you.)

That sounded kind of mild to me.

“What else?”

“
Gai in drerd arayn
.” (Go to hell.)

The bouncing stopped. The boy grinned.

Better.

“What other swears do you have?” I said.

Shmeggegge
.
²

“That’s not a swear.”

I wanted the real stuff. Shithead.
³
Asshole.
⁴
Something a boy could use.

But you’re too much of a gentleman.

“
Ikh hob dikh lieb
.”

What’s that mean?

“I love you.”

Oh, dude—same.

This is not your first appearance in a book. The other one, published when I was eleven years old, is called
The Memorial Book of Zychlin
, or
Sefer Zychlin
in some language I should know. After years of research, I know this about the book:

• It’s a collection of stories about and memories of your hometown, written by any and all survivors who cared to contribute. Such books were often compiled after the war and are referred to as
  Yizkor
  books.
  Yizkor
  means memory.
  
• It contains black-and-white pictures, some simple portraits of citizens, such as the one depicting an old man in a long coat smoking a very long pipe, but most are group shots: angry gray-haired men holding up a piece of paper and scowling, dapper young men (the same ones during better times?) gathered around a table and demonstrating the props of a meeting: ledger, document, cigarette; a mixed-gender group with little rectangles of paper stuck to their lapels and dress fronts; a sports team wearing striped jerseys, which, had they been allowed time to pack, could have saved the Nazis some cash; soldiers with rifles posing next to horse-drawn carts full of people and bundles; three skinny men standing in the snow wearing nothing except what looks to be wet pajama bottoms.
  
• It is blue.
  

I first saw the book in the library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington when I was hunting for clues about your history. This was back when you were still merely the subject of a potential story. It was quite easy for the librarian to find
Sefer Zychlin
for me. She even translated a couple of the captions as we stood between bookshelves.

“These are people who survived,” she said, stopping at a group shot of twenty-five people.

I didn’t even recognize the man in the top row, far right.

She told me one page listed the town’s martyrs, which is what the authors called everyone who’d died during the Holocaust. I asked if
she saw any Libfrajnds in the list. Yes, she said, there’s a Mendel. Your older brother.

I couldn’t take the book with me, but when I got home I searched the Internet to see if I could find one at a nearby library. Instead, I located a copy for sale on eBay. Two weeks later, it was mine.

The book is not only blue; it’s also thin, but heavy, like you when I grasp your elbow to help you stand.

I thought I would find all kinds of stories and secrets about your life between those blue covers—stories about you and your parents, the cattle business and the creamery with the pretty girl, the temple and the fountain and the courtyard. Those anecdotes might be there, but not for my eyes.

I own the book of your life, but I can’t read it.

It’s written in Hebrew and in Yiddish, and I’m so ignorant that I can’t even tell which is which. Not that I haven’t tried. When I first got the book, I asked a friend’s mother-in-law to translate it. This woman grew up in Germany, but escaped to Israel before it was too late. Presumably, she spoke both languages in question and would be able to Anglicize the whole book for me. She’d done translating before, my friend told me, and had lots of free time. She’d probably love the intellectual stimulation of a taking on a big project.

The woman agreed to look at the book and seemed enthusiastic about helping me. A couple of months after I gave it to her, she invited me to her house. I was so excited to finally learn about your childhood.

“I cannot do this,” she said, handing it back to me. “It is too much. I cannot take the time.”

She was apologetic, but wouldn’t explain further. When I got home, I called my friend. She didn’t understand her mother-in-law’s sudden change of heart, either. Maybe, she guessed, reading the book was too emotional for her. Maybe her translation skills weren’t as great as she’d assumed, and her mother-in-law was embarrassed to admit it. Maybe she really didn’t have time.

Later, some other people, mostly Israelis I found through an online Jewish genealogy website, helped me translate snippets of the book.
None of them described your life. They’re mainly about good times that happened long before the men with the rifles came to town. Few potential contributors survived the Holocaust, so the stories mostly came from people who’d left in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the decades when my relatives emigrated from their Old Country villages. At least that’s what I think most of the book consists of. Like I said, I can’t read it.

The pictures, however, are not all so irrelevant. After I bought the book, I showed it to you. I worried that it would trigger a nasty flashback—that you’d flip out after seeing those men in the snow. But you didn’t.

“That’s me,” you said, tapping your thick finger onto the top corner of the group photo of the Zychliners who’d outlasted Hitler. There are seventeen men and eight women, all wearing business suits. Most of the men, except for you and a fellow with a thick neck and impressive pompadour, have covered their heads with hats. The faces have filled in and the hair has grown back. No one smiles or frowns.

So, do you give the people in the nursing home candy bars because it’s the kindest thing that was ever done for you, or because you see them as guards that you must bribe? I have always gone with the second theory. How else can I explain your franticness when the Snickers stash in your top drawer gets low?

“She makes my bed!” you’d say.

Or: “The Little Doctor—she’s good to me.”

At least the need to restock takes you out of your room once in a while.

You charmed the ladies who ran the gift shop, of course. When you still left your wing of the floor, your first stop was their minuscule place of business. They displayed the candy on one end and the coffee pod machine on the other. You’d collect $20 worth of Snickers and enough rolls of wild cherry Life Savers to get you through the week.
Then you’d pay an extra dollar for a coffee and ask the proprietor du jour to make it the way you like it. It isn’t their job to make the coffee—that’s why they set up a self-serve system. But the chicks can’t resist a man who shuffles the hallways wearing a blazer and who refers to them as “my baby.” Who knows how many
That’s my baby
’s you collected, but one of them will stand respectfully when you go, in a mink no less, just as sad as the rest of us.

The
Yizkor
book that I can’t read says there was a sugar-beet processing plant in Zychlin, and a pretty bridge where young couples would make out. I can picture the bridge, but I have to tell you I have no idea what a sugar beet is. I spent years writing a book about an American town that was also full of sugar beets, and even though I’ve looked up the term in several places, I still don’t get it. Are they like regular beets except sweet? Are they like sugarcane, but called “beet” because of their shape? Are they sugar or beet, for God’s sake?

Why didn’t I ask you this question? Surely, you’d know the answer if this mystery crop really was part of your town’s industry. I guess I cared more about atmosphere than the exports, so I pressed you to tell me whatever you remembered about Zychlin. It wasn’t beets. It wasn’t much of anything, really.

There was one big church and one synagogue, which stood around the corner from your uncle’s house, but no hospital. If there was a fire, people ran around with buckets of water to put it out. Most of the streets were made of cobblestone or dirt, the houses, of wood, though some photos show homes of stucco or cement behind the people lining up for deportation.

Everything else I’ve learned about Zychlin comes from websites, reference books, or the
Yizkor
book, which is being translated for the public one frustrating section at a time. I buckle these facts together as if I’m writing a term paper so I can imagine where you spent your happy years.

The town is almost dead center in the middle of the country, about fifty-nine miles from Warsaw and eleven from Lodz, its closest big city. Around ten thousand people live there now, though there’s no indication that any of them are Jews. I can’t even tell if Zychliners like Jews these days. On a website that appears to be dedicated to children’s welfare and is in need of “passionate” volunteers, there’s a cartoon that looks blatantly anti-Semitic. It shows three bearded, hook-nosed, black-hatted men standing in a row. One is looking at a book, and one, who happens to be holding his
tallis
over his head (in case you weren’t sure of their background), is screaming at the others. I write down the caption and type it into the Google translator.
People with passion
, it says. And now I’m confused. Are they saying that the Jews in the cartoon are respectably passionate … or crazy-passionate?