Category Archives: European Jewry

March 22, 2010 · 8:04 am

Life in America

by Harry Lazarus (Tenafly, NJ)
interviewed by Bruce Black

When I was growing up, I used to love listening to my grandfather, Harry Lazarus, z”l, retell  stories about his childhood in Zharnov and how he made his way to America. Before his death a number of years ago, I recorded one of our story-telling sessions in his apartment in Tenafly, NJ. In this final segment, he describes his arrival in America and his courtship with the woman who became his wife.

BB: How did you get to New York if you didn’t know any English?

HL: I didn’t know nothing. Just this word I knew: “Ticket, New York.” Then I didn’t know which train to take and I looked for Jewish faces and I said to a couple, “New York? New York?” And they said, “Yeah, New York.” And I went on the train and I took an English magazine and I’m reading because it was American inspectors, too. They could take me off from there again and send me back to Canada.

And I was reading and all of a sudden the train, in a certain place, stopped, and we had to change to another train. I had to run again and find out if the train goes to New York. And then I went up to the other train and didn’t say a thing, and I read the English paper, the English magazine, and then, when I come here to Grand Central, I went out and I looked if they don’t run after me.

And then I went up on a streetcar. I paid five cents and I said to the man, “Hundred Street, a Hundred Street.” I was sitting there in front and he was going, going, going, going. And then, when it was a Hundred Street, he said, “Here, go out here.” I went out to a Hundred Street and I walked over and there was my brother, Izzy, living. I was in America.

BB: So you lived with Izzy and his family?

HL: I was by my brother Izzy. I was living there a little while by him as a boarder, and then I didn’t want to go to be a bread baker. I wanted to be a cake baker. So, my brother Meir sent me in a place and I got ten dollars a week to learn how to be a cake baker. I went in there til I worked myself up to twenty-five dollars, and I worked myself up to forty dollars, and I was already that time about three years in this country, and then I got acquainted. I lived downstairs where my brother used to live, and there was a girl, Becky. And I lived there as a boarder for a little while and right away she fell in love with me. When I came home from work, she started to make me tea and talk and this and that, and then I said, “Have you got some nice pictures from friends?” She showed me this beautiful picture, and I said, “Oh, I would like to see this girl.” She said, “Oh, she’ll be here Sunday.” I said, “All right, I’ll be here Sunday with my friend.” But when we came to see them, they walked away.

BB: Why?

HL: They walked away. You know, those times, you used to have a Victrola in the house, and I said I’ll come back home with my friend and we’re gonna dance. But they walked away to Central Park. I didn’t run after them.

But then I used to belong to a place where all the lansleit came together every week, every two weeks, and we used to have somebody to have a speech and then they had some little music and we used to dance a little bit. We used to enjoy ourselves. So, a bunch of landsleit.

So I said to Becky, “Come, you want to go to dance at the place?”

She said, “All right.”

I said, “Take along your friend, too.”

And she took her along.

And she was a very beautiful girl.

Then, after the dance, I took her home. She lived in Second Avenue. Then I took Becky back home to a Hundred Street and that’s all.

Then, one time when I came down from my brother to go to sleep, it was about 9 or 10 o’clock, I came down and Fanny, this girl, came out from her friend’s house, from Becky. I said to her, “Fanny, can I take you to the bus, to the– what it used to be–an elevator.”

She said, “All right.”

I took her to the elevator, and I said, “Fanny, can you give me a date?”

She didn’t seem too eager.

I said, “It doesn’t have to be this week, it could be next week.”

She gave me a date for another week. And we made an appointment that we should meet at a certain place there. I came there and I walked up and down and down and up and up and down about a half hour, but I didn’t think, I never thought she was going to leave me out. And I stood there. And then all of a sudden, after a half hour, she came nice and dressed up.

I said, “Where were you? What’s the matter?”

“Oh,” she said, “my family was there and I told them that I want to see a boy. ‘What kind of boy? Ah, you’re not long in this country, what do you have to see a greenhorn?’”

She said but she didn’t care, she didn’t want to disappoint me. She came. She came, and I went with her for a visit.

We went around, you know, we went for a soda, we went there. In those years, I don’t remember how much it was, five cents or ten cents a soda, and I took her for a soda, and I took her for a little ride, and I made an appointment for the next time. All right.

Next time I made an appointment and we went to Coney Island. For five cents we went with the subway to Coney Island. There for a few cents I bought her a frankfurter. I don’t remember how much it was, ten cents or something.

BB: Nathan’s?

HL: Yeah, Nathan’s. And we ate this and sat around. She didn’t bathe, and I didn’t bathe. She didn’t want to bathe. And then a few of my friends were there in Coney Island and they were bathing. And after they were finished bathing, they all got dressed and they took a taxi to go back home. They said I should go into the taxi with Fanny. So I wanted to go in, but Fanny didn’t want to go in. It was there four boys in the taxi. She didn’t want to go in. So she said that she wants to go home with the subway. So I said all right we’ll go home with the subway.

And I made a date to see her again and again and again. And I worked myself up. I got a job already on 23rd Street in a pastry shop and I started to save up already a few dollars, and I used to go out with her. I used to take her for a ride. I used to go to a restaurant. It used to be fifty cents a dinner, you know? We used to go in for a dinner or something. Everything was nice, everything was good.

And then, after a few months walking around with her, I bought her a little fox, and I gave her this, a present. And we kept on going for a little while, and then I said to her, “Fanny, let’s get married. I got already five hundred dollars saved up. Let’s get married.”

And she said, “All right, I got two thousand dollars in the post office. We’ll put it together and we’re going to get married.”

I said, “Okay.”

So we made a date to go to the rabbi that was on 12th Street, and she lived on 8th Street. I dressed myself up in a nice blue suit and she dressed up beautiful, and we walked to the rabbi, and the rabbi had there about ten people.

BB: Friends of yours?

HL: A few friends, a few from the family, another few. He just made ten people to make the brachas and everything. Fanny’s mother made a dinner. About fifteen or twenty people were there for the dinner. My brother Meir was there for the dinner, too. His wife wasn’t there but he was there.

BB: How old were you?

HL: I was twenty-two years old. And she was the same, maybe a year younger. I was just three years in this country when I married Fanny. She was I think the same age, twenty-two. And we got married and we went for a honeymoon.

BB: Where did you go?

HL: A little town in New Jersey. With the bus, we went there. When we came there, the electric lights were out, and we had to be there in that place with candlelight overnight. The next day I had to go back, I had to go to work again. That was the honeymoon–one night.

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March 15, 2010 · 7:49 am

Ticket to New York

by Harry Lazarus (Tenafly, NJ)
Interviewed by Bruce Black

When I was growing up, I used to love listening to my grandfather, Harry Lazarus, z”l, retell  stories about his childhood in Zharnov and how he made his way to America. Before his death a number of years ago, I recorded one of our story-telling sessions in his apartment in Tenafly, NJ. In this segment, he describes how he made his way from Europe to America.

BB: So you came to the Jewish section of Berlin?

HL: I came there with another two boys, and the people came over and said, “What’s the matter with you?” And I told them the story that I ran away and I wanted to go back to Vienna.

And they said, “All right, we’ll buy you the ticket. You’ll go to Czechoslovakia and from there you’ll go to Vienna.”

And I said, “A ticket? That’s very nice.”

But when we came to Czechoslovakia, the inspectors looked up and asked, “Where’s your passport?”

I said, “I have no passport. I just got a worker’s book that shows I worked in Vienna.”

They said, “That’s not a passport.”

So they kept me there, again arrested in Czechoslovakia. If I wouldn’t have the book, the inspectors said they’d send me back to Poland. But I had the book showing that I had worked in Vienna, so they sent me back to Berlin.

They sent me back to Berlin with a soldier on the train. Back to Berlin.

BB: And when you got back to Berlin?

HL: I came back to Berlin and went again to the Jewish section, and they said, “All right, we’re going to buy you a ticket to go the other way through Dresden.”

They bought a ticket to go to Dresden. We went to Dresden. We went down, me and another boy, we had a few pieces bread, and we came there.

And we met a boy there, and I said, “You should smuggle us over to Vienna.”

And he said, “All right, I’ll go in and ask my father.”

If his father went along, he would smuggle us over to Vienna. Not to Vienna, but to the border. And that’s what happened, you know? He smuggled us over  the border, and then I took a train and went back to Vienna. And I was in Vienna.

That was the terrible time I had when I went to visit Zharnov.

BB: Where was your brother, Manny, during all of this?

HL: He was in Vienna. He didn’t go. I was the only one who went crazy.

BB: Did he know the trouble you were in?

HL: He didn’t know, but he found out when I came back to Vienna.

BB: Once you were back in Vienna, what did you do?

HL: A little while later we ran away to Paris.

BB: You and Manny? You didn’t need special papers to get to Paris?

HL: We couldn’t get passports. So, I bought a passport in a Polish consul. And that was my trouble. I bought a passport.

And the fellow says, “What should I write in?”

And I heard in America they needed engineers. So I told him, “Write in that I’m an engineer.” And Manny wrote in that he was a tailor. If I would write in that I am a baker, I would be safe. But I wrote in an engineer.

And I had the passport, you know. And in Paris we were about three months there. We kept on going to the consul and going again, and we had to wait, and every time he told us we needed something from America to prove that we got there somebody in the country.

We got letters from Izzy and everybody but the consul didn’t recognize it. So we were about three months in Paris and we spent a lot of money there. And then I decided, “Well, if we can’t go to America, we’re going to go to Canada.” So I got somebody, you know, and he made me out to go to Canada. I gave him some money, you know, and he made me up to go to Canada.

BB: So you went straight from Paris to Canada?

HL: We decided that we got a brother in England that we’re going to go to England to visit him and from England we’re going to go to Canada.

We came to England and he was very nice to us. He was a tailor, too, and Manny worked for him a little bit and me, I wanted to go there to work in a bakery, but I couldn’t do nothing.

Anyhow, we were there about two weeks and decided that we should go to Canada. We bought tickets, you know, to go to Canada. When we came to Canada, they let Manny out, they let my brother out, but me? They arrested me.

BB: Arrested you? Why?

HL: Because I wrote that I’m an engineer. They said, “What kind of engineer are you?” So they kept me back, and I was there, not just me, it was about fifty boys they kept back. We were in a prison, a house, and Manny wrote letters to Meir, to my brother Meir in New York.

He told him if they sent me back to Poland, they’d kill me.

So Meir was a very good person. He decided to come to Canada and take me out from there. He came to Canada, you know, he took me to the consul, and he said, “He’s in the bakery business and he’s all right.”

He said that he was going to take me into the bakery, but the Americans wouldn’t give me the okay to go there. Just because I said I was an engineer. They thought I was a liar, a Communist or something. They wouldn’t give me an entry visa.

So Meir paid for a lawyer to take me out. He paid $500 for the food while I was there, and he paid a lawyer $200 to take me out. And then I had to pay some money, you know, to a fellow to smuggle me over to America.

And that’s what it was. I went on the train and I went to a farmer about 4 o’clock in the morning and he put in a horse and wagon and he took me over.

I thought he was going to throw me down somewhere in the woods. It was winter, you know? But he took me over and he showed me the station, Over there, he said, you have to buy a ticket to New York.

That’s all I knew. Meir spent about $1,000, you know, my brother Meir. He spent about $1,000 to take me out of Canada.

When I came to the station, I said, “Ticket to New York.” And they gave me a ticket.

Next: Finding romance in New York…

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March 8, 2010 · 7:31 am

Turmoil in Vienna

by Harry Lazarus (Tenafly, NJ)
interviewed by Bruce Black

When I was growing up, I used to love listening to my grandfather, Harry Lazarus, z”l, retell  stories about his childhood in Zharnov, a small village near Lodz and not far from Warsaw, and how he made his way to America. He was a baker, with bright blue eyes above a thick nose, a warm smile, and broad, strong shoulders, and he spoke with the thick Eastern European Yiddish accent of his youth. Before his death a number of years ago, I recorded one of our story-telling sessions in his apartment in Tenafly, NJ. In this segment, he shares scenes from his life in Vienna.

BB: You were involved with the Black Market while you were in Vienna?

HL: I don’t want to say anything about it.

BB: Why not?

HL: I don’t want to talk about it, that’s all.  But I made a lot of money, and I used to go dancing, and I had a nice girl and I had a very good time. I used to go to operas and I used to go to shows. I had a very good time in Vienna.

And I figured a little later, I was already about 18 years old, I was already about four years in Vienna, and I knew everything and I spoke beautiful German and I wrote beautiful German and everything was nice. And I figured I’m going to buy myself a little business there and get married and stay there in Vienna.

And then when Hitler started to talk, Hitler, he was in Austria, you know? Hitler, he started to talk about Jews and all that stuff and right away there was a lot of trouble in Vienna, you know? The government was a socialist government, and there was a Communist Party and they marched to the Parliament, and I marched, too.

BB: You were a Communist?

HL: I marched with the Communist party. I marched. And when we came there, they threw fire, you know, the things that fire, they threw on the Parliament. As soon as the marchers did that, the soldiers came out with machine guns and they started to shoot and everybody ran. And I ran, too. But somebody pushed me up to a tree and I was hurt.

I went to the doctor the next day and I told him. He said, “What the hell? Why did you march? Who told you to march?”

I said, “Nu, I marched.”

And that was the end of my time in Vienna when I had money in my pocket.

BB: So what’d you do?

HL: I figured that I would go back to Zharnov. I used to have in Zharnov my uncle and a nice girl that I left there, a girlfriend. And I wanted to see them. And I went back to Poland.

When I came back home, I was over 17 years old, so they wanted to take me for a soldier. They wanted to take me for a soldier. But I didn’t want to go to be a soldier for the Pollacks.

When I went home, the soldiers on the train, when they saw a Jew with a beard, they grabbed his beard and they did all kinds of trouble to the Jewish people. So I should go to be a soldier to fight with them? I didn’t want to.

I said to my uncle, “I want to run, to go back to Vienna.”

So I went back, I tried to smuggle myself over to Germany, and it wasn’t easy. When I came to Breslau, I was sitting on the train by a German officer, and I told him I wanted to go to Vienna. And he said, “You better hide yourself. The Polish detective is going to be here. They’ll take you off.”

So I hid myself in the toilet and I didn’t let anybody in. And I was laying there in the toilet. I was laying for a long time there and I was so tired already from laying there that I came out and I said “Can I go out already?”

And the German officer said, “No, not yet.”

And I had to go back again until I came to Berlin and the Polish inspector couldn’t take me off no more.

So I came to Berlin and I went over to the police and asked, “Where’s the Jewish street?” And he told me which street car to take to go to the Jewish section.

Next: From Berlin to New York

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March 1, 2010 · 8:33 am

War Breaks Out

by Harry Lazarus (Tenafly, NJ)
(interviewed by Bruce Black)

When I was growing up, I used to love listening to my grandfather, Harry Lazarus, z”l, retell  stories about his childhood in Zharnov, a small village near Lodz and not far from Warsaw, and how he made his way to America. He was a baker, with bright blue eyes above a thick nose, a warm smile, and broad, strong shoulders, and he spoke with the thick Eastern European Yiddish accent of his youth. Before his death a number of years ago, I recorded one of our story-telling sessions in his apartment in Tenafly, NJ. In this segment he describes his life in Zharnov when  war between the Austrians and the Russians breaks out.

BB: So, you were saying the war broke out…

HL: Yes, then the war broke out. The Russians were in Zharnov. Then the Austrians chased them out and grabbed all the boys, fourteen-year-old boys, to chop stones. And then they took us and sent us away to make trenches.

We were there by a farmer, two boys laying on the floor or three of us covered up in our coats, and at 5 am we used to go to the place where the sergeant counted us, and then we ate something, and then we had to go to dig the trenches.

One time my boots fell apart. I walked about two miles without the boots in the snow. When I came there to the place, I warmed my leg under my jacket, and the sergeant hit me with a whip, the Austrian sergeant. He hit me with a whip. I had to stay with both feet in the snow.

And some fellow that spoke German came over and said, “What did you hit him for? He hasn’t got boots.” And he sent me in the place to peel potatoes until they were going to fix my boots.

They fixed my boots, and I came out, but instead of going to them I ran away. I couldn’t go on a train because I didn’t have any documents. So, I ran. When I came to a farm or somewhere, I went inside to the farmer and I crossed myself and I spoke Polish.

They didn’t know whether I am Jewish or not, and I begged for a piece of bread or something, and that’s what they used to give me: a piece of bread or potato or something. And I would sit around there, and then I’d run again.

I ran, I don’t know, maybe forty or fifty miles. I kept on running until I came to Kunsk. There was my sister. Not from my father’s first wife, but a sister, and she was no good. She was a terrible woman. When I came there on a Friday morning, she gave me something to eat and said, “When do you go home?” She wouldn’t let me stay over Saturday in her place. “When do you go back to Zharnov?”

So I had to run from her place to Zharnov. It was maybe another ten miles. When I came back to Zharnov, I went to my uncle. He was a very good man. He kept me there, you know, and I was by him a few days, until a soldier asked “Who wants to go to Vienna?” And I registered to go to Vienna, and another few boys registered to go to Vienna, too.

So, we came to Vienna. We were put in a barracks where the soldiers lived and they gave us something to eat, all right, and then they came in the next day or two and asked, “Who wants to go to Czechoslovakia?”

At that time Czechoslovakia used to belong to Austria, and I picked up my hand right away to go to work in a leather factory. And another boy picked up his hand. And they sent us away to Czechoslovakia. The city was, I think, Brinn.

And they took away all our documents, and then they gave me an apron and boots and a piece of iron to take out the leather from the lime and bring it to the machine to fix up. The machine cleaned this up to make leather out of it.

But lots of times I couldn’t hit the leather, you know, with the hook. I couldn’t hit it. It would slide out. So I used to grab it with my hand to pull it over to the machine and my fingers got burned up from the lime. And I thought, “This is not for me neither.”

So, I ran again. They wouldn’t give me my documents back. So I ran away to a train, and I hid myself under the bench, and I knew that the train goes back to Vienna, and I went back to Vienna.

When I came to Vienna, everything was rationed. You couldn’t get anything without a ration card. I didn’t have any money to go into places to eat. So I said, “All right, whatever’s going to be is going to be.” And I went back to the barracks.

I came to the barracks and the officer said in German, “What are you doing here?”

And I said, “I burned my fingers up. I couldn’t work there, so I ran away.”

And he called me all kinds of names in German, “Verfluchte Yuden! Verfluchte Yude! I’m going to send you back to Poland!” Oh, he hollered murder.

But I had one nephew there who worked in a very big factory. He found out that I am there, and he made a job for me in the factory. So the German let me out. He gave me another document and he let me out to go to work in the factory.

I went to the factory. It was a very big factory, about 20,000 people there, and they put me in, and I had to put electric lights in, you know? Electric lights.

I used to work in that place and we used to get one meal a day, just a little meal. One time everybody was kicking, and I said to a friend, “What are you kicking for?” And he said, “We’re eating horse meat.” So I had enough already. I didn’t eat it.

And then I lived in a place, you know, I used to pay there, I don’t know, two krone or five krone, to rent a room. And I used to live there as a boarder, and I brought over Manny, and he was a boarder there, too.

After work we used to go in a people’s kitchen to get something to eat, like a bowl of soup or something. And then we used to go home with nothing more than a piece of bread in my pocket. I used to have such a terrible life.

But I was with Manny, and he made a few dollars, and we used to share, and soon I was making a little money on the Black Market…

Next: From Vienna to Berlin…

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February 22, 2010 · 8:59 am

Growing Up in Zharnov

by Harry Lazarus (Tenafly, NJ)
(interviewed by Bruce Black)

When I was growing up, I used to love listening to my grandfather, Harry Lazarus, z”l, retell  stories about his childhood in Zharnov, a small village near Lodz and not far from Warsaw, and how he made his way to America. He was a baker with bright blue eyes above a thick nose, a warm smile, and broad shoulders, and he spoke with the thick Eastern European Yiddish accent of his youth. Before his death a number of years ago, I recorded one of our story-telling sessions in his apartment in Tenafly, NJ. In this segment he describes his early years.

BB: So, Grandpa, tell me about growing up in Zharnov.

HL: Well, when I was seven years old, I was a very lively boy. I used to run around in winter without skates–just with my boots–on the ice. I ran up and down the river and everything, and I used to go outside and I used to stay by the fire, and then I used to come home.

And my mother used to work in the bakery. She worked very hard, and I used to help her as much as I could. I used to run to buy everything, to help whatever I could. In the morning before I went to the Hebrew school, I used to carry out the rolls, the orders, to restaurants, and then I used to go to Hebrew school half-a-day, and then I used to go half-a-day in the Russian school, the Russian-Polish school.

And everything was going all right but I was never satisfied with what we had in the house. I always liked to take something more. In the summer the druggist man had a whole wall with grapes, and I went in there and took bunches of grapes. And I had another boy, a partner, and we went out and we had grapes for a whole day. We had grapes!

And it was the same thing with everything. I went in the teacher’s garden and I went over to pick up some cucumbers. I needed cucumbers? But I went there to pick them and I spoiled so much stuff by going in, and that boy was supposed to watch so that we could get away. But the teacher caught me, and he gave me a slap in the face, and took me in to my father and complained.

My father saw that he made me a red cheek and said, “Why did you hit him so much?” And he hollered at the teacher.

But, anyhow, that’s what I used to do in Zharnov.

BB: Anything else you want to say about your childhood?

HL: Then girls and boys weren’t allowed to walk together. Girls used to walk separate and boys used to walk separate. It was a very religious town.

So, I used to take down these stickers from the trees and I used to throw them on the girls. The more wild I was, the more girls I had that loved me.

I went in Hebrew school–there weren’t many students, I wouldn’t say much, about twenty-five boys in the school–and the rabbi’s daughter fell in love with me.

One time we had to give him our papers, and after that we had to write the whole thing over and over. I didn’t like his writing, so I didn’t want to give him the paper. Then he took me and he hit me with his strap. He gave me some slap! Not just me, you know, a few other boys–they didn’t like his writing either, so they didn’t give him the papers. But he knew that I am the leader, so he strapped me.  He hit me very much. And when I came back home, my brother, Izzy, went to the rabbi and told him, “If you’re going to hit him, I’m going to hit your head off, if you’re going to hit him so. You made him black and blue marks from the strap.”

BB: Why didn’t his daughter try to save you from the beatings?

HL: Oh, she was crying. She called her mother over, and they pulled me away. Her father wanted to kill me, you know, he was so mad because I didn’t give him the paper.

And that was my life. I was growing up. When I was twelve years old, I knew how to read Russian and Polish and Jewish, and an uncle of mine came from a big city.

BB: Which city did he come from?

HL: He came from Lodz. He made a theater, and he put together a show in Zharnov. He took one of the finest buildings and he made a show and he put me in the show. And everything was nice, everything was good.

But when I was about thirteen years old, my mother passed away. She was sick, and my brother Izzy wanted to be a doctor. He was in a hospital, an intern, in a big city, and we sent him a telegram to come back. And he came home, and she died in his hands, my mother.

When she died, my brother Izzy decided to get married so he could take care of us. I was twelve or thirteen years old, my sister Yetta was about nine years old, and my sister Tilly was six years old. He figured he would get married and would take care of us.

He was full of life. He made himself a little room where we had three mills and where we made oil for the farmers before Easter. He made there a room for himself to live there, a very poor room.

My father didn’t like that life. He liked to have another wife again, and he started to have arguments with my brother Izzy.

My brother Izzy said, “Nu, I’ve had enough.” He wrote away a letter to Meyer, our step-brother in New York, and Meyer sent him a boat card. At that time, a boat card was about twenty-five dollars to go with the boat to come here. I don’t remember if he sent him the money or if he sent him a card, a boat card, but Izzy went away to America.

He came to America, and, well, he couldn’t be a doctor in America. So, he went and learned how to be a dress operator. And at the same time he used to go in a place to help out in a barbershop–he knew how to give a haircut and a shave and he used to make a little money, you know?

Then, when he had enough money, he sent for his wife, Lutzie. She was pregnant when he left her, and she had the baby, Morris, in Europe. She had the baby there and then he took over his wife, and he took over Yetta, and he took over Tilly. He brought them over here. And he tried to keep them alive with the money that he made.

BB: Why didn’t he bring you and Manny over?

HL: Me and Manny? He didn’t take us over. We remained there, but he took over Tilly and Yetta.

BB: How did Izzy meet Lutzie?

HL: She was in my mother’s family, and he was in Lodz and got acquainted with her in Lodz. And he went around with her and everything, and then he married her because of my mother passing away. He married her, and then she got pregnant, and he thought he’s going to lead the business and everything and that’s what’s going to be, but my father didn’t like it.

So, he went away to America, and he brought over Lutzie with Morris, Tilly, and Yetta, and he had a poor life here.

And I was in Zharnov with Manny, and he worked with a tailor and he got a few cents and we used to share together, you know?

BB: And your father? Did he remarry?

HL: My father was in love, and he married again, a nice woman. He married, and he put her right away in the bakery, and I knew already how to work in the bakery, too. Everything was going fine, but a year later he passed away, and he left me an order that we shouldn’t leave my uncle in, but my uncle didn’t care. He came and he threw everyone out.

He threw out Lutzie… she was in Zharnov, too, you know? I was thirteen years old, I used to bring her a piece of candy and a little soda or something because I knew that she was pregnant. She never forgot this, what I used to do as a young boy.

When he came, Lutzie had to go back to her town, and she had the baby, and then Izzy took them over to America.

I remained there in Zharnov, and I had to make a living for myself.

For Pesach I went in another bakery and I worked by the matzahs. They made matzahs for Pesach. So I worked by the oven to shovel in the matzahs and bring them out, and I had to be very careful. When you put in the matzah, the raw matzah mustn’t touch the baked matzah. The rabbi would come, you know, and he’d look if I worked the right way. And I worked the right way. Whatever I made–two dollars or three dollars a week–I made a little living. That wasn’t so bad.

BB: And then what happened?

HL: Then the war broke out…

Next: The Austrian army chases the Russian army out of Zharnov and conscripts the village youth to dig trenches.

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November 9, 2009 · 9:00 am

A Small Rescue

by Mimi Schwartz (Princeton, NJ)

November, 8, 1938 :  Some villagers smelled smoke wafting through the windows. Someone heard Mrs. Lowenstein shouting, “Our synagogue is burning. Please, help!” But the street in this little Black Forest village remained silent. Only one voice was heard, a man man shouting: Stay inside and shut the curtains! And people did as they were told. The fire brigade (including two Jews who used to belong before Nazi times) went to put out the fire, but strangers in brown shirts on a truck aimed rifles at them and said, “No!” Only when the house next to the synagogue was in danger did these men—“hoodlums from Sulz!” as the villagers called them later—give the command to use the water hoses to quell the fire on this night, Kristallnacht.

The next day everyone knew that the heart of the Jewish community in this tiny village had been destroyed. The synagogue’s beautiful interior was ruined: the dark wooden benches for 500, the delicate candelabras hanging over the center aisle, the carved wooden balustrade leading to the women’s section, and the ark for the Torah with its sacred scrolls. All was lost, people thought. And with it, the optimism of those who believed their Christian neighbors who said that “the crazy house painter from Austria will disappear and things will be as before!” Not so, not so. Jews now knew without a doubt that they must leave 300 years of history if they still could—and the fact that everyone in this village of 1,200 had gotten along before Hitler didn’t matter.

One night, a few months later, a young Jewish couple heard a knock on their door. They were frightened. And even more frightened when they opened the door, and there was the local policeman. “Don’t be afraid!” he said softly. “I won’t hurt you. I have something to give for you.”

The wife backed away, but the husband said, “What is it?”

“A Torah.”

“A what?”

This policeman, it turns out, had seen the Torah scrolls lying in the street on Kristallnacht and thought it was not right—a holy book, treated so badly. So he took it home, a heavy thing, and dug it deep into his garden. When he heard that the young couple, a few houses from his, was packing to leave, he hoped they might take the Torah with them.

The wife suspected a trick, but the husband thought, This man is a good man, a decent man I’ve known all my life! He told him yes, bring the Torah. The next night, another knock, and there was the policeman carrying the sacred scrolls like a giant baby wrapped in a blanket. A day later this Torah, hidden in a rolled-up living room carpet, was placed in a huge crate that the couple was shipping by boat to Haifa .

I saw this Torah in Israel, north of Acco near the Mediterranean Sea. It is in a Memorial Room built by those, including the young couple, who escaped the village in time and started again, this time farming avocados and melons instead of trading cattle as before. On the wall beside the Torah are the names of eighty-seven village Jews who didn’t make it, weren’t rescued by anyone, and so were murdered in Riga, Theresienstadt, and Auschwitz.  I bowed my head to honor them, and when I looked up in outrage and sadness, I saw the rescued Torah.  Its edges were soiled and slightly charred, and there was a knife gash; but its Five Books of Moses, saved by one policeman, was open for all to read as before.

I still wonder how many it would take, like this policeman, to rescue hope from the fires of hate.

Mimi Schwartz’s latest book is Good Neighbors, Bad Times – Echoes of My Father’s German Village, from which this essay was adapted. Other recent books include Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction. Six of her essays have been Notables in Best American Essays. She is Professor Emerita of Richard Stockton College in New Jersey and her short work has appeared in Agni, The Missouri Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Calyx, The New York Times, Tikkun, The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Florida Review, Brevity, Writer’s Digest, and Jewish Week, among others.

This essay originally appeared in several Jewish newspapers and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

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July 27, 2009 · 8:37 am

The Lost Cellos of Lev Aronson

by Frances Brent (New Haven , CT )

7 July 1941
Riga

With difficulty Lev Aronson carried his cellos, bows, and cases up the stairs of the main post office. In a notebook, many years later, he wrote: “the typical wide stairs of old Russian government buildings, cold cement and steep steps, hard to handle with two cellos and emotional pain. . . . ” Two Latvian auxiliary police—volunteers dressed in civilian clothes and newly issued brassards— escorted him from behind. Lev shifted his weight up the stairwell. A group of Jewish musicians, jackets over their shoulders in the heat, was already leaving. No one spoke, “but a whole world was expressed in their glances.”

Since Melngalvju nams, the House of Blackheads, was destroyed in German bombing and fires on the evening of June 29, the predominantly non-Jewish radio orchestra had lost its largest instruments and most of its music library. The post office had become its headquarters.  Other Jewish musicians with valuable instruments had been summoned to the radio station. Lists of their names had been obtained from Latvian collaborators. Everyone milled around in a daze in the large postal room. Cases were opened; bows and instruments were lifted off velvet and satin linings. Outside, there was a great deal of commotion: Hundreds of people were in the streets. German cars made their way through the roads while vigilantes crowded the neighborhoods, leading small processions of startled Jews. Inside it was quiet enough to hear the ping of vibrating strings.

Someone hastily pushed Lev forward with his aluminum and leather cases, and the principal cellist of the radio orchestra, a man he knew well, approached. Lev was nearly six feet tall. He was accustomed to thinking of himself as “a man of the world,” but he was disoriented in the unusual setting. The man who was facing him, a well-known musician and a colleague, was not a common criminal like the thugs in the streets. He nodded awkwardly in greeting before Lev reluctantly unlatched and opened the lids of the cases.

When Lev released the instruments from their ties, it was the last time he touched the beautiful spiral, the seahorse tail of the Amati scroll. The cellist, his old colleague, smiled, shifting his gaze to the window. Then, turning his back, “his meaning was clear.”

Something lunatic caused Lev to ask a question. He chose his words in German, the current language of the street, rather than Russian, which would have been used ten days earlier: “Can I have a receipt?” The room filled with laughter. Lev felt a hand clutch the collar of his coat, shoving him backward, down the stairs.

[…]

Later in life, when he returned to the story of the confiscation of his instruments, the elements were always the same: the knock on the door, two Latvians wearing armbands, mounting the cement steps of the central post office, his colleague’s averted glance, laughter, a hand on his coat collar, a kick or a push, falling, tumbling down the shaft of the stairwell.

Opposite the post office there was a park with benches. Lev crossed the road in a daze. His trousers were ripped, his cheek and the bridge of his nose were bleeding. He sat in the half-shade under a broad oak. He thought about the Amati. He felt as though he had “forcibly delivered a friend.” After several minutes Lev painfully stood up. There was an odd noise in his ear. Since childhood this was a sound he had heard whenever there was complete silence. He knew he had to get back to the apartment where his parents, his sister, and Chiutan were waiting. It was dangerous to be seen on the streets. Many prominent Jewish intellectuals and civic leaders had already been rounded up, shot on the pavement, or dragged to Zentralka, Central Prison, or the Riga Police Prefecture . Strangely the fear of being arrested bothered Lev less than the humiliation he had felt among the musicians from the Radio Orchestra.

With Dead Expressions

On his way home, Lev passed the Opera House. A group of singers, dancers, and musicians, many old friends and colleagues, were gathered at the stage door. From a distance they seemed to be talking lightheartedly. It felt strange to be without an instrument, but out of habit he approached them anyway. When he came close enough to be noticed, their bodies stiffened, and they looked back at him “with dead expressions.” Some turned their gazes and others stepped aside, hurrying into the building. Only the dancer Osvalds Lēmanis moved forward and offered a handshake: “Have faith, old friend. I’ll do my best to look out for you.” Lev walked on. He understood the need for self-preservation. His relationship to his old colleagues could lead to their interrogation, arrest, or the loss of work. “So why bother?” he asked himself.

Lev’s identity as a Jew was now his main concern, and this was a completely new experience. How should he get back to his apartment? He would use the old city’s indirect routes, avoiding main thoroughfares and extending time until dusk. In darkness Jews and gentiles appeared the same. The old city was crisscrossed with alleyways and narrow passages connecting the buildings to one another. Houses were so close that neighbors could raise their windows, lean out, and talk; they didn’t have to use loud voices. He was able to go a long distance by passing through backyards. Small tunnels and old stone entranceways led to different sections of the old city. The silence was eerie. He could hear the echo of his shoes and an occasional drunkard humming “O Tannenbaum” though it was out of season. Then he was beyond the old city, two-thirds of the way home, past Pulvertornis, Gunpowder Tower. He forced himself to walk with confidence, his back straight, his head high, without a trace of meekness. Revelers passed him, their faces flushed from drinking.

8 July 1941
Riga

And so it was odd when they shouted, “Here are your instruments!”

A vehement knock at the door the next morning. Two Latvian collaborators and a German soldier: “All Jewish males will evacuate this building!”

On the street, men gathered from many different apartment buildings, some dressed in summer suits, one with phylacteries on his forehead. They waited for a long time before the strange announcement: “Here are your instruments!” One of the collaborators had buckets, soap, and rags.

Some spectators assembled on the corner as the men were put to work washing the street. A few laughed uncomfortably. Some taunted. The crowd formed a circle and watched as someone was lashed with a leather belt across his naked behind until he was totally covered with blood. The performance continued until people grew bored; even the guards seemed to lose energy. After a while they lined the men up and marched them through the streets.

On their way they encountered Russian prisoners of war, perhaps three hundred of them, in shocking condition. Their hands dangled at their sides and their clothes had been ripped. Some didn’t have shoes. Their feet dragged. Lev was amazed to see how expressionless they were, not responding when the Germans struck them with the butts of their guns to make them move forward.

Both groups were ushered through the gates of a city park. The Russians arrived first and they queued up along a series of long, narrow ditches. It looked like a burial ground, and everyone thought the same thing. Several guards pushed the men up to the edge of the ditches.

A uniformed German officer and several Latvians in civilian clothes stepped forward. The German had the soft face of a cleric. It was round and smooth except for the left cheek, which was scarred. He said: “Russian communists tried to destroy the beauty of these parklands, digging trenches for defense against our German army. Their judgment was wrong. Our army won’t be stopped by archaic tactics. This is the army of the future, led by the wisdom of the Führer. So that you remember, you’ll restore these grounds with bare hands!” The work continued until close to midnight.

9 July 1941
Riga

Lev’s hands, so important to the life of a cellist, were being destroyed. The next day he returned to the trenches, digging again without a shovel or gloves. His friend, the Chinese wrestler, Chiutan, had wanted to come along, arguing that he could do the work and save Lev’s hands, but both knew it was impossible.

In the early afternoon, when the task of filling the trenches was complete, Lev returned to the apartment block. German and Latvian officials were operating the elevators. Lev took the stairwell, wondering what would happen next. On the landing he saw a guard standing in front of his apartment. The door was taped, sealed with a large purple sticker, and on it were printed the words: CONFISCATED BY SECURITY POLICE. Lev approached: “I live here. It’s raining. I need a coat.”

The guard answered, “You don’t live in this apartment any longer. Where you’re going you won’t need a coat. Get out!” He pushed him down the stairs, and his body bounced against the railing. On the ground floor, another guard was waiting.

But nobody knew what would happen. Lev found his family and many others crowded into the empty apartment of a neighboring building. People were sitting on the floor or leaning against walls. Lev would think back later, “They already appeared to be mourning the dead.”

After several hours, the same SD man who had been stationed at the door of Lev’s apartment entered with some Latvians. One of them, named Ansons, had been in school with Lev.

“All men, outside!” it was announced.

When they were boys, Ansons’s name had appeared next to Lev’s on the roster, and sometimes Lev had helped him—“saved his neck”—when school assignments weren’t completed.

“Ansons, help my father—not me—he has a leg injury and walks with a cane,” Lev whispered.

Ansons didn’t answer.

There was turmoil and crying. Then a second announcement: “Young men, out of here! Old men stay! The rest will be turned over to Latvian authorities.” Soldiers separated families that clung to one another. But Lev’s father had been spared.

Again, Lev was on the street. About twenty men were lined in rows with Latvian guards stationed at five-foot distances around them. Ansons was in front of Lev, a rifle on his shoulder. Lev began talking to him quietly. “Where are we going? Where are they taking us?” Without turning his head, Ansons whispered, “Zentralka. Don’t ask anything else. Leave me alone. If you ask again, I’ll pretend I don’t know you. You’re on the way to God knows where, and that will be the end of you. I have to go on living. Don’t talk to me; it will only get me in trouble.”

Frances Brent is the co-translator of Beyond the Limit: Poems by Irina Ratushinsakya. Her book of poetry, The Beautiful Lesson of the I, won the 2005 May Swenson Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Yale Review, the Denver Quarterly, and New American Writing.  She lives in New Haven , Connecticut .

This excerpt from The Lost Cellos of Lev Aronson is reprinted with permission of the publisher.

For more information about the book, you can visit: http://atlasandco.com/new-releases/the_lost_cellos_of_lev_aronson/

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April 13, 2009 · 8:31 am

My Father, The Jewish Athlete

by Helen Epstein (Lexington, Massachusetts)

When I was growing up in the 1950s, none of my friends’ Dads worked out at a gym, let alone swam laps in a pool. My father did. For nearly two decades between the two world wars, he represented Czechoslovakia in international competitions and two Olympic Games. He also coached and served as a role model for younger Jewish swimmers.

One of three sons of an assimilated Jewish family, Kurt Epstein was born in 1904 in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bohemia. The Epstein boys played at being American cowboys; their parents employed a cook and a nurse, a German tutor and violin teacher.

Sports were an important part of life for Czech children by then– girls and boys, Christians and Jews, children of factory workers as well as children of factory owners learned to swim, skate and row. The Epsteins lived on the Elbe river and, early on, Kurt began to use it.

“Any mood can be improved by a good swim,” my father always said.

But there’s no question that he saw swimming as a response to anti-Semitism. That was one of the reasons he joined his school rowing club, which introduced him to athletic discipline, and its rewards.

Rowing made him an asset to his school and small town and soon Kurt began to think about competitive swimming. He and his friends who swam in the Elbe followed newspaper reports of races in Prague, invested in a stop watch, began to clock their times. Then, they signed up to compete.

According to scholars, Czech Jews, like Jews all over Central Europe, were well-represented among athletes of the 1920s and 1930s. This was largely due to the work of Dr. Max Nordau, who called for a “muscular Judaism” at a Zionist Congress in 1898. Dr. Nordau, a physician and one of Herzl’s earliest supporters, argued that a muscular Jewry had existed in ancient times but over the centuries had been destroyed by ghettoization.

Whether or not Kurt was aware of Nordau’s ideas, he would have been in sympathy with them, and eager to put traditional Jewish stereotypes behind him like most Czech Jews.

In 1924, Kurt took pride in joining the Czechoslovak Army in “It never occurred to me to stay up all night and drink potfuls of coffee like some to try to produce an irregular heartbeat and get a rejection,” he recalled.

He was selected for reserve officers school and posted back to Prague where he played water polo in the Vltava River. Then the Czechoslovak National Swim Club requested that he be furloughed to compete in Barcelona, the first of many competitions he attended from Scandinavia to North Africa.

By the early 1920s water polo was one of the roughest and most popular spectator sports in Europe. It is tempting to ponder the psychology that drew men to such a rough sport. Kurt recalled speculating about it himself whenever his team played against the Hungarians who rarely lost a game.

I once asked why a player was playing so furiously since his team was already winning by two digits. He answered that after the war, each one of Hungary’s neighbors had taken a piece of their land. Therefore it was important at least in sports to score as high as possible.

For my father, the ultimate place to score was at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Whether or not to participate in what would become known as the Nazi Olympics was a hotly debated question throughout the world. The Maccabi ordered all its members to boycott.  A Gallup poll indicated 43% of Americans favored boycott and many athletes refused to participate.

Kurt Epstein decided to go. When asked whether he ever regretted his decision to participate, Kurt always said no. He believed sports occupied a higher plane than politics and described the triumph of “the American Negro runner” as he called Jesse Owens, who defied Aryan notions of racial superiority by winning four golds.

Two years later, Hitler annexed what is now the Czech Republic. Kurt was deported to Terezin, then to Auschwitz, then to a small labor camp called Frydlant. There, the prisoners took turns giving lectures to one another on subjects they loved. My father gave one on the Olympic ideal and the importance of amateur sports. He sometimes gave his sports training, along with luck and friendship, as reasons for his surviving Nazism.

When he returned to Prague after the war, he was elected to the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee. When the Communists took over in 1948, he felt that he would not survive a second totalitarian regime and vowed to get out in time “in a swimsuit if necessary.”

He arrived in New York City in the summer of 1948 where, for a decade, he was unable to find steady employment but where he was soon elected Treasurer of The Association of Czechoslovak Sportsmen in Exile in the Western World. Eventually, he was accepted into the ILGWU and became a cutter in a clothing factory in New York’s garment district.

He maintained a correspondence with a network of athletes-in-exile –Jewish and non-Jewish — living in Australia, South America, Israel and Europe, read the sports section of the newspaper every day and never lost his belief in the international brotherhood of sports.

He taught his children how to swim, and I still do.

Helen Epstein is the author of Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From — the first two volumes of a trilogy about the families of Holocaust survivors — and the biography of Joseph Papp, the American Jewish founder of Free Shakespeare in New York City’s Central Park.
Her website is http://www.helenepstein.com.

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