Category Archives: European Jewry

October 22, 2012 · 8:17 am

Ring of Defiance

by Ellen Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

Recently I lost a gold band off the ring finger of my right hand. The ring is a plain gold band, and I use it as a guard to keep that hand’s main ring, a lovely garnet I once bought in Jerusalem, from slipping off.

The gold band had been my mother’s wedding ring, and I wore it  constantly, not only as a reminder of her, but also of an episode that has meant an increasing lot to me over the years.

I have never forgotten the day in May of 1939 when my mother and I had reservations at the Hotel Bremer Hof , a well known hotel in Bremen, for the night before we were due to board the North German Lloyd liner EUROPA for our emigration to the United States.

When it came time for dinner Mimi (my pet name for my mother) called room service for some food to be brought up for Pips, my Scotty, who had been certified to travel with us. Pips even carried traveling papers stamped with an official swastika clearing him for the voyage.

Pips’ food arrived and hit the spot with the dog. But it was the slip of paper on the silver tray that left the message I remember to this day. It read in elegant typescript: “Our Jewish guests are requested to refrain from entering the dining room for any meals.”

The next morning my mother and I stood on the Bremerhafen pier undergoing one last bodily inspection before boarding the S.S EUROPA.

Two fat bosomy matrons in white uniforms had already searched all orifices of my mother and me (I was all of 11 years old) looking for gold, diamonds or other treasures which we might intend to smuggle out of Germany. Not having found anything they were looking for one of the heavy females spotted my mother’s wedding ring and demanded: “Hand it over!”

With a rapid, but calm, movement my mother slid off the ring, moved a few steps closer to the edge of the pier and tossed the ring into the harbor water between the pier and the ocean liner. Too young to know what the dangerous consequences of her action might have been I admired my mother’s courage that day

The S.S.EUROPA left Bremerhaven early that evening. The shipboard band played “Muss I denn, muss I denn” (a German folksong beginning with the words “why must I leave this little town?”)

There were tears in my mother’s eyes as we stood at the railing watching Bremen fade into the distance. I did not understand why she cried, but I was very young and did not have her memories of better German days.

It was an enormous feeling of satisfaction to visit Pips at his kennel on the top deck. Twice a day a German sailor, black-white-red swastika emblem pinned to his uniform blouse, walked my little Jewish dog around the upper level of the ship to do his “business.” Even this eleven-year old somehow found this to be an act of poetic justice.

Soon after our arrival in Louisville, our new American home, my mother requested my father, who had managed to arrive ahead of us, to buy her a new wedding ring. She did not feel married without it, she said.

And it was this ring, which I wore as a guard on my right hand, that I’d lost.

Fortunately this episode has a happy ending.

After a few hours of frantic searching, the Ring of Defiance reappeared. It had slipped off my finger during a session on the computer and awaited discovery right under the keyboard.

Of course, it is not the original Ring of Defiance, but even as a replacement I am very happy to have it back on my hand where it belongs.

Born in Germany, Ellen Norman Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel.  Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

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August 6, 2012 · 7:24 am

The First Family

by Sheldon P. Hersh (Lawrence, NY)

There were a number of subjects that were always considered taboo and simply not open to discussion.  No matter how hard I tried, my parents were adamant about not revealing certain details of the firestorm that had taken the lives of their extended families. Not one other family member apart from my parents had been spared. I was particularly interested in certain events and personal experiences relating to the Holocaust but was rebuffed at every turn whenever I touched upon a topic that was deemed off limits. The wrong question would bring about an instant change in behavior, a change that became only too apparent when looking at their somber faces. But it was their eyes that gave it all away; their eyes were truly windows to an inner compartment awash in anguish and distress. Sad and dejected, my mother’s glistening eyes would stare off into space and flicker in concert with a gush of tears. And from my father, a piercing silent stare that brought an immediate end to my innocent if not foolish curiosity. I never saw him cry. It was as though he had already gone through his lifetime allotment of tears and the cisterns were now dry and empty for all time. Both had already shed oceans of tears, and though my mother’s supply was somehow replenished, my father’s tears had simply vanished. But there were things that I wanted to know and so I continued to poke and prod hoping to find answers by attempting to enter a world that was forbidden to outsiders. Whenever I crossed the line and sought out matters that were not meant to be discussed, my mother was always quick to intervene.

“Don’t antagonize your father. He’s a broken man,” she would plead in barely audible whispers. “He’s suffered enough already. You are very young but one day you will understand. I promise you, my son, one day you will understand.”

One such topic dealt with my father’s first family, a wife and three children, four innocents who perished during the Holocaust while imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto. Along with thousands of ghetto residents, they had succumbed to starvation, exhaustion and illness while the lives of countless others were cruelly extinguished in nearby killing centers. The story of this first family was a chapter in a book that was destined to remain closed and unread.  From my earliest recollection, I sensed that this was a subject that remained strictly off limits, and, though my interest was quite naturally piqued, I refrained from asking too many questions. My father, generally open and talkative, remained resolute and silent in matters relating to this phantom first family. There were no details of how they lived or any information as to how they died. Talk of their appearance, likes, dislikes, mannerisms and personalities was never forthcoming and remained under constant lock and key in my father’s secure memory bank. My mother, perhaps fearful of unpleasant repercussions and not wanting to open old wounds, tactfully avoided any subject that was certain to unsettle my father. “He has suffered enough,” she would often say. “There are things you should not ask. Your father is nervous enough.” The first family was clearly one such subject and she wisely stayed clear of any discussion relating to this most sensitive matter.  She would, however, occasionally forget herself and release a snippet or two of information about the first family but quickly regained her footing and dared go no further. What had appeared so promising at the outset was suddenly withdrawn and I was left guessing once again. It was akin to a pinhole in a drawn window shade that yielded little, if any, illumination and insight.

The first family’s names were never mentioned and their faces never graced the pages of our once emaciated photo album. I would occasionally think about this mysterious first family, for, after all, these children were my very own siblings.  My ever-fanciful imagination endeavored to bring each of the lost members back into the fold by assigning names and concrete features to faceless individuals who, in spite of my best efforts, continued to reside in some far off unreachable planet. There were times when, emboldened by a jolt of overpowering curiosity, I approached my father with questions relating to his first family. “Foolish child,” he would quickly reply. “How could you ever possibly understand?” And just as with other Holocaust era questions that left him at a loss for words, the conversation would abruptly end with his use of this very short refrain.

While visiting with my parents a number of years ago, I was determined to be a bit more assertive in my desire to learn of this first family. Whether it had been the presence of my own children or the appreciation that I could no longer be put off, my father had softened somewhat and appeared a bit more receptive to the idea of introducing his first family into our daily conversations. As the sole survivor of his extended family, he was the only one who could provide needed information about those who had not survived. No photographs, letters or mementos of their existence had ever surfaced after the war, making my father’s recollections all the more critical. I was well aware of his pain and sensitivity, and, at my mother’s urging, I suggested that we proceed at a pace of his own choosing.

Within the little time that remained during that last visit, my father began speaking of life in the ghetto, and, with some reservation, introduced me to his young daughter and two infant sons. Though details were meager, a milestone had been reached that, I hoped, would facilitate further discussion.  The first and most difficult hurdle had been overcome and it was as if a sprinkle of clarity was added to a distant blur. Visions of faint images were beginning to inch forward with the promise of additional clarity if only time would allow the process to continue. Sadly it had not. My father died unexpectedly shortly after our initial breakthrough.  This small first step had barely scratched the surface and now there  was no one left to ask and nowhere else to turn.

Years later, I came upon a speech given to a large crowd in the Lodz ghetto by Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the ghetto Jewish council. An order had been received from German officials that 20,000 Jews were to be deported and that the Jewish council was to decide which Jews were to be chosen for certain death. It had been decided to place the “unproductive elements” of the ghetto, the elderly, the sick and children below the age of ten, on the list for deportation. In a speech, titled ‘Give Me your Children,’ Rumkowski stunned a grief stricken crowd that was soon to be left in a state of unimaginable terror.  “I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my own old age I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers give me your children…I must perform this difficult and bloody operation. I must cut off the limbs in order to save the body itself.”

Josef Zelkowicz, a witness to these horrific events, writes In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto “Hours have passed since these woes, these agonies, were inflicted on those wretched people, but the situation has not calmed down one bit. Mothers have not yet tired of shrieking, fathers’ wellsprings of tears have not yet sealed, and the silence of the night amplifies the reverberations of the screaming and sobbing. No sound reaches your ears, man, but that bitter wailing; no thought occurs to you but death; and your heart ponders, nothing but devastation.”

I will likely never know what became of this first family, but I am now able to appreciate why it was my father could not relive a time that drove so many to madness and exile from the human condition. His common refrain — “Foolish child! How could you ever possibly understand?” — has taken on a clarity of its own. He was absolutely right. I could not then, nor ever in the future, understand what had transpired. He succeeded in keeping his secret well hidden, and I sense that his intention to do so was not only to maintain his own emotional and physical equilibrium but to keep us, his current children and loved ones, safe from harm.

Sheldon P. Hersh, an Ear, Nose and Throat Physician with a practice in the New York metropolitan area, is the co-author of The Bugs Are Burning, a book on the Holocaust. For more information about his work, visit:  http://tinyurl.com/86u3ous

 

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May 14, 2012 · 7:00 am

Accident of Fate

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

No such thing as
too many concentration camp movies.
No such thing as
too many concentration camp books.
I have seen and read many, but hardly enough
for somewhere inside of me,
I know I should have been there,
there in any camp you choose
with a number on my arm,
and my bones sticking out of my body.
I do not know how to call it,
accident of fate or God’s hand,
but I have been found guilty of the soft life
here in this land of bountiful
where I can decide which restaurant to patron,
or what popular play to attend.
I feel I should be someplace else,
rousted out of the barracks at two a.m.,
hoping to be spared another beating
or a final trip to the chambers.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in a new YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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May 7, 2012 · 8:29 am

Light Music

by  Ilan Braun (Le Tour-du-Parc, Brittany, France)

Have you ever heard
On a summer evening
The violins and the cellos sobbing
While high in the sky
Swallows are  dancing
A place where the bows on too tight cords
Are running up faster than life
Faster than death
Where  grey-faced musicians
In spite of all
Smile  to the children around
Where tears flow like streams
Stemming from springs
Believed to be forever dried up
Do you hear, still,
This light music?

Ilan Braun, a retired French journalist who wrote for L’Arche, says that “This poem was inspired by the tragedy of the Terezinstadt concentration camp.”

A poet, writer, painter and amateur historian on the Holocaust and post-war Jewish clandestine immigration to Israel, he has lived in Israel and Australia and visited over 30 countries.

You can read more of his work in Labyrinthe poétique: De la terre au ciel (Publibook, Paris, 2009) and in English (“The Oak of Tears”) in Under One Canopy: Readings in Jewish Diversity, edited by Karen Primack (Kulanu Inc. Silver Spring, MD. 2003).

For more information about his work, visit: www.ilanbraun.dr.ag

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April 9, 2012 · 2:16 pm

Conjugations of God

by Ilan Braun (Le Tour-du-Parc, Brittany, France)

There is no past or imperfect tense
In the Creator’s Utterance
Everything is present and perfect
What has been proclaimed at the Dawn of Time
Still rings hollow to our ears
The Creator cannot be ‘past’
He is beyond Time
Neither yesterday nor today nor tomorrow
He is the Fullness and the Unity of Time
The Whole, the Infinite
Continuum
He is permanent
He is “the” Permanence
At every billionth of a second of our lives
Within each heartbeat
HE IS!
Not human conjugations of Time
Futile and morbid
How to conjugate the time of God?
Just as we can not really explain the swelling of waves
Crashing on the shore
GOD is the first wave
Breaking on humanity
Its divine spray wetting our faces and our souls

Ilan Braun is a retired French journalist who wrote for L’Arche. A poet, writer, painter and amateur historian on the Holocaust and post-war Jewish clandestine immigration to Israel, he has lived in Israel and Australia and visited over 30 countries.

You can read more of his work in Labyrinthe poétique: De la terre au ciel (Publibook, Paris, 2009) and in English (“The Oak of Tears”) in Under One Canopy: Readings in Jewish Diversity, edited by Karen Primack (Kulanu Inc. Silver Spring, MD. 2003).

For more information about his work, visit: www.ilanbraun.dr.ag

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September 12, 2011 · 7:52 am

Reunion in Oswego

by Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

Late summer of 1945.  The war was finally over.

It was a strange time, an unreal time. True, Germany had been defeated. There would be no more casualties among the sons of friends. But the revelations had begun in the spring and what we read in the papers and saw in the newsreels surpassed the worst nightmares we could have had.

That summer I sat in a train traveling from Kentucky to Oswego, New York,  headed for an encounter which took place because Mimi spotted a photograph in a newspaper.

Amazingly determined to make their new life in Louisville a total success, my middle-aged parents worked very hard at jobs they would have never dreamed of doing in their earlier European existence before 1939. Now that the war had ended they came home from work every evening and faced the letterbox with fear. They dreaded finding the telegram or the official letter from Europe confirming the unbearable.

My father especially, feared that mail: three brothers, one sister, their spouses and their children were unaccounted for.

One Sunday afternoon that fall Mimi, who saved stacks of newspapers and magazines during the week to read on her day off, sat surrounded by papers in her favorite armchair in our living room, her feet up. In the dining room my father was trying to teach me how to play chess. Suddenly my mother jumped up, scattering the reading materials all over the floor.

“Max,” she screamed. “It’s Max. Leo, Ellen, come look.”

Her voice was higher than usual, all color had left her face. She stood in the doorway and pointed to a front page photograph in the Aufbau, the German refugee weekly.

Together the three of us bent over the dining table and passed the paper from one to the other in silence as we studied the picture intently. We squinted at the photograph time and time again, wishing it into the shape of Max Nussbaum, my father’s older brother.

After searching frantically in a kitchen drawer, I located the magnifying glass among matches and clothes-pins. With the enlargement Uncle Max became real. A balding, chubby man, he leaned over the railing of an incoming ship, one of the eagerly waving passengers entering New York harbor. A caption explained that thanks to an act of Congress an entire camp load of prisoners liberated in Italy was to be relocated at a site in Oswego, New York.

“My God, I’m almost sure it is Max. Is it possible?” said my father. The cigarette in his hand trembled. “We must go to him.”

I had not heard him mention the name of his siblings since the day we arrived in Louisville. Perhaps he hid his anguish in silence. But now, after learning that his favorite brother might still be alive, my father seemed near panic. He had to make certain it was Max.

The next morning a long distance call to the newspaper editor in New York confirmed the name of Max Nussbaum on the passenger list.

Wartime travel restrictions were still in effect. Military personnel had priority and Pullman reservations were not available. None of that mattered: coach was all my parents could afford.

For a day and a night the three of us took turns sitting on any seat we could, standing in the aisle or guarding our suitcases at the rear of the compartment. It was a long emotion-filled trip. What thoughts must have gone through father’s head as we moved through vast stretches of farmland and stopped at dozens of anonymous railroad stations. Did he feel anticipation, joy, a sense of loss over the others?

Seven years had gone by since I had last seen Uncle Max but I remembered the occasion.

“I’ll never emigrate,” he said that spring evening in Berlin in 1938, leaning back comfortably into the brocaded purple sofa of my parents’ apartment, his face well-barbered and pink.  “Why should I?”

He was deep in conversation with my father, unaware that the little girl playing with her doll nearby overheard him. Above their heavy pouches Uncle Max’s brown eyes twinkled in perennial optimism.

As he watched his brother strike a match to light his pipe, my father’s expression was far more serious. The match’s swift glare reflected the heavy gold of the watch chain hanging over the belly of Uncle Max’s dark suit.

“I simply don’t believe it…this talk of secret arrests,” he said.

“You are a fool, Max,” my father’s voice was harsh. “You must make plans to emigrate before it is too late. And for heaven’s sake, be careful about being seen out with Else.” Else was Uncle Max’s Christian girlfriend.

Max blew out the match carefully, then deposited the charred wood in the ashtray.

“What would they want with me?” he asked, “I’m so unimportant.” A small wreath of pipe smoke encircled his round face before disappearing behind his balding head. He smiled at my mother who had just finished playing Chopin and rose from the piano bench heading for the kitchen to prepare some coffee.

I was very young and Uncle Max appeared old to me because he had already lost most of his hair. But I liked him very much. He always brought me presents and told me stories. I looked forward to Sunday mornings when my father and Uncle Max visited the Cafe Kranzler and I was allowed to come along. I could order anything I wanted there but I always chose the same: a meat-filled pastry, the specialty of the house.

The café kept a rack of sophisticated magazines for the pleasure of its guests. I always pretended to look at the magazine pictures, but it was Uncle Max’s stories I tried to hear. The stories he told my father were more exciting and spicier than the ones he told me.

The men chatted freely assuming I did not understand. Hiding under the expression of boredom I listened intently, fascinated by the delicious details of my uncle’s amours. None of my girlfriends could boast of an uncle married to a genuine countess, even if that marriage lasted only three days. Unfortunately no one in the family ever mentioned Uncle Max’s marriage and I could never ask, for that would unmask me as a spy. But the image remained with me for years: my jolly, pipe-smoking Uncle Max sitting on a throne like some oriental pasha while his countess, clad in white fur, nestled at his feet. One of my more delightful fantasies, never substantiated by anyone.

The visits to the Café Kranzler ended all too soon when Jews were no longer welcome in public restaurants. But listening to Uncle Max continued to be refreshing during the rumor-ridden days of that pre-war spring. Most of the people who came to our apartment uttered dire predictions about the future. Uncle Max alone radiated confidence. Only he asked, “Why leave all this behind for the unknown?” pointing in the direction of the Bluethner grand piano and the porcelain-filled vitrines of which Mimi was so proud. That was enough for me. Within seconds he had me forget “quotas, affidavits, passports, and passage,” all the strange new words around which daily conversation now turned.

I even forgot the fears that came with darkness when the world outside our second floor balcony became a cauldron of shadows and evil. Our guests arrived during late evening hours: friends who were afraid to sleep in their own homes because of the secret arrests Uncle Max smiled off. They accepted gratefully the hospitality of Mimi’s extra mattresses spread on the living room floor, the use of her sofas, or even the hard floors.

“Kindchen, what would you like me to bring you next time?” Uncle Max never called me by my name and I thought he might not know it. But his words were always comforting. Strange, on the night of his last visit to us the darkness outside our balcony did not even bother me. I watched him knock out his pipe and bid us goodbye and wished all our visitors were as positive as he.

Early the next morning he was arrested. In the pre-dawn hours two Gestapo agents knocked on his door. The neighbors on either side were asleep and heard nothing.

Someone who knew him saw Uncle Max later that morning en route to the local police precinct and quickly called Else. She took a taxi to the Central Police headquarters on the Alexanderplatz and watched as prisoners from all over Berlin were unloaded into the grim old building. After the big gates were shut she walked to the nearest telephone booth. She wept as she reported to my parents that the shipment she had awaited had gone astray, which was her coded way of letting us know the Gestapo had arrested Uncle Max.

Oswego came up with the sun. From the railroad station it appeared a small and sleepy town.

We carried our bags across the street to the hotel which could not possibly have seen grander days. Now it had become the center of heavy traffic. When we lined up at the front desk we discovered other relatives who had come to visit camp inmates.

“Reservations?” In the early morning light the room clerk looked gaunt and gray like a Dickens character. He appeared angry when my father told him yes, we did have a reservation. He leafed through a big book and shuffled through some cards before he parted with one of his rooms.

The room was on an upper floor and overlooked an air shaft. No elevator.
We washed up in a hurry. Then, searching for a fast breakfast, we crossed the square in front of the hotel and looked for a coffee shop. Wooden benches surrounded the war memorial in the town square. A few early morning occupants stared at us with suspicion as we walked past. Even the pigeons avoided our path.
After breakfast we started out for the camp. My father remembered his brother’s sweet tooth and had us stop at a candy store for a welcoming gift.

“Good morning, I want the biggest box of dark chocolates you have,” he said to the saleswoman. His voice quivered with excitement.

The woman behind the counter eyed us with distaste through her rimless glasses. She did not seem anxious to sell her candy. She stood motionless while her glance traveled over each one of us.

“Strange sales technique,” Mimi mumbled under her breath. She worked as a saleslady in a store at home.

Quietly my father repeated his request. He was red in the face. I could tell he was holding in his temper. Only the desire to bring a present to his brother kept him in the store.

A taxi took us to the old army barracks in the suburbs which had been converted to house the refugees. A guard at the fenced-in gate issued us passes. A bright sheet of sunlight touched even the gray paint of the barracks with hope, promising a golden autumn. It was a going to be a good morning.

We had written to Uncle Max and told him to expect us.  Now we sat in a waiting room until he could come to us.

When he walked through the door, cold, unlit pipe in hand, there was no more doubt. All four of us burst into tears. But they were happy tears. Afterwards my father and Uncle Max stood for a long time with their arms around each other. Neither man said a word, but every few seconds my father shook his head ever so gently. Perhaps he was trying to convince himself that he was not imagining the scene. Were there words for this kind of occasion?  We couldn’t find them.

Uncle Max was no longer chubby. I did not remember him being so short. Of course, I had grown in the meantime. Now, at seventeen my perspective had changed. In his drab army fatigues with the pert black beret hiding his totally bald head my uncle looked like a jolly padre serving as an armed forces chaplain.
He indicated he wanted to show us around. With a courtly gesture he opened the door to Mimi and me. We went to his room first.

The barrack cubicle sparkled in the light falling through the barred window. Books leaned against each other on a shelf over his bunk. There were photographs of his parents, of his brothers as children. A multicolored woven blanket repeated the reds and blues of the book covers. A battered shofar hung on one wall. I remembered that shofar from my grandparents’ home.

We sat on his bunk while he spoke to us. It was incredible that this gentle, kind man had survived several notorious concentration camps. How had he survived Dachau?

“I walked south,” he answered smiling, “toward Italy.”

We did not believe him. My parents looked at each other, then back at him. He nodded his head.

“I escaped, yes. You know I always felt that I was too unimportant for the Nazis to go to a lot of trouble over me. And I remembered that you thought me a fool. Believe me, I thought of that often. I had enough time to think. Disguised as a peasant, with a burlap bag slung over my shoulder, I walked straight through Germany. I avoided borders. I crossed into Italy from Austria. I no longer remember how many weeks it took me. I traveled at night and slept in caves during the day. I was fortunate: most people were kind. It was the closing months of the war. Even farmers had little to eat. They believed me a beggar – it wasn’t hard – and gave me food. Sometimes it was a piece of dark bread, a few potatoes, sometimes even a piece of sausage.”

“By the time I arrived in the Abruzzi Mountains in Italy, I was in big trouble. From all that walking my shoes had fallen into shreds. I spoke no Italian, so I pretended to be a deaf-mute. Had I opened my mouth it would have been the end of me. So I used my hands to communicate. Occasionally that landed me a little food for my bag.”

“Shall I tell you something? I was almost relieved when the carabiniere picked me up. My feet were so frozen and bloody they barely carried me. And I was tired of hiding. I wanted to be in the sunshine so badly, I no longer wanted to live in caves. I was prepared to die I was so weary. To let them shoot me on the spot.” He dropped his arms in a gesture of surrender.

“But they didn’t shoot you, Uncle Max.”

“I was close to it. I was a mighty suspicious character, a German-speaking beggar in the middle of Italy, German-occupied Italy yet. I didn’t understand the Italian interrogation. And so I landed in the jaws of Il Duce and yet another camp…” Suddenly he stopped, ready to terminate the recital of his troubles. Instead he invited us to meet some of his friends.

A celebration surprised us in the mess hall. Planked tables had been pushed out of the way. In their place chairs were set up in rows. In the front row my parents and I sat with Uncle Max and listened to an older camp inmate welcome us in German. He ended with a Shehechyanu, grateful that the assembled group had been saved and for the reunion like ours that day.

Someone played a Schubert sonata on the tinny upright in the hall. Strains of “The Linden Tree” followed. I noticed several people mouthing its words: “Am Brunnen vor dem Tore, da steht ein Lindenbaum…” and saw the tears in their eyes over the song familiar to them since childhood, reminding them of homes long lost.

At one end of the mess hall refreshments were set out. As we juggled paper plates filled with cake along with army-style coffee mugs, Uncle Max’s friends came to greet us, one after another.

Suddenly an old woman laid her hand on my arm.

“Excuse me, young lady,” she said, “but do you know that your uncle is a hero?” Her dress hung loosely, her face told its own tales of past dangers and flight. “Of course, he will never tell you this, but many of us were kept alive because of Max’s optimism. Not a day went by but someone in our camp was ready to give up hope.”

“We were all so discouraged…no food, no warm clothes, so little chance of finding our families again. But this man,” and she pointed a bony finger at Max, “this man hobbled around on his sore feet and spoke to those who just sat, ready to die. ‘Just wait,’ he said to them, ‘hang on just a little longer. One of these days we will be freed…another week, another month. It won’t be long.’ He wouldn’t let any of us give up.”

I turned to Uncle Max puffing on his freshly-stuffed pipe, pretending he hadn’t heard. A shadow of the twinkle I remembered was in his eyes as he put his arm around my shoulders.

“I just promised your father I would visit you in Louisville after they discharge us here. Tell me, Kindchen, what would you like me to bring you?”

Born in Germany, Ellen Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel. Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

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August 8, 2011 · 7:58 am

My Father Is Dying

by David Merkler (Barcelona, Spain)

My father is dying and I don’t know how to handle it. My father is dying and I don’t believe in G-d. My father is dying and I’m having difficulty seeing justice in the world.

My father was born in Budapest on 6th January 1933. On the 30th January Hitler came to power. I was born on the outskirts of London, and raised in a very comfortable middle-class neighbourhood of London, but I am a Hungarian Jew. A Hungarian Jew who doesn’t speak Hungarian and has hardly visited the country, but my temperament and spirit are there in eastern Europe on the banks of the Danube. We grew up without knowing anything about the Holocaust. The only thing I knew was that my Uncle and Grandfather had died in the war. The details were sketchy, but I knew I was afraid of Germans. We had a beautiful house, a 3 storey detached house, but nothing in it. All my friends were surprised. When they came to visit us, our million pound house was furnished with sticks of furniture and second hand items. Even we children were clothed in second hand garments. Other memories stay with me. I marveled as my father would “weld” spent bars of soap onto new bars of freshly opened soap. How did he do it? What was the trick? The trick was not to waste anything. And food, of course. Nothing could be thrown away. I sat at the dinner table until my food was finished. I didn’t like the food. Hard luck. I sat at the table for half an hour or longer after dinner had finished until my plate was empty. Rules of the house.

And looking back on this regime, I finally began to understand what had been happening when I was well into my thirties. We were always in a ready state to move, to flee the country. What if the Hungarian Fascists (the Arrow Cross) took over the leafy Wimbledon suburbs of London? What if Eichmann marched in again on March 19 with a contingent of SS? You could never be too safe. If they came, we wouldn’t wait around this time. Sell the house and on to the next country, wherever that would take us.

My father is dying and I can’t understand why. If G-d exists, surely the survivors should be allowed to continue surviving. If virtually my entire father’s family was murdered, worked to death, died of starvation in the Budapest ghetto or committed suicide, then my father must have been a statistical mistake. (Correction: my father stated that, in fact, most of those who died in the ghetto died of thirst. Nuances of an agonizing death. What would you prefer? Starvation or dying of thirst?) Yes, by 1944 they knew where they were going. They weren’t going to be resettled in those exquisite cattle trucks or forcibly marched on a school excursion. So my great great uncle Sandor Feuermann and his wife Mitzi committed suicide. They chose to cheat the hangmen in their own way.

I have just read Suzanna Eibuszyc [http://tinyurl.com/3rl2ktf]. She states “that in every survivor’s family, one child is unconsciously chosen to be a ‘memorial candle,’ to carry on the mourning and to dedicate his or her life to the memory of the Shoah.” So now I understand why I was placed on this earth. My Argentinian born psychologist has told me to try to learn to “bear” the burden and not “suffer” the burden. Semantically it makes sense, but in practise? I walk down Barcelona’s sunny streets and I cry. I cry every week and sometimes every day for the 16 victims of my grandmother’s family (direct and in-laws) and for all the Merklers who were deported from Batya and Kalosca. All German speakers at some stage with German surnames. Feuermann, Haas, Merkler, Glück. My 8 year old son Alexander asks me: If we have a German surname, why did the Germans kill the Jews? Answers on postcard please addressed to Alexander Merkler, aged 8, Gelida, Barcelona, Spain.

My father is dying and probably the only person who cares is me. I am such an egoist. My link with the old country, the old language, with a witness to the atrocities of another age, is leaving me. My father’s memories are the memories of a child survivor. The shame of having to put on the star of David, the shame of being called a filthy Jew, the guilt of remembering stealing bread from a woman at night in the ghetto, the excitement of watching films though a crack in the wall at a cinema where Jews weren’t allowed to go. My father is dying. Hungary paid USD 50 to my father in compensation for the murder of his brother and USD 80 for the murder of his father. They recognized their collaboration with the Germans in the murder of the Jews. Post-communist Hungary didn’t have much money to pay out. Keep your money. It doesn’t help.

As I grow up, my father shares more and more information about what actually happened. When his mother dies, he delves back into the past, divorces my mother, marries a Hungarian woman with a large family and starts research work on his family. The work is gleaned into a book. A tribute to that lost lifestyle and those who lost their lives. I am educated in details of the Holocaust that most people will never know about. Hungary was the last country whose Jewish population was exterminated and Budapest the last city to be “cleansed,” but they didn’t have time to finish the job, not quite. They murdered my grandfather in March 1945, they murdered my uncle in April/May 1945, but they couldn’t destroy all the evidence this time, the personal possessions, the photos, the intervention of the neutral powers, the liberating forces. My father was liberated by the Soviets. My uncle? Did he pass away before or after Gunskirchen camp was liberated by US forces? Did he breathe a moment of freedom before passing away at 16? Peter murdered at the age of 16 far from home, far from his parents. G-d doesn’t exist. I am telling you G-d doesn’t exist. Stop praying. To put it in my grandmother’s words. “When you are dead, you are rotting meat.” And she knew what she was talking about.

My grandmother died in 1984 at the age of 80. We visited her house every Saturday until I went to University. I don’t know how she bore the burden. She lost her husband, her elder son, her sister, her nephew and her best friend, but she was unrelentingly tough. Her pain was everywhere, but she was so strong. When she finally decided the time had come to end it all, she decided to take an overdose of sleeping pills. We found her on the floor of her kitchen on several occasions still conscious. She was simply too physically tough. Her body wouldn’t obey her and give in. My father wants to be buried with his mother. She is his hero. She had escaped to Britain. She enlisted in the US Army, worked as a translator translating correspondence going into and out of Germany for the Americans in their efforts to catch Nazis at the end of the war. My grandmother went into communist occupied Hungary, found my father in an orphanage, bribed the Soviet border guards and took him out. Only 3000 DPs (the initials of that pleasant British euphemism stand for Displaced Persons) or Jewish survivors were allowed into Britain because the British were quite sick of the “Yids” at this stage blowing up their troops and the like in British Mandated Palestine.

So I discover I am a minority three times. I am a Jew. My father is an immigrant, whereas almost all the Yids I know in Britain are second generation, and, finally, I discover that my father Andrew (in fact András) had had the gall to cheat death and was placed in a Swiss safe house towards the end of the war. So what does that make me? My mother’s family were from the Russian empire and my father’s family from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Simple, but according to the new map of Europe I am a Hungarian, Slovakian, Polish, Bielorussian Jew with a German surname born in England living in Spain. My father told me more recently that we are ethnic Germans because the first Merklers came down the Danube from Germany to Hungary in the 17th century. Tracing back through my paternal grandmother’s line, we have changed mother tongue four times in five generations from German to Hungarian to English to Spanish/Catalan. Motke always said, “More Askenazi than David isn’t possible.”

My father is dying and doesn’t know where he wants to be buried. A very untypical dilemma. Should he be buried in Budapest’s Jewish cemetery where we have plots purchased for life or death (or until the next Holocaust when it is decided to dig up the remains of the Jews and burn their bones as there aren’t enough Jews alive to murder in Europe any more), or should he be buried with his mother on the outskirts of London? The only problem is that the London burial plot has to be renewed after 40 years, and will I take care of his grave if I am living in Spain? Or maybe he should be buried in Spain? So my father discusses the options over the phone coming to the conclusion that he should have his mother dug up and buried with him in Budapest or Barcelona. Sounds like a sight-seeing tour of Europe. Where shall we go–London, Budapest or Barcelona? But in this case it’s deadly serious.

My scars will never go away and I wasn’t even there, but I feel I was there. My family were murdered and I know all the details of their last moments because of testimonies, because of my father’s work, historical records, because I have their photos, even passports, even personal possessions. My father went to Kalosca. The main employer of Kalosca was Merkler Lajos, and his paprika mill was the biggest in Hungary. When they came to take him away, nobody cared that he had created more employment and wealth for everybody in that town or that he was married to a non-Jew. They took him away with the other Jews and they pillaged and stole everything. My father visited the town several years ago. When they discovered he was a Merkler, one of the old men returned to him an ivory letter opener without saying  a word. A symbol of opulence in the 1940s when not everybody could afford such an item. The guilt had got to him and he wanted to return the stolen goods 60 years later. I have the letter opener in my study. Another scar, but this time visible.

My father is dying and the doctors don’t know what he’s got. He’s been sweating at night for a year and has lost 10kg (22lbs). The symptoms are the same he had after the war when he contracted tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, the disease of the ghettos, thriving on overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions, attacking the undernourished whose defenses are weak. The virus stays dormant in your body and as your defenses get weaker it gets stronger. My grandmother died at 80. My father will be 79 next January 2012.

So you see Hitler will finally get what he wants. Another Jewish corpse will be added to the Jewish graveyard called Europe.

David Merkler wrote this piece in between managing two small businesses, one a language school, the other a remodeling business. He was born and grew up in London, England  and now lives in Gelida, outside Barcelona, Spain, with his partner, Valeria. He has two sons, Joel and Alexander, from his first marriage. You can reach him at davidmerkler@languagesbarcelona.com

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February 21, 2011 · 9:58 am

Unlikely Pair

by Chaim Weinstein (Brooklyn, NY)

I don’t dare stare at this Yiddish-speaking pair;
I eavesdrop instead, not nice, but life’s tough,
Waiting here in the cold for the 44 bus.
One, white-stubbled, stooped, bushy-browed
The other, nine, scrawny, short-limbed, pale,
Under black velvet cap long sidecurls twist,
Tsitsis turned yellow beneath his vest,
Like an old book’s pages, brittle beliefs,
Each a symbol centuries in his time.
Rough sage stares at Sidecurls’ gash;
Young boy shrugs, evasive eyes.

Old man nods, tells his tale right there:
An old Riga field, survived a bomb blast,
Head ringing, a brief deaf-mute;
About, blurry lines of white lab coats,
Dying to know it, fight his fate, stand his ground.
Doctor’s voice icy now, pierces his ears:
“We’ll amp this gangrene leg in his sleep.”
Adrenalin-lava explodes to his gurgly, “Nein!”
Blue veins in taut neck thicken, loudest, “Nein!”
Docs stop dead in their muddy tracks to hear,
Mouths clamp shut as he cries out loud
Moaning heart, Shema-tongued, mouth unstilled,
So Jew-like, he survives himself alive again.

“Now, Yingeleh,” hoary one says,
“Take care of your boychik self,
And don’t take no klops from hate-filled goys,
Gedenk: we Yidden give smacks, don’t take ‘em.”
With that he hobbles into coldest night,
Leaves sadness on the sweet young face.

The little boy, guideless, sighs, confused:
Torah-seeking, no-wave-making Jew,
Or Stubbled, injustice-smashing proud one?
Ovens and gas and beatings
Now a throbbing memory in each
Like an elusive melody
Dares us to remember
Dares us to forget.

Chaim Weinstein taught English for more than thirty years at two inner-city junior high schools in Brooklyn, NY. Two of his poems, “The Shul is Dark” and “Mr Blumen,” appeared last year on The Jewish Writing Project, and an early short story, “Ball Games and Things,” was published in Brooklyn College’s literary magazine, Nocturne. He is currently working in several genres and is hoping to  share a larger selection of his work in the future.

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October 11, 2010 · 7:23 am

The Survivor

by Rafail Kosovsky (West Hollywood , CA )

Free or in captivity, I always feel that I am a Jew. I have forgotten the prayers my father taught me. I have forgotten the Hebrew alphabet and I consider myself a secular Jew, but every time I step into a synagogue, I feel a strange excitement. I feel that I am getting in touch with something holy and getting closer to some profound age-old secret.

It might be obvious for any reader of these memoirs that the dominant theme of my life story is anti-Semitism. I have given this phenomenon a great deal of thought, trying to understand why the Jews, who as a people have made such a great contribution to humanity, have so many haters. I see basic human and political components to this phenomenon. Perhaps the word “human” is more of a euphemism for what is in fact an ugly manifestation of basic zoological instincts.

For thousands of years the Jews led distinct religious and secular lives with special emphasis on education, hard work and making the best living under any circumstances. This always caused envy, resentment and anger from their neighbors. If such inherently negative feelings are not moderated by education, the cultural environment, and the political system, tragedy is almost inevitable.

I understood the political side of this issue by reading an article by Shulgin – the former Chairman of the Russian State Duma during the early 20th century. He was a vivid monarchist and anti-Semite. I stumbled on his brochure appropriately titled “Why we don’t like you.” In this small booklet he accuses the Jews of insufficient patriotism, resistance of assimilation and many other sins, and in conclusion he finds that after two thousand years of Jewish experience in economy, trade, and the sciences, the Russian Jew possesses superior qualifications and therefore the State must limit their activities in favor of Russian businessmen. This is, so to speak, the political component of anti-Semitism.

But all of this has no direct relationship to my story.

Regardless of political systems, regardless of basic human nature, in the most difficult situations, I was fortunate enough to meet good people willing to help me and save me. This is what brings happiness to me – the knowledge that the world is not without good people and that good people are in the majority.

It just seems like the good is always less noticeable than the evil.

During WWII at the age of 17, Rafail Kosofsky was captured by the Nazis. For almost four years he lived among his enemies, hiding his Jewish identity, and feared being unmasked and killed.

After the war, he spent several years recollecting his memories and published 1307 Days Under The Noose, the book from which this passage is excerpted with permission of the author.

For more information about the English edition, visit: http://www.amazon.com/1307-UNDER-NOOSE-Rafail-Kosovsky/dp/0615241131

or write Rafail Kosofsky for more information about the Russian edition at  rkosovsky@roadrunner.com

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June 14, 2010 · 8:00 am

My Father Is Arrested

by Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

The knock on the door of our Berlin apartment came around five o’clock one dark morning in May of 1938.

It was the favorite time of day for the Gestapo to make house calls. Their victims were usually asleep and not many other people saw them at such an hour.

When my mother opened the door, two men in dark raincoats stood outside. One of them muttered, “Geheime Staatspolizei,” and pushed the door open and let himself and his partner in. Their clothing was as anonymous as their faces. Perhaps secret agents are picked for their faces. Only members of a Secret Service look like this, no matter what their country. No one ever remembers them afterwards.

We lived in a time of constant rumors, all of them threatening. Even I, a child, had recently heard of an impending roundup of Jewish men in our Berlin community. There would be a mass raid, a razzia. Why–and what was to happen later–no one knew. A pre-dawn knock on the door was dreaded, almost expected, that summer. The only speculation was for whom that knock would come and when. Yet when it came for us, it surprised my father and mother.

Inside the apartment, the agents confronted my father in the foyer and announced their orders for his arrest. My father asked permission to take a little of their time: he needed to shave and dress. There was no way of resisting.

Permission granted, one agent remained in the bathroom with him and took up a position by the window facing into the room. The other man stayed in the foyer with his back against the slightly open bathroom door.

I tried to be unobtrusive. From my spot in the small entrance hall, I peeked into the bathroom. Inside, I saw my father’s face in the mirror over the sink. I thought him calm and accepting. But I noticed how his hands shook while he freshened up.

My father had suffered several recent gall bladder attacks. My mother said it was bad nerves. Conditions in Berlin were more than favorable to nervous tensions that spring in 1938, especially if you were Jewish and in a prosperous business.

Now she went into the kitchen and got ready a dose of his medication. She came out holding a small bag in her hand and said he must be sure to take it with him. One of the agents remarked drily there would be little chance for using it.

I saw my mother’s eyes starting to blaze. I cowered as she turned on the two Gestapo agents. Fearlessly, she chastised them for barging in on our peaceful household at such an hour, for taking away an innocent man when everyone knew how wrong that was. How could they face their consciences performing such a mission?

I like to think the Gestapo men remembered that scene. I did, all of my life. It took incredible guts to speak out the way Mimi did. She remained lady-like, even in her scolding. But she certainly exploded that morning. She had good reason. The Gestapo men knew that, too.

In later years, when her health and mental strength failed, she was often afraid of things that seemed childish to outsiders. But I remembered Mimi’s courage and I recalled how she stood in the hallway of our fashionable apartment, wagging her finger under the nose of the Gestapo agent, backing him against our bathroom door. Would I have such guts were I put to the test?

That dark morning the man at the door just shrugged his shoulder while the other one inside the bathroom ignored her. None of that deterred her. “Where are you taking my husband?” she asked repeatedly until the second man finally answered.

“To the police station.”

The landing outside our apartment door was still dark when they took my father out. My father, wedged between both agents, turned to Mimi.

“I have a cousin in America. He lives in Louisville (he pronounced it Lewisville), in the state of Kentucky. Try to contact him and see if he can help.”

Mimi dressed quickly, then she helped me with my clothes. We began the rapid walk to the police station just a few short blocks away. Just as we arrived, breathless, at the precinct, several police vans pulled out. All the vans were fully loaded. The razzia had already produced sufficient results.

Inside the station Mimi asked again and again about the destination of those departing vehicles.

“Alexanderplatz,” was the desk sergeant’s brusque reply.

She decided we would follow them. A long taxi ride brought us to the center of Berlin. The driver stopped at a large, dark gray, forbidding-looking building. Threatening, just like the mood of everything else that morning.

Many years later I saw the dreaded headquarters of the Gestapo in a television newsreel. Even after many decades that view crystallized the special and horrible aura I once felt. I could not know what went on in that building, what unspeakable and excruciatingly painful torment people experienced there. What I sensed at age ten was that it was an evil place.

The day I entered it with Mimi, I saw a warren of dark corridors filled on either side with windowless, small, brown cubicles. In one such sparse hole in the wall I waited quietly at her side while Mimi faced a heavy-set official behind a desk. The chubby man rustled some papers pretending to look up my father’s name.

The prisoner, Leopold Nussbaum, he informed us, was on his way to an interrogation center, but the family would probably have some news from him within a few days.

Not encouraging information, yet the official was a shade kinder than others we had encountered on our way in. Why that was, I couldn’t tell. The way he looked at Mimi was definitely less insolent and arrogant.

We stood waiting for the streetcar at its Alexanderplatz stop. Buildings just as dismal and forbidding as the one we had just left surrounded the traffic-filled square. I glanced across the street at another evil-looking dark, tall structure. I felt Mimi shudder as she looked at it, too.

“The Volksgerichtshof,” she volunteered without my asking.

In later years I learned more about the People’s Court and its use by the Nazi regime.

Mimi might have known even then what kind of place it was. Few prisoners left it without an order for their execution, if they left the building alive at all.

The long ride home on the streetcar was bleak. Mimi looked discouraged and fearful. My feelings of course, were a reflection of hers. She was quiet and sad and barely spoke. It was May, yet everything around us was still gray and cold. It started to drizzle. Times were suddenly desperate. I had a dreadful sense of foreboding.

Born in Germany, Ellen Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel. Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

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