By Marilyn Schonfeld-Davenport (Louisville, CO)
I am a first generation American and a second generation Holocaust survivor.
My mother was born in Korosten, Ukraine.
My father in the shtetl of Oleszyce, Poland.
They came to this country in 1950 with my three-year-old sister who was born in a displaced persons camp in Ansbach, Germany.
They were lucky, my mother always said. They were not in concentration camps.
They met during the war on a Russian state-owned farm (Sovkhoz) in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan.
I do not know the name of the farm. I do not know how my father ended up there. Only that while in the Russian army, he jumped off a train to escape banishment to Siberia and found himself on the same Sovkhoz.
They were lucky, my mother always said
They were not tortured. They did not starve.
They did not have to hide underground or in sewers or cellars with rats.
They did not have to strip down naked and suffer inhuman conditions and humiliating treatment.
They did not have to forage for food in the forests.
They did not have to watch their children die.
My parents were lucky.
Not like their dear survivor friends whose tragic stories I overheard as a child, amidst the shuffling cards and the clicking chips of the poker table.
But still, their young lives were thwarted by the horrifying rampage of a madman.
They were scared. They were on the run.
They were separated from their families.
They scampered to strange places, seeking refuge and safety.
Their fate collided at the Sovkhoz where they fell in love and lived in relative peace. And waited. And wondered, when will it end?
They worked in the fields, repaired small machinery, slept in bunkers and occasionally had a decent meal of more than watered -down soup.
My mother worked in the canteen and snuck my father extra bread and cigarettes.
That’s all I know about their life there.
After the war, they got married and returned to Korosten so my dad could meet his in-laws and my mother could say hello and goodbye to her family.
My dad set his sights on America.
The land of promise. The land of opportunity.
She was going with him.
But first he wanted to go back to Poland to see what happened to his family.
He had no idea if anyone was still alive.
Somewhere, somehow he discovered they all perished in Belzec.
Except for one sister.
She escaped with the help of a priest and was in a displaced persons camp in Ansbach, Germany.
And so they went there.
My mother said they walked.
But how? How did he find out about her? How did they walk all that way?
Who helped them? How long did it take?
My past is a patchwork of fragmented stories and unanswered questions.
They hang suspended looking for a place to rest, to make me whole.
My father never talked about his past or his childhood.
I try to seam it together through any research I can do, any tidbit I can find.
A box of papers from the DP camp; sponsor forms, luggage tags, passport pictures, a diploma from ORT that said my father could make a shoe.
But I reach a dead end when it comes to my Polish family. There is so little.
There are only imagined faces of my relatives instead of photos that do not exist.
Imagined lives in places I cannot fathom.
I never asked enough and they never said enough.
I do not know enough.
But I do know this.
I am a first generation American and a second generation Holocaust survivor.
I am defined by that more than anything.
Marilyn Schonfeld-Davenport has always held the stories of her parents and her ancestors deep inside her, those few that she knows, those fragments that she can piece together. These stories composed the backdrop of a relatively carefree childhood in the suburbs of Chicago, but beneath the surface was the lingering impact of her parents’ trauma: her mother’s anger and fear, her father’s quiet introspection.
Throughout the years, Marilyn has returned to those haunting stories of her youth to try to weave the pieces together and better understand her past. She is currently working on a memoir of sorts, based on her mother’s notebooks of recorded minutes as the secretary of the Trossman Family Club. Uncle Sam Trossman, the patriarch, brought her parents and sister to this country after the war. She lives in Louisville, Colorado with her husband Mark and dog Wilson. Her two grown sons live in Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota and she misses them every single day.
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