Tag Archives: post-Holocaust

March 26, 2012 · 8:05 am

The Mystery My Mother Left Behind

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI)

My late mother loved the New York Times crossword and she loved reading mysteries. Born in Poland, she said the puzzle helped her perfect her English; she never explained the specific appeal of crime novels, but she was a huge fan of Agatha Christie, John Creasey, Frances and Richard Lockridge, and Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. I read almost all the mystery library books she brought home; they were always better than the books assigned in school. On my own, I discovered the comic mysteries of Phoebe Atwood Taylor. While my mother enjoyed a good joke and had an Imogene Coca kind of laugh, those books weren’t serious enough for her.

It wasn’t until after my mother died in 1999 that I discovered profound and unsettling mysteries in her own life that I’m still trying to unravel. My mother was a Holocaust survivor. She lost her family, her home, her freedom — and would have lost her life if the war had lasted any longer than it did. She spoke about those war years sparingly, and when she did, I was too young or too overwhelmed to ask the right questions that would have yielded more information.

Going through her things after the funeral, I found something shocking in her closet. My mother had kept the concentration camp uniform she was wearing when she was liberated by the Americans in April 1945. You’ve probably seen “dresses” like these in movies and documentaries: thin, crudely sewn, it was gray with purplish stripes (though the colors may have changed over the decades). My father told me she’d washed it after the war, but he couldn’t say why she had kept this reminder of her horrible brutalization and the nightmare of seeing her world ground to dust.

I knew the names of the camps my mother had been in and contacted one via email but nobody could find records for her. This was troubling, since I knew that despite bombings and German attempts to destroy files, records existed for many camps. And then I tried again, this time using the number on her uniform.

A world of mysteries opened up to me. For at least part of the war, my mother, Helena Klaczko, was listed in several Nazi records as Lidja Garbel. How do I know this Garbel and my mother were the same woman? Because the insanely detailed prisoner card for my mother at Buchenwald lists her parents’ name, her street address in Poland, her education and her birth date. All the information matches what I know to be fact. Whatever her name, the woman with that number on her camp dress was the woman listed on the card and indisputably my mother.

But why did she have another name? The mystery deepened when I discovered that in a transport from one camp to another, there was a woman whose number was right before my mother’s and whose last name was also Garbel. So somehow, for some reason, my mother took this other woman’s last name as hers. But why? And why Lidja? Was it possible there had been an actual Lidja Garbel whose name my mother had assumed for some reason? The sister of this Frida Garbel?

My father had no idea what the answers were or what any of it could mean. And when I told him that this same Buchenwald prisoner card said my mother was married to a Mikhail Garbel, whereabouts “unknown,” he scoffed. “People said all kinds of things during the war.”

I had written a handful of Nick Hoffman mysteries by this point, and even been reviewed in the New York Times my mother revered. Sadly, my mother never got to read any of them because she was so sick when they started coming. But nothing in any of them matched these real-life mysteries whose solutions I have pursued in many directions, without answer. Sometimes I wonder if there really was a Mikhail Garbel or even a Lidja Garbel, if both were completely invented. Sometimes I think, what if my mother was married before she met my father? Sometimes I think, “There’s a book in this, if only I can find it.” And I wonder if my mother read mysteries not just as a fan, but as someone who had turned her own life into something mysterious.

Lev Raphael is a prize-winning pioneer in American-Jewish literature, and has been publishing fiction and nonfiction about the Second Generation since 1978. The author of twenty-two books which have been translated into almost a dozen languages, he has spoken about his work in hundreds of venues on three continents. His fiction and creative non-fiction are widely taught at American colleges and universities, and his work has been the subject of numerous academic articles, papers, and books. A former public radio book show host and newspaper columnist, he can be found on the web at http://www.levraphael.com.  He blogs on books for The Huffington Post and reviews for the on-line literary magazine Bibliobuffet.com.

You can check out his latest book, the Jewish historical novel Rosedale in Love, at http://www.levraphael.com/rosedale.html

This piece first appeared on The Huffington Post, and it’s reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

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March 12, 2012 · 8:06 am

Meta’s Untold Story

by Donna Swarthout (Berlin, Germany)

The few stories that were passed down to my sister and I were about survival, escape, new beginnings in America. These stories always drew a clear line between the tragic background of the Holocaust and the fate of our family. We never knew. No one told us. My grandfather’s sister, my great aunt Meta Adler, was left behind. Five siblings escaped to the U.S., Israel, and South Africa. Meta vanished from sight and memory.

No one in our family kept Meta ’s memory alive. We have to look back and construct a memory of her life. So we can keep her with us. Some people discover a living relative who they never knew about, a sibling who was given up for adoption or a parent who was long absent. We discovered Meta, an unwed country woman who worked as a maid and failed to pass the U.S. immigration examination because she was too shy or scared to answer the questions.

The silence was broken last year on a sunny April afternoon in Altwiedermus, the village where Meta and the rest of my father’s family trace their roots. We had traveled to the rural enclave, forty-five kilometers northeast of Frankfurt, to see the old Adler house and meet with Gisele, the woman who had spent years researching the fate of the twenty-seven Jewish residents of the village in 1933. I had almost canceled the trip due to a sense of unease about what might lie ahead. Instead, we drove into the past and the vague contours of my German Jewish family history were abruptly reshaped in a darker hue.

It was Gisele, someone I had just met, who told us about Meta as we sat at her dining room table and thumbed through an enormous album of her historical notes, photos, and clippings. Meta stared at us from the past with a direct gaze that ended the decades of erasure from our family tree. As Gisele patiently related further details about the thirteen Jews who perished, I was too stunned to concentrate and can’t recall much of what she said.

How could I not have known about Meta ? Was I told about her as a child, but the story hadn’t lodged in my memory beside the other vignettes with the happy endings that were passed down to me? In the following months I queried key family members about our family history narrative. It was through these conversations that I slowly became aware of the collective family silence about Meta. This knowledge brought deep sorrow, but there would be ample time to grieve for Meta. I felt a much more urgent need to honor her memory and restore her to our family.

That fall I met a Jewish woman whose family had fled to the U.S. even later than mine. “It was because my grandfather would not leave until all family members had permission to emigrate,” she said. “Not my grandfather,” I had to tell her. The silence about Meta was a thin cover for the guilt that must have haunted my grandparents. Couldn’t they have done more to help her escape?

Reclaiming Meta ’s place in our family has not been easy. Only the faintest traces of her life have survived. Many people in Germany, from government archivists to self-designated Holocaust historians like Gisele, have shared clues about her fate. Months of research after our trip to Altwiedermus yielded little more than a set of financial records that the Nazis used to assess whether she could keep her meager Reichsmarks earnings. The trail runs cold on a bare sheet of paper dated May 9, 1942, four years after my father’s family fled to the U.S. The document notes that she was “evakuiert.”

Nine hundred and thirty-eight people were deported from Frankfurt on May 8, 1942. The records from this transport were destroyed, but Meta was likely among the deportees. We think they went east, possibly to the Izbica concentration camp in Poland. The date and location of her death are among many of the unknowns in her story.

The German government has placed Meta’s name among the Holocaust victims at two memorial sites in Frankfurt. Our family of survivors has so far done nothing. My father and his sister inherited the silence of their parents. They had a living memory of Meta, but could not reach back to embrace her. It is left to the “second generation” to look back from a greater distance and tell her story. My move to Germany in 2010 was the first step that made this possible.

My aunt has now broken her silence about Meta and supports our efforts to reclaim her memory. She remembers Meta as a woman in the shadows, perhaps someone who lacked a valued place in the family even before they left Germany. She also recalls that my grandfather, Meta’s brother, left the problem of what to do about Meta to my grandmother.

As a child I yearned to know more about my parents’ lives in Germany and the events surrounding their escape. Decades later I’ve uncovered a hidden truth about my family history: we closed the door on someone we lost. I will now pass down to my children a different Holocaust story than the one I heard as a child. Our efforts to confront the past, while living as Jews in Germany today, have become a new chapter in our family narrative.

This summer we will lay a stolperstein (brass stumbling stone) in the ground for Meta Adler. So she can be remembered, in the village of her birth and within our family. Meta’s stone will join the thousands of cobblestone memorials to individual Holocaust victims throughout Germany.

Donna Swarthout writes about being Jewish in Germany on her blog Full Circle http://dswartho.wordpress.com/. Her recent work has appeared on The Jewish Writing Project and in Tablet Magazine.

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January 16, 2012 · 9:43 am

In Search of a Baal Shem

by Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove,PA)

I never heard her call him the “Baal Shem of Michelstadt.”

Instead my grandmother spoke of “Rebbe Seckel Loeb Wormser” as a “Wundermann,” a miracle-worker.

My first real memory of him is connected to a beam of bright sunshine falling into her parlor window, setting off her “good” blue-and-white Wedgewood dishes glistening on the table. She was feeding me a mid-day meal along with telling me about the famous man.

I was not in her parlor frequently for my parents and I lived in another city and we did not see her often. Even  rarer was the chance of hearing my Oma tell me stories.

Tiny sun motes floated about the room that day as she spoke to me of the rebbe’s wisdom, his kindness and his strong religious faith.

“Both Jews and Gentiles in the small town of Michelstadt south of Frankfurt benefited  from his remarkable skills. Many a person depressed by business or health problems found the Rebbe’s calm, serene manner and his gift for active listening eased his troubles, perhaps even solved them. And when a healed  visitor walked out of Seckel Loeb’s door, it was always with renewed self-worth and confidence.”

Oma had her personal reasons for passing on tales about the great man.

Her own mother, my great-grandmother, Babette Muhr, had been brought to the home of the rebbe as an orphan child.  He had taken her in  and raised her as a member of his own family until the day when, as a grown young woman, she left Michelstadt to be married.

At least a half a century passed before the name of Rebbe Seckel Loeb Wormser entered  my thoughts again.

Long after I had arrived as a child-survivor of the Holocaust in the U.S, married, and had raised a family of my own, the mail brought a brochure put out by a well-known publisher of Jewish books.

One of the titles advertised for sale read: “The Baal Shem of Michelstadt.”

I could hardly wait until the small book arrived and lay open on my desk.

It was a collection of warm, sentimental episodes taken from the life of a man once renowned as a healer and worker of miracles. The book was written in the early 1900’s by a Swiss rabbi, Naftali Herz Ehrmann, under the nom de plume of  “Judeus.”

I was stunned to find in it many of the stories my grandmother had once told me, stories I had somehow not trusted to have been “real.”

But it was the photograph on the book’s last page which stirred me the most: a picture of a house.

It was a box-shaped wooden structure — two full floors and a triple-window mansard.  The metal plaque attached above the first-floor windows aroused my considerable interest. It read: “In this house the humanitarian S.L.Wormser lived from the year 1826 to his death in 1847.”

The plaque was dedicated as a tribute by his hometown of Michelstadt.

I concentrated on the windows in that photograph. How I wished I could transport myself into the past. This house was surely the home of Rebbe Seckel Loeb Wormser, the Baal Shem of Michelstadt, and now I knew these were the windows through which my great-grandmother must have looked out at the world.

The more I read about the Rebbe’s life, the more faint images culled from my grandmother’s tales came back to me. I remembered certain details which were mirrored in the book.

After forty-one years I finally decided to go back to Germany.

One important reason for my return was the nagging wish to learn more about him, to find out what I could about the man they called the Baal Shem.

On the June day when friends drove my husband and me to Michelstadt, I carried the book about the Baal Shem with me.

We reached Michelstadt in the middle of the day. Ancient houses embellished with distinctive “Fachwerk” decorations lined the cobblestoned streets. I closed my eyes and pretended to be back in the medieval hamlet of southern Germany that was once the destination of many a Jewish and non-Jewish pilgrim headed for a visit to the bushy-bearded saintly man with the kind brown eyes known throughout the neighborhood as teacher and healer.

After a hearty meal in the oak-beamed dining room of the Green Tree Inn, I no longer needed to pretend. I was close to realizing my fanciful daydream. This very hostelry was a favorite with Jewish travellers who visited Rebbe Seckel Loeb. Many stories about the Baal Shem of Michelstadt grew into legends here, nurtured no doubt by glasses of excellent local beer. Because of their fondness for the inn, some patrons even nicknamed it “The Jewish Canteen.”

Armed with the family record, I finally entered the tall doors of the “Rathaus Annex” and headed for the chief of tourist reception. I told the man I was looking for links to an ancestor who grew up in the house of Rebbe Seckel Loeb Wormser. Immediately I felt my tourist stature increase to that of a VIP.

Meanwhile I could hardly wait to see the house of the Baal Shem.

No one knew the Wormser House by that name, so it took much searching and asking for directions before I located it. Suddenly I stood in front of it: my photograph had come to life.

One hundred and thirty-five years after Rebbe Seckel Loeb died here, the house was still in use. I walked around it and inspected it from every angle. Now it was occupied by a law firm, but no one was in. I was disappointed that I could not enter. I so wished to see the rooms where the Master taught the Holy Books, where the wise man counseled the troubled on urgent problems now long forgotten, and where my own ancestor climbed the stairs.

I left the Wormser House hesitantly and returned to the Rathaus-Annex where I had an appointment with the town archivist.

In one wing of this ancient seat of the mayors of Michelstadt, a Herr Hartmann presided  over  records dating back to the 13th century. His amazing collection of documents owed its survival to the little bomb damage the town sustained during World War II

I knew nothing about my great-grandmother except her name: Babette Muhr.

Herr Hartmann delved into his well-preserved archives of the Jewish community. Within a few minutes he located a page listing the death of a rabbi named Wolf Muhr in 1848. This is really a coincidence, he told me, because he had never come across that name before, let alone the name of a local rabbi.

I was convinced that there was a connection between Rabbi Muhr and my ancestor and asked the archivist to trace it.

We did not succeed that day, but I found a book of local Jewish history on his shelf and he allowed me to browse in it.

I discovered that Wolf Muhr was Seckel Loeb’s cantor who handled the town’s rabbinical duties in Michelstadt until 1826. During that year Rabbi Wormser returned after a lengthy stay in the town of Mannheim where he worked as a healer at the local hospital.  Upon his return to Michelstadt he resumed his post of rabbi there.

I had gotten closer in my ancestor search. The archivist promised he would continue it. Perhaps we would find the connection someday.

The old Jewish cemetery was too far from town. I wanted to stay in Michelstadt a little longer to meditate at the grave of Rabbi Wormser, but my time ran out. I did not make it to his last resting place and to the new gravestone which replaced the desecrated monument of the Nazi period.

However, a final touching experience awaited me during my last hour in town: I was given  a tour through the Baal Shem’s synagogue. Like most German synagogues the original tiny structure, built in 1791, was torched by the Nazis. Only its exterior shell remained.

One Jewish family still lived in Michelstadt in 1969 when members of a few remaining Jewish communities in the state of Hesse met and decided to restore the former synagogue as a museum.

It was named the Lichtigfeld Museum in honor of Dr. I.E. Lichtigfeld, a postwar rabbi of Hesse, who tried to revive Jewish life in the area. The Lichtigfeld Museum primarily memorializes Rebbe Seckel Loeb Wormser, the Baal Shem of Michelstadt, whose love for humanity once brightened this town.

Ritual objects, books and mementos filled the showcases along the walls of the modest ex-sanctuary. Among them were two new additions I had brought from America: the English translation of  “The Baal Shem of Michelstadt” and a copy of my own biography of Elie Wiesel, “Witness for Life.” Having them in this place is an honor I cherish.

The site of the original Almemor had been preserved. I stood near the spot where the holy man once prayed and I reflected on the tremendous faith he inspired.

What was the real nature of the Rebbe’s “miracles?” Were the stories his deeds generated just that–exaggerated accounts of local happenings, blown out of proportion by his simple fellow country–Jews who needed someone or something to believe in?

The hatred-bearers did extinguish the spark of life here and they succeeded in wiping out the  decency and healing which once existed. But they could not erase the memory of the Jewish spirit that long ago filled this building and this town.

And who knows? Perhaps the special memory may be the most lasting of this Baal Shem’s many miracles.

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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November 7, 2011 · 8:35 am

Learning a New Language

by Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

My father is teaching me German.
He still speaks fluently, even though he
escaped from Nazi Germany almost
seventy years ago when he was seventeen.

We study nouns and verbs.
We study when to use the formal pronoun, Sie, you
and when to use the more familiar, Du.
One must be offered permission to use the familiar.

We study dialects.
The word Ich, I.
The Berliners pronounce it Ick.
Those from Frankfurt am Main, Isch.
Those from Schwaben, Ich or I.

He tells me when he was a kid he and
his friends used to say in a Berliner dialect,
“Berlin jeweesen Oranje jejessen und sie war so süss jeweesen.”
I was in Berlin and ate an orange, and it was very sweet.
“And then we added, dass mir die brüh die gosh runterglaufe is,”
with the juices running down my mouth.
He explains: “It is in our Schwäbisch dialect.
I should say, it was our dialect.”

Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us (2007), a collection of poems about her family and the Shoah. Her poems and essays have appeared in several journals such as the Connecticut Review and Limestone, as well as on Beliefnet. She is a teaching fellow at Clal.

This poem has been reprinted with the kind permission of the author and Clal-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

For more about Kirchheimer’s work, visit: http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?WRD=janet+r+kirchheimer&page=index&prod=univ&choice=allproducts&query=Janet+R+Kirchheimer&flag=False&ugrp=2

And to read Kirchheimer’s recent piece on observing Kristallnacht this year, the first without her father, who died this past July, visit: http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/kristallnacht_without_my_father_20111102/

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October 17, 2011 · 7:49 am

The Tapestry of Self

by Donna Swarthout (Berlin, Germany)

The tapestry of my life has always had loose threads, strands that stick out in different directions and seem unlikely candidates for a fine woven print. Sometimes I tuck one of those threads away and get a pass on explaining who I am to the world.  Why share that I am Jewish if I feel more secular than religious? Why tell others that I am a German American Jew who in some ways feels more German than Jewish?  I’ve been living in Berlin, Germany for the past year where my mind has been feverishly at work trying to solve the puzzle of my identity.

The part of me that has always felt German now revels in the daily opportunity for self expression. Each step towards language fluency makes me feel more whole and I am exhilarated on the rare occasions when I meet someone who does not speak English. My taste buds crave a daily käese stange (breaded cheese twist) or kürbiskern brezel (giant soft pretzel with pumpkin seeds) and although I do not eat much meat, I love hearing my kids say “schnitzel!” as a substitute for “shit.” I come close to feeling at home in Germany while sitting for hours at the Rüdisheimer Platz wine garden enjoying the company of family and friends over a picnic dinner.

But there is a deeper significance to my German residency than the opportunities to speak a language I love, enjoy the food, and experience the rich and diverse cultural life of Berlin.  I am coming full circle, returning to the birth place of both my German Jewish parents so that I can integrate the past into the life of my family in a way that the first generation of Holocaust survivors and escapees could not.  This cannot be done from America; one has to be on German soil to experience the past and to grasp that there is a new landscape for Jewish life in Germany today.  Stepping into that landscape and seeing how it feels is a powerful way to pick up some of the loose threads of self that make up my identity.

Our son Avery turned thirteen this year and decided he wanted to become a bar mitzvah in the birthplace of his ancestors.  Our family is not clearly affiliated with any branch of Judaism so it was a bit daunting to find a place for ourselves amongst Berlin ‘s population of approximately 20,000 Jews and nearly a dozen congregations.  We’ve attended Reform, Masorti and Renewal services and are still getting used to reading Hebrew that has been transliterated for Germans (bar mitzwa instead of bar mitzvah) and a host of unfamiliar approaches to songs and rituals.

We will fully experience being Jewish in Germany when Avery becomes a bar mitzvah this October with Ohel Hachidusch, Berlin’s very small Renewal congregation.  The bar mitzvah will take place at the Jüdisches Waisenhaus Berlin (Jewish Orphanage of Berlin). The former orphanage is a historic building that was devoted to the welfare of Jewish children from 1913 to 1940.  After Kristallnacht many of the children were brought to safety via Kindertransport. The Nazis closed the building in 1942 and deported the remaining residents to concentration camps.  This will be the first bar mitzvah held in the Waisenhaus since it was restored and reopened in 2001.  As part of his coming of age, Avery is helping with a memorial project for my Great Aunt Meta Adler who was a Holocaust victim.

In the midst of a generally upbeat year of growth and discovery, I have also had some low moments. I never feel isolated but I do at times feel alienated in Germany, especially after encounters with government bureaucrats. It has been well over a year since I applied to have my German citizenship restored and I am still waiting despite the fact that I provided complete records of my German Jewish ancestry to the federal government. My constantly simmering anger at the indifference of the bureaucracy to my meritorious application is matched by my determination to see this process through to a successful conclusion, even if I have to hire an attorney. ( I’ve written about Reclaiming My German Citizenship in a recent essay for The Jewish Writing Project http://tinyurl.com/3ffufg9.)

And then there are those perpetual encounters with Germans whose scrutinizing comments leave a chill in their wake.  I have endured quite a few mini-lectures about what rule my children have broken and how important it is that they “pass auf” (watch out) and modify their behavior.  After silently suffering through too many of these lectures, I recently blew up at a woman on the U-Bahn in my best German for lecturing my daughter about her subway behavior.  These encounters make my skin crawl with their eerie reminders of an era when everyone was under suspicion for conduct that was outside the narrow realm of what the National Socialists deemed permissible. Is there something in the German psyche that propels such finger-wagging behavior?

But as I embark on my second year of living in Germany my paramount feeling is that this is a place where I can be fully German, Jewish and American.  As part of Germany’s growing Jewish population, I want American Jews to understand that there are Jews who do not want to place a strike out line through the German part of their identity.  The German thread does not have to be tucked away but can be woven back into the tapestry of self that represents who we are.

Donna Swarthout moved to Berlin with her family to explore her German Jewish heritage and identity and the nature of Jewish life in Germany today.  You can read more about her experiences on her blog Full Circle: www.dswartho.wordpress.com

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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 22, 2011 · 7:13 am

One Holocaust Movie Too Many

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

How many times can you see
the broken bodies piled high
at Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen?
How many times can you stare
into the vacant eyes of prisoners
crammed into three-tiered bunks?
How many times can you cringe
at the frightened people wedged into boxcars?
Apparently there is always room
for one more picture of piled shoes,
pajama-clad skeletons, empty suitcases.
I say this sitting comfortably
at a cafe in a Jewish neighborhood
where I can see a young man
wearing Sandy Koufax’s #32 baseball jersey,
knowing that the world seems safe – for now,
knowing, too, that I do not hear the awful trains
rumbling towards their final destination,
except in a generational memory
never to be ignored or forgotten.

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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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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July 18, 2011 · 7:52 am

Reclaiming My German Citizenship

by Donna Swarthout (Berlin, Germany)

It was last June that my husband Brian and I completed our applications for German citizenship before moving from Bozeman, Montana to Berlin, Germany.  By reclaiming our German citizenship we hoped to come “full circle” as the descendants of German Jews who fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.  We are still waiting for the magical moment when we learn that our citizenship has been restored, but we both believe it will be worth the wait.

It was not a magical moment when we told my mother that we were moving to Germany.  The opportunity to connect with my past, become fluent in a language I fell in love with as a child, and to once again be Jewish in Germany meant nothing to her.  How could we bring her grandchildren to the place of horror and persecution from which she and my father had fled?  No answer would suffice.  She did not speak to us for six weeks.

I don’t know what it felt like for my parents and grandparents to be stripped of their German citizenship, to be stateless from 1938 until 1944, and to finally become American citizens.  My maternal grandmother seemed to remain stateless, eventually leaving America for Israel, then Switzerland, and finally going back to her beloved  Germany.  My paternal grandparents were more typical immigrants, creating their own oasis of German culture in the middle of New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood (complete with apfel strudel, kartoffel salat, and lots of wurstchen).

No form of Holocaust reparation is enough, but reclaimed citizenship has more significance for me than any financial restitution our family may receive.  My children and their descendants will have opportunities that my grandparents could never have imagined.  We will have access to Germany’s universal health care system and free system of higher education.  We will automatically become citizens of the European Union which means we can live, work, and study at a university in any EU country under the same conditions as nationals.  We will not have to give up our American citizenship, nor do we want to.

I will take full ownership of my identity when I regain the citizenship that was stripped from both my parents’ families.  As a German American Jew I can embrace each of these three elements of my identity to whatever degree I wish.  Just as I have always struggled with what it means to be Jewish, I will always struggle with what it means to be German.  But I am entitled to my German citizenship, and I may soon have it.

After months of fruitless attempts to track down my citizenship application, I learned in March that the all-efficient German bureaucracy had lost it.  The application contained many documents that I had painstakingly put together to establish my German Jewish identity.  These were my personal historical building blocks that had suddenly vanished.  The official who delivered this disturbing news politely apologized and suggested I file a new application and begin the process all over again.  His cold words hit me like a stamp that says “no one cares.”

Now it is June again, our first school year in Germany is coming to an end, and my oldest son is preparing for his bar mitzvah in Berlin this fall.  Avery’s bar mitzvah will take place on the anniversary of my father’s bar mitzvah in New York City in 1942.  My son and my father will have both taken this step as immigrants, and as German American Jews who belong to a vibrant and thriving Jewish community.

I also have high hopes that the stress and frustration of trying to move my  citizenship application forward are finally behind me.  My application was eventually found and is being processed in Rathaus Schoeneberg, the place where John F. Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963.  Kennedy not only said that he was a Berliner, but that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.” As we embark on our second year of living in Germany, I feel optimistic that Kennedy’s vision will become a reality for me.

Donna Swarthout came to Berlin with her family to explore her German Jewish heritage and identity and the nature of Jewish life in Germany today.  You can read more about her experiences on her blog Full Circle: www.dswartho.wordpress.com

And you can hear her reading a version of this story on NPR’s Berlin Stories: http://berlinstories.org/2012/06/27/donna-swarthout-on-coming-full-circle/

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July 4, 2011 · 9:59 am

Sweet Dreams

by Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

Sometimes I dream I’m the one who kills Hitler.
It’s simple. I walk up to him,
shoot him in the face, and watch his head
explode into a million
glass pieces that clink on the floor
like a Saturday morning cartoon character’s.
Except he doesn’t get back up.

And sometimes I am Yael.
I invite Hitler into my tent as he flees from his enemies.
He tells me he is thirsty, and I
give him milk, and he falls fast asleep.
I pick up a tent pin and hammer. I drive the pin
through his temple until it reaches the ground.

Other times I’m part of the plot to assassinate him
aboard his plane. This time I make sure
the bomb explodes. He falls faster and faster, crashing
with such force the earth swallows him up, as if he never

existed, and I’m sitting on the back porch, the sun is shining,
and all my grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles
are laughing and telling stories.

Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us (2007), a collection of poems about her family and the Shoah. Her poems and essays have appeared in several journals such as the Connecticut Review and Limestone, as well as on Beliefnet. She is a teaching fellow at Clal.

This poem has been reprinted with the kind permission of the author and Clal-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

For more about Kirchheimer’s work, visit: http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?WRD=janet+r+kirchheimer&page=index&prod=univ&choice=allproducts&query=Janet+R+Kirchheimer&flag=False&ugrp=2

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