Tag Archives: post-Holocaust

January 28, 2013 · 9:30 am

A Silver Lining

by Sheldon P. Hersh (Lawrence, NY)

As a physician, I dare say I know a thing or two about noses. Not that I’m the nosey type, mind you, but I have been examining, probing, and snaking my way through noses for quite a while. So when something in a nose appears to be out of the ordinary, or when anything, for that matter, just doesn’t sit right, I stop and ruminate a while and think of the possibilities. Such was the case a number of years ago when, during a routine examination of an elderly gentleman, I found myself going back to take a second and even a third look at the inside of his nose. This gentleman had come in for an entirely unrelated matter, but there was something very peculiar about his nose. It was something that I had never seen before.

Noses typically possess an inner lining of pink, moistened tissue, but this gentleman’s nasal lining possessed a sparkling grey, if not silver, hue, a strange finding to say the least. “Does the nose bother you in any way?” I asked. “No, not at all. The nose feels just fine,” he responded. I was deliberating whether or not to move on to other matters but my curiosity was piqued, leaving me no option but to inquire further and become a bit nosier. “What kind of work do you do?” I continued. “A silversmith. I’ve been a silversmith since I was seven years of age.” And then it dawned on me that fine silver dust had more than likely entered his nose during all those many years of working with silver. With time, fine specks of metal had settled beneath the carpet of tissue lining the inside of his nose resulting in an internal tattoo.  “I see you have an interest in silver,” he remarked. “You must come and visit my home sometime. I have some very interesting old and new pieces of silver Judaica that I am sure will catch your fancy.” I was taken aback. “How could you possibly know I have an interest in Judaica?” I asked, somewhat skeptically. “Very few people know that I am interested in old silver Judaica. Tell me how is it that you know?” He paused for a moment and, with a wry smile, stated, “I saw the mezuzahs on your doors and the pictures in your consultation room, and, besides all that, you have that look– the look of a collector.”

Within three days time, I stood at his front door waiting to gain entrance to what I hoped would be a collector’s paradise filled with objects that celebrate Jewish life and tradition. I was not disappointed. The front room was drab and lifeless and one could not help but detect  the unmistakable smell of old musty furniture. But much like the sparkle of stars against a darkened sky, the glitter of silver pieces flickered  from the surfaces of  tables placed side by side in  the center of the room.

“These are my pieces,” he began, pointing to exquisite silver Kiddush cups, candle sticks, Chanukah menorahs and plates, all with Jewish themes meticulously hammered on each item by this most gifted old world craftsman. I stood in awe not knowing what to select; I would have taken them all. “I have some old pieces to show you, as well. When we left Poland in the early seventies, the government placed a limit on the amount of money that could be brought out. There was, however, no problem bringing out sliver Judaica if one so desired. And so I went about seeking out and purchasing silver Judaica and was able to leave with  a good number of pieces.” Many of these items had a tragic history, he explained, having either been sold or handed over to Polish neighbors for temporary safekeeping by Jews who were driven from their homes by occupying German forces and who would never return to reclaim their family keepsakes.

I was most attracted to these old pieces as each had a story to tell, bountiful tales of joyous family celebrations, as well as the inevitable accounts of anguish, illness and death. There was one particular piece that caught my attention. Over to the side of one table stood a tall stately Kiddush cup. What made this piece standout was its octagonal center, a stunning detail that separated this cup from all of the others.

The cup must have been a prized family possession that had passed from father to son. I imagined that with the arrival of the Sabbath, the head of the household would have taken hold of the cup and solemnly recited Kiddush while the rest of the family stood in silent reverence around the dinner table. As my fingers surrounded this beautiful cup, I suddenly found myself thinking about the original owners. What had happened to them, and where could they possibly be at this moment?  But I knew. I knew only too well what had happened to the owners. Anyone acquainted with our history would most assuredly know.

This cup survived but can tell us precious little of those who once held it close to their hearts. The fathers who blessed their children at the Sabbath table, the smiling mothers who were overjoyed that the Sabbath had finally arrived, enabling the family to be together once again.  I bought the cup and use it frequently when family and visitors come by for a Sabbath or holiday meal. I’m sure the owners would have wanted it that way.

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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October 15, 2012 · 8:07 am

Crumbs

by Sheldon P. Hersh (Lawrence, NY)

Crumbs are rarely, if ever, a topic for discussion. And rightly so for these annoying particles serve no obvious purpose and even tend to complicate our lives by finding their way into some of the most obscure and difficult to clean places. Crumbs, by their very nature, deserve to be thrown out with the rest of the trash. My mother, however, had an entirely different outlook when it came to crumbs. A Holocaust survivor, she would never permit food, no matter what the size, to be discarded in so demeaning a fashion. In her kitchen, crumbs were afforded a layer of respectability and were never included with the refuse that was thrown into the trashcan. At our home, crumbs were properly collected and set aside so as to ensure a more fitting and sensible method of disposal.

With her hand properly cupped, my mother would deftly sweep every visible crumb into a waiting bag that had recently been selected as a repository for our collected crumbs. “How can I throw this food away? These crumbs could have been a source of nourishment and hope in the camps and ghettos where there was little or nothing to eat,” she would solemnly recount. When it came to food, nothing would ever go to waste; it was simply out of the question to do so.

During the war, Jews, like my mother, quickly became masters of improvisation, cleverly turning less than desirable edibles and scraps into presentable, life-sustaining meals. Crumbs were part of the process and had taken on a new found importance in the camps and ghettos. Leftover bits of bread were always eagerly sought out and occasionally fought over by those driven by all consuming hunger. Oftentimes hidden on one’s person, crumbs became the currency of survival when food rations were not forthcoming or when a sick loved one was in dire need of nutrition. While growing up, if we children happened to be present during the collection of crumbs, mother’s stories relating to food, or lack thereof, would always accompany the gathering process. “We scavenged for crumbs,” mother related tearfully. “Crumbs meant survival.  Crumbs could have given a ghetto resident another day of life.”

Each meal and snack produced a new crop of crumbs and the bag would slowly fill. Once it was decided that the right amount was present, my mother would dutifully make her way to a pre-determined site in the back yard and begin sprinkling crumbs upon the ground. In no time at all, birds, accompanied by an occasional squirrel, would appear and descend upon this feast of tantalizing crumbs. The symphonic rhythm of the birds’ frantic pecking interspersed with the sporadic sounds of flapping wings had become an unforgettable melody that would bring a knowing smile to her beaming face. She was overjoyed knowing that nothing, not even the smallest crumb, had gone to waste and that some hungry creature had been given a proper meal.

Our custom of collecting crumbs quickly ended with my mother’s passing. Crumbs had suddenly become a nuisance of sorts and there were more important things to do with our precious time.  Yet every year when the winter months arrive, I find myself hypnotically drawn to the window that overlooks my own backyard. The ground, now bare and frozen, provides very little nourishment to the few winged residents that have elected to remain behind. Every once in a while, a number of birds land unexpectedly beneath the window and begin pecking aimlessly at the lifeless ground below. With nothing to show for their efforts, I can sense their frustration and disappointment as they raise their eyes in my direction and give me a look that nearly always conveys the same simple, yet urgent, request: remember… please remember us. 

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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August 13, 2012 · 8:41 am

Memories Lost and Found

by Donna Swarthout (Berlin, Germany)

The stamp of German Jewish culture left its imprint on me as a child growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s. My nanas, papas, and tantes spoke German and Yiddish and served kuchen instead of cookies. They dressed up a lot more than ordinary Americans and seemed very refined. They were still immigrants in a new country whose dependence on each other deepened the bonds within our extended family.

Decades later as an adult living in California and Montana, there were only rare moments to connect with my cultural heritage. I often tried to reach back and touch the memories from my childhood, to bring them closer and feel their presence in my daily life. But how could I grasp these vague shapes from the past as they receded further into the distance? My memories were no longer solid or extensive enough to offer more than a footnote to my identity. I was floating through life in the vast ocean that is America without an anchor, without a strong enough sense of home.

Most of my relatives who were born in Germany are gone now, so the only way to reclaim my past was to come back to the land from which they fled. I took this step two years ago and have wandered since then without a map or plan into the rooms of a place that is both new and familiar. The events that my parents closed the door on are here for me to discover and the memories from my childhood seem closer at hand. I’ve picked up the thread of family history that was broken in 1938 and am stitching it back into the fabric of a changed Germany.

Like a time traveler, I have stepped into the past and present, trying to understand the extent to which Germany lays a claim on me. I’ve opened myself to the pain of a genocide that cannot be understood and the joys of finding my place in the vibrant landscape of Jewish life in Berlin. I came here to experience the culture that captivated my senses as a child, but I never expected to find anything that would shed light on my own family history. I never suspected that my family kept secrets.

When my father’s family closed the door on their homeland, they locked my great-aunt Meta into a past that would remain hidden from the next generation. Meta was the Holocaust victim who my family never spoke about. My father was eight when he left Germany so he would have remembered Meta. But he inherited the silence of his parents, and chose not to share the story of his aunt who was left behind.

My father only wanted his two daughters to hear about how the family escaped to America, struggled as poor immigrants, and successfully pursued the American dream. He protected us from having to grieve over a loss that he had no control over. But the descendants of those who escaped and survived should not be spared from knowledge or grief; we have a collective responsibility to learn our stories and remember them.

It would have been easier not to dig up the past, to put aside my determination to fill in the gap in my family history. I could have avoided the awkward discussions with my aunt, the charges of tainted motives from one of my cousins, and the countless hours spent searching for records that had been destroyed. But the injustice of a lost memory loomed so much larger than the tensions caused by confronting my family’s silence.

More than seven decades of silence about a forgotten Holocaust victim have now ended. On July 2, 2012 we placed a stolperstein for Meta in front of the former Adler residence in Altwiedermus. We restored Meta to her place in our family and her village. This small stone is tangible evidence of a lost life; like a gravestone it marks a place to honor the dead. Meta’s stone is a permanent link to the past for our family and a town that has had no Jewish population since 1938.

Meta’s memorial ceremony was the culmination of more than a year of effort to reconcile an omission in my family history. I did not come to Germany to be a family researcher or Holocaust historian. I never expected to experience the kind of pain and grief that I felt about Meta. But my need to account for the past placed me on the path of a single victim, and brought a depth of sorrow that I had been shielded from as the daughter of German Jewish parents.

As I stood on the steps of my father’s childhood home before the small crowd gathered on a rainy Monday morning for Meta’s memorial ceremony, I could barely retain the composure necessary to speak for Meta. But with the support of my sister and my son, who raised the money for Meta’s stolperstein as part of his bar mtizvah in Berlin, I gave voice to the life of a woman who was forgotten. This is one of the most powerful things I have ever done in my life.

I’ve made other discoveries about my family since coming to Germany, discoveries from the lost and found of a land that holds many fragments of a dark past. Each discovery strengthens my sense of self and helps me to find my footing as a Jewish woman in Germany today. I don’t want to lose myself in the past, but to touch and preserve a part of what was left behind, to carry the reclaimed memories with me into the future. I feel more free to live in the present now and ready to fill the pages of a new chapter in my family’s German Jewish history.

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. This piece first appeared on AVIVA-Berlin.de and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher and author. To read Swarthout’s earlier piece about her great-aunt Meta, visit:  https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/metas-untold-story/

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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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July 2, 2012 · 6:00 am

Breaking the Jewish Taboo on Germany

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI)

I never expected to travel to Germany at all, let alone five separate times.  And the idea of enjoying myself there and making German friends would have struck me as implausible–if not crazy–ten years ago.  Why?  Because I grew up the son of Holocaust survivors and Germany always seemed to me the apotheosis of evil.  I feared and loathed it.

Letting go of those feelings prompted me to write My Germany, a combination of mystery, travelogue, and memoir.  Weaving together my story with my parents’ stories, it charts my unusual journey from hatred to reconciliation.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to be invited to speak about it across the US and Canada at Jewish book fairs, colleges and universities, libraries, churches and synagogues, the Library of Congress, and German cultural institutions.  The response has been profoundly accepting and sometimes–it embarrasses me to say–even rapturous. I’ve often had crowds of over one hundred people attend my events.

I’ve also done two book tours in Germany sponsored by the American Embassy in Berlin and the American Consulate in Frankfurt.  And I’ve been interviewed by Der Spiegel International.  And, amazingly, a German TV producer has expressed interest in documenting my next tour.

But American Jewish newspapers and magazines (print and on-line), even ones I’ve published reviews in over the years, have ignored the book.  That’s despite the fact that I’ve been publishing Jewish-American fiction and creative non-fiction for over thirty years, and that the book is published by the University of Wisconsin Press, highly respected for its Judaica and memoirs.

So why the virtual blackout?

I haven’t written the book to urge anyone to like or visit Germany.  It’s a description of how I emerged from my horror of Germany as an idea and then came to terms with it as a reality.  But even that’s apparently too much for many Jewish gatekeepers, who still seem to be suffering from collective PTSD over sixty years past the Holocaust.  Or they think their audiences are.

It’s not just editors who have problems. One prominent professor of Jewish Studies who resisted a visit of mine to his school accused me of offering Germans “forgiveness,” even though my book specifically says nothing of the sort.  But he couldn’t even cope with the word “reconciliation.”  He said that was just “code.”  You’d expect a professor to be more up-to-date: recent anthologies about post-Holocaust relations between Jews and Germans specifically distinguish between the two terms.

Reconciliation doesn’t remotely mean forgetting or even ignoring the past.  It’s acknowledging the historic chasm can never be filled in, but embracing the fact that one can reach across it in compassion and strive for mutual understanding.

A Jewish student at a major university said that when he told friends at Hillel, the school’s Jewish student center, that he was going to my reading, they asked why he’d bother.  (They were already furious at him for wanting to work in the automotive industry in Germany.)  Another college student at one of my readings said her father refused to speak to her about her majoring in German.  I’ve heard many more stories like this.

Even in-laws have asked me how I could possibly go to Germany under any circumstances whatsoever, and say they would never dream of doing what I’ve done.

How can I return to Germany?  Because of all the people I’ve met there who are deeply involved in Holocaust education, whether through teaching, writing, publishing, or community work.  Because when I met individuals agonizing over their parents’ or grandparents’ Nazi past, I realized how much better off I was to be the son of victims as opposed to perpetrators.

Of course, you could argue that My Germany wasn’t widely covered by Jewish media because it lacks worth or substance.  But you know what?  Disliking one of my books hasn’t stopped Jewish reviewers in the past from expressing their opinions in print, going all the way back to my first collection of stories in 1990, Dancing on Tisha B’Av.

That book was controversial for mixing stories about gay Jews and children of Holocaust survivors, and there were many Jewish Book Fairs where I would never be invited to speak about the book.  Attitudes among American Jews about gay issues have changed for the better. But when it comes to Germany, our community seems, for the most part, frozen in time.

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

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May 21, 2012 · 8:24 am

A Poet’s Reflections on Approaching the Edge

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

In looking at my two Holocaust poems–“Accident of Fate,” The Jewish Writing Project, May 14, 2012 (http://tinyurl.com/cpywfs5) and “One Holocaust Movie Too Many,” The Jewish Writing Project, August 22, 2011  (http://tinyurl.com/d7dt7po)–I can’t help notice that there is a sizable difference in perspective.

In “One Holocaust Movie Too Many,” the earlier one, I am the outsider looking in. I see pictures of the Holocaust, but the screen filters me from reality. I am there and not there, separated from the horror via celluloid and watching from a distance in present time where the world is safe and Jews can be proud of their heritage. In the poem, I do not hear the “awful trains,” except in a vague generational memory. I am as distant as anyone who has not been through the camps.

In “Accident of Fate,” there is a closer, deeper perspective. Yes, there is also the movie screen, but I wished in this poem to state much more emphatically that my involvement in the horror is much more than a memory. It is a feeling that I have been spared, granted life, but should not have been. Except for this accident of fate, I should have been in the barracks waiting to be put to death. The poem raises vividly an unresolved philosophical dilemma: why was I allowed to live while others were marched to the chambers? I realize, of course, there is no answer to this question. In the latter poem I am singed by the fires of the crematorium. I am there – far more so than in the first poem where I exist as a curious spectator.

My different vision for each poem was cast by personal history. My parents escaped Vienna in 1939, and I was born during the war in safe Switzerland. On some level (though not as much as my father), I have suffered from some kind of “survivor’s guilt,” never fully escaping the thought that I, very easily, could have been one more nameless victim.

I never truly understood my father’s torture, but I am beginning to see now that I am not totally unscathed from the horrible history. Though I did not fall in, my toe has always touched the rim of this terrible abyss. In the second poem I move closer to the edge.

Each time I approach the edge, I find myself compelled to write.

Here is a poem that I wrote after thinking about the process of moving closer and closer to that edge:

My Father’s Soul

Two Holocaust poems written months apart,
both describing horrors seen on the silver screen,
both touching on my escape from
the fires of the crematoriums.
In the first poem, I serve as spectator
seeing the barracks from a distance,
realizing I have been fortunate enough
to live free in a Jewish neighborhood.
In the second poem, I am the participant
with the growing sense
a part of me, a part of my father
still lives among the prisoners,
and what’s more, I have no business
being a survivor, being allowed
to live free in a Jewish neighborhood.
I am my father’s son;
his survivor’s guilt is my guilt.
His soul is my soul as I put
one foot ahead of the other,
casting my eyes upward at the smoke.

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 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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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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