Tag Archives: second generation

August 17, 2026 · 7:30 am

Crown Heights (1955 – 1960): Through the eyes of a daughter of Holocaust survivors

By Sandra Hurtes (New York, NY)

Crown Heights was a world my mother and I explored together. The effects of Hitler’s war revealed themselves from St. John’s Place to Montgomery Street, from Utica Avenue to Albany Avenue. On our way to the doctor or the grocery or the park, my mother whispered stories about the greena (greenhorns from Eastern Europe who came to America after the Holocaust).

There was Esther who lived on President Street and had three children. My mother pulled me close and said, “Zug gurnish, mámala, [say nothing, sweetheart], Esther screams every night about Auschwitz.” With each walk, the story took on different tones. Soon it became, “Esther is in the hospital. Her psychiatrist is giving her shock treatments.” Then my mother, nodding in understanding, pursing her lips, sighing.

I wondered who was home watching Esther’s children, and if her husband, Murray, was cooking supper. I tried picturing her getting shocked, but didn’t know how that looked. I wondered if the shocks singed, like electrified barbed wire.

When my mother and I visited her friend Margie who lived on Lincoln Place, my mother reminded me, “Don’t stare at Margie’s hand.” On her right hand were four and half fingers. She sawed her middle finger in half while working in the munitions factory she was transferred to from Auschwitz. When Margie’s hand was steady, it appeared as if her finger was bent at the knuckle. Then she moved, and the finger wiggled like it had no bones.

There was Sylvia who once lived on Carroll Street. I recalled her only through my mother’s stories. One afternoon Sylvia was vacuuming. As she pushed the long hose along the floor, she fished in her pocket for a sucking candy. When she began choking on the button she’d accidentally slipped in her mouth, her son David frantically called the police. By then she was blue. The police held her upside down but the button was lodged too deeply.

 Each time my mother told me the story she said, “Sylvia survived Hitler to choke on a button in Brooklyn. God bless America!”  And all I could think about was that the police and David saw Sylvia’s underwear when her duster fell over her head.

There was Mrs. Steinberg who we often passed on Schenectady Avenue, pushing her shopping cart. While hiding in Siberia, Mrs. Steinberg had two miscarriages. Each time we passed her in the street, my mother admonished me, “Quick, mein scheina kint [my beautiful child], smile, say hello to Mrs. Steinberg before she gives you the evil eye.”

My mother lived in fear of the evil eye, a superstition she brought with her from home. This belief—that a curse would be cast upon us when someone was jealous of something we had—was one way in which she would remain old-fashioned, regardless of how glamorous she became. And so, since my mother had two children and no miscarriages, she worried she’d be cursed by Mrs. Steinberg.

To ward off the evil eye, my mother protected herself by making her hand into a fist and pushing her thumb through her index and middle finger. Whenever we saw anyone else who might curse us, we reflexively made the fist and held it behind our backs. If asked how we were, we said, “Fine,” and squeezed our fists tight.

There was Manny on Montgomery Street. He was my story, and a secret I kept from my mother. He came from Poland and struck it rich in a shoe business on Orchard Street. Manny was tall and lanky, with hair falling across his forehead hitting close to his right eye. Every afternoon I played pretend games with his daughter in their apartment. Just before I left for supper, Manny came home, undressed and stood naked in the bathtub, the water from the shower sliding down his body. The shower curtain was pulled apart, the door wide open.  

I never told my parents about Manny. I knew innately that what he did was wrong, and I wanted to protect him. And I was ashamed too, of the excitement I felt running past the bathroom, once, twice, three times, stealing looks as he rubbed a soapy washcloth in circles on his chest.

Ironic. Impossible. Ordinary. That was our Crown Heights.

Girls played double dutch, the jump ropes crisscrossing in the air like lines on a globe. There were hopscotch games chalked in yellow and pink, girls hopping in this box and that one, their ponytails flying back and forth or frizzy hair like mine a powder puff around their heads. Boys played Johnny on the Pony on the corner of Union Street and Schenectady. In the street, they kicked the can; gangly boys ran and hid as the metal cylinder rolled beneath parked Chevys and Desotos.

There was the varoooom of motorcycles speeding down Eastern Parkway. The soft rapid murmur of prayer trailing the Hasidic men in black as they hurried in and out of the subway. The high-pitched whine of alley cats crawling through garbage cans. Taunts like shake it don’t break it and your momma followed me and my friends, all of us barely aware of who we were.

When my mother and I walked together, she looped her arm through mine. We maneuvered between the stories of the greena and the everyday. We thanked God for our ability to hold a glass firm with all ten fingers, to not need shock treatments, not be the ones whose evil gaze was feared.

At home, my mother sang Que Sera Sera in a wistful tone as she cleaned the bathtub, a rusty can of Ajax in her hand. She scrubbed until the tub was spotless, singing all the while, what will be will be. When she bencht lecht (lit candles)for Shabbos, a tichal (kerchief) over her head, she prayed she would one day see all her siblings, as one family at a time, they emigrated to Crown Heights.

We believed we kept our stories to ourselves. We told each other we were lucky. The complications of war belonged to the others. When my mother and I strolled the promenade of Eastern Parkway, tree branches canopied over us, and birds flew from their nests. In those times, Auschwitz seemed so far away.

Sandra Hurtes’ work has appeared in The New York Times, The Jewish Week, Poets & Writers and many other publications. This essay is excerpted from a collection that she’s working on tentatively titled “Halfway Home.”

 

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August 10, 2026 · 7:30 am

My Name is Chaim — Life!

By Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

We were Jewish when I was growing up,

American-style, New York-style Jewish,

the way our nearby kosher deli was kosher

but not kosher enough to be patronized by

the more religious Chasidim.

We patronized our local Temple Beth-El annually

on the High Holy days and smiled at all the strangers

in the fully seated congregation, pretended to

listen to the Hebrew prayers, imitated davening

with the others and nodded greetings of the day

when we all left to comfortably return to our

secular homes and apartments.

We knew that we were Jewish by the way we rooted

for the new-born state of Israel to survive the cold-

blooded attacks on its inchoate survival, by the way 

our friends celebrated holidays that others didn’t recognize, 

by the pride we felt when we noted the success of Uncle Miltie, 

the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers and Danny Kaye, 

Red Buttons, Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas — and rooted 

hard for Sandy Koufax (even as we privately kvelled 

in the memory of the grand accomplishments of the player 

and the man named Hank Greenberg, who, I later found out, 

had attended the same high school as I did).

My father didn’t make a big deal about religion,

never spoke about his European youth, and called me

Chaim (never once using my American name).

It wasn’t till my own old age (sixty years after he

found his forever home in Jewish Heaven)

that the wisdom came to me to comprehend

my Jewish-Yiddish name.

He had escaped the hell of his Polish ghetto and

had married a Latvian beauty of a similar escape and,

after they thought they were done filling our home

with loving girls, ten years later, I appeared, a son, 

to be loved without condition, a son who somehow 

represented life, a promise of the continuation, 

not so much of our Jewishness but of our name 

and our mystical — more than mythical — connection 

to Moses and David and our new heroes of the decade 

of my birth, with names like Herzl, Ben-Gurion, 

Eban, Dayan, Allon and Meir.

We Jews know well how to survive and thrive.

We understand the holiness and the value and vitality of life.

Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.

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March 10, 2025 · 6:30 am

My Mother Museum

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI) 

First Gallery

My father lost her cookbook after multiple moves, the black-and-white student’s notebook in which she wrote down her favorite recipes in bold, foreign-looking script. It was the one possession of hers I wanted most after she died.  I relished watching her cook with the ease and flair of a professional chef in our dimly-lit Washington Heights kitchen with a view of another Depression-era apartment building across the street.  Same gold and brown bricks, with an equally ridiculously English name like The Windermere in a neighborhood that had been filled with German-Jewish refugees and was slowly becoming Hispanic.  But the book was unique, my mother as curator.

Second Gallery

The small cameo brooch of a woman in profile must be fifty years old or more but looks brand new because she never wore it.  A friend brought it back for her from Italy is all I remember her saying.  But who?  Was it the Polish man I heard about from a family friend after she died, the man she “should have married,” a socialist from Vilnius like her instead of my born-on-a-farm father?  Why did she keep it if she never put it on/why did she never put it on?  What did it mean to her?  I’m asking these questions too late.  It nestles in its white cardboard box lined with cotton, untouched, pristine, a buoy in a mysterious sea.  

Third Gallery

The cream-colored enameled compact weighs over half a pound, is embossed with leaves and a bird in flight.  Embossed in gold and made in France: modèle déposé, registered design.  There’s room for a lipstick, there’s a mirror inside on the left, there’s a lidded compartment for face powder on the right.  It’s an object out of a film noir, the kind of thing a lustrous femme fatale would use with magical, elegant hands to make herself up while people stared at her effrontery, her chic.  Oh, she was definitely chic.  One of her students from Belgium said “Elle avait du chien“: French for desirable, intelligent, and strong.  I see that in some photos from the late 40s.  By the 50s the look has disappeared and she’s an American housewife.

Fourth Gallery

Hanging in her closet in a plastic dry cleaner’s bag like any ordinary dress was the slave labor camp dress she was wearing when freed by Americans in eastern Germany, April 15, 1945.  Dark gray strips that seem almost purple on light gray stripes.  Thin, grim cotton with a roughly-sewn beige number patch above her heart.  The number helped me access German records of her incarceration in ghettos and camps.  Was this relic kept as evidence that she might not have survived if WWII had lasted longer?  That the crimes she endured were real?  It won’t tell me.  Can you really call it a “dress” or even a “uniform”?  Reality seems too big for such small words, for the bomb lurking there day after day. 

Last Gallery

This particular lined notebook has not been lost, but I wish it had been.  Black-and-white exterior, starker still inside: a record of her deepening dementia caused by years of chain smoking.  Here, instructions are repeated about when to take which pill.  Bits of news randomly copied from the New York Times.  Worst of all, grotesque, are the definitions of “Memory” she transcribed from a dictionary.  Remember, Remember, Remember says every miserable page.   The desperate lament of a mind drifting out to sea, the words of a voluble, witty, multi-lingual woman ordered at first, then scrambled, finally misspelled, broken, gone.  I want to destroy it but I can’t—it’s her anguished Last Will and Testament.

Gift Shop

CLOSED

Lev Raphael is an American pioneer in writing about the Second Generation, a project that he began in the late 1970s.  He’s the author of Writing a Jewish Life, Dancing on Tisha B’av, My Germany and 24 other books in many genres.  His work has appeared in fifteen languages and he’s done invited talks and readings in Israel, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, England, Scotland, Canada and all across the US.  Venues included the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Oxford University, and The LIbrary of Congress. Lev taught creative writing at Michigan State University and Regents College in London, and has been invited to teach at Leipzig University in Germany.  Michigan State University has purchased his literary papers and they are available to students and scholars for research.

The piece first appeared in The Chaffin Review and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

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January 29, 2024 · 7:30 am

Unwelcome and Unwanted

by Esther Erman (Mountain View, CA)

These days, now that most of them are gone, Holocaust survivors are honored and revered. But, from my experience, this was not always the case. 

I remember hearing that the mother of a famous Jewish writer became angry upon seeing a newsreel about Jews in Nazi labor and death camps. To whom did she direct her anger? The Nazis perpetrating the crimes? Alas not. Her ire went against the Jews who were – what? dumb enough? unlucky enough? to get caught and thrown into those places. 

I arrived in the United States as an infant, the child of my survivor parents who had lost everything in their place of origin, Poland. To say that we were unwelcome and unwanted is putting the case mildly.

Each of my parents was the sole survivor from their family of origin. To the best of my knowledge, most of my family perished at either Treblinka or Auschwitz. Both of my parents survived ghettos, labor camps, and Auschwitz. My mother also survived the death march and Bergen-Belsen. Calling my parents traumatized is also putting the case mildly. Despite this extreme trauma, they had the resilience to meet and marry in their DP (displaced persons) camp in Germany and produce a child (moi), born eighteen months after my mother was liberated from Bergen-Belsen.

At the  DP camp, my father managed to connect with an uncle in the United States who sponsored us to emigrate. By the time the requisite paperwork arrived, my mother was too pregnant to get on a ship. We had to wait until I was born and then able to lift my head – around age three months. 

By the time we managed to leave Germany, it was March of 1947. We set sail from Bremen on the Ernie Pyle. The crossing was so bad that my mother was sure we’d die in the middle of the ocean. I think that the Ernie Pyle was not the most seaworthy vessel. It foundered in the middle of the Atlantic, and we were towed back to Plymouth, England. There, for the seven days it took to get another ship for us to transfer to, we were not allowed to set foot on British soil. I expect it was a long seven days. 

We arrived in the United States on April 1, 1947. The uncle who’d sponsored our journey left us to fend for ourselves. He was a miserly bachelor who kept our existence a secret from a large branch of the family in Chicago. Perhaps they might have been more generous than he in providing support for my traumatized parents and me? His motivation for all his behavior remains an unsolvable mystery. It’s only been in recent years that the folks in Chicago learned that anyone from the family in Poland had survived the war.

Soon after our arrival, we settled on the Lower East Side. It was not trendy then. Given the post-war housing shortage, a building on Suffolk Street that had been slated for demolition was removed from the demolition list. Our first home was a rat-infested firetrap that had my crazy clean mother weeping with frustration daily. My father worked two jobs and was so rarely home, I cried when I saw this stranger. When my mother first attempted to tell an American Jewish woman about her experience in Auschwitz, the response was: “We suffered here also. Sugar was rationed.” Any wonder that my mother became depressed?

As I’ve come to reflect on my family’s experience, I can’t help wondering what might have been if my parents had had some support – any support – in those early days. Might it have made a difference? Or were they just too traumatized for there to be any meaningful help for them? I know that regular Americans were not thrilled to welcome us refugees. I think many Jewish Americans – maybe insecure themselves, maybe not long enough distanced from their arrival in the United States – did not welcome this reminder of where they had come from. 

I think about this feeling of being unwelcome and unwanted – which stayed with us as we made “successful” lives in the United States – when I hear about the plight of current refugees. Even for those more fortunate in their settlement than we were – the stigma of being a refugee lingers long after the initial trauma might reach some degree of resolution.

Like Rebecca, the heroine of her novel (Rebecca of Salerno: a Novel of Rogue Crusaders, a Jewish Female Physician, and a Murder), Esther Erman was a refugee. As an old “white” woman who speaks good English, she realizes she doesn’t typify the usual image of a refugee — but, despite the passage of time, the scars remain.The daughter of two survivors of the Shoah from Poland, Esther was born in Germany. A naturalized citizen, she early developed a passion for language. After receiving her BA and MA in French from different divisions of Rutgers University, she returned there for her doctorate in language education. She wrote her dissertation about Yiddish, her first language, which she had abandoned at age five. A multi-published author still trying to settle on her next big project, Esther now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Lee. When they’re not traveling—especially to be with family in other parts of the United States and in England—she loves to bake, quilt, and add to her monumental book collection. Check her website for upcoming events: EstherErman.com.

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April 25, 2022 · 6:30 am

My Father’s Holocaust

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

My father escaped the Holocaust,
but suffered for it, and when, as a kid,
I pointed out he never actually
spent time in Auschwitz or Dachau,
he stared at me, “Same thing,” he said.
“You’ll see,” he added. When I pressed
him further, he said only one word: “Family.”
I didn’t see, the Holocaust becoming 
just one more historical fact.
I began my own very secular career.
Then I saw a picture at a lecture
given by a famous art historian.
Thumbprints of dirt, blood, ink, 
mounted upon rows of stripes
in different colors, an abstract
suddenly becoming very real— 
a line of prisoners awaiting the 
morning roll call in the freezing cold.
I looked closer at the thumbprints
and could see my father’s face.
“I am here, remember me, never forget.”
A generation later I am still safe, still free, 
but the picture still haunts me.
“I escaped,” I said to the thumbprints.
“Oh, no, you didn’t,” I heard my father say. 
And finally I understood his words.

Mel Glenn, the author of twelve books for young adults, is working on a poetry book about the pandemic tentatively titled Pandemic, Poetry, and People. He has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. You can find his most recent poems in the 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 5, 2019 · 9:29 am

Anne Watches Me

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

Anne Frank and the Marranos of the
Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam
would not be proud of me as I walk, with cane,
a second day in this canal-laced capital.
Even surrounded by rich Jewish tradition,
located in the center of town,
I feel tangential to the teachings of
Spinoza and Maimonides.
What will make me feel more Jewish?
I have broken too many rules,
avoided too many rites, to lay claim to
being an active participant in my own religion.
And yet,
I am my father’s son,
he who escaped the Holocaust,
who suffered survivor’s guilt,
who nevertheless passed his heritage on to me.
I think of him, and all Jews, those who perished,
those who survived, as I slowly climb the stairs
in the Anne Frank House in the heart of a city that
has remembered and respected its Jewish history.
Ascending those stairs to the “Secret Annex,”
I can hear Anne’s footsteps behind me,
asking questions for which there are no answers:
Why me? Why us? Why now? –-
questions that echo both past and present
as tyrants then and now seek to control the world.
Anne, I feel your strength and bravery
wandering the rooms of your abbreviated adolescence
as a renewed Jew here in the old city of Amsterdam.

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 the 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 8, 2017 · 10:38 am

Look to the Sky

by Toba Abramczyk (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

When I was a small child, my dad, a Holocaust survivor,  used to take me over to the window and ask me to look to the sky. He would take my brother and sister and ask them to do the same thing. This happened all the time, whether it was a barbecue or a family occasion, he would take us out and say “Look to the sky.”

When I got married, he took me outside. It was the hottest day of the year, but he asked me to go out and look to the sky

When I had my first child, he said “I am not good with babies. Don’t let me hold her, my hands can’t carry her and I will drop her.”

His hands were bent and swollen from years of hard labour and butchering meat for years and years.

The day my daughter was born, there were about ten family members in the hospital’s recovery room, all waiting for a turn to hold her. All I could see was her little body bobbing up and down from person to person.

There was so much noise and laughter, but through all this hoopla, I could see my dad holding his first grandchild, tears streaming down his cheeks. He was singing so softly to her. I had never heard my dad sing. Perhaps this was a lullaby his mother sang to him. He then walked my daughter to the window and said, “Look to the sky.”

That’s when I got it, I finally got it, and I started to cry.

I was sobbing so hard, everyone around me thought I was breaking down, but my mom understood. She took my hand and smiled.

All these years, all the times we had “looked to the sky,” my dad was showing his family, everyone who he had lost in the Shoah — mother, father, sisters, brothers – he was showing our faces to them, his legacy, and now his granddaughter.

Toba Abramczyk is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her father was born in Belchatow Poland, the only survivor of seven children. His parents and two younger sisters, grandparents and extended family were taken to Chelmno. One older brother was shot on the street; two older sisters and an older brother were taken to Lodz and then sent to Chelmno in 1944. Her father came to Canada in 1956 after serving in the Haganah as a soldier (1948-1952) in the engineering corp while in Israel. Her mother came to Canada from Rovna Poland in 1930. A single parent of three children, Toba  lectures on the Holocaust, has gone on the March of the Living as a chaperone, and volunteers with various Jewish organizations. 

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April 24, 2017 · 6:30 am

At the Butcher’s

by Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

Take a number please,
the dispenser reads
at the butcher’s.
I take one and wait in line.
It’s before Shabbos, everyone is rushed,
people pushing or being pushed,
trying to get to the counter, to get their food,
someone mutters, “I was ahead of you.”

“Who’s next?” says the butcher,
and panic falls from me like a puzzle
dropped on the floor and I can’t
find all the pieces and the ones I can
pick up don’t fit together anymore and

I want to tell them about my father’s
sister and how her visa number was too
high and there were too many people in
line ahead of her waiting to get out and how
she was deported to
Auschwitz and she didn’t get
a number there and if she had, she
might have survived and

I want to tell them about my friend’s mother, how
she got a number on her forearm in
Auschwitz, and how she got a
visa number after the war and about the
dreams she has every night and

the butcher calls my number, and I
cannot make a sound.

Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us, poems about her family and the Holocaust.  Her recent work has appeared in The Poet’s Quest for God and is forthcoming in Forgotten Women.  Janet is currently producing AFTER, a cinematic film about Holocaust poetry.  https://www.facebook.com/AfterAPoetryFilm/

Reprinted from Lilith Magazine, where this poem first appeared, with kind permission of the author.

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October 24, 2016 · 6:20 am

Father’s Phantom First Family

by Sheldon P. Hersh (Lawrence, NY)

When it came to keeping secrets, few were as tight-lipped as my parents. Once these two Holocaust survivors decided to exclude any one particular topic from conversation, no amount of whimpering, urging or cajoling could convince them to reconsider. You see there were some wartime memories that proved just too painful to discuss and so keeping them under wraps was felt to be the only sensible thing to do.

One such prohibited topic dealt with my father’s first family, a wife and three small children, four innocent victims who perished during the Holocaust. They, along with thousands of others held captive in the Lodz Ghetto, had either succumbed to starvation, exhaustion and illness or were ruthlessly singled out, rounded up and taken to nearby killing centers. The story of this first family had become a closed chapter in a book of tragedies that was to be kept out of sight and out of mind. From my earliest recollection, I sensed that this was a subject that was strictly off limits and, though I was always intrigued, I knew better than to ask too many questions.

My father, who was generally an open and talkative sort, never spoke of this phantom first family. There were no details of their lives and no information as to how or where they died. Talk of their appearance, likes, dislikes, mannerisms and personalities was never forthcoming and remained under lock and key. My mother, perhaps fearful of not wanting to open old painful wounds, seldom discussed any subject that was certain to upset my father. “Your father is a nervous man,” she would often say, “he has suffered enough. There are things you should not ask.”

On rare occasions, mother would inadvertently let a word or two slip about the secret first family but there was never enough information that would amount to much of anything. She always seemed to catch herself right in the nick of time. It was like a pinhole in a drawn window shade that permitted a hint of light but resulted in little, if any, illumination or insight. The first family’s names were never mentioned and their faces never graced the pages of our emaciated photo album.

Growing up, I found myself trying to come up with likely names and images for this first family. I played with the possibilities. The color and texture of their hair, the color of their eyes and any distinctive facial features that would make them stand out in a crowd. In spite of a vivid imagination, my efforts failed miserably as these faceless spirits continued to elude me. Whenever emboldened by a jolt of curiosity, I would cautiously approach my father with questions relating to his first family. “Foolish child, how could you ever possibly understand?” was his customary response, a refrain he often used whenever feeling distressed and at a loss for words. I accepted defeat and never gave it much thought until my own children came on the scene.

While visiting my parents a number of years ago, I was determined to be a bit more forceful in my attempt to learn about 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 began to appear a bit more receptive to the idea of introducing his first family into our daily conversations. As the lone survivor of his extended family, he, and only he, could provide information about those who had not survived. No photographs, letters or mementos of the first family’s existence had ever surfaced after the war, making my father’s recollections all the more critical. I was well aware of his sensitivity and appreciated his vulnerability, and, at my mother’s urging, I proposed that we go slowly and proceed at a pace of his own choosing.

Father took a long deep breath and began to speak haltingly of the strife and struggle of life in the ghetto. He continued on this theme for a number of minutes before introducing me to his young daughter and two infant sons. Though details were quite meager, a milestone had been reached that, I hoped, would lead to more open discussion in the near future. A major hurdle was overcome and I could immediately appreciate that a bit of clarity had been sprinkled onto a distant blur. Visions of faint images were beginning to inch forward ever so slowly with the promise of additional advancement if time would only permit. But it did not. My father died soon after our initial breakthrough. This first small 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 most remarkable work by Josef Zelkowicz, a witness to the horrific events that took the lives of so many in the Lodz Ghetto. In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto, Zelkowicz describes how children were brutally separated from hysterical parents, forced onto transports and then taken to extermination centers:

“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. I now, however, understand why it was my father could not relive a time when mothers and fathers, all terror stricken and desperate, wept uncontrollably as their loving children were savagely torn from their protective embrace. His common refrain—“Foolish child, how could you ever possibly understand?”—has now taken on a clarity of its own. My father had been right all along. I could not possibly understand. I could not possibly appreciate the horrors that had left him dispirited and at a loss for words. When it came to any talk, any mention, any recollection of the first family, I now realize that my father couldn’t and my mother wouldn’t. He succeeded in keeping his secret intact, thereby helping safeguard his sanity and keeping 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 author of Our Frozen Tears (http://tinyurl.com/kuzlscb), as well as the co-author of The Bugs Are Burning, a book on the Holocaust.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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August 1, 2016 · 5:54 am

The Matter of The Errant Sun                        

by Sheldon P. Hersh (Lawrence, NY)

Try as she may, mother could not escape her past. As a survivor of the Holocaust, she was left with an abundance of painful memories that would surface throughout her lifetime. As far back as I can recall, she shied away from discussing her experiences out of fear of opening painful wounds and, perhaps most important of all, not exposing her innocent children to the unspeakable horrors that she felt best be kept hidden. She remained highly sensitized to certain distinctive sounds and visual displays that, if present, could easily result in anxious moments or outright panic. I recall how she was terrified by the sound of a passing siren and remained frozen in fear until the siren’s harsh shrill disappeared far off in the distance.

And then there was the matter of the errant sun. She rather enjoyed the sun’s presence, but at times it brought about disturbing recollections that mother would rather forget. On many a sunny day she would quietly make her way to the living room and place herself directly in front of the large picture window. She happened to favor this one particular window for it seemed to best capture the sun’s majestic brilliance. Once seated in her upholstered chair she would lean slightly forward placing the palms of both hands against the window’s glowing surface. Then, as if on cue, her eyes would slowly close as the sun’s rays entered our home extending a much-appreciated warm embrace.

The sun often brought a smile to her face, but many a time her demeanor could change in dramatic fashion. A smile signaling joy and contentment would suddenly vanish, having been replaced by a sorrowful, clearly pained expression. And as would so often be the case, her initial tears of joy were suddenly pushed aside by the bitter tears of sadness and despair. For even within the dazzling sunlight, shadowy companions, nightmarish figures, were always by her side.

Mother kept much of her past life to herself but there were instances when she relented and agreed to share some of her thoughts and recollections. On one such occasion, she felt the need to speak of the sun’s past betrayal and how it had once meekly surrendered to an unspeakable evil. An inexcusable act that contributed to the misery and despair of those confined to the ghetto in Lodz, her hometown in Poland. As was usually the case, a trickle of glistening bitter tears began to appear on her pallid cheeks in anticipation of the story she would soon relate, a story about her long running squabble with the sun.

“You see during the war the sun left us,” she began. “It was a time when the sun, like so many others, left us to suffer and die. When I looked through the dirty windows, past the walls of the ghetto, I could see the sun shining. I could see people smiling. You see, my children, without the sun, there is no light and no warmth. The sun wanted no part of our world and forced us to live in darkness.”

She related how things appeared beyond the ghetto walls. Flowers bloomed, birds tweeted, and children played. But within the forbidding walls, all was dark; all had begun to decay. Wasted infants would whimper in unison while the sick and elderly lay with eyes nearly closed knowing the end was fast approaching. Most would soon succumb in this world of darkness. Mother was tormented by the sun’s presence beyond the ghetto walls. It was so close yet so distant. In its own peculiar way, the sun had joined the many forces of evil that subjected the Jews of Europe to unimaginable hardship and suffering. “It’s better not to ask,” she ended, “better never to know. Some things should remain hidden.”

Years passed and the sun returned to her life. Mother spent her remaining days sitting by the glowing window enjoying the sun’s life-giving energy and warm embrace. But I sensed early on that she could never forget, nor entirely forgive, the sun for its past indifference. And rightfully so. She had been witness to the errant sun’s darker side—the time it fled, refusing to provide light and joy to a people in desperate need.

Sheldon P. Hersh, an Ear, Nose and Throat Physician with a practice in the New York metropolitan area, is the author of Our Frozen Tears (http://tinyurl.com/kuzlscb), as well as the co-author of The Bugs Are Burning, a book on the Holocaust.

 

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