Tag Archives: WWII

March 17, 2025 · 7:30 am

Tzipa

by Nina Zolotow (Berkeley, CA)

“You also have a Jewish first name,” my mother told me. “It’s Tzipa.” 

“Tzipa?” I asked, trying to reproduce the completely unfamiliar sound I was hearing.

“Yes, Tzipa. She was grandma’s sister who died.”

“Oh,” I said “Okay.”

There we were, sitting together on the couch in the light-filled living room of our brand-new house, up on a hillside in a canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles, California, and I was young enough to simply accept the mystifying information that, in addition to my English first name, Nina, I had a “Jewish” first name, Tzipa, without asking any questions. But I always remembered what my mother told me. Even as the years passed and I never heard anyone call me Tzipa (my relatives called me Ninala or Ninatchka), I always remembered that name.

I also believed that no one else I knew had two first names. I didn’t realize then that it is very common for Jewish people to have a Hebrew name in addition to their name in the language of the country where they were living, and that their Hebrew names were not just second names in another language, but they were spiritual names in “God’s holy language.” I missed out on learning that, I think, because my parents, as well as my grandparents, were not religious, so I never went to synagogue or Hebrew school.

So that made me think that it was only me who had a secret name. It was like a magpie surprised me with a gift, dropping a small shiny object at my feet, and having no idea what to do with it but not wanting to get rid of it, I put it in a box with other precious objects. And I took that box along with me with every move I ever made, from city to city and even from one country to another.

I might have learned more about Hebrew names had I married a Jewish man. But, instead, I married a man who, despite being raised by parents from a small Protestant religious sect, the Church of the Brethren, always believed that everything he learned in Sunday school was just so many stories, stories that had no relationship to the world as he knew it. And he and I together raised two children who we brought up just as I had been raised without any religion.

“Do you remember me telling you about my Hebrew name, Tzipa?” I asked my husband recently.

“Tizpa?” Brad said. “No, not really.”

“I guess that name doesn’t mean anything to you,” I said. “But I definitely told you. I think you might remember when I tell you that it means little bird.”

“Ah, little bird,” he said, smiling fondly. “Yes, I do remember something about that.”

When I became an adult, my appreciation for my secret name grew because even though I didn’t like the sound of it, I learned that it means “little bird.” Tzipa, you see, is a diminutive of the biblical name Tzipporah, which is derived from the Hebrew word for bird, “tzippor.” And because birds can soar across the vastness of the skies above us, free from the restrictions that keep humans tied to the earth, in Jewish symbolism birds represent freedom. They also represent the awakening of the spirit and the connection between the earth and heaven, the material world and the spiritual one.

“Did you know that I have a Hebrew name?” I asked my brother, Danny “It’s Tzipa.”

“No, but I like the sound of that,” he said. “How did you find out about it?”

“Mom just told me that when I was a kid.”

“So, you mean that Mom and Dad gave you a Hebrew name?”

“Yes. They named me after Grandma Goldie’s sister who died in the Holocaust. But maybe you didn’t know that because no one ever called me by that name.”

“Okay…. Well, that’s a good person to be named after. It’s a nice way of keeping someone’s memory alive, whether the name gets used or not.”

Then, less than a year ago, my first cousin, Susan, sent me the result of the research she had done on our maternal grandmother’s family, the Levinstein family from Kudirkos-Naumienstis (also known as Naishtot) in Lithuania. And there at the end of the document was quite a lot of information about Tzipa, who she was and how she died.

I learned that Tzipa, who was one of the older sisters of my maternal grandmother Goldie Levinstein, had been born in Kudirkos-Lithuania in the 1890s. And that unlike her three sisters, she did not emigrate to the U.S. but instead stayed in the town where her parents and two brothers still lived. She married a rabbi named Itzhak, and together they had six children, five sons, Haim, Eliyahu, Israel, Dov, and one other whose name and fate we don’t know, and one daughter, Leah.

Then, on June 22, 1941, the Germans invaded the town and set the Jews to work under the supervision of local Lithuanians until a day in early July when a group of Lithuanian “activists,” under the command of Germans, attacked the city. This group ordered all Jewish males above the age of fourteen out to the streets and then took the Jewish men in groups of fifties to the Jewish cemetery. There the Germans and Lithuanian activists together shot one hundred ninety-two prisoners at the edge of pits they had already dug. The women and children were later forced into a ghetto within the town. On September 16, the 650 remaining women and children, and a few remaining men, were transported to the Parazniai forest by armed Lithuanians, who forced them to take off all their clothes and then lined them up and shot them all.

But Tzipa, her husband, and three of her children, Leah, Israel, and Dov, escaped the mass murders. After frantically packing up some kosher food, they ran for their lives. Once across the river, they fled into a more rural area. The first few days there they spent in an open field eating grass and finishing up the last of the kosher food. Then they found an abandoned shack and moved into it.

During those first long summer days, I imagine they must have seen birds of all kinds flying from tree branch to tree branch or high up in the distant blue sky above them and longed to be free like that, to fly far, far away from that place. Because things soon got worse.

Israel and Dov both left, joining the Lithuanian army that was attempting to fight off the Nazis. So Tzipa went away for few days, returning with flour for making bread, which she had purchased with money she received from selling her gold fillings. But her husband Itzhak, the rabbi, refused to eat non-kosher food. So he gradually starved to death. And then Tzipa herself came down with dysentery. 

What must it have been like for her to be dying and know that she was leaving her young daughter—only 14—completely alone?

Dov was killed fighting the Germans in the open fields. Haim was murdered by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators, as was Eliyahu, along with his wife and their two month-old baby. But two of Tzipa’s children survived. Her son, Israel, was badly wounded and became disabled—his hand was seriously damaged, and he lost the toes on one foot—but after the war, he emigrated to Brazil. And her daughter, Leah, also survived. After her mother died, she found a job at a factory where they paid her with small amounts of food. And after the war, she found her way to Israel, which is how our family knows this story.

“Did I ever tell you that I have a Hebrew name.” I said to Quinn, our child who is a scientist now living in Scotland and who strongly identifies with being Jewish.

“Yeah, I remember you telling me,” Quinn replied. “I actually wrote the name out for you in the Hebrew alphabet when I was studying Yiddish.”

“I’m very glad you do remember. What are your thoughts about me having the name of a woman who died during the Holocaust while trying to save her family?”

“Yes, well, I do think it’s nice to keep her memory alive by giving her name to someone in the family, but it’s also some heavy shit because it represents how you grew up with the Holocaust all around you—after all, you spent a lot of time as a child around adults who must have had a traumatic response to that genocidal event.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Even though I didn’t understand much about it at the time, I always had some awareness of it.”

To be honest, I’m still grappling with what it means to me to carry the name of that extraordinary woman. But, at last, I finally know what to do with the gift of the Hebrew name that was given to me all those years ago. I am taking it out of my box of precious things where it has been hidden all these years, placing it in the palm of my left hand, and reaching my hand out toward you, saying, “Here. Look at this.”

Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, where there is both brand new and older works, and you can also subscribe to her on Substack, where she is releasing one story a week. Nina has also written or co-written four books on yoga (seeyogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right. 

This story originally appeared on Nina’s blog, Delusiastic! and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

3 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, European Jewry, Family history, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, Russian Jewry

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

June 25, 2018 · 7:04 am

Unexpected Departure, 1938

by Helga Harris (Sarasota, FL)

Perhaps due to my age, I was the only member of my family of four who had not been upset about unexpectedly leaving Berlin in April 1938. My parents kept their plans to emigrate a secret from me, fearing that I, a talkative child, might speak out and be heard by a Nazi. My brother, Eric, five years my senior, and I had opposite personalities. He was an introvert. For weeks he had known of the family’s plans and was treated as an adult. … and I …  as an afterthought.

I saw the horrors in the streets of Berlin, especially toward old, religious-looking Jewish men. Some were beaten, punched in the face, pulled by their long curly side-locks, flowing black robes, dragged by their legs through the streets or by the tzitzit of their prayer shawls. It made me shudder and wonder what the future held for Jews in Germany.

When walking in the street it was common to hear thunderous sounds from blocks away of soldiers marching in high brown shiny leather boots, displaying the swastika armband on their brown shirts, and waving flags while marching on the cobblestone pavements. Besides the noise of goose-stepping soldiers, the storm troopers sang their patriotic songs in high decibel. Knowing the Nazis would be within our sight in a few moments, Mutti always quickly pulled me into a building’s doorway in order not to be seen. It was mandatory to salute the flag or be instantly arrested.

“Mutti, when will this stop?” I asked innocently.

She looked at me sadly and said, “I don’t know.” Mutti always seemed to know everything. With that realization, my perception of where I lived changed. To this day I cringe when hearing marching music, and I am wary of the display of flags. Nationalism frightens me. In my geography class in Berlin, I became intrigued about that fascinating land, America, “The land of opportunity, where the streets were paved with gold.” I was a cynic, even at such an early age. I didn’t believe the gold part, but dreamed of living in “The Land of Opportunity” and freedom.

I was not made aware of my parents’ plans to leave Berlin and travel to America until a week before our departure. Suddenly, large wooden crates appeared in our living room. It was then that my parents finally explained their agenda. I was happy and excited to escape Hitlerland, but the timing was too abrupt. I questioned myself. How will we live there? I don’t know English. How will people understand me? I’ll feel stupid in school.

My main misgiving was how I would tell my best friend, Ruthchen, that I’m moving to America. We’d been close, like sisters, since kindergarten: half of our lives. How will I say goodbye to her? The most serious question in my mind was: Will I ever see her again?

The difficult job was to convince my parents that I must say Auf Wiedersehen to Ruthchen. In 1938, Jews in Germany were always on alert when outside the safety of their home. (A year later, after Kristallnacht, there were no secure places.) Both families discussed the request and finally agreed for Ruthchen and me to meet; possibly for the last time of our young lives.

After all these years, I can still conjure the image of my dearest friend standing with her mother on the platform of the Berlin train station for the last goodbye. Our mothers had lectured each of us to control our emotions. For young girls, not yet eleven-years-old, that was difficult. We were also instructed not to bring the usual farewell gifts of flowers and chocolates.

It was a cool and sunny day that April in Berlin when we met at the railroad terminal. I remember Ruthchen dressed in a wool pleated navy skirt and hand-knit light blue jacket (to match her big, sparkling eyes), her blond curls escaping from her beanie hat that framed her round, sweet face. I probably wore something similar.

I recall clearly how our mothers were attired. Both wore well-tailored dark wool suits. Each had a fox (the entire animal, from head to tail) draped nonchalantly over their shoulders. The mouth of the animal was fashioned into a clothespin, to which the tail was secured. That look both fascinated and abhorred me. When I was very young, I hoped that the animal with its soulful eyes would loosen the clip somehow and spring from Mutti’s shoulder to freedom. To complete the outfit, they wore Marlene Dietrich type felt fedoras, leather gloves, purses, and clunky, dark oxford shoes. The young matrons did not look out of place: it was the style of affluent women of the 1930s.

For our exodus, my parents decided to separate the family for security reasons. My father and brother were to follow my mother and me by train a week after our departure from Berlin. That was a frightening thought. I wanted us to be together. My imagination went wild with terror. What if Mutti and I got lost? I’d want to be with my father … he could always make me smile. My mother was serious with no sense of humor. Or, what if something happened to Papa and Eric? What would my mother and I do to help? A month ago we heard that Hitler had marched into Austria and occupied that country “peacefully.” What’s next?

The plan was to travel to Belgium and stay with relatives in Antwerp and Brussels for six weeks while waiting for our visas to the U.S. Two sisters–my mother’s first cousins; one family living in Antwerp with her husband and son, the other with her spouse and daughter in Brussels–had moved to Belgium to escape Hitler two years earlier. The sisters, like my mother, were born in the same shtetl and moved to Berlin after WWI. My cousins and I, all the same age, had been very close in Berlin.

Although both cities are in Belgium, the spoken language in Antwerp is Flemish and in Brussels, French. My ten-year-old cousin, Vera, in Brussels, felt superior to Ziggy, in Antwerp. She tormented him for not speaking French and emphasized that Flemish is a non-language. I didn’t like being the third wheel. “Why are you so mean to Ziggy? It’s not his fault that he lives in Antwerp.” “I don’t care. Flemish is a stupid language and he’s stupid, too.” I later learned that in 1941 there was a knock on the door, and Vera’s father was forced out of their house, arrested, and shipped to Auschwitz Concentration Camp, never to be heard from again. The rest of the family somehow survived the war and got to New York five years later. Vera and her mother were never the same free-spirited people again.

My six weeks in Belgium were a wonderful experience of new things and foods that we all had been craving due to years of rationing for Jews in Germany. After leaving Belgium, my parents, Eric, and I, were scheduled to travel to Paris. The land journey would end in Le Havre. There we’d set sail on the magnificent SS Normandie and be on our way to New York. In order for it to appear as if we were on holiday, my father bought round-trip tickets. My brother had studied English for the past three years and offered to teach me rudimentary phrases. I was thrilled.

Brussels and Antwerp were interesting cities, but nothing compared to the splendor of Paris. I loved watching people while sitting in cafes, eating al fresco, and smelling the perfume from the flowers in window boxes that seemed to be everywhere.

I was impressed by French women, who all tended to be slim and wore simple, elegant clothes. They were masters at draping scarves and making every outfit, no matter the price, look unique. It instilled a style I adopted and empowered me to become a dress designer, which I’d been dreaming about. By comparison, I found German and Belgium females were rounder, had no sense of style, and wore too much makeup and jewelry. I learned a lesson from the French: be classic, understated, and you will look like “a million dollars.” I liked that American expression.

Never will I forget the abundance of food of every kind, especially the meats. (Kosher meat had not been available for several years for us in Germany.) I must have had a grin on my face when I finally bit into the juicy hotdog that snapped with every bite and as the liquid ran down my arm. Mutti permitted me to have as many as I wished, knowing that eventually I’d have my fill. Even the mustard was luscious. Eating freshly baked butter-dripping croissants and crunchy warm baguettes every day was unforgettable.

My one regret: I wish I had been older to experience and understand more of the uniqueness of the trip. Even as a young child, I recognized that Paris was more vibrant, artsy, and sophisticated than Brussels, Antwerp, and even cosmopolitan Berlin. More important than the food I craved was the freedom of speaking in public … not worrying about being overheard by the Nazis. Unfortunately that changed after the war started.

I would not have objected to living in Paris, but America was waiting for me. I was ready,

A writer, artist, and fashion designer, Helga Harris has published a memoir, Dear Helga, Dear Ruth, as well as articles in The St. Petersburg Times, The Sarasota Herald Tribune. and The Tampa Tribune. Her stories have appeared in anthologies, including Dolls Remembered, Doorways, and, most recently, We Were There, which was published by the St.Petersburg Holocaust Museum. Her latest memoir is Susie … WAIT! and her first collection of nonfiction short stories is Nothing Is Forever. She is currently co-leader of a writing program at The Lifelong Learning Academy in Sarasota.

“Unexpected Departure, 1938” is an excerpt from her most recent memoir, There’s A Witch In My Room.

Leave a comment

Filed under European Jewry, Family history, German Jewry, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

June 16, 2015 · 7:30 am

Memories of a Jewish WWII Veteran

by Jerome Massey (Fairfax , VA)

Interviewed by Rick Black (Alexandria, VA)

(Rick Black and Jerome Massey met through Olam Tikvah, their shul in Fairfax, Virginia. This is the second part of a two-part interview.)

RB: You were in a couple of different army units and then in the 1204th engineers, a firefighting unit, and fought your way up through Italy to Germany. Did you know about the camps while you were in the service?

JM: No, didn’t have the slightest idea. Hell, you didn’t know where you were half the time. They tell you to go up the road about 25 miles or 15 miles or something. But they would tell you what road to go on – and the German roads were wonderful, better than anywhere else. And you could go along the roads and some of them have dead bodies, broken equipment, all sorts of stuff like that. It was a mess. The Germans were using horses to pull some of their equipment and we got there just after they’d been strafed by our forces. It was a mess.

You can remember all those things and you keep on going and stop and spend a night here and spend a night there. Eventually you’d fight a fire here and there. We were assigned to take care of a German airport, a military airport to be used as auxiliary landing spots for our people. We didn’t do anything. We found an old BMW motorcycle and we used to run up and down the runway with it at 100 miles an hour. Crazy. But no airplanes tried to land at the airfield. So then we went further southeast into Germany to different places.

I forget the name of the town we were in when the war was finally over. All I can remember is the celebration. At night everybody was firing their weapons up into the sky; it was something. It was like the 4th of July at the Washington memorial or the Lincoln memorial. All the skies lit up with shells going off, things like that – not fireworks, but shells blowin’. Right next to us there was a little compound of Polish DPs. It was a barbed wire compound and they had gotten a hold of some alcohol. It wasn’t grain alcohol. So they drank it that night and three or four died in the middle of the night, they poisoned themselves, and the next morning they buried them right there in the ground, right next to us.

Funny thing happened that night, we got hold of sparkling wine or what have you, so we were a little shiker, just a little bit shiker, and we were shooting each other with the tops of the champagne and you could imagine a bunch of GIs lined up on the floor shooting each other with champagne. But that’s the truth. The Germans still had a group of diehards there – you had to be very careful. There were all kinds of ditches and stuff . . . booby traps, etc.

RB: Just cause the war’s over doesn’t mean you can’t get killed . . .

JM: Yes. Some of the Nazis were really terrible. So we keep on goin’ and then the CO, a lieutenant, gets word from army headquarters that we had to send a couple people of the unit to this camp. We thought it was a displaced persons camp. So the lieutenant picked me. I don’t know why he picked me to go along with him, but he drove the jeep. He wasn’t supposed to be driving the jeep. So, it wasn’t but about 10 miles, I guess, or 5 miles – horrible odor. Horrible odor. And we get there and it’s impossible to describe what you saw. You know, corpses stacked up like firewood – hundreds of people starved to death, half-starved to death, skin and bones. And the crematoriums and the ashes – horrible, really horrible, keeps you awake at night still when you think about it.

RB: Hard to believe what people would do to people . . .

JM: That’s right – it was horrible. There’s no word to cover it.

RB: It had been liberated already, right?

JM: It was the second day – I got there to Dachau the second day. The Germans took right off when they saw that we were coming. All the armies just disappeared. The Russians were coming from the other side and they took off.

RB: Still wearing the stars on their . . .

JM: Yes, of course . . . I can’t even describe it. I don’t want to describe it.

RB: After the war, did it ever cross your mind to go fight in Palestine?

JM: Like I said, I was pretty shot when I got out and I was thinking about it but I wasn’t capable of doing it . . . I picked up amoebic dysentery in North Africa and a couple of other things. I was very afraid of the dark, too. I couldn’t go anyplace dark. I carried a weapon with me wherever I went. I still have it today. I was very nervous. The slightest noise could get me very, very upset. It’s typical of anybody who was over there. You’re all tensed up; your body and mind never relax. It took several years to recuperate – I was a mess.

Anyhow, my stepfather, Joseph Hecht, and Dave Friedman, a close friend of the family, were both ardent Zionists and did all they could for years for the Zionist movement. In Norfolk, the Jews did all kinds of things for the Zionist movement – and that ship that sailed, that they made into the Exodus, originally sailed from Norfolk. It used to go between Norfolk and Baltimore. When it was ready, it sailed out into the Atlantic and hit a storm and had to come back. You see, it was a bay ship, not an ocean ship.

So, it had to be refitted and several of the crew stayed at my stepfather’s house in Norfolk. They stayed there while the ship was refitted and they raised the money to do it. It was all hush-hush. After the ship was refitted, it left Norfolk and went to Europe to pick up the refugees.

Lt. Col. U.S. Army (Ret.) Jerome L. Massey won numerous commendations in his service during World War II and in subsequent years. He will be 93-years-old in July.

Rick Black is a prize-winning poet and former journalist for The New York Times who owns a poetry and fine art press in Arlington, VA. You can see his work at http://www.turtlelightpress.com

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry

Tagged as , , , ,