The Girl in the Cellar

by Gerda Krebs Seifer

  Esther, my mother-in-law-to-be, continued to ask Harold if I was “really Jewish,” since I didn’t speak Yiddish. I found her question rather funny, if not a little bit insulting. Having gone through the Holocaust and having lost most of my family, I didn’t need to prove to anyone that I was Jewish. After she got to know me better, Esther, or Grandma, as we called her, stopped asking these questions.

  Harold wanted to finish his training in California at the V.A. Hospital in Long Beach. I was pleased that we’d be leaving Massachusetts and looked forward to living for a year in California. I had heard many positive stories about California and truthfully I wasn’t happy living in Boston. I found Bostonians rather snobbish, and the salaries were lower than those of New York. More than that, the humidity really bothered me. Harold’s mother wasn’t too happy that we were leaving Boston. She was looking so much forward to bragging to friends about her brilliant son, the doctor, but she knew we were leaving Boston for only one year and that we’d be back to open the office in the city.

  We purchased a new blue Chevrolet (not a Cadillac!) and left Boston at the end of June 1956. A moving truck picked up our few pieces of furniture, which I’d had since my single days. What I loved most about Boston was broiled lobster. Also, I loved the Boston symphony, summer concerts, and the evening art classes I took at Harvard. Boston is a city with a rich history that is the home to great schools and universities; nevertheless, I was glad we were leaving for a long cross-country drive and new adventures. We planned to do some sightseeing as we drove across the country.

  Our car didn’t have air conditioning—few cars did in those days—but it had an automatic shift. Driving through Arizona and Nevada in the early summer was sweltering. We drove across flat Kansas planes and up through the mountains of Colorado, where patches of snow were still on the ground in July. We visited the breathtaking Grand Canyon. Then we hit the Mojave Desert. We drove through the night to escape the higher temperatures in the sun, but the heat in the car was still unbearable. We wondered how large the desert could be and how far it stretched out.

  And then, in the early hours of the morning, as we entered San Bernardino, the temperature suddenly changed. Cool, dry air blew in through the open windows. The difference in temperature was such a relief. We pulled to the side of the road, parked against a curb, and quickly fell asleep. We woke up refreshed about 6:00 a.m. We were in California! It took us about two more hours of driving before we arrived in Long Beach. We hit tremendous traffic on Lakewood Boulevard, where workers were arriving at Douglas Aircraft, manufacturer of airplanes.

  There were many ads for jobs. One could just walk in and be hired on the spot. We drove to downtown Long Beach seeking a motel where we could just go to sleep, but the only rooms available were for vacation stays. Long Beach was a resort town during July and August. The motels were situated on the beach, and you couldn’t rent a room for less than a week.

  The sand was clear, and the beach was long and uncrowded, unlike the beaches on the East Coast. Eventually, we found a commercial motel, lay down on the bed, and fell fast asleep. When we awoke in the early afternoon, we took out a map of Long Beach and began looking for an apartment. It didn’t take long to find a one-bedroom with a living room and kitchen at a reasonable price, three streets from the beach. In comparison to Boston, prices in California were much lower.

  We liked our new apartment, and it was not far from the V.A. Hospital. It was a luxury to have a bedroom, because in Boston we’d had only one room that served as a bedroom, living room, and kitchen at nearly double the cost of what we paid in Long Beach for three rooms. Our furniture and luggage arrived the next day, and I started fixing our new apartment. The weather was sunny and dry, with no humidity or rain. Every morning the sky was overcast and we were sure it would rain, but by eleven o’clock in the morning, the sun came out. What’s more, every day was just the same—a delight! Long Beach had a close-knit Jewish community as well as other supportive groups, such as the PTA and hospital volunteer groups.

  Each time I took a walk in Long Beach, I saw the calm blue ocean. Palm trees seemed to be everywhere. I called the tall, skinny palms “the old ladies” with their stockings falling down their legs, the old dried lower leaves showing beneath fresh green leaves. Other palms looked like pineapples, plump and green, and others that had long beards, like those found in Palm Springs.

  A few days after our arrival, Harold started working at the VA Hospital and I began getting to know Long Beach, a fairly large city, thirty minutes south of Los Angeles, depending on traffic. I looked for a job in a hospital and once again faced a familiar dilemma: California would not reciprocate my New York State license. And so I began working per diem as a private duty nurse. In time, I would work for other doctors in private offices. At the end of a year, Harold thought about staying in California and opening an office in Lakewood. It was easier to open a new practice in California than in Boston, where there were many well-known and established doctors. Harold’s mother was very disappointed, but after many telephone conversations with her and a trip to Boston (when I was five months pregnant), our decision to stay in California was made. I was happy not to have to return to the East Coast, but I left the final decisions to Harold. He, of course, knew how I felt.

  Harold opened an office in Lakewood in the summer of 1957 for the practice of internal medicine. I was his nurse. Elizabeth Jan was born on October 6, 1957. In the mornings, Harold worked at the V.A. Hospital, I took care of the baby, cooked our evening meals, did the laundry (diapers included) and cleaned our apartment. When Harold returned from the V.A., the baby and I were ready to go to Lakewood to the new office. A patient loaned us a crib, which we put in an empty room in the office. For five or six months, Liz slept most of the time and didn’t disturb us. Once she got older and required less sleep, I needed to spend more time with her and had to give up working in the office. Also, I was pregnant again. Philip Henry was born on March 31, 1959. We hired someone for the front office, and I stayed home with the children. We purchased a small house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a good-sized backyard. When our daughter Elizabeth was three, I helped to start a nursery school at the Jewish Center with Lois Cohn, a retired teacher. The school met once a week for just a half a day, a modest beginning.

  I became a frequent Jewish Community Center attendee, what with picking up my children from nursery school, attending organizational meetings, taking my children to swimming lessons, and going to exercise classes. I served as chairperson of the women’s group of the UJA, as well as on other JCC boards in the summer of 1962.

  In the early 1970’s I got a call from Sharon Kenigsberg, Director of Community Development at JCC. Sharon asked me to speak at The National Council of Jewish Women because they couldn’t afford to pay a speaker. Sharon asked, “Have you ever given a talk about your experiences as a Holocaust survivor?” At first I was dumbfounded, never having been asked that question, but finally I mumbled that I’d give it a try, though she shouldn’t expect me to talk like a professional. She was relieved when I said yes. She told me that I’d do “just great.”

  By the day of the meeting, I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to say. When I entered the meeting room and was introduced, however, I began talking on a subject that was very familiar. My speech was not well organized nor was I a skilled speaker. It didn’t seem to matter, since I held the attention of the whole room, or nearly the whole room. Some women sitting at a nearby table seemed to be having their own discussion about the sale of tickets for a future event—very unnerving. Still, my audience gave me a round of applause when I finished speaking, tears were shed, and I received many nice comments. From then on I also started speaking in junior and high schools.

  In 1985, the Board of Education required California schools to include in their curriculum the study of the Holocaust, but while talking to students, I learned that their teachers were themselves uneducated on the subject. Slowly, knowledge of this great traged
y started seeping into schools, and many teachers wanted to know more. After my first talk at JCC, I began speaking regularly to countless students, organizations, policemen—to anyone who wanted to hear my personal account. I spoke at schools even while on vacation. I spoke to audiences in Poland, England, and many states across the country, never tiring of telling my story. I spoke at Holocaust museums. I had a good rapport with my audience, talking to them and not at them; many would remember some of my personal stories and that was what mattered most to me.

  * * *

  14 I don’t know if she ever met her future husband, because I moved from Mrs. Glickman’s after several months to be closer to the hospital where I worked.

  15 Erasmus Hall High School is the same school from which Barbra Streisand graduated many years later.

  16 When our first child Elizabeth was about five, she told me after I kissed her, “Mummy your breath smells.” That was the first time I realized how my smoking affected other people. Later, I gave up the habit.

  Harold and Gerda, Wedding Day 1955

  Harold and Gerda on skis in front of the

  Matterhorn, Zermatt, Switzerland, 1972

  The Seifer children, Liz, Philip, and Julia in the late 1990s

  Harold and Gerda at the Memorial dedication to her parents,

  outside the Jewish Community Center in Long Beach, 2014

  Harold and Gerda attending a Teachers’ Workshop at CSULB

  Gerda speaking to a senior class in 2016

  First Return to Poland

  Harold and I planned to ski in Switzerland with a group of doctors in 1972. Harold also wanted to see Poland, the country where it “all happened,” so we shortened our ski time to one week, planning on a week to visit Poland. I wasn’t happy about going back to a country where I’d lost my family and experienced so many traumas. Frankly, I was afraid of Communist Poland, but I had agreed to go. We got our visas, and after a week of skiing in Switzerland, we flew from Zurich to Warsaw.

  We flew on the Polish airline, Lot. The plane was filled with mostly men, all of them dressed in drab black suits, coats, and hats. There was no happy relaxed conversation going on. Each passenger seemed engrossed in his own private thoughts and remained quiet. Once the plane arrived in Warsaw, the passengers walked out in an orderly fashion, their faces without expression. It seemed as if eyes were looking at us from everywhere.

  As we entered the airport, we were paged over the loudspeaker. Who knew our names? Who wanted us? I became nervous because we were back under a Communist regime I’d already experienced. A beady-eyed man approached us from Orbis Travel Agency who had our train tickets to Przemyśl. I gave him the name of the Bristol Hotel we’d tried to book, but he categorically told us that we did not want to stay there but at the Hotel Europejski. It turned out that he knew all about our travel plans, and when I asked him why Orbis hadn’t answered any of my letters, he simply said, “we never write back.” He was hoping to stay with us for the whole week, but I told him that I spoke Polish and wouldn’t be requiring his assistance. He demanded a bottle of liquor as a bribe before he’d give us our railroad tickets that he held tightly in his hands. In every airport there was a foreign goods store where you could obtain cigarettes, liquor, chocolates, and other luxury items with foreign currency only. Harold bought a bottle of liquor and we exchanged it for the two railroad tickets. Little did I know that I could’ve obtained these tickets simply by going to the railroad station and buying them at the ticket window! The man drove us to the hotel. We got out of the car and never had to deal with him again.

  To our great surprise, Janina Tarasiukowa greeted us in the lobby of the hotel. I had written her, telling her when we planned to visit Poland, nothing more, but she had apparently found out which hotel we were staying in. She was craftier than a CIA agent! It was the first time Harold met her. I had told him a lot about her, and he found my descriptions very much on target. Of course, they were unable to talk because neither spoke the other’s language. I was their interpreter. I gave Janina the many gifts we’d brought for her, and she invited us for dinner on another day.

  Registering at the hotel meant leaving our passports at the desk. While Harold was taking care of the registration, a young woman sitting at another desk looked at me and put her finger to her mouth, gesturing to me with a smile not to talk anywhere in the hotel. When Harold finished registering, I suggested we walk up the stairs to our room rather than take an elevator. He asked why. I told him what the young clerk had insinuated. He didn’t believe me and thought I was imagining the whole thing. But I insisted that we had to be careful with what we said and that we should write each other little notes rather than talk in the room. On each floor of the hotel, an old woman sat at a small table, whose main duty was watching the comings and goings of the guests. She always had a cup of tea at her side and noted when the guests came and left the room. I had heard reports of guests whose suitcases had been searched, but I don’t think ours had been.

  We went to Tarasiukowa’s apartment, where she lived with her married children in a three-bedroom apartment. A large room served as both living and dining room. It was quite a crowd inside the tiny apartment, but it was normal in those days. We were served a soup made of cow’s stomach that Harold actually enjoyed, though he’d never tasted it before. “Baby Andrew” sat at the table with his wife and their little girl. My gifts, which filled one big suitcase, consisted of coffee, cartons of cigarettes, jeans, and other clothing—all requested by Janina.

  From Warsaw, we took a train to Przemyśl. Nearing the railroad station gave me palpitations. Suddenly I was very nervous, excited, and actually curious to see it after an absence of thirty-two years. Once we left the station, all the street names were familiar, as if I had left Przemyśl yesterday. Yes, there were some bombed out buildings, a few new structures, but on the whole, the city looked as it did in 1940. I showed Harold my mother’s building where I’d grown up. Before the war eight families had lived in eight apartments, but by 1972, there were eighteen tiny apartments; people were allowed only a certain amount of square feet per person. Therefore, if a member of the family moved or died, one room of that apartment was separated by a thin wall, a new door was made to the single room, and a new quarter was created to fit one or two people. The toilets were still outside, and the new occupants put in a single gas burner for cooking; if they were lucky, they could get a water faucet rather than having to fetch a bucket of water from outside.

  We walked to 10 Moniuszki Street where my uncle Samuel Goliger’s large building stood. It was two stories high, consisted of twenty or more apartments, and was built in a square, surrounding a large yard. A balcony facing the yard ran all along the building with doors leading to each apartment. The house looked well cared for. Since my uncle hadn’t claimed his house, the city government had taken it over and sold individual apartments. Of course, I could have claimed the house as my own, but with some people owning their apartments, it would have been impossible to prove my right to the building.

  My mother’s house, in contrast to my uncle’s, was neglected, its walls crumbling, the brass door handles dirty and dull, and many windows were broken. It gave me a very sad feeling. The backyard, which used to have a nice garden, was bare; there were no flowerbeds or trees. A woman peered out the window and I told her that I used to live in that apartment. “Could we come and take a look at it?” She was pleasant and let us in. I asked her if by any chance she might have found any doll or toy that might have been left there from my childhood. Unfortunately, she’d found nothing. Other families had lived in the apartment before she’d moved in.

  Upstairs, we knocked at an apartment door that was occupied by the Męcinski family. Pani Męcinska opened the door. She recognized me immediately, hugged and kissed me and invited us inside for tea and cake. Her sister and her niece, Eva Sokoluk, joined us. We talked aboutpre-war days. Naturally, we spoke Polish, and my poor husband had to sit through our conversation, not understanding a wo
rd. The three ladies were so happy to see me and were very welcoming. I have heard stories where survivors came back to see their homes or apartments and were not allowed to enter and were treated very badly. Some of those neighbors would say things like, “What, you’re still alive? Hitler didn’t finish you all off?” Happily, that had not been my experience.

  Afterward, we went to the center of the city. I showed Harold St. Hedwig’s, the elementary school I’d attended, the park where I’d played, the street where my father’s store had been—now occupied by a food store with little stock on the shelves.

  We went to Przemyśl City Hall and found that my mother’s house listed me as the heir of the building, but the lumberyard, which had belonged to my uncles, Adolf and Henryk, had been taken over by a travel agency, Gromada, that had plans to build a hotel on the huge lot.

  As we walked in the city, many unimportant and very important events suddenly filled my head. As Przemyśl was close to the Russian border, it had few visitors, especially foreigners. Dressed like foreigners and suntanned in winter from skiing in Switzerland, we stood out wherever we went. If we looked at a shop window, pedestrians would stop and gape at us. When we looked at them, they turned their heads in embarrassment. Many people had never seen people so well dressed. I wore a sealskin ski jacket, and Harold wore a long sheepskin coat. We found a restaurant near the rail station, which I remembered from before the war. It was quite crowded, and as we entered, everyone sitting at the tables turned their heads in our direction. Diners sitting close to us were even more surprised, hearing me speaking Polish, ordering dinner. The food was extremely inexpensive when paid with dollars. Everything that the restaurant offered was tasty. We exchanged dollars into zloty, getting thirty zloty for one dollar. However, in a black market, people would come up to us and offer 600 zloty for a dollar. People could buy luxury items in foreign stores, but they had to have U.S., English, or German currency. Polish stores had few supplies and those were of poor quality. However, there were stores selling Polish handmade wares, such as carved wooden boxes and figurines, as well as amber jewelry that was set in steel (silver and gold were not available then). But the best items the shops had to offer were handcrafted wool rugs, decorative pillow covers, table and chair covers, and beautiful wall hangings.