by Vic Shayne
“Have a seat,” said Uncle Harry. He sat on the edge of my bed and I pulled up a chair. For the next hour or so I told Uncle Harry everything he wanted to know about me, and maybe more. He was interested in learning about Maitchet and my family and any of the details I cared to share about the slaughter in my shtetl. Then he asked me about my experience in Mauthausen, how I survived, and how I came to Italy.
“How did you live?” he asked.
“I don’t know that myself,” I answered.
“And the Americans rescued you?”
“Yes. They liberated the concentration camp.”
“Then you were taken to Salzburg?” asked Uncle Harry.
“Yes, but I wasn’t conscious,” I answered. “I was little better than dead. The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital.”
Uncle Harry shook his head sympathetically and laced his thick fingers together. He leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees. “Tell me,” he said, “tell me how you’ve been spending your time here.”
Uncle Harry wanted to know how long I had been in Italy and what I did in Palestine. All the while he continued to listen intently, rarely interrupting except to ask me to elaborate here and there. He let me get it all off my chest, to share my sacred memories, and to choke on my recollections of the atrocities. I told him about my nightmares and my sleeplessness. I told him things I don’t think I had mentioned to anyone up to that point. And when I had finished talking, Uncle Harry waited. If there was more to say, he didn’t want to interrupt. So we stared at each other. I studied his round face, beady eyes, and square jaw. Finally, a trace of a smile appeared on his thin lips.
Uncle Harry asked me, “Are you all right?” I nodded.
“Good,” said Uncle Harry. Then he slapped me on the knee with his heavy hand. “Let’s go to dinner. You hungry?”
“Sure,” I said.
When we went downstairs, there was still a crowd milling around Uncle Harry’s car. When we decided to walk, they followed us all the way to the restaurant. I thought Uncle Harry was going to shoo them all away, but he didn’t.
As soon as we stepped inside the restaurant, Uncle Harry, with me as his interpreter, asked to meet the owner. A friendly little man emerged from the kitchen wearing a thin white shirt and an apron stained with pasta sauce. He was wiping his hands on a white towel and his arms were dusted with baking powder. Uncle Harry asked me to ask the owner whether he had enough food to feed a hundred people. The owner nearly fell over. He took his apron in his hands and wiped the sweat off his face. “You mean tonight?” he asked.
Uncle Harry said to me, “Tell him, yes, tonight.”
The man nodded his head and kept repeating the word “Si.”
So Uncle Harry invited everybody within earshot to dinner at this little restaurant. “Tell them, Motel,” he said to me, “that I’m paying, but this man,” he pointed to the restaurant owner, “this man is your host. Rispetto? Okay? Capisce?”
Every table, chair, and bench was taken, indoors and out. Some people were sitting on planters, and girls were sitting on the laps of boys. You would have sworn it was a scene from a wedding reception. Wine was poured bottle after bottle and people were raising their glasses in toasts to who knows what. It was the biggest party I had ever seen since Purim in Maitchet. By the end of the second hour, the restaurant owner had cooked up everything in his kitchen and used up most of his wine, and I became the most popular friend to a hundred people in Ostia. When we were finished with dinner, Uncle Harry made an announcement. He stood up and said to everybody, “I hope you all enjoyed your dinner. Let’s toast a final drink to our host.” Then a big cheer burst out followed by applause and whistling. Uncle Harry raised his glass to the restaurant owner who by then looked like he had been through a tornado. Somebody poured the man a glass of Chianti and he drank it in two gulps.
“Now,” said Uncle Harry, “I want everyone to join in and clean up this place.”
This made the owner more than thrilled. He grabbed Uncle Harry’s hand and shook it vigorously. And, without a complaint or excuse, everyone eagerly went to work. They cleared the tables, washed the dishes, mopped the floor, and straightened out every table and chair. By the time they were finished, you couldn’t tell that such a wild party had ever taken place.
When Uncle Harry came to Rome, he treated me like I was a son he never had. To me, Uncle Harry was an icon in a short, stout body with the face of a serious businessman who always knew what to do and how to get it done. He dressed in the most expensive suits, smelled of expensive cologne, wore gold rings on his thick fingers and traveled in limos and taxis.
Over the next couple of days, Uncle Harry bought me a new suit and gave me a wad of cash. He invited me to his hotel where he introduced me to a beautiful actress, his wife. Then he took me to the movie studio that was just being resurrected in Cinecittá and introduced me to a young movie producer named Dino De Laurentis, who was making a movie called The Captain’s Daughter (La Figlia de Capitano). De Laurentis winked at Uncle Harry and asked me if I wanted to be in his picture. Of course I said yes and a month later found myself on a movie set as an extra dressed up as an Italian peasant. Being in the movie and meeting all the gorgeous actresses, including the producer’s wife, the star Silvano Mangano, was a great diversion from my problems of getting a visa. Days on the set helped pass the time.
But the sad fact was that my life was going nowhere. I was no closer to leaving for New York than when I first set foot in the American embassy to file for my paperwork years earlier. But Uncle Harry had a plan. He told me to pack a small suitcase and meet him downstairs in the morning. That’s when I jumped in the limousine and we hit the road. We were headed to Naples where the American consulate was. Uncle Harry was about to barge into the Italian visa offices and lay down the law.
The first person Uncle Harry came to tried to put him off and give him the runaround, but HB wouldn’t have it. He was hollering in English, a language that nearly everyone within earshot was trying to understand when spoken so fast and boisterously. HB punched the desk in front of him and made a pencil jump out of its holder as he screamed, “We paid you, for God’s sake! We filled out all the forms. Where the hell is his visa? I’m not leaving this damn office without that visa, do you understand?”
Uncle Harry was intimidating. He wasn’t afraid of yelling at people. If he was just putting on a show, then he was better than any of his actor clients because I found him quite convincing. Apparently so did everybody else. The bureaucrats were wondering what kind of man would come all the way to Italy, dressed in the finest suit they’d ever seen, barge into their offices, and make demands like an army general. All sorts of officials were called in to deal with this irate American big shot. They tried to calm him down. Calm down? HB wouldn’t even sit down. He paced, he sighed, he grumbled, and he stomped. The bureaucrats were running around like chickens. They put aside their other cases and started a massive search for the records of Mordechai Leib Shmulewicz: me. They were speaking a mixture of Italian and English that I couldn’t understand at all except for my own name, which was now being used as a curse word. All the files were turned upside-down until at last somebody discovered my file at the bottom of one of six stacks on the desk of a scrawny bureaucrat up to his elbows in paperwork.
“Well?” said Uncle Harry. “You found it, didn’t you, you incompetent idiots?”
With a red face and a ring of perspiration soaking his collar and underarms, one of the secretaries cleared his throat then made an admission. “It appears that the visa for Mordechai Leib Shmulewicz has been issued. He has gone to America already.”
Uncle Harry stared at the man with fire coming out of his eyes. “Either you are out of your mind, or I am out of mine. What the hell are you talking about?” Uncle Harry demanded. “He’s sitting right next to me.” Uncle Harry pointed at me in the chair beside him. “What do you think this is—a ghost? Can you see him? There he is. Take a good look! Mordechai Leib
Shmulewicz.”
They could see me, but they shook their heads as if I didn’t really exist. “No,” one of the secretaries said while looking at my file. The consulate workers stared at one another for over a minute. Then it became painfully obvious. My visa, the one I had been waiting years to be issued, was sold to somebody under the table. “Somebody else has it,” someone said, barely above a whisper.
“Somebody else?” Uncle Harry repeated. “And whose fault is that?”
So that’s what happened. I was the victim of the black market. My visa was gone, along with an imposter using my name and now living somewhere in America. Uncle Harry stood there like a stone. His arms were crossed in front of him and beads of sweat materialized on his forehead. The veins were pulsating in his neck and he began to tap his fingers on his forearm. There was a momentary staring contest. Uncle Harry pointed his finger at the man in charge and said, “Are you going to do something about this or is there going to be an even bigger problem?”
The bureaucrats got the message and said that a visa would be issued to me within a few weeks. HB put his hat back on his head and stormed out of the building with me in tow. Harry called his son Milton in New York and told him, “Tell Aunt Frieda I’m bringing her nephew to America. Make a big party for him. I like him; he’s a nice guy. When he gets there, we all need to make him feel welcomed.”
With hardly enough time to kiss my friends good-bye, I packed up my bags in Ostia, traveled to Bagnoli near Naples, and waited for my ship to arrive. At last, I was soon saying arrivederci to Italy.
America the Beautiful
The last time I had been aboard a ship was on the way back to Anzio, Italy, leaving a new nation called Israel. Now I was heading out over open waters to the port of Bremerhaven, Germany, on the north coast of General Eisenhower’s American occupation zone. In Bremerhaven I boarded a huge U.S. Army transport ship called the General J. H. McRae and shoved off from Europe. Disappearing behind me as the ship cut through the harbor was the country where the whole nightmare had begun. I watched Germany fade to nothingness along with a thousand of my fellow passengers who were refugees like me, looking for a new life.
The trip across the Atlantic was rough, with people fighting seasickness the whole way. I had no problems, though, and found myself taking care of a man who was sick from the day we left until the day we entered U.S. territorial waters. And at that point, everybody went up on deck to soak in the sun. We were quite literally among the tired, poor, and huddled masses as our ship steamed passed the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor. She was looking right at me, filling me with hope and relief. The year was 1950. It was January 26th.
It took over an hour to disembark. There were thousands of people clamoring and searching the crowd for faces to match photographs held in gloved hands. I, too, was surveying the faces as I was carried along by a river of people. It was a strange scene. The air was filled with uncontrollable sobbing and tears ran down cheeks and onto trembling lips. There was hugging and kissing and hands were squeezed until they hurt. A woman held her soft hand to a young man’s face as she said over and over in Yiddish, “Remember me?” Another woman grabbed hold of a lady and cried out, “We thought you were dead. We thought you were dead.”
I pushed my way along until I saw a middle-aged lady standing before me in a long, dark woolen coat and matching hat. At first I thought it was my mother. She had Momma’s eyes. Momentarily confused, we looked at each other. I needed no picture to know it was her. “Aunt Frieda?” I asked. An expression grew on her face that was hard to interpret. It was a smile and a frown. Tears began to flow. We cried as she pulled me to her. “Motel,” she said. That’s all she could say.
My reunion with Aunt Frieda and Frieda Watskin (my cousin) in New York Harbor was a bittersweet meeting. I could not help but see my mother every time I looked at her. And I was speechless. Even as I arrived at her home, I couldn’t come close to telling her what happened to our family. The pain gripped me. More than the pain of my loss and the suffering of my family, now I knew the pain of trying to tell Aunt Frieda what had happened to her baby sister. Too terrible. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t bring myself to speak about it. Not yet. Maybe over time.
In the next few weeks, I became acquainted with relatives I had never known, including cousins, aunts, and uncles. We understood one another by speaking in Yiddish until I could learn English. When I had settled into a routine, I regularly joined my relatives on Sundays in the Bronx, as we all met up at the home of my aunt and uncle with the last name of Watskin. I was once again part of a big family gathered around a dinner table. But amidst the laughing, arguing, kvelling, and lively conversation, the greater part of me was alone. These people who were so nice to me didn’t know me at all. How could they? How could they ever see into me and all that my eyes had seen? For them, there was no real war, no real loss. I did not begrudge them for their innocence, but neither could I find a bridge over our differences. I was a stranger in the midst of family. Yet as we sat together to eat and enjoy one another’s company, no one could understand how much this meant to me as I silently stared at their faces while they rambled on and on about the mishagoss going on in their lives.
Aunt Frieda and I immediately became very close. She wanted to give whatever she had to me—love, support, happiness. “If it’s mine, it’s yours too,” she told me. We shared a link to a world of people found only in our memories. With our shared sentiments, I wanted to take care of her as well. Although she had invited me to stay with her, she lived in a furnished little apartment that was too small for the both of us; so, I found a place to stay nearby with a friend. Uncle Harry, too, invited me to live with him, but being on my own was the best I could imagine for myself.
Like many other refugees from Europe, including several friends I had already made in New York—fellow Holocaust survivors—my most immediate goal was to become a citizen of the United States of America. I shed my “old world” name, Mordechai Leib Shmulewicz, for a new one: Martin Small. I came to be known as Martin Small soon after I moved to New York. Martin was easy for me and everybody else to pronounce. I kept my same initials. Then a friend of mine said, “Shmulewicz is too hard to pronounce. This is America. You need a last name that’s not so big.” My answer was, “Small is not big.” And that’s how I changed my name to Martin Small.
So I had a new name; now it was time for a new life. It was also time for me to start a family, and the best way to do this, my cousins insisted, was to find the perfect woman. “We’ll take care of it,” they said. At about this time, I became acquainted with a distant cousin named Bernie whom everyone called Sonny. He was attending New York University. Sonny knew all sorts of girls—college girls. One day he called my Aunt Frieda and said, “I found a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn. She speaks Yiddish. Her father is a furniture manufacturer.”
My aunt was excited. She told me, “Martin, Bernie made a blind date for you—a nice Jewish girl who speaks Yiddish.”
My English was not so good. When she told me this, I said to her, “I’m not going.”
Aunt Frieda’s face dropped with disappointment. Sonny had gone through all sorts of trouble to line someone up for me and I dismissed the whole thing right away. I wouldn’t give it a chance.
Aunt Frieda asked me, “Why don’t you want to go?”
I said, “Bernie’s a nice guy, but I don’t want to meet a blind girl.”
Almost in disbelief, and kind enough not to laugh at me, Aunt Frieda explained what a blind date was.
Once that was ironed out, I said, “Okay then, I’ll go.”
The next day Sonny came by in his car and picked me up. He was all dressed up and ready to impress the girls we were off to meet. He told me to get in quick. He said, “I’ve got a great double date lined up,” and he didn’t want to be late. I hopped in the front seat and off we went to meet the girls.
While driving, I stared out the window and started thinking about a friend of mine, Yossel A
brams, a Holocaust survivor I knew from Italy. He was living in Washington Heights—on the way to our date. When we got close to Yossel’s house, I told Sonny, “Stop the car; I want to visit my friend.” I felt uncomfortable about being set up and I wanted out.
Sonny was in disbelief. He ignored me at first, but I persisted. Then he turned to me and said, “Are you crazy? I have a girl waiting for you. I made a date for me and you.” He was speaking as if I may not have understood where we were going. But I understood very well.
I told him, “I don’t want to go. Pull over the car and drop me off at Yossel Abrams’s house.” I grew more and more adamant. “Pull over now.”
After a minute of arguing, Sonny steered his car off to the side of the road and came to a screeching halt. He screamed at me, red in the face, “Get out of here!” He was so mad that he wouldn’t even look at me anymore. As soon as I stepped out of the car and closed the door, Sonny mashed his foot on the gas pedal and took off.
I went to Yossel’s house, rang the bell, and he invited me in. His wife, Esther, and their baby daughter were inside and I kissed them all hello. They weren’t sure why I decided to drop by just then, but, as always, they seemed happy to see me. When I stepped into Yossel’s living room I noticed there were two young ladies—sisters named Doris and Ida—waiting patiently for their friend, another girl who was renting a room from Yossel and Esther. The three girls were about to go out on the town for the evening. I could see that Doris and Ida’s friend was ironing her blouse in the other room. We all looked at one another and smiled.
Yossel clapped his hands to break the awkward silence. He said to Doris and Ida, “I’ve got an idea. While you girls are waiting, let’s all sit down and play cards.” Then he looked at me and I said, “Okay.” I wasn’t especially in the mood for cards, but what else was there to do?
