by Vic Shayne
Where most Holocaust survivors have lost all connections with their families and their possessions, including old photographs, at least I have these clear, beautiful images to remind me where I have come from.
Before Miriam graduated from Hunter College, she decided to take a year off to travel west across the United States. She and a girlfriend packed their car and off they went, California bound. But on the way to the Pacific Coast, Miriam stopped in Colorado and told her friend to go on without her. Without a lot of money to spend, Miriam found a room in a trailer for rent and lived with a roommate. Later on, her roommate’s brother, Bill, paid a visit. Miriam was smitten, and my daughter began dating Bill until eventually they married and settled in Colorado. It wasn’t long before Miriam gave birth to my granddaughter, Jenniffer Rachel—and my grandson, Jacob Michael.
Now a new world opened up to Doris and me. We traveled west to visit our growing family. Each time we stayed in Colorado, we fell in love with its mountain views, high altitude, and slower pace of life. The scenery was nothing short of therapeutic. Our days in New York were numbered.
At one point we were speaking to Miriam on the telephone and she told us, “Maybe since you are getting older, we should all be together.”
Doris and I sat down and discussed what Miriam was proposing. In our eighties, we decided to move to Colorado and start all over. While I stayed in New York, Doris went out west looking for houses but couldn’t find what she wanted. She came back empty-handed and we thought maybe the process of moving would take longer than we guessed. But Miriam was determined to find us a home, so she set to work searching the market for houses. It was only a few weeks later that we received a call on a Sunday morning. Miriam told me she had discovered the perfect house for Doris and me in a nice neighborhood. I remembered having visited the neighborhood Miriam was telling us about and that I liked it.
“Then that’s that,” I told my daughter.
Doris and I sold our house and sent Miriam a check to buy our new home so that when we arrived in Colorado we could move right in. We visited the gravesite of our son, were given a send-off by the Jewish community, and said so long to New York. Just before we left Long Island, I was honored with a lifetime achievement award during a lavish banquet sponsored by our synagogue and all the friends we had made over the decades.
This may all sound like the end of a long saga, but with me, life never stops sending me surprises. In my late eighties, you may ask what else could happen of any consequence? What would I do with my time?
I was never one to sit still for very long. In my new Colorado house, I went into my basement and created a workspace, lining all my tools against one wall under a small window. To the left of the bench I put a table where I could sit and design new pieces of artwork. And to the left of the table was where I stored scraps of wood, canvases, and crafts materials. My goal was to express myself through art. I never had any formal training as an artist but to me this was not the point. I was not out to impress anyone or sell anything. I wanted to somehow pour my soul into an expression that somebody might recognize and think about.
Over the years I had created a number of works related to Jewish themes and my experience in the Holocaust. Now, though, with even more time on my hands, I would really go to town. The senior citizens center near my new house had some great equipment—drill presses, band saws, grinders, sanders, routers, and other devices for woodworking. Inspired by a friend from Long Island, Gerson Rappaport, who showed me how to make a mezuzah out of wood, I got to work carving my own creations, with Hebrew letters in the designs and figures fashioned out of pine. A mezuzah is a small piece of paper bearing the first two paragraphs of Deuteronomy and is meant to be attached to the doorposts of a house as a reminder of the Jewish people’s covenant with the Almighty. The paper is then encased in a covering that can come in thousands of designs. My own designs are made of wood that I find wherever I go. This has a certain amount of significance for me, taking a discarded scrap and turning it into something valuable. To me, among other things, it is a metaphor for the Holocaust survivor who, as a castoff after the war, had to create himself anew. Each of my mezuzahs is a resurrection of sorts.
Also in my basement I’ve continued to paint pictures on canvas and wood, create varnished wooden sculptures, and glue, hammer, and sand a series of projects with Holocaust scenes. To this day, my basement is a museum of my art. When I travel to give a talk, sometimes I take one or two pieces of my art along with me. After my talk, students and their parents will come up to the dais and contemplate what I’ve depicted. They stare at the steps in the stone quarry of Mauthausen and at the puffs of human clouds ascending from the chimneys of the crematoria. Without me saying a word, every visitor can get a glimpse into my past. They can see where I’m from and where I’ve been, from Maitchet to Mauthausen to the Statue of Liberty. My expressions hang in Yad Vashem at the Holocaust memorial, synagogues, churches, schools, living room walls, and museums. Many have told me that my artwork is a type of therapy for me. Maybe it is. They say I survived to tell the story of what happened. But what am I trying to say? At the very least, people should know what happened and what was lost. I want them to pause to think, not about me, but about themselves, their own character, and their own families. Without such reflective thoughts, there can be no change for the future and no appreciation for the suffering of others.
Over the years I’ve had a steady stream of visitors coming to my house asking to see my artwork. Members of my newly adopted synagogue, mayors, lawyers, judges, doctors, statesmen, writers, professors, students, children, war veterans, fellow Holocaust survivors, television crews, filmmakers, artists, rabbis, and priests have all taken the tour in the quiet of my Colorado basement.
A little more than a year ago, I received a call from a professor, Victoria McCabe, PhD. A long-standing faculty member of Regis University in Denver, Dr. McCabe called me to say that she saw an article written about me and my Holocaust years. She said she wanted to pay me a visit. I told her to come over whenever she’d like and I would show her my art collection. She told me it would be an honor if I would share my time. But it was me who was honored.
You may wonder why the professor of a Catholic university would want to visit me. Well, I’ve come to know that this is a strange world and that people have their reasons. Eventually, those reasons come to the surface, into the light after years of suppression. Dr. McCabe sent me a very nice letter as a follow-up to her phone call. With her letter was an article that had been written about her. It said that she is one of the daughters of a former American soldier who fought in World War II. The article said that her father kept a letter-sized box tucked away in his closet in his home in Iowa. As a young girl, Victoria McCabe noticed that once in a while her father would have a drink or two before revisiting the contents of the box in his closet. He was lost in his thoughts, quiet and melancholy. He would walk into his closet and remove the wooden box and study the contents. This is the only way he could look at the things he kept hidden. Yet for some reason he was drawn to take them out and review them time and again over the years. What kinds of contents must have been in Mr. McCabe’s storage box that required him to get drunk before he would dare to look inside? Why would he keep such things if they affected him so deeply? Such are the workings of the mind and memory—they do not even make sense to those of us who continue to be haunted by images and recollections.
On one occasion, Mr. McCabe allowed his daughter to look inside the box. She found gruesome photographs, as well as letters and documents relating to her father’s discovery of Dachau concentration camp. From that moment on, Dr. McCabe’s life was permanently changed, sending her on a life-long journey to explore the Holocaust and, in her words, “read everything I could get my hands on concerning that part of history.” These artifacts, sealed away in Mr. McCabe’s closet, hidden in a wooden box, were his darkest secrets. The box held the horrible memories of what her father, as an eighteen-year-old sol
dier, had seen with his own eyes: the skeleton figures, piles of dead bodies, inhumanity, ruin, and carnage upon the discovery and liberation of Dachau. “He didn’t talk about it unless he was drunk, and he would not only talk but sob and weep about what he saw,” Dr. McCabe remembered. All of these things were too horrible to remember, but at the same time, too horrible to want to forget. I know just how he felt. The box was a powerful metaphor for the minds of every one of us who has survived the Holocaust, whether inmates, soldiers, doctors, nurses, or partisans. The mind, damned until our last breath, is filled with memories of experiences that defy human understanding. We suppress these memories—we try to lock them away, out of sight—but they haunt us and beg us to revisit them over and over again throughout our lives.
In the face of today’s movement of Holocaust denial, we must ask ourselves how many thousands of these boxes exist all over the world? What secrets are your father or grandfather keeping from the light of day? Believe me, there are hundreds of thousands, if not more, of these wooden boxes filled with traumatic images. I meet people every week who relate their stories to me—American soldiers, army doctors, and liberators. Recently I met with a former army officer who came upon a concentration camp when he was twenty-one years old in Austria at the close of the war. His sentiments mirror those of so many others. “I was there,” he said. “I was there and anyone who says these things never happened is filled with an evil lie that they themselves cannot even realize. I was there. Not only did these events happen, but they were even far worse than words and photographs can begin to express.”
The horrors of the Holocaust are burned not only into the minds of us Jews, but we must understand that there are many, many other victims as well. When you watch television or see an event where World War II veterans are gathered, you must try to imagine what is in their minds. You would be very surprised. We are all victims of an unspeakable, unresolved trauma.
Over the telephone Dr. McCabe told me that she teaches an intensive course on the Holocaust at her university. When she arrived at my door, I was greeted with a warm, sincere smile. We chatted for a moment or so, Doris offered the professor something to drink and eat, then I led her downstairs into my basement. I didn’t say a word. I wanted her to roam freely and look at my art on the walls. I sat down and told her, “Take your time and look around.”
As if in a museum, Dr. McCabe’s eyes carefully studied every piece of artwork in the room. She looked at my sketches of Mauthausen and the framed carvings mounted onto wood, depicting images of chimneys bellowing out smoke in the shape of prayers. Her eyes fell upon hands carved like flames reaching up to heaven, the only escape from the hell of the concentration camp. Dr. McCabe, as a professor of Holocaust history, understands what happened. But nothing seemed to prepare her for what so many people have experienced alone with their thoughts, staring at my art in my basement. She stood like a stone in the middle of the room and tears began to run down her cheeks. She was speechless.
Then we talked. The professor was in my house for hours. It was a solemn occasion. Before leaving she asked if I would like to come speak to her students. I said I would be honored. When I gave my presentation in her classroom at the university, Dr. McCabe’s students were exceptionally intent to listen to what I had to say, and they were loaded with intelligent questions. It warmed my heart to know that they were truly interested. A bridge had not only been forged across generations but also across religious boundaries. Before I left, Dr. McCabe expressed to me that she would like to bring her students to my house for the full “tour.”
I said, “You can all come at once at any time.” Well, to my surprise, a week later I got a call that everybody was coming over and that they were bringing food, a barbecue, and drinks. When they got to my house, we had a feast for thirty people, and they wouldn’t let me or Doris lift a finger to help. I was a guest in my own house! Dr. McCabe’s students treated us like royalty. And, of course, in small groups they toured my basement museum. In the following weeks I received letters from students expressing their appreciation and concern. I was told that I made the Holocaust real to them. Their visit was mutually rewarding. Like never before, I discovered the therapy that came from sharing my Holocaust experiences in art and in talks to student groups. Students from age ten to twenty have interviewed me for their school projects. Groups of fifty to five hundred have gathered to listen to Doris and me. Some of these wonderful youngsters are grandchildren of American GIs who liberated the death camps and fought to save people like me. Such is the case with Annalise and Christa, daughters of Beth Eberhard and the granddaughters of U.S. Captain Elmore K. Fabrick who was with the 11th Armored Division—one of the forces that liberated Mauthausen in the spring of 1945. Captain Fabrick, who passed away in June 2007, took pictures of the atrocities of the camp, and his letters home to his wife about the military campaign and what he saw in Europe are all documented in sobering detail. Annalise and her two friends, Kari Mahannah and Rachael Perkins, created a documentary called Voices of Mauthausen, which took third place in the nation in the National History Day Competition, June 2007.
Inspired by the realities of the Holocaust and Captain Fabrick’s experiences, the Eberhard family, including Christa, Annalise, Beth, and her sister, Marie Bainbridge, took a vacation to Europe and visited Mauthausen. Beth Eberhard wrote to me: “It was chilling to visit the place we had heard so much about, with the reality of its evil for all to see. We picked a flower from the quarry for you. I pray that God’s goodness and blessings be with you to the end of your days.”
I thank God that I have been able to give the families of the U.S. servicemen at least a little something in return.
The Circle Comes to a Close
I have to tell you that God is a powerful force in my life. We have a unique relationship. I don’t understand Him and He probably doesn’t understand me. But on this one day, thirty-six years after I had set foot in New York to start a new life, God decided to give me a gift that made my legs fall out from under me.
Two weeks after coming to Colorado, I was called by a student at the Hillel Center at Colorado State University in Fort Collins—about two hours north of where I live. I was asked if I would like to come speak to the students and visitors of the school in a panel of Holocaust survivors and tell of my experiences. Naturally, I said I would be honored to share my story. When the event took place, I gave the highlights of my life, and, as usual, when I had finished, a great part of the audience was lost in thought. I was glad that I had given this talk, but I came home late at night, very tired. You see, each time I give one of these talks, a whole flood of memories comes back to me. These memories never stop breaking my heart. Many times, although I have repeated my story over and over, I must pause in the middle of my talk to allow my own tears to subside. Then, with a patient audience ever in front of me, I collect my thoughts and move on. So after my talk, I arrived home and was getting ready to go to sleep when the telephone rang. Jim Curry had called me. He said he was trying to call me for a long time but nobody was picking up the phone.
Jim said, “Martin, you sound tired. How come?”
I said I was speaking at the university in Fort Collins. “I just got home after a very long day, Jim.”
“You were speaking?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “I was talking about my Holocaust experience to a group of students. I told them about what happened to my family and the time I spent in the concentration camp.”
I told Jim that as of late I was spending a lot of my time speaking to groups of children, students, and anyone else who would listen. I told him about how the students were so interested in what I had to say and how I had more invitations than I had time to accept. Jim thought this was curious. Of course he knew I was a Holocaust survivor, but now he wanted to talk about it in more detail. After all of the years between us, and now that I moved away across the country and was ready to go to sleep, Jim wanted to talk.
Jim asked, “Where wer
e you?”
I never discussed this with him in detail before, but for some strange reason, now seemed to be the best time. More than thirty-six years since the date we met in Central Park, after years of close friendship, I said, “I was in the concentration camp Mauthausen, the worst one of them all.”
When I said the word “Mauthausen,” it was like a shock. There was a very long pause. He didn’t speak right away. The silence lasted for at least a minute—this is a very long time if you watch the seconds tick by on a clock. I didn’t know what was going on, but I heard him on the other end. I could hear his breathing. I waited for Jim to speak. As if trying to process the information, Jim asked me two or three times, “Martin, you were in Mauthausen?”
Patiently, I said, “Yes” each time he asked.
He asked, “How did you survive?” Then he paused and said, “How come you never told me?”
I said I didn’t ever want to talk about it. I never wanted to get into the details.
Now it was my time to be confused.
