He tells me they all tried to help one another in the camp whenever they could. Early on, by offering a hefty bribe to a Nazi guard, Leon was allowed to sneak away a few times to his old home and dig up some of the money he had buried in his backyard. He used some of that money to buy extra food for Yisrael Lau, our Lulek—who was just a young child and was starving to death. His brother Naphtali (Tulek) was hiding him like Marek had been hidden. Later, when Naphtali was too weak to walk, Leon, himself also just skin and bones, carried Tulek on his back.
I was so proud of Leon when he told me this. What character he showed, that even when he himself barely had the strength or resources to survive, he would extend himself to help others in the camp. Hearing this story I know all over again that I have made the right decision to marry him. Not only is Leon strong, but he is clever and brave. It strikes me that Leon’s role in the lives of these two boys mirrors their mother’s role in mine; and as though in marrying him, fate has given me a way to thank her.
At one point, Leon didn’t remember exactly when, the Nazis separated the workers and said they needed only those trained in certain trades: locksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers. Leon had worked in the wholesale construction business with his mother for years and had never done any specialized labor like that. The Nazis ordered the Jews with those skills to identify themselves. His cousin Henry, who was trained as a locksmith, raised his hand and nudged Leon to do the same, which he did. It was one of those snap decisions we all faced so many times during the war when your life is at stake and you don’t know the outcome of going one way or the other. When the Nazis then brought each of the volunteers into a room to be tested, Leon feared he had just “volunteered” to get shot for lying. He saved his life by waiting for a moment when the guard wasn’t looking and then running to join the men who had already passed the test and were lined up several yards away.
After the camp at Hortensja was liquidated in November 1944, he and Henry and all the other workers were put on trains to the labor camps at Czestochowa. In the commotion of getting off the train, Henry and Leon were able to run away to the house of a Pole Henry knew. They jumped over the wall and the Pole gave them blue Polish workers’ uniforms and they were able to hide until the Liberation of 1945.
Only later is Leon able to tell me the most painful part of his story. In the early days of the ghetto he had married Sala Jacobowitz, who soon became pregnant. When her time came, they decided she would be safer passing as a gentile and going to the Polish hospital in town to deliver. But someone denounced her as a Jew. The day after she gave birth to a baby girl, they were both taken out and shot. Leon was never able to say goodbye to his wife. He never saw his little daughter.
New Lives
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to sow, and a time to reap;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1–4
FEBRUARY 1947
I have just learned I am pregnant. If I could, I would keep this baby inside me forever; always within me and always safe. How I hope this child can heal some of Leon’s pain over the baby he lost. We decide to delay our move to Argentina, not wanting to risk such a long ocean voyage with me in my condition.
And then we learn that Sabina has gone into labor. We visit her in the hospital after she delivers a baby boy. She and Abram are ecstatic and relieved that the baby is healthy. They name him Joel.
But why does Sabina have such a high fever? The doctor says that she has a raging infection. There are still many shortages even now, two years after the war, and the hospital has no antibiotics to treat her. The only hope is a blood transfusion, and Leon is the right blood type. That we could lose her now would be too cruel a joke.
But fate plays by its own rules, and four days later, after all we have been through, after we have survived this war together, after Leon has given his blood, Sabina is dead.
I have had my best friend, as close as a sister, torn from me. I cannot bear this. Will loss and grieving never end?
Soon Abram moves with the baby to Detroit. Not only will Joel never know his mother, he will grow up with only Abram to tell him about her. And Abram himself barely knew her.
SEPTEMBER 1947
But soon I am reminded that life offers gifts as well. I go into labor and Leon insists we go to Schwabing Hospital, more expensive and not as near but more established and more well-equipped than the local hospital where Sabina delivered. Though they have the most critical lifesaving drugs, there is no anesthesia for childbirth and I suffer for many hours. But it is September 13, and while the war has shaken my faith in God, I am still, as my mother was, superstitious, and I am determined not to tempt fate by giving birth on the 13th. So somehow I hold on and at one a.m. on September 14, at the very start of the New Year, Rosh Hashanah, our precious daughter Helen—Hendla—is born.
Endings
Weeping may endure for a night
But joy cometh in the morning.
—Psalms 30:5
1947–1951
We bring Helen home from the hospital and soon after receive the extraordinary good news that we have been chosen by HIAS for sponsorship to immigrate to America. The Jewish community in Kansas City, Kansas, has offered to sponsor a small number of Jewish immigrants to come to America and by luck we are selected! It turns out to be four years before all the arrangements can be made. Those are happy years of watching our baby grow, taking holiday trips to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, saving a little money, and eagerly anticipating what lies ahead.
What a shock, then, to finally board our ship and endure two weeks of utter misery, crammed into steerage like human cargo. Thankfully, Leon is not affected by seasickness, so he can take care of Helen.
In Munich I had always been so dependent on our baby nurse, Leah, to help take care of Helen and I am already worried over whether I will know what to do. Now I am so sick the entire time, much worse than being pregnant, though not as bad as Liberation day, when I drank that entire bottle of vermouth.
Then we learn that because of a disastrous flood in Kansas City, the Jewish community there is no longer prepared to accept us, but the one in New Orleans, Louisiana, comes to our rescue. So even though a last-minute change of plans takes us by surprise, I am relieved that a new destination will shorten our voyage and that we will reach land in two days.
I am so grateful to leave that awful ship, feeling, not for the first time, the relief of escape. It helps, of course, that I can speak English. Poor Leon and Helen are lost in the strange noisy gibberish all around us. We feel a bit helpless and overwhelmed, but the kind woman from the New Orleans Jewish community who is there to meet us immediately takes charge and makes us feel welcome in our new home.
With my feet on the soil of America, for the first time in so many, many years, that tight band across my chest breaks. It is more than a sense of security for our future. The very air feels free. I feel as if my body has stretched wide open and at last I have all the room I need to deeply and fully breathe.
New Beginnings
AN AFTERWORD BY HELEN REICHMANN WEST
For my mother, emigrating from Germany to start a new life meant that for the first time in twelve years she had a future. And for that future to be in America was a dream come true. America, a strong country safe from oppression, a country where all people lived with the universal human rights of freedom, security, equality, and justice.
1951: NEW ORLEANS
Though I was only four, I remember my feelings during our transatlantic crossing, which I must have absorbed from my parents: exhilaration; excitement; we’re going to America! What had sustained my mother throughout the war was her belief that eventually America would enter and save the world. All she had to do was survive until then.
Yet alongside the thrill and confidence about what lay ahead in our new home, I know we felt a humbling vulnerability about being outsiders and alone. I had met a little girl on the boat to play with and I remember her talking excitedly about an uncle who would be there to greet her family when they arrived. How lucky she was, I remember thinking, that they would know someone. We were “newcomers,” late arrivals where everyone else was well established, while we would be unfamiliar with, and to, everyone we met.
I came to learn that to take on the status of immigrant is a profound transformation that becomes part of who a person is: not just occasional moments of cultural awkwardness, but an ever-present lens through which one looks inward as well as out.
Arriving in America and finally feeling safe and free, my mother was caught off guard on her first shopping trip in New Orleans. She set her purse on a counter at a department store so she could hold on to me with one hand and have the other hand free to check out housewares for our new apartment. She wasn’t being careless. She thought there was nothing to worry about, because in America everyone had what they needed, so of course no one would steal.
You won’t be amazed, as she was, that when she returned to retrieve her purse, it was gone. This wasn’t just the end of her purse. It happens. She’d survived much worse. This was the first unraveling of her deepest conviction: that the miseries people inflicted on each other would disappear if only they lived in a society free of poverty and dedicated to justice and equal rights. There would no longer be any reason for the worst traits of human nature. Greed, envy, violence—gone. And America, she believed, came as close as anywhere in the world to being that place. This was a future worth living for. It was a vision of humanity that got her through the most devastating explosion of inhumanity the world had ever seen. So this theft robbed her of a lot more than just her purse.
I’m touched by her idealism and naïveté after all she had lived through. It strikes me that the war years had interrupted the normal course of her development as a young person on the threshold of adulthood. What there was to learn about life and human relations during the war was an aberration. Only now, at thirty-five, could she resume where she had left off at twenty-one.
My mother was soon in for another shocking disappointment when she got on a bus in New Orleans. She climbed aboard for her first outing and walked toward the back to take a seat. At first she couldn’t make sense of what the driver was telling her. Then she realized from his gestures that he wanted her to move up front. She did but had no idea why. The bus drove along making stops and filling up; and then finally she understood.
All the black passengers went to the back, and when the seats ran out they stood crammed in the aisle. This was even though many of the seats in front were empty. In Poland she had had to sit in the back of her classes at university just because she was a Jew. Coming to America meant no one could make her sit in the back. That “honor,” she now learned, was reserved for the blacks. This was how she learned about racial segregation. She told me it was ironic that she still couldn’t sit where she wanted.
My father had gotten a job at a store that sold radios and some of the first television sets. His English wasn’t good enough for him to be much help with the customers, but he was great at organizing and arranging stock and, with his skill with numbers and neat European hand, at keeping the books and accounts. The other employee was a black man who had been working there for thirteen years. The boss decided he needed a manager and promoted my father. It sickened my father that he should have any role in denying this other man what by rights of seniority and ability should have been his. He brought him home for dinner. Though it wasn’t much, there was nothing else he knew to do. The boss fired my father for it.
We lasted in New Orleans for six months. My parents hated the racism. They had little in common with the Southern American Jews there. As kind and helpful as they were, my mother could only speak haltingly with them, and my father not at all. They couldn’t tolerate the weather, found the culture as alien as the moon and, according to my mother, you couldn’t find a decent loaf of bread. New Orleans would never feel like home.
Even though it meant giving up the financial support from the New Orleans Jewish community and depleting our paltry savings, my parents decided we’d move up north, where many Holocaust survivors had settled; the communities there might feel more European Jewish. My mother told me how low she felt leaving New Orleans. She was so weary of wandering. She had thought she was finally done with that, and here she was on another train looking for a place to live. She had to hold back tears as she rode past the backyards of houses where laundry hanging on clotheslines fluttered in the breeze. Everyone else has a place, she thought. Will there ever be a home for us?
1952–1957: BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
It had been thirteen years since my mother felt rooted and knew what “normal” felt like. What she got when we settled down in Baltimore was a far cry from anything she had imagined growing up in Poland or newly liberated in Germany.
My parents bought a grocery store, with living quarters attached, on a corner in a poor, mostly black section of East Baltimore. The living room and kitchen were behind the store and the two bedrooms, a small storage room, and a bathroom were upstairs. It was a neighborhood of broken-down old houses. There were housing projects across the street, three-story apartment buildings built in a square around a concrete inner courtyard where neighbors could visit and children could play, and this was where the smaller number of white people lived.
In those days neighborhoods like this were called slums. The term ghetto hadn’t yet been appropriated for its current usage, but still retained the original meaning my parents knew all too well. We were the only Jews. We struggled with English and were just as foreign to our neighbors as they were to us.
The idea was that for five years my father and mother would work like dogs, live frugally while accumulating some savings and building up the business, and then sell the store for a nice profit. After that we would move up to a better business and a more comfortable life. Saving money was made easier by the backbreaking hours, which left my parents little time to spend anything. They worked from six in the morning till nine at night every day but Sunday, when they closed at two. The only time my father closed the store was for two days during the High Holidays. Some of our customers told my father they respected him for that. Eventually we adjusted, but the early days were especially hard.
Here’s an idea of what we were up against. We’d been living in Baltimore for just a couple of months when one fall evening, after the store was closed, my parents and I were in our living room in back. Suddenly we heard a loud banging on the door and men yelling something we couldn’t understand. Warily, my father opened the door to face three black teenagers wearing masks, demanding we give them candy.
We had never heard of Halloween. All we knew was that these wild men in disguise, yelling in English we had trouble making sense of, were demanding we hand over our stock-in-trade. We thought we were being robbed, and I was terrified. Seeing our confusion, the trick-or-treaters somehow managed to explain this ritual. Everyone relaxed, candy was disbursed, and we were relieved that rather than being held up, we’d just been initiated into a strange American cultural practice.
Before we got here, my family’s common language was German, but now that we were in America, English was what we spoke at home. My parents spoke Polish to each other when they were alone or if they didn’t want me to know what they were talking about. Eventually they made friends with other Holocaust survivors, mostly grocery-store owners like us, and the families would visit with each other on Sunday evenings. When we children were in the room everyone spoke English. The point was for the children to assimilate. But when we were off playing, the grownups spoke Polish or Yiddish. I managed to learn neither language. The only times this bothered me was when I was forced to sit through a boring evening at the Yiddish theater and didn’t understand a word. It was especiall
y frustrating when everyone laughed and I got ignored every time I asked what was funny. I understand now these were the dirty parts, the same as in Hebrew school when we would skip certain portions in our Torah study and I never knew why. So my parents kept one foot in their old world and one in the new. I don’t think America ever really felt like home to them. As an immigrant, I, too, grew up feeling outside the mainstream culture and I became a psychologist because I wanted to know what “regular” people were like.
Over time my parents established themselves as important members of the community. The store was tiny, yet my father crammed the shelves with everything a family would need, all neatly and attractively arranged. I didn’t much care for the huge glass jar of pickled pigs’ feet next to the dill pickles and pickled onions, but other jars lined up by the cash register were filled with every penny candy a child might desire. Within easy reach on the shelves below were cookies and packaged pastries, the finest Hostess and TastyKake had to offer. And I could freely help myself, without asking, to as much as I wanted whenever I wanted.
Our store was a meeting place where people would regularly run into their neighbors and take a few moments to visit. One of the neighborhood teenage girls used to perch herself on top of the meat case and regale us and anyone else who cared to listen with the latest news about her social life and boyfriends.
My mother found herself in the very position she had spent all her years growing up in Poland working to avoid. She was determined to choose her life and not have it dictated to her, yet here she was stuck on her feet all day selling groceries. Raising me was her primary source of satisfaction. There wasn’t much joy for her in those early Baltimore years, and I was the light of her life; her consolation prize, you might say.
She was an extraordinary mother, my greatest gift. I once commented to my husband that when I was a child, I believed that of all my friends I had the best mother, and he said, “I think you did.” (Even today many of my friends use her as a role model for dealing with their own children, asking themselves, “What would Barbara do?”) We had a relationship of total honesty and trust from the beginning—although a critical family event a few years later made clear that this wasn’t an absolute truth.
Claiming My Place Page 19
