Like many people with Down syndrome, Henry was born with a heart defect, so each time she brought him the same odd, cholesterol-conscious meal: a grilled chicken sandwich from McDonald’s (hold the special sauce); ten Pringles potato chips (baked, not fried); a banana; a serving of fruit compote that she had cooked, usually strawberries; and two cookies. Served in that order. Henry looked forward to our visits because he loves to eat. He’s not much of a talker and would send us on our way when he was done.
But I was no less the beneficiary of these outings. Most of the time when I picked my mother up at the Metro station, she would be schlepping one or two heavy shopping bags filled with containers of food she’d cooked and frozen for me. My freezer was always stocked with her chicken matzo-ball soup, chopped liver, stuffed cabbage, beef stew, mandelbrot, and apple pie. She made her piecrust on a wooden board the old-fashioned way—a big pile of flour with a well in the center into which she worked the eggs, sugar, and butter to make her dough. She was a great cook, having learned a lot working with Sabina in the kitchen in Ulm and developing a natural facility for it over the years. She refused to believe it, though. She still defined herself by her reputation as a terrible cook from when she burned the coffee at Zionist youth camp. But good cook or bad, feeding her children was one of her highest priorities.
One Sunday after we had visited my brother, she and I took ourselves out to lunch. The restaurant was crowded and we faced a half-hour wait. However, there was room at the bar. My mother, who was never more than five foot two to begin with, was by then quite tiny and couldn’t get onto the bar stool from a standing position. She tried to hoist herself up by putting one foot onto the rung of the chair but lacked the strength to follow through. So I got behind her and, with one arm under each of her armpits, I lifted her onto the stool. Then I pushed the chair close in to the bar. It was like putting a baby in a high chair.
Boy, did we laugh.
2007: FINAL DAYS
My mother’s greatest gift to me was that she didn’t merely survive but truly lived, in keeping with her highest ideals and values. Her life was precious to her and she fought for it—but only on her terms. Some years earlier a sniper was terrorizing Washington at Metro stations. She preferred riding the Metro to driving when she could, but under the circumstances, I suggested maybe she should avoid the Metro for the time being. She said, “I don’t want to live that way.” I didn’t say another word.
My mother retained an outer beauty reflecting a natural inner grace. She was blessed with excellent health and an uncommonly youthful appearance, sharp intellect, and physical vitality. And a gentle, sensitive nature of such sweetness that endured despite the extraordinary hardships she’d suffered.
Over time, my mother lost most of those close to her but remained healthy, fit, and self-sufficient. She always said that she was in no rush for whatever lay ahead, but neither would she wish to return to some younger age. Even at ninety she still lived alone in her own home, did most of her housework, and drove her car. Notwithstanding her disclaimers about lack of skill in the kitchen, she was a wonderful cook and never lost the instinct to feed her children. Where as a child I had resisted her efforts to make me eat, as an adult I felt blessed that she still stocked my freezer with all the Old World comfort foods of my childhood.
Around this time, the same kind of serendipity and uncanny coincidence that so often punctuated my mother’s life played out in my random meeting with Planaria Price, the writer of this book. I was vacationing with a friend in Big Sur, California, and we went out for dinner. Because of a fierce storm few people had ventured out and the restaurant was almost empty. Marcia and I sat at the bar and started chatting with the only other people there, Planaria Price and her husband, Murray Burns.
It was the kind of evening when the chef was sending out free food and conversation flowed. We learned that Planaria was a teacher of English as a Second Language from Los Angeles. She wasn’t acquainted with my childhood friend Rena Horowitz, who also teaches English as a Second Language in Los Angeles, but Rena, whom I called later that evening, was quite familiar with her. “You met Planaria Price? She’s phenomenal! I attend her workshops whenever I can and have all of her books. I’m so impressed you met her.”
By then the four of us had already become fast friends. As we got to know one another Planaria became intrigued with my mother’s story. “This should be a book,” she said, to which I replied, “I think so, too, but it’s more than I’m about to take on.” “I’ll write it!” she exclaimed. A few weeks later, back home in DC, I followed up by sending Planaria a DVD shot ten years earlier of my mother telling her story. We both wanted to be sure it hadn’t just been the wine talking.
I presented my mother with what I thought was a gift: that someone wanted to write a book about her life. She saw nothing in herself or her story special enough to merit a book. While she’d always taken herself seriously, she lacked any sense of self-importance. But she agreed to the project as a gift to me.
A few months into this process, Planaria twice coming to Washington, DC, to interview my mother and sending me questions to explore with her, my mother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. For the better part of one year, as she underwent fairly mild chemotherapy treatments, she and I spent precious hours together gathering the information and memories that have become this book. Her remarkable memory for descriptive and narrative detail and self-awareness of her inner life fueled Planaria’s intuitive vision in a way that seemed almost channeled.
One example: Planaria wanted to know if my mother could describe her first-grade teacher, even what she wore on the first day of school, if she could remember. That my mother did remember was amazing enough. But when I started to pass her answer on, Planaria stopped me short and said, “Wait. Here’s what I see. She’s tall and thin, has light brown hair that she wears in a bun and light eyes. She’s wearing a gray dress with brown dots and a gold crucifix on a chain around her neck.” The only part that deviated from my mother’s description was the color of the dots. They were black.
For all her happy memories of growing up in Piotrków, or probably because of them, my mother never wanted to go back there. But I did. And several months into our conversations for this book, I had the chance.
In August 2007, my cousin Irving Gomolin (Idek’s son), his daughter Molly, and I attended a reunion in Piotrków for the families of Jewish survivors from the town. The occasion was a ceremony at the Jewish cemetery to dedicate a crypt containing the sacred writings that Naphtali Lau had risked his life at the start of the war to rescue from the Great Synagogue and bury before they could be destroyed. Naphtali and his youngest brother, Yisrael, were the only members of Rebbitzin Lau’s family to survive, and I was honored to meet them in Piotrków.
Naphtali saved his and his young brother’s lives while they were in Buchenwald. They made aliyah (immigration) to Israel after the war. Naphtali was eighteen and grew up to become top aide to Moshe Dayan and participated in the Camp David peace talks, when Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made history by ending the state of war between Egypt and Israel. He ended his career as Ambassador Lau-Lavie, Israeli Consul to New York. Yisrael, eight when he was liberated, grew up to become the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel and head of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. Both men came to know many of the world’s top leaders, movie stars, and even the Pope.
I knew of Naphtali because as chairman of the Claims Committee, working for restitution to Holocaust survivors of private property seized by the Nazis, he and my mother had corresponded over the years. She had documentation of her family’s ownership of the building at 21 Piłsudskiego Street, where they had both grown up. Naphtali told me that my mother was his most significant connection to that part of his life. He had been close friends with her younger sister, Regina, and told me that he had loved her. And he shared a few memories of my mother and her friendship with the rebbitzin. It wasn’t until a few years later that I lear
ned of my father’s role in helping him survive in the labor camp, when I read about it in Naphtali’s autobiography, Balaam’s Prophecy. This connection from the past and a natural affinity forged an ongoing connection with him and his wife, Joan. Naphtali died in 2014.
During this powerfully affecting trip to Piotrków, my cousins and I, though we knew our family home had been torn down, went to see the empty lot at 21 Piłsudskiego. The city of Piotrków is now designated on the deed as owner of the property. Poland has the worst record in all of Europe for restoring what had been stolen from their Jewish citizens. The argument is that the Germans, not the Poles, committed the war crimes of confiscating the property, so Poland is not responsible for compensating the rightful Jewish owners. There has been restitution in recent years for Jewish community property, the orphanage, the community center, etc., but not for private homes. Though it is possible, in theory, for Jews to reclaim their homes. All they need to do is return to live in them or pay all back taxes since the war. In other words, not. The Great Synagogue in Piotrków, bullet holes still visible in the walls, is now the public library. With no Jews left in the town to worship there, it’s probably just as well. At least it hasn’t been left to fall into ruin or be demolished.
Yet it’s also true that the mayor and city government couldn’t be more encouraging and supportive of our Jewish reunions there every few years. They help organize our visits, and during the day or two before our arrival they conduct programs to teach the schoolchildren about what happened and why we’re there. These interesting, complicated, seemingly contradictory impulses play out all over Europe, where anti-Semitism is on the rise (yet again) and at the same time where many people are trying to understand and commemorate their own loss of the Jewish communities that had been such a rich, distinctive, and colorful part of their national histories. But there are no Jews left to inform their mythologies, that’s the whole point. And so many of the most sincere efforts at honoring this extinct world, like the lively, hip, restored, old Jewish section of Kazimierz in Kraków, come across like Disneyland.
The key event at our reunion was the ceremony at the memorial in the Rakow Forest, where during the liquidation the Germans shot hundreds of the Jews they had rounded up, fifty at a time. Standing alone at the edge of our gathering was a tiny, birdlike man who had bicycled over, wearing a suit too large for him. Clearly he had dressed up out of respect for the occasion. I learned this was a local Pole who as a fifteen-year-old peasant had witnessed the executions and now, sixty-five years later, this unassuming, uneducated old man had the heart to join us. I cannot recall this image without choking up.
My final moment in Piotrków: everyone was on the bus but I had to run back to where we had lunched to retrieve some papers I’d left there. We had taken over and brought in kosher food to the restaurant on Rynek Trybunalski, the main square where my father’s family had their business, where my mother and Heniek and all the townsfolk took their evening shpetzias. The place was empty, except for the chief rabbi of Poland (an American), who’d been part of our event, and the two Polish barmaids, their glasses of schnapps raised in a toast.
Shortly after I returned from that trip we learned that my mother’s treatments hadn’t worked. Over the next two months her medical condition worsened, and after three weeks in the hospital it was clear that she wasn’t going to get better. As her pain increased I had to coach her on how to act when she was ready to ask for something stronger than Tylenol, so unnatural was it for her to say “I need something.” Up until then her only replies to “How are you feeling?” were “Fine” or “Much better.” (“Much better than what? You were fine!”)
We talked openly and sometimes even joked about everything that was happening. One afternoon in the hospital, out of the blue she said to me, “Don’t put my age in the obituary.” She was ninety-one.
I said, “But if someone asks me afterward how old you were, what am I supposed to say? ‘I don’t know’?”
She thought for a moment, then replied, “Say eighty-nine.”
I frankly don’t know whether this was motivated by a quirky kind of vanity or an irrational fear that I could get in trouble for some ancient monkey business with her birthdate on her legal documentation for entering the United States. But it cracked me up.
Until her last moments my mother remained true to herself and never lowered her standards. Her doctor remarked that it was almost unique in his experience for someone facing their own mortality to seem more concerned with the needs and feelings of others. The day before she died, she was groaning in pain. While I was on the phone trying urgently to reach her doctor, she was pressing me to charge her cell phone battery so that I’d have a backup, wanting to spare me my frustration when I’d let mine run down.
But when she understood that living an independent existence would no longer be possible, she was ready to let go. She lived a long life, self-determined to the end, and triumphed by dying according to the laws of nature, not of Hitler. My mother held on until just after midnight on the 13th, as she’d done when delivering me, and at 12:30 a.m. on October 14, 2007, my mother met her end, unafraid.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OTHERS
THE GOMOLINSKI FAMILY
Itzak Hirsch Gomolinski: Died in Treblinka Concentration Camp.
Hendla Libeskind Gomolinska: Died of typhus in the Piotrków ghetto, July 1941.
Hela: Survived Bugaj Labor Camp and Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps with her eight-year-old son, Marek. In 1947 she and Marek immigrated to Haifa (then Palestine) to reunite with her husband, Jacob Brem, who had survived the war serving as a conscript in the Soviet army. He died in 1967. Hela died in 2007. Marek (now Moshe) is now living in Haifa. In 1943, Hela’s brother-in-law, Abek Brem, who was instrumental in Basia’s first escape attempt, was taken by the Nazis to Rakow Forest outside of Piotrków with others and shot.
Chanusck: Died in infancy.
Idek: Survived imprisonment in Bugaj Labor Camp and Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Immigrated to Montreal, Canada, after the war. He died in 1996.
Josek: Survived Bugaj Labor Camp, then escaped into the forest in transit to Buchenwald. After the Liberation, he was severely injured in a car accident. When he recovered, he immigrated to Montreal, Canada. He died in 1998.
Beniek: Died in Treblinka Concentration Camp.
Rifka: Died in infancy.
Regina: Died in Treblinka Concentration Camp.
OTHER FAMILIES FEATURED IN THE STORY
Uncle Josef Libeskind (Hendla’s brother, Basia’s uncle): Survived the war hidden by a gentile family in Warsaw. Immigrated to Israel afterward.
Aunt Sura Libeskind: Hidden for a time with a gentile family in Warsaw, who were then denounced by a neighbor. She and they all died in Auschwitz.
Janek: Survived the war by passing as a Pole and living with a gentile family in Warsaw. After Liberation he immigrated to Paris. Janek is responsible for saving the lives of his family members who did survive.
Mala: With forged papers, passed as a gentile in Germany, escaped to Switzerland, then immigrated to Israel after the war.
Mania: Passed as a gentile in Warsaw, immigrated to Israel after the war.
Mendel: Survived the war with his wife, Genia, and their son, Shlomo, passing as gentiles in Warsaw. Settled in Israel after the war and died of leukemia soon after. When a teenager, Shlomo immigrated to the United States and is currently a professor of mathematics in Oregon.
Moshe: Survived Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, then immigrated to Ramat Gan, Israel.
Rozia: Died in a concentration camp.
Uncle Mendel (Hendla’s brother, Basia’s uncle) and Aunt Sprintza Libeskind: Died with four of their five children, including Hinda, in a concentration camp.
Elkanah: The only member of the family to survive, after imprisonment in Hortensja Labor Camp and Buchenwald Concentration Camp. He moved to Philadelphia, where he died shortly thereafter.
Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau: Died
in Treblinka Concentration Camp.
Rebbitzin Chaya Lau: Died in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.
Naphtali (Tulek): Survived, while protecting his young brother, Yisrael, in Hortensja Labor Camp and Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Immigrated to Israel, where he became a journalist, and later a diplomat serving as Moshe Dayan’s top aide and as a participant in the Camp David peace talks with Anwar Sadat. He ended his career as the Israeli consul general in New York. He died in 2014.
Shmuel Yitzhak (Milek): Worked in the Hortensja Labor Camp, but unfortunately stayed home with his parents on the day of the ghetto deportations and was sent with his father to Treblinka, where he was killed.
Yisrael (Lulek): Protected by his brother Naphtali, survived Hortensja Labor Camp and Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Immigrated to Israel, where he grew up to become the chief Ashkenazi rabbi from 1993 to 2003. He is now the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and the chairman of Yad Vashem.
Baila Reichmann (Leon Reichmann’s mother): She and five of her six children died in Buchenwald. Only her son Leon (Basia’s husband) survived the war.
Abraham Reichmann (Leon Reichmann’s brother): The first Jew to be killed in Piotrków for not obeying curfew.
Henry Marton (Leon Reichmann’s cousin): Survived Hortensja Labor Camp and settled after the war in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
Heniek Wajshof (Basia’s high school boyfriend): Died in Treblinka Concentration Camp together with his parents, his sister Dora, and his new wife, Maryla.
Mania Wajshof (Heniek Wajshof’s sister): Survived the war.
Srulek Wajshof (Heniek Wajshof’s cousin): Escaped to Russia and survived. After the war he settled in Netanya, Israel.
OTHER MAIN CHARACTERS
Itka Ber (Basia’s childhood friend): Died in a concentration camp.
Itka Moskowitz (Basia’s college roomate): Died in a concentration camp.
Rozia Nissenson (Basia’s school friend): Survived a concentration camp, settled in Haifa, Israel.
Claiming My Place Page 21
