Long Journey Home: A Young Girl's Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust

by Lucy Lipiner

  I have no recollection of the train ride to Brussels until someone shook us awake.

  “It’s your stop. This is Brussels. You need to change trains here for Antwerp.”

  I have no recollection of finally arriving in Antwerp, but I knew we had come to the right place—Papa had scribbled the address on two pieces of paper and placed each one of them inside our coat pockets.

  The building appeared small from the outside, a townhouse facade attached on both sides. But inside, the space was enormous. Although it was an orphanage, it felt homey with a relaxed air about it.

  Boys and girls of all ages—some as young as four years old—who were rescued by Christian families or hidden in churches and convents during the war were now running, playing, and laughing. Some were reading. The older ones were interacting with the little ones—helping with their homework, I assumed.

  We were instructed to sit on a wooden bench out in the entry hall. Again, we felt stared at. They also pretended not to look, but I knew they were all stealing glances at us.

  Moments later, in came a man and a woman, both perhaps in their fifties. Later, I learned that both were directors of the facility. Then a beautiful young woman in a white uniform and wearing a white cap joined them. All three looked at us with disbelief in their eyes. They seemed to be figuratively scratching their heads, not knowing exactly what to do with us.

  They spoke in whispers—I’m sure to spare us embarrassment—occasionally glancing at us as if that would give them a clue. I have no doubt that our appearance screamed the need for urgent care. But I was beyond feeling anything— and beyond caring what people thought. I just wanted to sleep. It was obvious that these three adults were trying to solve a problem and come up with a plan for us.

  I thought I overheard them discussing our clothes. I knew we appeared dirty and disheveled, but I didn’t expect never to see my clothes again. In fact, that is exactly what happened: everything we wore was discarded immediately.

  The young woman in white asked us to follow her. She smiled, and I could not take my eyes off her beautiful smile. I guess I always liked it when people smiled.

  We climbed a flight of stairs leading to a long corridor lined with many doors on each side. She told my sister to remain in the corridor and wait for her. I didn’t know what to make of it. Over the years, I had grown to suspect every intention toward my family—good and bad. And now, Frydzia and I were being separated for the first time.

  The young woman opened a door to what looked like a bathroom. I saw a sight I had not seen in years—maybe never—a room for bathing and cleaning up. I knew such rooms existed, but I could not recall having experienced one firsthand. The tiles on the floor were black and white, and the walls were white. The tub was already filled with warm water. The entire room seemed veiled in warm mist—it felt heavenly. This wasn’t real. So many first experiences. I just stood there transfixed and tired.

  “You should get undressed now,” the woman in white said, “and place all your clothes in the hamper back there in the corner and then get into the warm tub.”

  She handed me a bar of soap and told me to take as long as I wished. All that kindness, and I doubted even genuine and honest intentions. It was all so overwhelming. With a smile on her face, she turned and gently closed the door behind her.

  In all my thirteen years, I couldn’t recall ever being in a room by myself with a closed door. It felt strange. The tranquility of the room and the stillness of the moist air made for an almost out-of-body experience. Instead of getting washed, I just sat on a stool and looked around. Then I remembered the tub and the warm water. I tried to remember when or if I had ever bathed in a tub of warm water. In the camps, we used to shower in communal showers under huge, flat showerheads suspended from the ceiling—but a tub of warm water for me alone? I could not remember such a thing ever happening.

  Getting clean was no small effort, especially my hair, now a tangled mass, barely resembling my long, thick brown hair. I scrubbed and scrubbed until I ached all over. I saw dirt floating on the surface of the water. I was horrified. I stood up and reached for a long hose. With much turning and twisting I finally got a powerful jet of water to spill out of the hose. I rinsed my hair and the rest of my body and let the filthy water drain out.

  I stepped out of the tub and walked over to the hamper for a last look at my clothes. I just stood there, dripping wet. Nothing belonged to me. It felt good. I felt free. Finally, I had scrubbed away all the grime and dirt of all those nasty years of war. Watching the dirty water running down the drain was a promise of something good.

  I heard a knock on the door. The beautiful lady in white stepped in holding a large white sheet. I worried about the remaining dirty water in the tub. I hoped she had not noticed. She just stood there for a short moment looking at me and then quickly draped the sheet around me and drew me close to her. I thought I saw tears in her eyes.

  That evening, Frydzia and I were indeed separated for the first time. After having had some bread and a glass of milk, I was led to a room that appeared like a large dormitory. Actually, it was one of four dormitory rooms in the home. It was lined with many beds on both sides.

  This was a room for the youngest girls, between the ages of four and thirteen. I was among the oldest. At first, I cried. Why was my sister taken away from me? I couldn’t understand. I needed to be among the oldest girls, not the youngest. Was I expected to give something of myself to these little children? I was tired in so many ways. I had nothing to give anymore. I wanted others to give to me. I needed desperately for someone to look after me.

  That night, I went to sleep in my own bed—not a canvas cot but a real bed with several blankets, a soft fluffy pillow inside a freshly laundered white pillowcase. I took such care not to disturb the beautifully made-up bed—I crawled on my hands and knees into what seemed like a haven of two white sheets. For the first time in my life, I went to sleep between two sheets! This was no dream, and it was no ordinary sleep. This really felt like I had died and went to heaven.

  Next morning, I was awakened to a ruckus of little girls chattering, some asking to be helped with getting dressed and washing up.

  Oostduinkerke, Belgian shore, Summer, 1946. Orphaned Jewish children rescued by Christian families, Churches and Convents during World War II

  39

  Hilda—Mother Image

  At breakfast, I was allowed to join the older girls, my sister among them, around a long table. And there was so much food. Mostly, I recall a huge platter of scrambled eggs and sliced bread with a thick spread of butter. Bread had always been my favorite food. But the half a grapefruit in front of each of us, I didn’t know what to make of it or how to eat it. I had never seen it before. I just sat there staring at it.

  Frydzia and I had been introduced to the cook the night before. Her name was Hilda, and she was rather large. But later, I learned she was large in so many good ways. Her heart was large. Sometimes, I wished she was my mother. I think I searched for a mother image during our entire stay in the Antwerp home. Hilda was watching me being puzzled by the grapefruit. She approached the table, grabbed my right hand still holding the spoon, and with her hand pushing on mine, we plunged into the grapefruit and it splashed my face. My first taste of the tangy fruit came from the juice that had been dripping down my face. Still, I came to love that woman. Hilda was German, and she was Jewish, and she was the first person we could communicate with because she spoke German, the language Frydzia and I understood.

  Everyone else spoke Flemish or French. Frydzia and I experienced a language barrier. From the very start, the staff members tried hard to communicate with us through gestures and some Yiddish words. But they felt that learning French was extremely important, so we were enrolled in a French-speaking school almost immediately.

  At first, it was difficult not being able to communicate with children my own age. I needed a friend, and I was anxious to make friends. All I could do was smile and nod my head. Still,
I believed that soon I would be able to speak their language. Papa was right that life would be normal and that we would have plenty to eat. Still, there were moments every day when I missed my parents terribly.

  Before long, I was asked by a staff member to help with the morning routine of getting a little girl ready for breakfast. We were introduced. Her name was Dora, and she was so sweet. Dora was six years old. She spoke French only and that was how she communicated with me. I felt embarrassed and confused, but I was eager to help Dora with the morning routine. At the same time, I was learning French from little Dora. It gave me a sense of accomplishment, and I was beginning to understand my place in the room for the youngest children. Perhaps the staff members believed that by helping the little girls I was helping myself to overcome my own emotional difficulties.

  The little girls that ran around and played happy games and smiled during the day were in fact experiencing terrible nightmares each night and reliving their own traumatic early childhoods. Some remembered their mothers and fathers taken away by the Gestapo, and some were too young to remember anything, so it seemed. Still, they cried out in their sleep. It didn’t take much for me to understand how lucky I was. I had Frydzia, and I had my parents!

  Celebrating Chanukah, Antwerp, Belgium, 1947, Lusia front row, second on the right

  40

  Survivors’ Communication Board

  For more than a year, we lived in the home for orphaned Holocaust children in Antwerp. Then Frydzia and I returned to a DP camp in Germany to be reunited with Mama and Papa. I didn’t care that it was Germany. All I wanted was to be with them. I missed Mama and Papa tremendously. Papa kept in touch with his brother, our uncle Jack in Brooklyn, New York. Uncle Jack promised to bring us to America, however long it would take.

  It was three years after the end of the war, and it was our fourth DP camp. So much had happened. My parents still lived under the sword of their tragic loss of their sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, and cousins—literally, dozens of members on both sides of the family.

  For my mother, one loss in particular weighed upon her and seemed to embody all the unspeakable grief of the Holocaust. It had its beginning long before on that night in October 1939, when we had encountered the stranger in white my mother always referred to as the “guiding angel,” the man who had reached out of the darkness to save our lives.

  Mama and Papa, DP camp in Germany

  That cold, wet night, we had traveled all night long. First light found us at a small village, yet this tiny place was a hive of chaotic activity, and an uninterrupted hum of human voices emanated from the center of it.

  Our coachman maneuvered the wagon into a spot at the edge of the village, and my parents told Frydzia and me to stay put in the wagon while they walked away to find out what was going on. As always, I felt frightened seeing my parents depart, but Frydzia held and squeezed my hand hard, giving me the reassurance I needed.

  There, in the middle of the crowded main street filled with people and vehicles, an utterly amazing coincidence occurred; my mother ran into her oldest sister, Tante Hanah, and Hanah’s nine-year-old daughter, my cousin Feige. They too were far from home on that fateful morning. Hanah’s husband was at home in Brzesko, a town in southern Poland, with their two younger children. Hanah and Feige were trying to reach their home.

  As Mama and Tante Hanah came toward our wagon, it seemed clear to me that they were discussing something important. Their gestures and their faces seemed agitated. Their bodies seemed to bend in despair. Both cried and wiped their eyes. It seemed a desperate situation that I did not understand.

  Later that day, we said good-bye to Tante Hanah and Feige, and for years, we all assumed they were home and safe. Long afterward, I learned about the sisters’ conversation. Hanah had begged Mama to take Feige on our journey, but Mama refused, saying she could not undertake such a responsibility and that, in times of great turmoil, “children should not be separated from parents.”

  Hanah, Feige, and the rest of their immediate family were killed in the Holocaust. To this day, I remember my cousin Feige—a tall, skinny girl with long brown curls. The death of my cousin Feige, her two little brothers, and all the little children embody the evil that was the Holocaust.

  Mama lived a long life—she reached the age of 101! She spoke rarely about the loss of her family. But the weight of pain, tinged with guilt, stayed with her the rest of her life. “If only I had a picture,” she would say sometimes. “I can’t remember what they looked like.”

  For her and Papa, the agony of loss could be seen and felt in everything they did. Their daily activities had become almost mechanical; they performed them like a couple of robots, without thought or feeling. There was no joy in anything they did. And their depression was infectious, weighing heavily on our hearts.

  They were not alone. Virtually everyone in the DP camps had suffered similar losses. We lived in an environment of deep depression and unspeakable tragedy.

  My parents were photographed, I think, for an identification card to be used in the soup kitchen in the camp. It is probably the most sorrowful photograph I have ever seen—a middle-aged couple, thin and haggard looking, with deep-set eyes, absent and unseeing.

  Sometimes, I saw a glimmer of hope, a spark of life in their eyes. This happened only when they read the names of survivors posted on a huge bulletin board in the community building. The long exterior wall was plastered with handwritten scraps of paper as well, a communication board of the most desperate kind—“I am looking for my brother …” and “Has anyone seen …?” On and on went these heartbreaking lists of names of mothers, fathers, siblings, husbands, and wives. Even three years after the war had ended, people kept on searching for loved ones, refusing to accept reality.

  Always with a sliver of hope, Papa and Mama searched for familiar names. Maybe someone among the survivors would remember seeing a sister or brother in a camp or a ghetto. They checked the lists almost daily, and they posted their own notices. “Has anyone seen my sister Hava Urbach-Rand from Biala-Bielsko? Her sister Rosa survived the war and is hoping to find her.” “Perhaps someone has seen my sister Hanah … my brother Isaac … my brother David …” No one ever responded, and the dispirited expression in their eyes and body language came back to stay.

  They also clearly felt survivors’ guilt—especially my mother. “I don’t understand,” she would say. “Was I any better than Hanah or Hava? Did I give more tzedaka [charity] to the poor? How does God decide who is to live and who is to die?” She was so angry at God. I knew it, I felt it, and I saw it in her eyes.

  Uncle Jack, Papa’s brother in America, was trying all this time to take us out of this homeless existence. He regularly kept us informed about the process of securing affidavits for visas to enter the United States. The process was very slow, for American law still maintained a low quota for immigrants from the Eastern European countries. For that reason, Uncle Jack also traveled to Ottawa, Canada, to secure Canadian visas if the US visas did not materialize.

  Mama, US immigration/affidavit photo,

  Papa, US immigration/affidavit photo

  41

  To America

  We heard that on June 25, 1948, the Eightieth Congress had passed a new law: the 1948 Displaced Persons Act authorizing the admission into the United States of certain European displaced persons for permanent residence. The new law specified that the individuals could bring their families with them as long as they were “good” citizens, who could stay out of jail and provide financially for themselves without public assistance.

  The new law had revoked the old quota immigration system. Instead of a trickle of immigrants from Eastern Europe, the new law opened the gates to thousands of homeless people like us, living in camps like ours, across the European continent. President Harry Truman was instrumental in passing the new immigration legislation. He was our true hero.

  So, with the sudden change in our immigration status and with Uncle Jack’s effo
rts to get us to America, there was hope that it might actually happen—soon. We might finally be going to our new home.

  Uncle Jack, our American uncle

  I was too young to remember what a real home was like. It had been almost ten years since I had experienced a real home. What would it be like to have a home with more than one room? I couldn’t even imagine that.

  I had recently seen films made in Great Britain and America showing resplendent, palatial homes and beautiful ladies wearing beautiful ball gowns, descending grand marble stairs under magnificent crystal chandeliers. I didn’t understand or even believe there was such a life. I preferred films portraying simple lives in homes with white picket fences. Most of all, I dreamed of a bathroom—a real home with a bathroom. The very thought was unbelievable.

  In the camp, we all used a communal shower. Once a week, women of all ages and their young children flocked without fail to the shower—at either 6:00 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. Despite the lack of privacy, the shower was greatly appreciated and was looked forward to with much anticipation. Benches against the walls of the shower room ensured that, in addition to getting scrubbed, there would also be an opportunity for socializing and people watching.

  I remember standing under the huge, flat showerheads suspended from the ceiling and the delightful feeling of being enveloped in the warm flow of water. I was young, and my body was developing. I was keenly aware of being looked at—in a nice way—but there were no full-length mirrors anywhere, so I could not see myself as others did. Perhaps this is why, when I dreamed of a real bathroom, my mind’s eye saw it with a full-length mirror.

  I was fifteen, approaching my sixteenth birthday, when we moved to a transit camp called Funk Kaserne outside of Munich, Germany. There, the US immigration officials put us through a battery of tests—physical exams, psychological exams, chest X-rays, and other lab tests.