Living the Secular Life_New Answers to Old Questions

by Phil Zuckerman

  He got to Warsaw without incident, and was able to stay in the seventh-floor apartment of one of his contacts, a young woman named Janina. But on the third day there, someone—perhaps a neighbor—betrayed him. Two uniformed men broke into the apartment, beat Zenon, and then locked him in a room while they went to get a car in order to take him to the Gestapo. But Zenon managed to pick the lock before they could return, and he fled. For the next year and a half, he survived many such close calls, and many homeless nights, and many hungry days. Yet he was able to stay alive in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. His survival was largely predicated upon pretending to be a Pole. He wore a crucifix around his neck. He started attending church regularly, fastidiously learning the Catholic prayers and hymns, as was necessary to make his cover convincing. And his ability to speak perfect Polish was extremely helpful; most Jews in Poland spoke Yiddish, or Polish with a Yiddish accent, both of which were dead giveaways. He also did not look stereotypically Jewish. He was thus able to pass as a Pole. He eventually got a decent job working as an electrician. He managed to procure false identification papers, with a fake Polish name. He rented a small room.

  Though living a somewhat secure life—certainly much more secure a life than that of the captive Jews inside the Warsaw ghetto—every day was nerve-rackingly dangerous. Any person, at any time, could suspect that he was a Jew, denounce him, turn him in. And that would be the end of Zenon. It was not easy living this way. “There is a saying in Polish that best describes me at that time, ‘Na zlodzieju czapka gore,’ and it literally translates as ‘A thief’s hat glows,’ but we would translate it as ‘A guilty person looks guilty.’” There were many times when a particular landlord might give him a strange look. Zenon would leave immediately, finding a new place to stay in a different part of town. He’d move yet again, just to be sure. And again. He was always on guard, always nervous. “I was haunted by fear and forever insecure about being recognized and betrayed. Each new interaction—with a German supervisor, a Polish coworker, someone at the cafeteria, a neighbor—all were a constant concern. I worried over how I would answer personal questions, how I would react to an offhanded anti-Semitic remark. Could they tell that I was not one of them? Could they tell that I was a Jew? I fretted over my demeanor, my facial expressions. This worried me to the point that my anxious look itself probably became a source of suspicion.”

  But he managed, month after month. He eventually began working for various underground resistance movements. He functioned mostly as a courier, distributing secret information, cash, and weapons to other resistance members and various underground fighters. This was extremely dangerous work. Sometimes he found himself on trains packed with Nazi officers. Other times, he was followed down alleyways, or eyed suspiciously at bus stations. Sometimes he was asked to do things by people he didn’t know and wasn’t sure about—were they allies? Were they really part of the resistance, or was he being set up? Occasionally he was stopped at random by police or soldiers, who asked him about his business, scrutinized his identification papers—and had they looked into whatever package or suitcase he was carrying, well, that would have been the end.

  And yet he managed to get by, incident after incident. “I was filled with a passion and real sense of purpose. Life was full of danger at every corner, with every encounter, but it was also filled with an incredible sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. I gave of myself the most one could give, and I knew that, in a small way, I was helping people survive. I know of three people specifically who survived because of me, directly because of me and how I helped them.” Zenon thus focused not solely on his own sole survival, but in helping others to survive as well. He helped get people false papers so they could find work or avoid arrest, he helped people who were in need of hiding find safe houses, he distributed weapons to other people so that they could defend themselves. What was his underlying motivation? Why not just focus on his own survival, rather than put himself at great risk for the sake of others? “I wanted to help. I wanted to help. Can there be any other reason? I wanted to help other people.”

  Zenon witnessed the uprising in Warsaw against the Nazis in 1944, and the brutal, devastating repression that followed. But when Germany’s grip over Poland began to finally weaken, and as the Russians came closer to taking Warsaw, Zenon was arrested during a Gestapo sweep. He wasn’t arrested as a Jew, but rather on suspicion of being part of the Polish resistance. He was sent to a concentration camp, whose inmates were slated for deportation to Auschwitz. But luck was with him yet again. A small group of Polish workers was being selected for work in Vienna, and when a German guard recognized him as an electrician, Zenon was saved. He was switched into this small group of Polish workers slated not for Auschwitz, but Vienna.

  They were put into a cattle car, heading west. One day, the train stopped at the Kuloszki railroad junction—a busy intersection for trains from all over Poland. They were stuck there for hours. Late in the afternoon, another train pulled up right beside them. Zenon could see through the slats of his cattle car that it was full of emaciated Jews. He quietly began conversing with one of the men in the other train. The man said that their train was from the Lódz ghetto. Did he know Zenon’s parents and sister? Yes. And in fact, he confirmed that they were on that very train—although in a different cattle car farther down. “I could hardly believe what he said to me. I felt sick. I felt a pain in my stomach. I felt as if my heart—it had stopped beating. I felt totally, utterly helpless. You can’t imagine.” Zenon crumpled to the floor, covering his face, holding in the sobs. He could not let the other Poles in his cattle car know of the pain he was going through. He pretended to be sick, and then to be asleep. Eventually, his train departed, as did the train from the Lódz ghetto, carrying his family; they were taken on to Auschwitz, where his parents were gassed. (Zenon’s sister, however, did survive.)

  The cattle car full of Polish workers took a full three weeks to get to Vienna. Zenon and his fellow travelers received food and water only sporadically, often going three days at a stretch without either. “We were hungry and thirsty all the time. And we were very, very dirty. We had not washed in weeks. The time passed very slowly. We just sat on the floor quietly, expressionless, half-dazed, half-numbed.” When they reached a small town just outside of Vienna, they were quarantined. They were ordered to strip naked and to shower, while their clothes were disinfected. This is it, thought Zenon. His circumcision would give him away, and that would be that. But he was lucky yet again. The Polish workers were sent into showers together along with female prisoners from another transport; everyone was distracted by the naked women, and no one noticed that he was a Jew. When they reached Vienna, they were put to work in a labor camp. Zenon escaped. After several days of homeless scavenging, he managed to get work as an electrician with a small German firm (still pretending to be a Pole, of course).

  When the war was finally over, the Russians came to Vienna, and they refused to believe that Zenon was a Jew. They accused him of being a Polish accomplice to the Nazis—a collaborator. They took him out into the nearby woods to be executed. “Here I had survived the damn Nazis. And now here are the Russians who are going to shoot me, and for nothing!” But the two soldiers assigned to do away with him in the woods—for reasons Zenon will never know—decided not to kill him. Instead, they marched him out to a small road between the trees and told him to start walking and not look back.

  He had survived the Holocaust. He eventually found his sister in a displaced persons camp in Germany, as well as two aunts. One night, after a pleasant dinner with these relatives, he laughed. He can’t remember what it was that made him laugh, exactly. But it was the first time he had laughed in nearly six years.

  Zenon’s survival was based on several key factors: being young and fit, being able to speak perfect Polish, not looking stereotypically Jewish, being able to get on well with people, having good instincts for when to take risks, and being very, very lucky. But what did not help him, in any way, was re
ligious faith. Since he was thoroughly secular, God simply wasn’t part of the picture.

  But I wondered if, when things were particularly bad, had he ever prayed, even just for the immediate comfort such prayer might give him in the moment? “No. I did not. I did not.” What about that very dangerous moment when he was about to climb over the wall to escape the Tomaszów ghetto? “No. I did not pray to God. All I was thinking was, how can I jump without the guard seeing me? That was the only thing. When should I make my move? How much risk it was—that was all I was thinking.” What about when the Russians were taking him into the woods to be shot? “No. I didn’t pray. I didn’t even think to. Pray to what? I just felt anger that here I was—I had survived so much, only to have it end like this. That was all that was going through my head.”

  But what about all those lucky breaks? There were so many close calls: the tip from the German supervisor about the imminent liquidation of the Tomaszów ghetto, escaping from that seventh-floor apartment in Warsaw, getting sent to Vienna rather than Auschwitz, not being detected as a Jew during quarantine, and so on, and so on? Might one perhaps interpret all of this as some form of divine intervention? Maybe it wasn’t just “luck” pure and simple that explains Zenon’s amazing story, but perhaps it was God, looking out for him? Zenon does not accept such an interpretation. “Look, if I have to give credit to God for the good things that happened to me, then I would also have to blame him for the bad things that happened to me, and what I had to endure. If there was a God at that time, then he was not on my side. He was not protecting me. All that I went through? All that I suffered? The murder of my family, parents, relatives, friends? The beatings, the arrests? The endless fear? So much fear all the time. So much destruction. The entire ghetto liquidated—thousands of people killed. Millions killed. No, I cannot see how there is a God in all of this, looking out for anyone. I survived. But not because of God. No.”

  So how, then, did he cope through it all? If he didn’t turn to God, what did he turn to?

  “You know, I was just numbed. I don’t know the right term. But I was somehow almost hypnotized. I just focused on surviving. And this state of mind somehow shielded me from pain, even from hunger, at times. I don’t know. But I relied on myself. I did what I had to do to live. And I tried to do the little that I could to help others. That’s all.”

  After the war, Zenon moved to Italy for several years, where he got a degree in electrical engineering. Then he moved to America, and after receiving a scholarship and BA from the University of Oklahoma, he received a master’s degree from UCLA. He settled in Los Angeles with his wife, worked in the aerospace industry, helped to raise two daughters, and now, happily retired, occasionally gives talks to high school and college students about his experiences in the war. Framed pictures of his grandchildren maintain pride of place in the center of his living room.

  As was the case with Amber and the facing of her spinal cord injury with determined tenacity, Zenon’s successful survival during the Holocaust and post-Holocaust thriving were the result of numerous factors. But the tenacity that they share is clearly predicated upon and deeply embedded in the secular virtues of pragmatic problem solving, personal fortitude, and—as will be further illuminated below when considering Gail Stanton’s story—steadfast self-reliance.

  Surpassing Addiction

  Secular people employ nearly all of the same coping strategies that religious people employ when life is rough: they rely on family and friends, or they seek counseling and professional guidance. But unlike the religious, who turn to the God they believe in, secular people lack that otherworldly option. Secular options are all of this world. Thus instead of turning upward to the heavens for help, the nonreligious must inevitably turn to themselves. That gets to the heart of secular coping: a greater degree of raw, resilient self-reliance. I have heard it expressed many times, in various ways. And Gail Stanton, who is forty-one years old and lives in Tucson, Arizona, embodies this rugged secular self-reliance as explicitly and as inspirationally as anyone.

  As a result of her father’s untreated bipolar disorder, Gail’s family moved to a new state every year of her childhood. She dropped out of high school while in Vermont, and by the time she was in her late teens she was living in the streets of Austin, Texas, addicted to heroin, alcohol, pot, and just about everything else. She committed a variety of crimes to support her addiction, she was often arrested, and she was often in prison. Her boyfriend died of a drug overdose. Life as an addict in Austin was nasty and brutish. Finally, after a year’s stint behind bars—an experience Gail describes as “heinous on so many levels”—she decided to change, to make a decent life for herself. She left Texas, got sober, got into a healthy relationship, got her GED, went to a community college, transferred to a four-year college, got her BA, got a scholarship for graduate school, earning an MSW and an MPA, and a license in clinical social work. She is currently married, the mother of two boys, and the director of a large outpatient facility that helps people overcome drug addiction and related substance abuse problems. “I’m highly motivated by beneficence and justice. I think a lot of people get the short end of the stick, and we as a society don’t do much to help those that are less fortunate. And I’d like to leave this planet a better place than when I came. So if there is anyone I can touch, anyone I can help …”

  For Gail, the transition from heroin addict in the streets of Texas to happily married mother of two and well-educated director of an outpatient clinic wasn’t easy, and it took a long time. She enrolled in several drug treatment programs, she attended Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. She found the traditional twelve-step program particularly helpful. But the twelve-step program is intrinsically spiritual, and at its core is a professed belief in a “higher power.” So Gail just got into the habit of mentally plugging in her own secular substitutes anytime the words “higher power” or “God” were put forth. “Many people in the twelve-step community definitely look at that ‘power greater than oneself’ as God. But I could never buy into that. So I always just thought about it as being my connection to other human beings. Feeling a part of life. There’s an emptiness at the heart of addiction. And they often talk about filling that void with God. So I would just think about filling that void with ‘connectedness.’ Being connected to other people. The group is my higher power. So that worked for me.”

  Gail found heaps of insight and wisdom in the writings of Viktor Frankl and Erich Fromm. Frankl taught that in order for life to be worth living, it must have personal meaning, and we all must actively create that meaning for ourselves, while Fromm taught that connection is one of the greatest sources of meaning, and thus our loving connections to others are of paramount importance for human thriving. Gail also took up meditation, which she sees as a good technique to simply quiet her mind, and nothing more. And she’s even attended a few twelve-step programs specifically designated for atheists. “It was nice to go to a meeting now and then and not have to force myself to ‘not hear’ the word ‘God’ every time people say ‘God.’”

  Gail acknowledges that her godless way of overcoming addiction is extremely rare. In her many years of experience—as a user, as a recovering addict, and as someone who now works with other addicts—she is fairly certain that over 95 percent of the people that she has known and has worked with have been religious, have believed in God, and have found tremendous help in overcoming their addiction by turning to God. “Those that have a strong faith in God, it definitely helps them. Definitely.”

  And yet Gail did it without. How?

  “I’m internally driven, I guess. In all the mess, you know, I had to look internally. And prison did help, I will admit. That one year in prison I did get clean. And so when I got out—the longer you are away from drugs, the weaker the pull is. I mean, I still wanted to get loaded when I got out, but the pull wasn’t so overwhelming. So that helped me, in that regard.

  “But I didn’t pray or anything like that. I jus
t had to draw from inner strength. I had to look internally to find that. To embrace my own resilience, to get through it all. I think that’s what happened here. Just—getting into college, managing graduate school, it was very grueling. I had two little kids—the master’s program was pretty intense! And quite a few people dropped out. And although it was bad—seriously—I just did it, I got through it. I worked so hard.

  “If you can’t find stuff outwardly, you’re going to turn inward. If you can’t find it out there in a God, you’re going to find it inside—inside yourself. I couldn’t turn to a God, so I turned to myself, because that’s all that I had. That was the only choice left. I don’t feel like I’m exceptional or anything, I’m just me. But I had a lot of challenges, and I managed it, and I did it.”

  Secular Coping

  Such stories from people like Amber, Zenon, and Gail are quite illuminating, and the similar themes that emerge from their accounts are obvious: the whole “let go, let God” sentiment just doesn’t always work. Although it certainly has a Zen-like quality of acceptance that is admirable—sometimes we do just need to accept situations and not fight against or stress about circumstances beyond our control—the underlying assumption of accepting a higher power doesn’t cut it, at least for the secular among us. Amber could not “let go” with the onset of her paralysis. She had to fight and strive and recover and find meaning and value all on her own, and with the love of her mother and the help of friends. In Zenon’s eyes, no prayers were going to save him as a teenager in the Holocaust. He had to save himself. And while many people who deal with drug addiction find tremendous strength in believing in God, for Gail, belief in herself was more successful, more realistic, or rather simply more her way.