It sounded good to both of us, and so we made up a guest list and arranged for an orthodox Hungarian rabbi who was living in our camp to perform the ceremony. It happened in September 1946. I was pregnant, but it was still early enough along—four to five months—that I was not showing. Only a few of our friends knew that I was pregnant. The rabbi definitely did not know.
But a different problem arose which still makes me sad and angry to this day. I was wearing at this time a ring that my parents had given me on some small occasion—I can’t even remember what at this point. It was not a fancy or expensive ring, just a little thing with a tiny sparkling stone of some kind. But it meant a great deal to me as a keepsake of my mother and my father. When the Germans were demanding all the Jewish jewelry in the Stolpce ghetto, I specially hid the ring in my brassiere. Once I was with the partisans, I wore it openly again. And I managed to keep it through all the rest of the war.
Well, the Hungarian rabbi who was going to marry us was strictly orthodox. And one of the essential orthodox requirements for a woman who is to marry is to be fully immersed in a mikvah [ritual bath]. The immersion is presided over by orthodox Jewish women. And fully means fully—a complete exposure of the skin to the water, with no barriers. The ring had been on my finger for years—and it was a child-sized ring to begin with. I couldn’t get it off—it felt as if my finger had grown through and around it. So the rabbi sat me down and took some pliers and broke the ring off my finger so that I would be capable of full purification. He was very cold and matter-of-fact about it. He didn’t seem to understand what the ring meant to me, even though I tried to explain. I didn’t go so far as to physically resist—I wasn’t going to get into a fistfight with the rabbi who was going to marry us!
The wedding ceremony itself, which took place under the chupah [ritual tent-covering for the bride and groom as they recite their vows], was a very beautiful occasion. It allowed Jack and me to say aloud, before our surviving family members and friends, what we meant to each other.
But still, that episode in the mikvah, having my ring broken off my finger in the name of God, stays in my mind. I can see now how well it fitted in with what had become, by that time, my overall attitude toward the Jewish religion. Remember that I had grown up in a home in which the teachings of Judaism were presented as the teachings of God—Judaism and God were one for me. That changed fundamentally during the war. I wanted to marry Jack in a Jewish religious ceremony. I still felt very Jewish, very much a part of the Jewish people. But I could no longer accept that the views of the orthodox rabbis represented the will of God.
In particular, it angered me that, in response to the hatred and madness of the Nazi butchers, so many rabbis took the approach that submission, martyrdom, was the correct religious response. To martyr oneself was to perform a kiddush ha-Shem [a sanctification of the Holy Name]. I understand the principle here. The Talmud instructs us to bless God not only for the good on earth, but also for the evil. We are to accept—and love—creation as it is, as God created it. And we are required to behave in a manner consistent with this: to face hardships, and even martyrdom when necessary, is the essence of kiddish ha-Shem. So be it.
But those are not teachings that I could accept. I could not see death at the hands of the Nazis as a sanctification. It was a degradation, a horror. I wanted to live, I wanted my family to live.
That is not to say nothing was left of my faith in God. But insofar as I had faith, it was no longer in the God of the rabbis. A few weeks before she was killed, my mother—who had faced the truth that she had not long to live—said to me and my two sisters: “If any of you should survive this war, always know that I will be in Heaven as your protector. I will plead on your behalf with God or, if I cannot go so high as that, with any angel who will listen.”
I have always remembered those words. During the war, I did not pray often. And when I did so, I did not pray to God. I could not. God as taught by the rabbis no longer made sense to me, given what was happening before my eyes. But I could pray to my mother Cila. What mother Mary is to Catholics, my own mother Cila is to me. I pray to her to this very day. When I have to undergo surgery, or when Jack or any of the children have a health or personal problem, or even when I am about to board an airplane—I pray to my mother. I have never had a definite response, but sometimes I think she hears me. And I still hope—I can’t say I believe, but I hope—that when I die I will find my mother waiting for me in Heaven.
JACK
Like Rochelle, I also pray to my mother. In my case, I pray both to God and to my mother. It was the voice of my mother Sarah—it had to be her voice—that I heard in my dream in the late summer of 1942, the dream that told me Rochelle would be coming to my bunker in the woods. My faith in God was strengthened during the war, not weakened. I felt the horror, but I also felt a sense of being guided.
After the war, in Nei Freimann, I went to the synagogue on the major holidays. I still go, but I don’t feel that I have to be in a synagogue in order to pray. And when I am in a synagogue, I don’t usually pray with the words that are in the prayer book. I say my own silent prayers, sometimes with my eyes shut. I pray in Yiddish. To God and to my mother. Sometimes I feel as if there is a response.
Just like Rochelle, I hope that my mother is waiting for me in Heaven when I die. I hope that my father is waiting as well. But when I think about this, I think how can it be that a mother is waiting for her child in Heaven. Would this not go back generation after generation, until multitudes of mothers—all the souls of all the mothers who have ever lived—were doing nothing but waiting? Life has to go on, to have a progression.
Still, I hope to see my mother again. But as to what the afterlife holds, or if there is an afterlife, no one knows.
But the feelings that both Rochelle and I have for our mothers, for our families, should help you understand what it meant for us to start a family of our own.
The day came for the delivery of our baby—9 February 1947. In the Nei Freimann DP camp, there was no ambulance or other medical vehicle available. We managed to find an American soldier with a jeep who would drive us to the hospital in Munich. It was winter, and snowing hard. When we arrived, it was evening and there were no doctors there, only a handful of nurses, who were also nuns, taking care of the entire hospital.
ROCHELLE
The soldier who drove to the hospital told us that the DP camp regulations required that Jack and Ronke return with him while I checked into the hospital alone. There was no way that I could telephone back to the camp to talk to them—we didn’t have a phone in our house, and the official camp offices were closed overnight. So I would be completely alone until the next morning, when Jack would be able to return along with my cousin Sofka.
I started feeling intense contractions around ten o’clock that night. There were two nurses working in the maternity ward. Around me there were a number of German women in various stages of labor. Our beds were separated from each other by little hanging curtains. Whoever started to moan and scream the loudest got the attention of the nurses. They would either say that it wasn’t time, in which case there was nothing more they could do—no pain medication—or else they would wheel you on your bed to the delivery room.
When my time came, I asked if there could be a doctor present, because memories of my last birth were still in my head. They told me that there was a standby doctor, not present in the hospital, who could be reached in case of extreme emergency. For any kind of normal birth, it was the nurses only.
They kept telling me, all during the final labor, to push as hard as I could. And believe me I did—I pushed so hard that the blood vessels in my face must have broken, because when Jack arrived the next morning he told me that I looked like I had the measles.
Our daughter Cecilia was born at one A.M. If it was a girl, Jack and I had decided that we would name her after my mother Cila. So our Cecilia arrived—alive and, as much as they could tell, basically healthy. I was exhausted and so
relieved.
Soon afterward the nurses transferred us into a postdelivery area that was really just a room filled with a dozen or so cots, close together. The main instruction they gave me was to lie flat on my back and not to move for twenty-four hours. Otherwise, they warned me, my uterus wouldn’t settle properly.
My baby fell asleep next to me. But suddenly, in the middle of the night, I felt something hot and warm between my legs. I touched there and it was thick with blood. I was terrified that I would bleed to death and that no nurse would hear me—because I didn’t have the strength to yell, and I had been told not to move no matter what. It kept going through my mind that if something happened, my baby would have no mother.
But a nurse did come by, and when she examined me she explained that I was all right—the blood and tissue between my legs was only a piece of afterbirth that had not come out during the delivery. During the night it just slid out on its own. The nurse replaced the bloody sheet beneath me with a clean one, and that was it.
I stayed in that postdelivery room for a few days, mostly lying on my back. That was the standard procedure for new mothers back then. I kept looking around me at the other new mothers on their cots in the room. I had my visits from Jack, from Ronke and Sofka, but almost none of the other women had any visitors at all. They were young German girls who should have had friends and family in the city. I couldn’t understand it.
Then, one morning, I saw that one of the German girls was preparing to go home. The nurse brought her baby over to her—and the girl started crying, pleading with the nurse to keep the baby, not to make her take it with her. She even tried to get away without the child. Finally, she left with her baby, but I was so confused that I asked the nurse what was going on.
She explained to me that many of the German girls in the ward had gotten pregnant by black American GIs. And in those days, just after the Nazi emphasis on racial purity, it was an absolute disgrace for German girls to bring mixed-race babies—mischlings, they were called—home to their families. They didn’t want the babies. In fact, so many of the girls tried to sneak out of the hospital without them that they finally had to place guards on duty to prevent it. Otherwise, the hospital would have been left with more abandoned babies than it could have taken care of.
JACK
Having Aunt Ronke there when we brought Rochelle home was wonderful. She taught us the basics of child care—helped us with bathing, cleaning, and taking care of Cecilia when she got colds and other ailments, which was very often.
That was probably due to the fact that our house was drafty and it was the middle of winter. The only heating we had came from a single stove on the main floor. The camp gave us limited supplies of wood and coal and that was it. Much of the wood was wet, and so you had to blow on it until you burst to get it started. Meanwhile, the house would be filling with smoke. So you had to open the window to let out the smoke—and there went much of the warmth. We would heat up water on the stove to bathe Cecilia.
Once a week we would wash diapers. They weren’t really diapers, just a bunch of cut-up rag strips, but we called them diapers anyway. The diapers were a special problem for us because they wouldn’t dry well in the winter air, and also because there was an extreme shortage of them in our camp. A lot of the time Cecilia just had to go without diapers. We would keep her in a high chair with a hole we had cut in the seat. Underneath was a bucket. That was the best we could do.
Fortunately, I had an aunt in Israel named Pola. She had moved to Israel back in the twenties, before all the misery started in Europe. We found out how to contact her and she was so kind to us—delighted that we were alive and had a new baby. Even though she was herself in need—economic conditions were terrible in Israel at that point—she sent some packages of diapers and baby clothes that were a great help to us.
We also needed to get supplies of powdered baby food. There was a terrible shortage of that as well. But again, having American cigarettes to trade came in handy. I went all over Munich knocking on doors and bartering for baby food.
Somehow Cecilia came through all that. She was sick a lot, but she was also a beautiful and loving baby. And Rochelle and I were parents together, as we had dreamed of being.
Since we had a real family, we wanted to emigrate to the West all the more. We registered with the HIAS agency to go to Israel, as did most of the people living in Nei Freimann. But things still looked difficult in that direction.
But we did find out, through the UNRRA officers, the address of Rochelle’s uncle Herman—her father’s brother who had emigrated to America after World War I, when he was only fourteen years old. He was a contact for us in America, and having such a contact could make it much easier for us to emigrate there. I should add that there were some Jews in America who showed kindness by signing up as sponsors for refugee Jews to whom they were not related—although that was the exception and not the rule.
We started a correspondence with Uncle Herman, who was at that time living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Eventually he agreed to sign some papers saying that he would be our sponsor. He would put us up when we first arrived and help us to find work as soon as possible.
ROCHELLE
During that time—the middle months of 1948—we received a very touching letter from Jack’s aunt Pola in Israel. She would have been willing to be our sponsor to emigrate there. The British restrictions were suddenly no longer a problem, since Israel had declared its independence in May 1948.
Pola knew we were thinking of Israel and considering going there even if we did obtain a visa to America. So she wrote us to say that, much as she loved Jack and would have welcomed us all there as family, the conditions were so difficult that she had to advise us not to come. Israel was in a state of constant military tension with its neighbors. Jack would have been back in combat again. Jobs and food were scarce.
For our own good, Pola told us, we should forget about her feelings and go to America. We would have a better life there. And that is what we decided.
JACK
After months of waiting, our visas were approved to emigrate to America. But there was one final requirement—Julius, Rochelle, and I all had to be checked out by the CIA to make sure that we weren’t criminals or Communists or otherwise unfit to become American citizens.
When we had first registered in the DP camps in Germany, we told the truth about our wartime experiences—that we had served in partisan units, including that of Zorin. Unfortunately, the Soviet influence over partisan efforts in Poland made the CIA suspicious of all partisans, including Jewish partisans, who applied to emigrate to America. The presumption was that if you were a partisan, then you were a Communist.
That was very difficult for us to deal with emotionally. We had fought against the Germans—as Jews—and it was being held against us. Fortunately, we were able to explain the truth of our situation to a sympathetic CIA officer. He assured us that there would be no problems for us, and he kept his word.
It was August 1949 when we got the good news that we could go. Immediately, we packed up our worthwhile belongings. Along with other Jewish refugees with visas, we would go together as a small group by train from Nei Freimann to Bremerhaven, a German port on the North Sea.
We were still worried that something would go wrong at the last minute. Our greatest concern was that Cecilia was not a very healthy baby. She had constant ear and throat infections and had troubles with digestion as well. We were afraid that some official might give us medical exams and then rule that an unhealthy baby like that could not emigrate to America—which of course would have meant that none of us would have gone.
There was a Jewish baby doctor in the Nei Freimann camp, but he didn’t have an adequate supply of medications. So we tried to find a German doctor whom we could trust. It was not so easy for us, given what we had heard about the medical experimentation in the death camps.
Concerning those death camps, it has to be understood that, while we were in the woods with
the partisans, neither Rochelle nor I—nor anyone else in our midst—knew the truth about the workings of those camps. We thought that Jews were being killed by localized mass murders of the ghetto populations, as had happened in Mir and Stolpce. There were rumors that reached us concerning the camps, but only rumors. It was while we were living in Lodz, after our liberation by the Soviets, that we started to hear the real stories, not only from Russian soldiers, but from some of the camp survivors as well. And then, in Nei Freimann, with so many Jewish refugees as our friends and neighbors, we heard many more stories of life in the camps. Survivors could talk most easily with fellow survivors. They knew that they would be believed and understood. What those Jews told us about what they had lived through made us realize that, compared to the camps, our life in the woods—terrible and difficult as it had been—was a great good fortune, a blessing.
ROCHELLE
At least, in the woods, we had a kind of freedom. We were hunted like animals, but we had succeeded in evading the Nazis, at least for the time being, and now and then we could fight back.
JACK
In Nei Freimann, one of the young men who worked with me in the administration office was a survivor of Auschwitz. He was a good looking man, and several of the refugee Jewish women in our DP camp were showing an obvious interest in him. But all of that changed when the news got out that there was no chance of starting up a family with that man.
He told me the story himself. He had been experimented on in Auschwitz by the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele. The history books record the butchery that Mengele called “medical research.” The young man was castrated by Mengele. He could not bring himself to be with a woman, and was living in agony. The option open to Rochelle and to me—to start a new family, a new life—was closed for him.
Jack and Rochelle Page 20
