by R. D. Rosen
Sophie ended up sitting on the sofa talking to the good-looking guy, who, she soon learned, was one of the rugged models used in the Marlboro Man cigarette advertising campaign. Instead of warning him about the carcinogenic properties of cigarettes, she found herself entranced by this six-foot figment of Madison Avenue’s imagination. She even got to hold his hand when he showed Sophie a splinter that she expertly removed. However, her burgeoning interest in him evaporated at his mention of a girlfriend.
“You’re very good at that,” David said, looking on.
“I’m known for my splinter removals,” Sophie replied.
His wound cleaned, the Marlboro Man excused himself, leaving David to Sophie, who soon interrogated him.
David Zaretsky had been born into a large immigrant Jewish family in South Bend, Indiana—it hadn’t occurred to Sophie that Indiana had Jews—that then moved to Brooklyn when he was three. Now he was a venture capitalist focusing on medical advances. He had served in the Korean War in counterintelligence in Germany, where his job, ironically, had been to visit displaced persons camps and try to identify the Communists among the Jews there. He happily considered himself a failure at this task—he had no interest in making any more trouble for the Jews—and was far more successful at hanging out with his Jewish buddies at a Munich café.
On the basis of this information, Sophie quickly calculated his age as forty or a bit older. When he asked about her, she confined her autobiographical comments to the fact that she was born in Poland. He didn’t press her for details then, or ever, really. Maybe, Sophie would eventually conclude, he couldn’t face her past himself.
When they parted, David told her, “I’m in the phone book.”
Sophie sighed inside; she felt that their comfort around each other warranted something a little more aggressive on his part. She stole another glance at his left hand to make doubly sure there wasn’t a wedding ring on it.
She didn’t hear from him, and after two weeks her colleague Marvin reassured her that he still thought David Zaretsky was a very good idea and told her to be patient. Actually, she hadn’t been able to get him out of her mind. When he finally did call, he proposed they double-date with another friend of his named Frank. Frank had nightclub tickets to see Leslie Uggams, who had recently finished hosting a season of The Leslie Uggams Show on CBS—the first black person to host a network variety show since Nat King Cole back in the 1950s.
A limousine came to pick her up. The only other limousine that had ever come for her had contained the Nazi Leming. Her doorman’s eyes popped when David emerged in formal wear and helped Sophie into the limo, where his friend Frank was sitting with a beautiful young Norwegian woman. Forewarned that they were going out on the town, Sophie wore a cocktail dress she’d bought in London under a short lynx coat made by a Polish furrier friend of the family in Canada.
The limo turned out to be on loan, but by the end of the evening, they were hooked. Three months later, when she met David’s family at Passover, her head reeled from all the siblings and cousins she encountered. She wasn’t used to big Jewish family gatherings, yet it seemed to be exactly what she was missing. The sudden death of David’s brother-in-law in September brought them still closer together. She took David to Canada to meet her mother, Aunt Putzi, and Putzi’s family. Sophie and David were soon inseparable. In December, David’s good friend Burke and his wife, Gini, from London, came to New York to stay at the Hotel Elysée on East Fifty-Fourth Street. After observing David and Sophie, Burke and Gini asked the two of them, “Why aren’t you getting married? Look, David, you were the best man at my wedding, and if you want me to be the best man at yours, I strongly suggest you get married in the next ten days, before we go back to London.”
Why not, indeed? David had what Sophie craved: a great feel for family and friends, and plenty of both. Everyone who seemed to come into David’s orbit remained there. He made her laugh, he was loving and could show his love, something Sophie didn’t know how to do, but which she suspected he could teach her. And it didn’t hurt that he wrote her romantic poems, especially since Sophie hardly thought of herself as romantic.
Suddenly the wedding machinery was in frantic motion. David’s newly widowed sister Mollie drowned her grief by organizing the entire event with the help of her three daughters—Ellen, Ilyne, and Debbie. Her brother Bill owned a catering company and wedding facility on Long Island, with an open date on December 19, the day before David’s friends were scheduled to return to London. Mollie supplied her own rabbi, Saks Fifth Avenue supplied the dress, a jeweler named Arthur King supplied the wedding rings. Without a formal proposal, without ever having discussed whether to have children, without even much of a chance to get to know each other’s bad habits, David Zaretsky and Sophie Turner, née Selma Schwarzwald/Zofia Tymejko, were married. In the insane rush of it all, they forgot to eat at their own wedding and had to stop for sustenance at a diner in Queens on their way to the honeymoon suite at the Hotel Elysée that David’s friend, the owner, had donated for the night.
They were both back at work on Monday (the honeymoon in Mexico came a month later). In 1972 and 1973, they had two sons, Daniel and Jeffrey. In the mid-1970s, Sophie left Albert Einstein for Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, and they moved from Manhattan to Neponsit, an exclusive neighborhood on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. She stayed at Long Island College Hospital until 1985, when she took a job at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, Long Island, and their family moved to nearby Great Neck, one of the most Jewish suburbs in America.
Sophie saw her mother regularly now. Before Sophie met David, they were both single, lonely, and ecstatic to be together again. Laura would come down to New York from Montreal to see the sights and take the Circle Line Sightseeing Cruise around Manhattan. Sophie would fly to meet her in Canada for car trips to Niagara Falls and the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Laura had always loved nature and was interested in all forms of culture, but it was the art of enjoying life that she practiced best, and they talked and laughed their way through New York’s wine country. Laura started to travel widely and once, in Israel, discovered by chance her only living relative on her husband’s side, a niece named Aliza Schwarzwald Bar, who had been hidden by Polish peasants and lost both her parents. Aliza was almost exactly Sophie’s age, but she had always known she was Jewish, and after the war had made it to Palestine, where she became a prominent educator.
“I always had this problem with not knowing where I came from,” Sophie had told her cousin Alice several years before. “It was like being a person with a void around her, except for my mother, which was a saving thing because she’s a very strong person and I think she somehow managed to direct me in some way. That I was able to function, that I didn’t crack up or anything like that, like a lot of people have. So I think it’s to her credit, really, that she kept things going the way she did.” There was no telling how far Laura Turner would have gone had she not had the misfortune to be a Polish Jew in the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century. She spoke five languages fluently—Polish, German, English, French, Yiddish—and she could get by in a sixth, Hebrew.
When Sophie became eligible for citizenship by 1968, she was entitled to bring her mother to the States on a visa, but her mother was ensconced in Montreal and Sophie was single and still not committed to staying in America. By 1971, however, Sophie, married and settled in New York, brought her sixty-two-year-old mother to the city, where David had found her a bookkeeping job at a Wall Street firm. She moved into Sophie’s old studio apartment in the same Upper West Side complex where Sophie and David and their two sons lived. She followed the first job with another at Merrill Lynch, where she handled international accounts. She was so efficient that, on retiring, she had to be replaced with two full-time employees. Avid about learning, Laura made full use of Manhattan’s educational institutions and also began auditing courses at Hunter College in Manhattan—linguistics, art history, comparative rel
igions, and philosophy.
Sophie and her mother were once again in each other’s daily life, but they kept one secret from each other, and it was the same one: what had happened during the war, and that they each endured their separate realities during those years. Once in a great while, Laura would gently broach the subject of their lives in Poland, but Sophie didn’t want to hear about it. Sophie had learned too well from her mother how to put the past behind her and move forward. She avoided movies and books about the Holocaust, limiting her knowledge of World War II to a single volume, Herman Wouk’s Winds of War. As for psychiatry, that was for others. By 1970, history’s greatest genocide was already the subject of numerous books and movies, remembrance days and academic conferences, even caricature and satire. But it was a subject that Sophie knew almost nothing about.
Sophie had met only a few other hidden child survivors by chance in the New York City area. A fellow resident named Ruth Rosenblatt, herself a survivor, introduced her to a former hidden child she thought Sophie would like. Sophie and Flora Hogman hit it off immediately. The two women were joined not just by history, but also by a similarly wry sense of humor. They also shared something else: frustratingly impaired memories of their childhoods. Sophie referred to her brain as “Swiss cheese.” Flora just liked to say that she couldn’t remember anything.
They met often, including at Flora’s holiday parties, where they practiced equal-opportunity holiday singing, mixing Christmas carols and Hanukkah songs, with some Japanese songs thrown in out of respect for Flora’s Japanese companion, Naka. Yet their bond was real: two child survivors who had been in their forties before they could grieve at last for the little girls who had almost died and who could do nothing to save the parents and relatives who did.
In the spring of 1991, when Flora told Sophie she had been asked to lead a workshop at the Gathering, Sophie decided to attend after all.
Carla’s husband, Ed Lessing, now a sixty-four-year-old graphic designer with a full head of curly brown hair and a short beard tinged with gray, had fought attending the gathering harder than anyone, even though his wife had spent much of the past year helping to make it all happen.
“Aren’t you coming?” Carla had asked him just ten days before, realizing that he’d yet to make a commitment.
“Naw,” he’d told her. “Why should I come? And what would I do there? You’re going to be busy and I will just have to hang around until it’s over.” As far as Ed was concerned, Carla was the Holocaust survivor—or “hidden child,” the new magical term that the media had seized upon. The television networks had already been out to the Lessings’ carriage house in a suburb of the city to interview them while they sat on the new swing set with their grandchildren—the grandchildren who never would have existed had the two of them not been sheltered and saved by Christian strangers.
“Don’t you think it will seem a little strange, Ed, if you’re not there?” Carla said. “The husband of one of the organizers? When you’re also one of us?”
He was still not convinced.
“My own brother is coming from Israel especially for the conference, Ed,” Carla added. “It would be nice if you could be with him.”
Ed relented. Had he not suffered too—suffered in many ways more than his wife?
The remarkable thing, Ed thought, watching the hidden child survivors at the hotel, was the power of repression and denial, and the fear of touching old wounds. Ed had behaved for the entire last year as though none of it concerned him. What did he have in common with these miserable survivors? He prided himself on not being one of these people who came from Poland or Russia and could barely speak English. He had his own graphics design business right here in New York City. In any case, he was, perhaps understandably, not much of an optimist; his philosophy was that he’d seen it all, and the rest was going to be “a repetition of the same damn thing.”
Ed hung out near the registration desk on the seventh floor of the Marriott in Times Square, curious to see what kind of people would show up at the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II. They poured out of the elevators, balding men and freshly coiffed women, most of them in their fifties, with a few, like Ed and Carla, in their sixties and a smattering of people in their forties, born during the war. He stood to the side and watched as they registered at a long table, received their packets, their meal tickets, and pinned their name tags to their shirts and blouses. They looked quizzically at their programs and stopped by tables selling Holocaust-related books. One table, soliciting oral histories of the attendees, belonged to the not-yet-opened United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Within minutes, they were turning to one another, forming clusters, shaking hands, peering at name tags, hugging. The conversations bubbled with a variety of accents and languages. Ed clung to his pride, indulging his lifelong tendency to stand apart and observe. He stood in wonder as some men and women began to cry, their defenses needing only the sight of other hidden children to give way. The air was alive with something hard to describe: a mix of sorrow, history, humanity, connection, and release. Ed inched closer and squinted behind his eyeglasses to see what was on some of the name tags: not just their names, but beneath them, “Hidden in Poland,” “Hidden in France,” “Hidden in Hungary.”
Ed realized that he was looking at the greatest rebuke to Hitler’s evil. The Nazis had murdered Jewish children with an unconscionable single-mindedness and thoroughness. As Himmler pointed out to senior SS officers in 1943, there was no point in “eradicating the men” yet “allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons.” But he had missed a few, and here they were.
Ed blinked and saw not a confusion of middle-aged men and women, but the frightened children they had all once been. In an instant, he crossed over the border from aloofness and began to cry with the rest of them for their losses, and for all the other children who had perished. The dead too had been hidden children; they just hadn’t been hidden long enough. As for the living, they had come so close to death in so many cellars and closets and convents and fields all over Europe, and yet somehow they had all ended up together after forty-five years, members of a secret society of silence, a diaspora that had gone unnoticed and unknown for decades.
I never knew there were so many like me, Ed thought. Everyone he saw was so intimately acquainted with death, harboring a story so implausible, so sad, so haunting, that strangers couldn’t be trusted with it. He was embarrassed. Had it not been for his wife being one of the organizers, he wouldn’t have come. He would have stayed home, safe in his bubble of forgetting.
Bulletin boards had been set up as a central clearinghouse for information of all kinds:
“I am looking for Michel and Paul R. from Antwerp. . . . we were hiding in the same Flemish village: Belsele . . .”
“Pour Sara F. nous étions aussi à Trelon au Sanotorium . . .”
“If you were hiding in Charleroi, 1942–45 . . .”
“I am looking for the name and address of the convent where I was hidden. Can you please help me find it?”
“If you were in the convent of Egletons . . .”
“Looking for Clara S. living in Bucharest during the war. Call me . . .”
“Spent 1941–44 in Transnistria Labor/concentration camp. . . . Looking to meet anyone from Chernowitz or Transnistria . . .”
“Looking for classmates from Constantza Romania 1942–44 Jewish community school . . .”
“I am searching for survivors of the family of Philippe D (Austria) . . .”
“I am looking for my sister Celeste J. . . . She was badly wounded in August 1941, in Zaliesciche, Poland, in the crossfire between the Germans and the Polish forces. I last saw her in the town’s hospital—but the next day I was deported and never saw her again. . . . God bless you for your help in finding my long-lost sister. . . .”
“To anyone who was in Theresienstadt . . . did you know at that time a
woman named . . . ?”
On another board were copies of an assortment of notes and letters Jews had tossed out of the cattle cars on the way to the camps, in the hope that they would reach loved ones: “We are going to Poland to work,” one said. “Do not worry about us.”
Ed—and Carla and Flora and Sophie—sat in the hotel ballroom with the others, listening to the Gathering’s opening remarks by Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, the Gathering’s godparent organization. Foxman talked about hidden children’s “struggle to be with other people.” He spoke of the “pressures building over the years. . . . As our presence here demonstrates today, we can be silent no more. Our presence proclaims the need to speak, to bear witness, to remember the monstrous past that robbed us of our childhoods, and that has cast a shadow on our lives ever since.”
The unbearable randomness of it all hung over the proceedings like a disturbing cloud. The attendees could spend their entire lifetimes trying to ascribe meaning to the events that had marked the difference between their lives and the others’ deaths, and get nowhere at all. How was it that, in Holland, a country that lost three-quarters of its Jewish population, Carla and her immediate family had survived? Why had Flora reached middle age while her mother had not and her best friend Rachel would forever remain an eight-year-old girl with her hand raised at a school desk in Nice, France? What explained the fact that, in the midst of state-sponsored mass murder, Sophie and her mother had stayed alive in Poland under the noses of the very men who wanted to kill them?
MY NAME MAY HAVE BEEN MIRIAM
The most famous child survivor of the Holocaust in the 1950s was not Anne Frank—after all, she didn’t survive—but a young woman named Hannah Bloch Kohner.
