The Holocaust Kid

by Sonia Pilcer

  “Yes, yes—” I said impatiently.

  “Not even a moment for your mommy?”

  “I’ve got to go.” My voice was becoming ugly, the one I hated. After all the resolutions: What she went through, how she suffered. I could never have survived. I mustn’t make my mother suffer more.

  “Anyway, I’ll be Speedy Gonzalez since you’ve become such an important person,” she said. “We were talking and she asked me if you wouldn’t mind using her name for one of the stories. That way she could see her name in print. I mean, of course, if you use your name, that’s something else. But if you’re going to make up Louise Colet, why not Fela Brumstein? Or even, for that matter, why not Genia Radon?”

  At first, Liz swore to herself that she would never tell him about her child, afraid that it would destroy her marriage. How she cried nights as he slept peacefully! “God, can you ever forgive me?” She prayed in the silence of the night. Finally, she could no longer keep it inside of herself. Richard had to know the truth. But would he ever come back to her?

  / / /

  Eventually all my stories were signed with the names of my mother’s Polski platoon. But my most frequent pseudonym—once even receiving a note from a befuddled Glenn Ford thanking her for a stimulating interview, which, of course, never took place except in my imagination—was Genia Radon, my mother’s maiden name.

  DISPLACED PERSONS

  I am especially happy to be in a Jewish camp on the holiest day of your year. For the time being, you are here and you must be patient until the day comes when you can leave for whatever destination is yours. The U.S. Army is here to help you. And it must rest with you to maintain good order and friendly relations with the established authorities. I know how much you have suffered and I believe there is still a bright day ahead for you.

  —General Dwight David Eisenhower

  Landsberg, Germany

  September 1945

  Genia wheeled a baby carriage past the gray military barracks of “the Miracle of Landsberg.” Though it was better than the Berlin camp, where they had lived for six months after leaving Poland, it was still no paradise. She and Heniek had been in Landsberg for four years, waiting for papers to come to America.

  After the war, these camps sheltered thousands of “displaced persons,” refugees whose families had been killed. They had nowhere to go. Most had little in common except memories that haunted them and gnawing desperation, speaking a Babel of tongues, and more kept arriving. Some were very sick. But they were young and recuperated quickly. Children who had found each other during the war continued to run together like packs of mongrels. Couples still mourning dead spouses and murdered children were marrying again in improvised ceremonies. Pregnant women waddled with huge bellies. Babies sprang up everywhere. Landsberg had one of the biggest baby booms in history.

  The American Jewish Joint Committee, committed to “rebuilding Jewish lives and Jewish life,” aided Landsberg with its own hospital, orphanage, and nursery. There was a library, a synagogue with a Talmud printed on German soil and inscribed in Hebrew, “From Slavery to Redemption.” There were cooking and tailoring classes, trade schools, even a kibbutz with an agricultural training center for Zionists who would emigrate to Palestine. Youth and sports groups competed, theater and orchestras performed in the social hall, where American movies were shown weekly.

  As Genia walked by the barbed-wire gate, she passed a handwritten sign: TRADING HELPS THE GERMANS AND ONLY BLACKENS THE JEWISH NAME.

  The city of Landsberg was just outside the camp. Stately old German houses, painted brown and white with red cobbled roofs, butchers, tailor shops, konditerai with all kinds of sweets, cafes and restaurants, mountains on the horizon.

  What Genia noticed, though, were the others like herself. DPs, refugees from death and disease, who wore similar dresses, having received surplus fabrics from America. DPs walked with stiff postures down the street but turned around frequently, as if pursued, anticipating attack, arrest for an unmentionable crime, or perhaps being found by a loved one who by some perverse quirk lives. Genia looked straight ahead, her mouth pursed against hope.

  Thema Rosenkrantz discovered her sister, Esther, long thought dead, at the Tausgescheft. She had come for salt. Esther was trading a chipped teapot for vinegar. Thema began to scream. Her dark hair was blond so Esther did not recognize her, and she had grown fat. Suddenly, she knew her sister. Dropping the glass bottle of vinegar, she ran to embrace her. You could smell vinegar for days.

  Genia wheeled her carriage past German mothers with their baby carriages. Genia sidled up to them, close, as if inviting intimacy. She complimented the unsuspecting mother as she peered inside the woman’s carriage—the beauty of her baby, the fineness of her embroidery stitch. Glowing, the German woman was proud. Only then did Genia lure her to her own carriage. She stood back to observe the effect. How she exulted in that moment! That it could last forever! The surprise on the woman’s face! Stunned, the mother clutched the edge of Genia’s carriage, abandoning her own for several moments.

  “What a beauty! Exquisite. The eyes—” Genia dropped her eyes modestly. “Like the mother.”

  “They gasp,” she said after the woman walked away, “At the sight of you, my miracle. They lose their breath. Oh, you’re going to have a blessed life.” She sighed loudly. “Not like your momma’s.”

  The old clock in the stone tower struck two. The archway below it led to Augsburgstrasse.

  So much sadness and loss. But now Genia has her reward. Zosha’s photograph, the biggest picture in such an expensive golden frame, in the window of Herr Kruger’s photo shop.

  She peered into the window and only incidentally caught her own reflection, admiring her teeth. “My little one,” she whispered. “No one has eyes like you, although everyone admires mine too. Eyes are so important. After a while, they were all I recognized when I saw my face.”

  Genia thought of the photograph on her father’s roll-top desk. It showed her handsome mother, Zosia, with thick dark hair heaped in an upswept hairdo; dignified, stuffy Tata, her father, with his pompous mustache, pince-nez, and carved meerschaum pipe. Baby brother Jesse’s girlish brown curls uncut over his plump face. And Genia, the spoiled gymnazium student in the pleated skirt, white blouse, and navy blazer with her Jewish school’s emblem. Genia’s expression was serious, unsmiling, because her teeth were crooked.

  Herr Kruger stepped outside, startling Genia. “Frau Palovsky, you come to look at the picture again? Some people ask about it.”

  “Is that so?” she asked softly.

  “Yes. Actually today a woman walked in, who was it? I forget. But she said your daughter looks like that child actress in American movies. What is her name?”

  Genia took a deep breath. “Try to remember. Please, Herr Kruger.”

  “I don’t know American movies.”

  “Was it by any chance—Elisabet Tailor?”

  He paused thoughtfully. “Yes. I think that’s the one. Such a pretty girl, your Zosha.” He leaned over the carriage. “May I?” He started to lift the veil.

  “No!” Genia cried out in horror. “The baby is sleeping, Herr Kruger.”

  He drew back. “Excuse me.”

  “Oh, no.” Genia tried to mollify him. “It’s just that she wasn’t well in the morning.”

  “I’m so sorry. And now?”

  “Like a piece of gold.” She paused for a moment. “Herr Kruger, I was wondering if you could be so kind as to give me one more copy of the picture—for my uncle in America—”

  “Frau Palovsky, I’ve already given you half a dozen. Out of my own pocket, which I have to pay for—”

  “But you yourself said that people come into your shop and ask—” she implored, her eyes meeting his, unrelenting. “You know, after the war, it is all I have, so little—”

  He shook his head pitifully. “It’s very difficult for all of us now. We lost family too. My brother, Ulrich, was a Communist. They took him to Dachau.”


  “I’m so sorry.” She waited a moment, then asked, “Just one photograph?”

  “For you, I’ll make two. But no more.”

  She offered him her loveliest smile. “Thank you.”

  After returning inside, he turned to look at her. She remained standing outside.

  “He thinks he can touch you, just like that, with his gentile fingers. I’ll never let anyone harm you.”

  Genia bent over the carriage, lifted the veil, picking up the baby.

  “That’s you, darling. Can you see? In the center. Look, will you!” She stepped closer to the window. As she spoke her breath steamed the glass. “Did you hear what the man said? Someone told it to him. In America, they have a movie star who is a child. Elisabet Tailor. I knew it when they showed the film in the camp. Nation Velvet. Such a strange name, no? She could be your sister. The same eyes and hair. I swear it. Do you see? Pay attention, Zosha. Right there, in the gold frame. Next to the nothing bride.”

  The baby reached out to touch the hard and shiny glass. She left five dots like a paw mark. Above it, Genia traced Z-O-S-H-A in the steam. As it unwrote itself in a broken string of pearls, she sighed. “As I stand here, I just know it. Your life will be special.”

  Herr Kruger watched as the young mother crossed the street, wheeling the carriage. His eyes followed until she turned the corner. He took out a plaid handkerchief, fresh with the smell of bleach, and wiped his face. Shaking his head, he walked back into the back of his store to search for the negatives of the baby’s portrait.

  “To the post office, Zosha, before it closes. Maybe there’s a letter,” Genia said. From someone she hasn’t thought of. Forgotten. Resurrected from ashes, eyeglasses smashed, her father’s were gold-rimmed, slipping down his face as he fell asleep over Nowa Gazeta. A check from HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

  She stood in line with the carriage. There were many ahead of her. And only one clerk, a young German with wire-framed glasses, sheets of paper wrapped around each of his cuffs with rubber bands. So neat, the Germans. He was slow and stupid, fumbling through stacks of letters. As she waited, she began to fidget, staring toward the front of the line. It was so far away. How she hated to stand in lines. They should never make her endure this again after all the lines, for runny soup of turnip and potato peels, her crust of bread, to go to the pushka, when they allowed her. And now she must wait again. How can they do this to her? Don’t they know? There should be a special line for those who suffered. How she watched Momma, Tata, her baby brother, Jesse, stolen from her. How a freak of a predilection, her mother’s white kerchief, saved her life.

  Genia stared at the others ahead of her. Germans. A young woman, about her age, wearing a good woolen suit. Did she wipe toilets? Subsist on garbage? And what of the gentleman in front of her who holds his hat in his hand? Such a gentleman with such good manners. Was he so well-mannered when he informed on a Jewish business to be rewarded in kind? Her father’s shop—even the mayor’s deputy came to buy material for a new suit before the war. And the elderly man. How many Nazis did he raise? How much she hated, wishing cholera to overcome every last one of them, so they’d die violent, undignified deaths like everyone she loved.

  Mustn’t think these things, she scolded herself. Madness lay there like a soft bed. Mirka Abramson was taken to the hospital because her nightmares woke everyone in the barracks. Even afternoons, the sun an unbroken yolk outside the window, she wouldn’t stop screaming.

  Finally. Genia gave her name, pronouncing slowly so that he would understand. “P-A-L-O-V-S-K-Y. P like Piotrkow.” He leafed through the stack of P’s. “American Zone,” she added quietly. He looked up at her, curious as a viper.

  “Frau Palovsky, Heniek?” he asked, holding a letter with an official stamp on the envelope.

  “Yes, this is me,” she answered in her halting German Yiddish.

  She handed him her identity card. He returned it to her, with the letter. She wheeled the carriage to a corner where she ripped open the envelope in alarm.

  Immediately, she spotted the words GENERAL HERSEY. Bremenhaven. To leave on the ship, General Hersey. United States of America. She lost her breath. Permission to go to America. It had come. . . .

  America of refrigerators that light up like a theater with every kind of food to imagine, hot running water, and bathtubs like swimming pools. Private toilets too. Saving money, waiting to be sponsored. Genia had even sewn a jacket with padded shoulders exactly like Barbara Stanwyck’s.

  As she walked home, the letter folded in the zippered compartment of her pocketbook, she began her packing. Seeing herself wrap each precious piece of the Rosenthal china set in newspaper. Her Pfaff sewing machine with leg pedal. Her meat grinder, her black iron pots, the silver menorah. There was no weight limit. Her featherbed and down pillows, folding the double-button blanket cover, her embroidered pillowcases, the lace tablecloth, and the kitchen towels.

  Genia gazed down into the carriage. “We’re going to America,” she whispered excitedly, bending over to adjust the baby’s blanket.

  She found her way back to the old stone tower. Half past three. Soon Heniek will be home.

  Genia wheeled the carriage past the sign, TRADING HELPS THE GERMANS AND ONLY BLACKENS THE JEWISH NAME, into the camp.

  Inside the barracks, a thin wall separated their part from the Haupsteins and their two boys. Immediately, Genia was nauseated by the stench of Rena’s soup, bratwurst and cabbage. Worse than the hasag! And her nagging voice, which was loud and crude. Genia knocked on the wall. “Please, can you be a little quiet? My Zosha is sleeping.”

  For a moment, there was silence. Then Rena said so everyone could hear, “Who does she think she is, Pani Palovsky with her airs? I don’t care who your father was and your stinking apartment on Mokotowska. You’re here and have the same nothing we have.”

  Genia wouldn’t answer her, the pig who is common. America! America! She chanted the magic word as she carried the big iron pot to the coal-burning stove. “We’ll have our own apartment with a private toilet,” she whispered.

  She lifted the baby gently, placing her on their mattress. “Did you make a kaka?” She checked the diaper. “No! What a good girl. We’ll try later but first, mleko. You must be hungry, my little blue eyes.”

  She unbuttoned her flowered shift. All the women have such dresses because HIAS gave them the material from America. But hers with pearl buttons was the finest. Mother taught her how to sew, the silver needle darting in and out of her lap like a dragonfly. Genia stepped out of the dress, in just her silk slip, blue as the veins in Heniek’s strong arms and legs. If no one knew, she knew that it was real silk against her skin, even if the flowered dresses walked all over Landsberg. She unhooked her brassiere, then picked the baby up, drawing her to her right breast with its swollen nipple. It was fat with milk.

  “Drink, my love,” she crooned, easing her nipple into the baby’s mouth.

  Genia imagined a cave of tongue and teeth. A body of water waiting for the diver to split its mirrored skin. Heniek! So handsome. A jet of warmth shot through her body. Rena was screaming at her husband, Bolek, but she no longer heard. Mother and daughter were lost in each other’s embrace. White, milky bliss.

  A man could, of course, enter. Sometimes he did, the stranger, the one who traveled and traded money, counting in guttural Yiddish. He was always dark. Often he bore gifts. Now there was only the island of skin, the fields of nippled milk.

  Afterward, the baby chortled with Genia’s lovely soprano. Drawing her hands together, she sang, “Clap hands, clap hands till Daddy comes home. Daddy has money and Momma has none. Clap hands, clap hands.”

  While she peeled carrots, sliced onions to add to yesterday’s stew, how he likes, the baby played on the rug she had woven from rags.

  When she finished, she lifted the baby up. “Time for you to show Momma what a big girl you are.”

  The baby sat dumbly on the wooden baby seat, looking around as Genia made stra
ining sounds to give her the idea.

  “You’re lucky you have a toilet. Look, how clean and easy. I had to make in a can, when they let me.”

  The baby began to bounce restlessly, kicking her legs. Genia tightened her grip. “You’re not going anywhere.” She shook her. “I won’t change diapers in America.”

  Zosha began to cry. “Oh no!” Genia picked her up, kissing her legs, and placed her gently into her crib.

  Good. Zosha lay quiet. Heniek’s stew on a low fire. Genia took out the basket of strawberries. Truskawki! A sinful amount she paid at the market, but they’d dazzled her. Spending her pin money so she could have them. He’d be angry. She emptied several perfect berries into a white bowl, hiding the basket behind the wardrobe where it was cool. She rinsed them, then sprinkled sugar like snow so they would bleed their thick syrup. Being truly wicked, she pulled out her left breast, the one that Zosha neglected, squeezing her nipple until the milk frothed, spraying into the bowl of strawberries. Red, succulent. Tasting sweeter because she knows it is her own milk. Greedily, she sucked the roundness, then bit into the berry, its juice sluicing inside her mouth. Oh, good, good. Errant drops like rubies.

  Just then, she heard his steps outside. Doesn’t want to stop but doesn’t want him to know her secret. He’ll crush it with the heel of his shoe. No time, no money for such stupid things. So she swallowed them whole and they were gone, the berries whole in her belly like precious stones.

  Heniek entered silently, hanging up his brown corduroy jacket, worn at the elbows, the pockets stretched so they flapped unhappily.

  She noticed but said nothing. Instead, she threw her arms around his neck girlishly.

  “Heniek, I have such good news—” she began excitedly.

  He walked over to the stove, warming his hands. “Is supper ready?”

  The stew! She had forgotten. Running to the stove, she lifted the lid. “Oh, no!” She screamed, dropping it. The lid crashed on the floor.

  “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you make a decent meal without burning it? What else did you have to do today?”