The Holocaust Kid

by Sonia Pilcer

  “But I have such news. Wait until you hear!”

  “I don’t care about any news now. I’m hungry. Understand? I’ve been working since six in the morning. Chleb!”

  “Yes, yes. Just a moment.” She took out a loaf from the breadbox. “Look, fresh from the baker. Smell how fresh. Rye bread, you wanted.”

  He snatched the loaf from her, breaking off a piece with his hands.

  “Wait! What are you doing? Use a knife, Heniek.”

  He bit into the thick piece, teeth like fangs. “What about the meat?”

  “I only have two hands. Just a minute.”

  “I don’t see what you have better to do that you can’t prepare my supper so I can have it when I come home and not have to beg for my food. Is that too much to ask?”

  Genia placed a plate with stew before him. “Only the bottom burnt,” she said softly.

  He dipped the bread into the sauce, slurping as he chewed with his mouth open.

  She carried a plate for herself and sat down next to him.

  “Did you have a good day?” she asked.

  He shrugged, shoulders heavy as bricks.

  “Today I went to the post office—” she began again but he was rapt, his passion inside his plate. He tore off another piece of bread, wiping the curved rim with the crust. She had stopped eating and watched as the gravy ran down his chin. Finally, she said, “I wish you would use the knife.”

  He pushed the meat with the bread into his mouth.

  “It’s only good manners,” she added.

  “Let them have their good manners. I’ll eat in my own home how I feel like it.” To punctuate his words, he banged on the table with the bread knife.

  “Don’t,” she urged “The baby . . . ”

  His eyes gladdened as if he had suddenly remembered. “My little girl!” Swallowing the meat-soaked piece of bread, he rushed over to the crib. “Asleep like a challah. Come on, say hello to your daddy.” He leaned over to pick up the baby.

  Genia tried to pull him away. “She just fell asleep, Heniek.”

  “The only time I ever see her, she’s sleeping. I want to play with my daughter.” His arms reached into the crib. The animals began to spin. “Look, she has a dimple in her chin like her father.”

  “Heniek, don’t you want to finish supper?”

  He picked up the baby gently, unsure of how to hold such a creature, so small. But warm and soft. He ran his fingers over the white down on her face. “Like a kitten,” he whispered. “The fingers with their tiny nails.”

  Startled, the baby began to cry.

  “Don’t cry, kindeleh,” he pleaded.

  “I told you not to wake her up,” Genia scolded. “Now she’s going to cry and we won’t have any peace.”

  “Ssssh, Zosha,” Heniek said gently, puckering his lips as if he were mirroring the baby’s mouth. “Don’t you know your daddy?”

  “Give her to me,” Genia said, reaching out.

  “How’s my little girl?” he asked.

  He bent over to kiss the baby’s cheek. “Do you know your father loves you?” His lips softly touched her face, but the bristles of his beard cut her like a thousand splinters of glass. The baby shrieked with pain.

  “Stop crying,” he begged. “Zoshka, don’t you know me?”

  Genia screamed in horror. “What are you doing to her?”

  “I won’t hurt you,” he whispered helplessly. “Please. Do you hear? All she ever does is cry when I try to play with her. For God’s sake, Genia, stop her from crying!”

  Her face was hot with tears. Genia rocked the baby in her arms. “All right, my love. Momma won’t let anything hurt her baby.”

  Genia watched as Heniek read the letter, eyes ripping across the page, tripping on an English phrase, brows crushing each other, continuing. They drank tea from the white Rosenthal cups.

  He folded the letter, placing it on the table.

  “So it’s good, Heniek. No? America!” Pronounced like notes of a musical scale.

  He leaned back in the chair, sighing loudly. “Boje, Boje.” God, God. He repeated the word. “Boje!”

  “America, Heniek. Finally we can go. Isn’t it great news?”

  He looked at her as at a child, nodding to placate her.

  “It’s what we’ve wanted,” she insisted. “Aren’t you happy?”

  His voice was grave. “I have to make some money.”

  “But we have what we saved. Not much, but a little.”

  The chair swung back to an upright position, his shoes striking the floor. “What do you know? Gelt. We need gelt.”

  “What about—” she began gingerly, trying not to make him angry. “What we’ve saved? Powdered eggs and milk, not using all the meat coupons—”

  “Bupkes!” He blew up, as she feared he would, as he always did. “Not enough to buy a cup of coffee in your America!”

  “What are you talking about? I thought that—”

  “That what? You thought we’re millionaires like your father?”

  “He wasn’t a million—” She protested, but does he hear?

  “There’s not enough. Do you understand?” he raged. “I have to make more money. Do you understand?” He opened his hand and stared into the palm.

  “There’s work in America,” she assured him.

  He turned to her. “The Jewish agencies put you up for a few months and then if you don’t have a job, you starve. And don’t think it is so easy to get a job. I have to do something.”

  “Uncle Lolek could help—”

  “I don’t need your family.”

  As she poured water into their cups, she suggested, “Maybe I could work.”

  “You?” He laughed. “You can’t do nothing.”

  “I can sew.”

  He looked at her indulgently. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Not dangerous, Heniek.” She approached behind his chair, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You know how nervous I get, that I can’t sleep . . . ”

  Rancor spent, Heniek’s face was boyish, gentle as a glove. He stood up, pushing the chair to the side. Moving behind her, he embraced her waist, his hands moving over the splendid roundness of her hips.

  “What time of the month is it?”

  Her neck flushed with blood, a red continent rising to her cheeks. “Oh, Heniek! Now? The pot—”

  He took her hand, which was full of soapsuds.

  / / /

  The baby awakes to noises. The room nearly dark. A big black shape, huge and monstrous. The blanket flies away. Momma! A man’s back, white, glowing, rises up over her. Daddy! Momma is reaching out to him. “America!” she cries.

  “PASKUDNYAK”

  Paskudnyak: From Polish/Ukranian, a man or woman who is nasty, mean, odious, contemptible, rotten, vulgar, insensitive, and dirty.

  We live in Brooklyn, America. 24 Park Place. Crowned Heights. That’s what I was supposed to tell a person if I got lost. My mother worried about losing me like a loose button on her blue cardigan sweater.

  Our building was a dark tenement with a bomb shelter and the sign NO LOITERING, NO SPITTING, NO PLAYING BALL. From early morning until it got dark, the big children played Chinese handball against the wall while we chased each other in and out of alleyways. Everyone talked about the Dodgers. The Franklin Avenue shuttle thundered above us.

  My father worked in a knitting mill in another state, New Jersey. His fellow workers on the machines, beer-drinking Americans, spoke neither Polish, Yiddish, German, nor even Russian, all of which he knew, so he had to learn English. In his freshly laundered T-shirt, all could see the blue numbers B48356 swell on the inside of his forearm as Heniek forced a loose bolt into the scalding maw.

  All day, Genia’s silver needle imposed order, repaired broken seams, worn elbows and knees, created lively imitations of what she saw in shop windows. “Hello, young lover, whoever you are . . . ” She sang Hit Parade tunes as she sewed. “Shrink boats are a-coming . . . ”

  A n
eighbor, Mrs. Pellini, often dropped in for a cup of instant coffee. “Can you please to let out a little at the waist—God save me. I eat too much!—raise the hem, move over the buttons.” My mother called it her pin money and hid the dollars in her private drawer, where she kept her cultured pearls and her father’s cigarette case. Whenever Heniek objected to something she bought, Genia raised the specter of her pin money. He responded that she couldn’t ride the subway with what she earned.

  In the spring, she sewed matching cotton dresses for us. Truskawki, strawberries printed on a white background, the sleeves and waist finished with red velvet piping. As we modeled before the full-length mirror on the closet door, she cried in delight, “Look, Zosha, we’re exactly the same.” On a Sunday afternoon when the sun lit even our street in the subway’s shadow, we wore our identical dresses to the Botanical Gardens. My father took pictures with his Leica from Germany as mother and daughter posed like movie stars under a blossoming cherry tree.

  / / /

  In lieu of living family, my parents belonged to a large network of Polish Jews. All were survivors. Their names were music notes, the ladies of the arbeit-lager: Lola, Stella, Minka, Ruzha, Fela, Blanca, Lusia, Manusha.

  Every second Wednesday, they played canasta in our living room. As they tossed bright plastic chips and picked up cards, blue numbers flashing on the insides of their arms, the stories multiplied.

  “Pish, posh. I knew Mushka in the camp when she wasn’t such a fancy lady. She cleaned toilets with the rest of us.”

  “If Bolek hadn’t given me his piece of bread, I wouldn’t be here. Lucky me, I was dealt two red threes!”

  I understood Polish, so none of it escaped me as I played with my mother’s box of buttons under the mahogany coffee table. It had books about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and Auschwitz with photographs of concentration camp survivors in torn shifts, shaven heads—amidst bowls of celery stalks, cream cheese with scallions and radishes, Ritz crackers.

  “I wouldn’t give Uzek a broken cent. Now he’s an important man in B’nai B’rith. During the war, he had a big mouth.”

  The delivery was offhand. Lineups, beatings, starvation discussed as casually as yesterday’s weather. Their voices rose with excitement as they regaled one another with tales of daredevil escapes, morsels of wartime gossip, teasing each other’s memories as at a college reunion. After all, most of them had been in their teens when the war broke out.

  “You remember Yola? She was the not-bad-looking one with crooked teeth, who went with the German. He gave her crabs.”

  / / /

  When I was in second grade, we left behind the concrete shadow of the Franklin Avenue shuttle and moved uptown to the Heights. Washington Heights, that is, above Harlem and below Dyckman. Across the Hudson at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, a neon roller coaster flamed, and looming larger than God was the George Washington Bridge.

  “The Riviera” was carved in stone over the entrance to our apartment building. On either side of the marble columns were curse words in black spray paint.

  Our third-floor apartment overlooked 161st Street. When I wasn’t out, leaning on parked cars, passing a single Salem among giggly teenage girls, I sat on the fire escape of my parents’ pink bedroom. I watched my street for hours: boys pitched broomstick baseball, slithering on their stomachs to plunk wax-melted bottlecaps into skully boxes. Nearby, completely ignoring them, girls hopped between chalked potsy boxes, bounced pink balls through all the letters of the alphabet, jumped double Dutch without getting tangled in the two ropes, flying from side to side. Children whizzed past on tricycles as bent-over old ladies crawled up the block, pushing shopping carts of groceries. In the afternoon’s fading sunlight, mothers wheeled black-hooded baby carriages.

  As I sat on the fire escape, pigeons pecked at my lunch, an egg salad sandwich, which I had refused to eat the day before. The white bread was moist and pulpy. “I’m not throwing away food that could save someone’s life,” Genia insisted, placing it next to me on the windowsill. “If I have to, I’ll give it to you every day of your life. You can’t have anything until you eat your sandwich.”

  I crumbled pieces of the crust and tossed them to a fat gray pigeon who snatched them in his beak. We were both content. What my mother didn’t know was that I had discovered Chico’s miraculous French fries across the street from school. When you stuck your hand in the brown paperbag, the grease and ketchup flavored your fingers, which you could lick, and the taste lasted all day. It cost fifteen cents for regular, and a quarter for large. I rarely had enough money to buy, but I took dibs on my friends’ fries.

  The Heights made Brooklyn—mostly Italian, Irish, and Jewish—seem tame. Especially the streets east of Broadway. We rode the uptown AA past 116th Street, 125th, to 161st, our station, a dark, piss-scented grotto littered with broken bottles of Thunderbird. When you got to the street, St. Nicholas, you had to walk fast without seeming scared. Men lurked in parked cars, in doorways, hanging out of windows with their pants open. They exposed themselves, jerked off in front of you, followed you for blocks breathing heavily, whispering things in a voice that got inside of you, creeping into your sleep: mi puta, te amo . . . I never told my parents. They had to know, I figured, or they didn’t want to know.

  The High Holidays descended upon us. It began with Rosh Hashanah. My father poured red wine into the engraved silver goblets from his family’s home. He had dug them up after the war. Now he stood at the head of the table, mumbling in Hebrew as he held the goblet his father had once held.

  “Heniek,” Genia said, sitting down at the table. “Enough already. We’re hungry and you’re still dovening.”

  “Quiet!” he said sharply. “No wonder Zosha doesn’t know nothing. There’s no respect.”

  Then came Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentence. The only time of the year I didn’t have to eat. I wasn’t even supposed to brush my teeth.

  They lit yortzeit candles. Here,” my father said, passing me the prayer book opened to Zikhronot. Remembrances.

  He pointed to a passage. “Read this in English.” May we never abandon our memories. May our memories inspire deeds which lead us to life and love, to blessings and peace.

  I looked at my parents. Their memories did not lead them to peace, only tearful retelling of loss. In fact, they did nothing but remember. My mother pacing from room to room in the apartment, weeping inconsolably. When I wanted to go outside, she turned on me. “Paskudnyak! It’s the day I lost my whole family.”

  After months of gaga adoration, I finally succeeded in becoming one of the Cleopatras. They were a tough, cigarette-smoking clique of girls who rushed home after school to worship at the shrine of “American Bandstand,” then slithered through the streets in teased-out hairdos with satin bows clipped above the bangs, Liz Taylor makeup, and the cheapest, tackiest gear this side of Frederick’s of Hollywood. Felicidad flashed black see-through tops, her major bosom popping out of a black lace push-up bra. Cookie was a color freak; this week’s special, purple: purple sweater, skirt, tights, shoes, and headband. Lola’s glittering turquoise eyeliner started at her lobes and stopped at the bridge of her nose. I wore a tight black skirt, off-black runny stockings, and white lipstick, but my claim to fame was my hair. When fully teased and sprayed, it measured four and a half inches high.

  Wherever the Cleopatras went, acne-ridden boys with greasy pompadours followed, buzzing around us. Their transistors wailed, “When a man loves a woman . . . ” as they flicked Duncan yo-yos at each other, cut loud farts, made gross remarks, and ran after us, attacking with water balloons and pea shooters.

  Usually Felicidad and Cookie made out with Hector and Jesus, but sometimes they switched. I had a secret crush on Carlos, Jesus’ brother, who was a dead ringer for George Chakiris in West Side Story. We exchanged furtive, burning glances, consummated at Cookie’s party where we had French-kissed during Seven Minutes of Heaven.

  At sunset, the Cleopatras met on 158th Street, across the stre
et from Mt. Sinai shul. We smoked Salems, teased our hair higher, and sprayed it as the Jews prayed at the evening Sabbath service.

  My father looked up from his New York Times. We rarely encountered each other. During the week, he left for work while I was at school and returned after midnight. Most Saturdays he worked, but not today. “Where are you going?” he demanded.

  “Out,” I said.

  “You look like a tramp,” he said, inspecting me.

  Transistor radio plugged to my ear, I lip-synched “My boyfriend’s back and there’s gonna be trouble,” having gotten myself semi-dolled up in Pink Passion lipstick, a chartreuse satin blouse, tight black skirt with a slit on the side, off-black stockings, and roach-killer boots.

  “Everyone dresses like this,” I told him. Then figuring I’d be clever, I added, “Dad, this is the style in America.”

  “Who cares about style? Genia!” he called. “You let her leave the house like this?”

  My mother rushed out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on the dishtowel tied around her waist. “What do you want me to do?” she demanded. “Lock her up?”

  “You should do something before she gets locked up by the police. A Jewish girl walking on the street like that,” he grumbled, picking up the newspaper, which had fanned at his feet.

  I put my hand out, saying softly, “Mom, I need my allowance.”

  “Talk to your father,” she said, returning to the kitchen.

  “Dad.” I approached slowly. “Can I have two dollars and fifty cents, please? Cookie and Lola and me are going to the movies.”

  Without looking up, he said, “Tramps. Streetwalkers. Not companions for you. Why don’t you wash that crap off your face.”

  The downstairs buzzer would sound in five minutes.

  He sat there in his dictator pose.

  “Please,” I insisted. “You owe me my allowance.”

  “Give me peace!” he cried. “You won’t get a penny until you wash your face. Look at you.”

  “What’s wrong with the way I look?”