The Holocaust Kid

by Sonia Pilcer

  In her barracks, the Polish guards tormented her. Pietruszka, with her haunches like a horse’s and her fat, veined legs in black hose rolled around her ankles. She enjoyed digging her pointy, laced shoes into Genia’s waist as she scrubbed under the cots. If Genia protested, there’d be more. But if she seemed to bear it with equanimity, ignore her, Pietruszka grew wrathful. So she had to strike an attitude of dumb acquiescence, as if she were a donkey.

  And what of the other witch, Marchevka, named by them all Carrot, because of her hideous hair, actually the color of dried blood. She watched Genia wash the toilets, grabbing her by the hair if she was unsatisfied. It was Marchevka who gave permission to relieve themselves.

  The guards were ignorant, without schooling, except for the bootcamp of their brutal imaginations. And Genia had studied Latin, knew how to conjugate verbs, repeating them to herself obsessively. Veni, venitus.

  She had been a girl, sixteen; suddenly, she was in her twenties. When they were liberated in January 1945, she found her mother’s uncle Lolek, who, as a doctor, had survived in several camps. Before, he had been a stout man who favored potato latkes with sour cream. Now he was lean as a thief, his expression furtive. He had lost his wife, Tusha, in Dachau.

  Genia knew no one was left. At first, she had asked everyone she met, “Where were you?” She described her mother’s coat with the seal collar, her father’s mustache, Jesse’s straight brown hair and the blue mittens she had knit for him. She found one young woman from Czestochowa who had been on the same line. “Auschwitz,” she whispered. That was all. She told Genia that her own life had been saved by a German soldier who delivered her to a Polish farmer to clean stables.

  Uncle Lolek brought Genia to his cramped apartment in Czestochowa, where he nursed her back to health. For weeks while the pneumonia raged in her lungs, racking her whole body with heaving coughs, she thought of strawberries. She had imagined them as she stood staring at the assembly line of gun shells in the labor camp. To taste truskawki! Fresh strawberries!

  Oh, she longed to be clean and pretty with new teeth. Uncle Lolek had promised when she felt better, her teeth would be fixed. In the lager, they had rotted and turned black. Her hair had been thick, shiny like taffeta. She pulled at the razed strands that they might grow out quickly so she could roll her hair like the American actresses.

  When Genia was well enough to travel, she went back to her family’s house, Number Seven Mokotowska in Warsaw. Hadn’t Premier Mikowlajczyk announced on the radio: “Every Polish citizen who returns to Poland will be welcomed”?

  Just as her father had instructed them all before they left, she removed the wooden floorboard behind the boiler in the basement. She heard something. The caretaker, Andresz, who had known the family before the war, had followed her downstairs.

  He stood there, his gold tooth glinting in the shadow of the thick overhead pipes. “You found something,” he said.

  She held several diamond rings, her father’s cigarette case. She moved away from him, trying to hide behind the coal-burning boiler, which excreted smoke in obscene rumbles.

  “I thought they gassed all of you,” he said, stepping toward her.

  “Don’t!” she cried, terrified, backing into the wall.

  His steps echoed. “You don’t live here anymore. I’ll tell the polizia that you are stealing—”

  She handed him her mother’s engagement ring with the tear-shaped diamond, then tried to hide the rest behind her back.

  He pocketed it. Then moved closer.

  “Please—”

  “One more or I’ll call—”

  She gave him a smaller diamond. And ran.

  In a small striped suitcase, she carried her family’s wealth. She took a drozka to the big boulevard Marszalkowska with the fancy stores. Warsaw hadn’t changed. People still promenaded in all their finery, but she recognized no one. Couples drank tea with strawberry jam from steaming glasses in Cafe Ziemianska where Tata would take her for cherry tarts. Their laughter stabbed as she looked down at her own clothes. At least now she didn’t wear the yellow star.

  Having sold the diamonds, Genia had new brassieres and underwear sewn, dresses with pearl buttons, leather shoes. The color had returned to her skin, her legs were shaven, and she menstruated again. She had not bled during her years in the lager.

  She found Janek’s address from the Warsaw Jewish Agency. When he opened the door, Genia smiled. “Do you see anything?”

  He admired her new teeth, she, his glass eye.

  They went to a fine restaurant on Marszalkowska where they ate corned beef with horseradish and kapusta, cabbage. As he drank Russian vodka, arranging the shot glasses like a pyramid, she sipped blackberry brandy, protesting that it went to her feet. Then they returned to his small room, several blocks from where her family’s apartment had been, and made love.

  Genia bought him a suit of navy wool with thin gray stripes like Tata used to sell. He looked like a gentleman. They went to concerts of Liszt and Chopin, and finally, because he was her tattooed lover, she had no other, she bought him a motorcycle. When they waltzed, he dipped her body, his hand secure against the small of her back. As her head fell back, her hair flying behind her, she thought of herself as Rita Hayworth in Gilda.

  After a few months, the money vanished. Pouf! So did Janek and his German girlfriend, Fraulein Helga, with her blond hair and common features, on the motorcycle.

  All that remained was her father’s cigarette case. Genia returned to Czestochowa to live with her uncle Lolek and his new wife, Fela, his dead wife’s younger sister.

  Lying down on the small pallet in what had once been the maid’s room, Genia closed her eyes. Ever she is startled by the beauty of his features, her lover, whose demeanor is manly, the glossy black hairs under his arms, his thick beard. He is powerful, a partisan fighter, a hero. The one who will carry her from Uncle Lolek’s house, marry her.

  “We’ll be together forever,” she whispers. “You’ll be my Momma. Tata. And my Jesse.”

  SURVIVORS DANCE

  The Czestochowa Society of Heroes, Martyrs, and Refugees had decorated the community room with pink crepe paper and silver foil stars. Genia heard the American song “Funny Face” as she entered the room. Several couples were dancing.

  That’s when she spotted him. The beautiful, dark-haired man, standing alone. He wore a navy blue suit several sizes too large, his jacket suspended as from a wire hanger. His cuffs covered his scuffed shoes. But he was handsome. Like Tyrone Power. She shifted her weight from foot to foot. Summoning the courage of her new teeth, she smiled so they glistened in all their porcelain patina, just as her eyes did.

  Heniek turned away. It was too late. Too late for him to be standing there like a debutante at a ball, but his boss’s partner Marek had insisted. Inside his pockets, his fingers snapped like firecrackers.

  Women were seeing him again. Before when he weighed hardly forty-seven kilos, he was invisible. Now, having eaten a full loaf of chleb, dark bread, every day since the liberation, he had gained twenty-five kilos in four months. But he had to be careful. Shimon’s friend, Holzmann, had eaten flanken, potato galuskas, carrots and plums, drinking piwo by the pitcher. He wouldn’t stop even when they tried to take his plate away. “Glodny!” he screamed. “Hunger!” His intestines exploded.

  Genia went to the bathroom. When she returned, he stood in the same place. She sashayed past him so he could smell her perfume, Evening in Paris. Slowly she moved, wanting to meet his eyes, but shy. Maybe he was married. Maybe he wasn’t normal from the war. Her feet hurt in her new black leather pumps.

  Didn’t this girl know that he, like most of the men, had forgotten or rather, this no longer interested him? For months and years, they had played dead. They were called Musselman, not men, sheep, their skin a fish-gray pallor.

  I must wait until I am chosen. Genia fingered the white lace on her collar. As I was chosen by the Polish policeman who searched the Selection line, “Where’s the
girl with the white kerchief?” Does he see me? Now he was looking at her. She smiled shyly.

  This lovely girl with brown waves and shiny green eyes wanted him. Heniek hadn’t had a woman in such a long time. Except Tonia, immediately after liberation. The mole on the inside of her thigh had identified her in a heap of dead bodies.

  This one in the navy dress with a white lace collar was a schoolgirl. Did she know? Of existing on nerves, obedient but watchful for the moment when he could escape, leaving behind his brother, Yacob, to die in the dark, sealed basement of potatoes, where only those who clawed to the crack under the door could breathe.

  His eyes traveled to one place. Not her breasts or legs, between her legs, the roundness of her ass. He stared at the white skin inside her arm. This was a reflex, as an unmarried woman might look down to see if the man who has approached is wearing a wedding band. He moved a step to scrutinize her other arm. White as the damask on his mother’s Sabbath table.

  They were different, the ones with numbers. The numbers meant they would live if they could work. B48356. He felt for the blue tattoo branding the tender inside of his arm. Daily, the numbered ones stepped over the dead, picked through, defiled them for their own survival. Heniek felt the charred tips of his fingers hidden inside his pockets.

  Anyway, she had been somewhere too. Jewish girls who spent the war at school, as young wives and mothers, who became nurses, rebbitzen were not members of the Czestochowa survivors social club.

  He studied this motherless, fatherless waif who had survived by a hangnail, like all of them, and wondered at her smile, which was open and hopeful. Finally he approached.

  They danced to “Love Me or Leave Me” sung by Doris Day. He was stiff. She suggested they spatzier, stroll. Outside, he seemed easier, but so silent. She chattered about her English lessons and how she hoped to study medicine in the United States. He said that he worked for his cousin, vague about the exact nature of his job. Something to do with money.

  They stood on a dark corner. A prosperous Polish couple walked past them with a white sheared poodle on a leash. “Zyd,” the woman whispered to her husband. Jew.

  “What are they doing here?” the man demanded indignantly.

  Heniek and Genia were silent for several moments after the Polish couple had disappeared around the corner. “You heard?” Heniek dropped his voice. “More killed in Radom last week?”

  “They didn’t destroy enough of us? Cholera yasne!” she cursed bitterly.

  He took her in his arms. She allowed him to hold her as she told him about the white kerchief.

  “Where did they send you?” Heniek asked.

  “Hasag Hugo Schneider. I worked in the assembly line, cleaning gun shells. And you?”

  “Lodz ghetto. Until the Aktion,” he answered bluntly. “Then Auschwitz.”

  She took a breath. “Auschwitz,” she repeated the word. “It’s a miracle.”

  “Have you ever watched a cockroach? How they know your finger is behind them. How they burrow their bodies into any crevices in the wall, under the floorboard, make that squeaking sound. That’s what I was like. I knew how to survive. That’s all.”

  Slowly, they walked together, past Alleya 1. “This is where my family hid during the war,” she said. “Until they came to our apartment, rounded us up.” She showed him the market square where they had lined up for Selection. “We were the last building on the street, so I had watched for days.”

  “The beauty contest,” he said.

  She nodded. “I stay with my uncle Lolek now.”

  They stood outside her uncle’s building with the torn awning. “I’ll come back to Czestochowa to see you next week,” he promised.

  Genia watched Heniek’s back as he walked away. Would he return? She thought of Janek, her lager “husband,” who had abandoned her for a Niemka, a German woman, after spending most of her money.

  Heniek came back the next week, and the weeks after. They desired each other as often as they could steal moments, Uncle Lolek at work, Fela shopping, throwing off their clothes, throwing themselves against each other, bones clanging with hunger.

  As soon as they finished, it began again, for as long as he could, and there was never enough. She wanted to lose herself, melt into him, his arms forcing hers above her head. They married four months later.

  On a Saturday night in December 1945, Uncle Lolek gave her away. Genia wore Srola Federman’s navy blue dress, her hair rolled in a crown of white orchids. “The voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.” They stood under a chuppah, made of wooden two by fours and wrapped in a white tallit.

  Heniek crushed a wine glass with the heel of his shoe and sang in Hebrew and Polish, and all the men joined in “Di Yiddishe Partizanerin” as they carried him in a chair. The Czestochowa Society of Heroes, Martyrs, and Refugees contributed a whole beef shank.

  Fela grabbed her hand suddenly. “Genushka, you don’t have a mommy to tell you things you should know. So listen to me,” she whispered in her ear. “I’m a little bit older, so maybe I know something.”

  Genia tried to move away from her overpowering scent of dried rose petals. Fela’s hold grew tighter. “Don’t get him used to it too much or he won’t leave you alone.” She patted Genia’s hand.

  They took the train, second-class, to Tsopot on the Baltic Sea. They rarely left their hotel room. As she watched Heniek shave, Genia envied his razor, wishing it were her tongue, wishing they could stay in this room forever.

  After a few days, they came to Lodz, where Heniek once lived with his parents. A Polish family occupied his apartment. There was nowhere to go. Besides, there were pogroms. Jews murdered on the streets.

  Heniek paid someone who knew someone fifty dollars. Genia crawled on her stomach behind Heniek, hiding under a stack of mattresses on a flatbed truck. Several hours later, they crossed the border to safety—into Germany.

  OUR FATHER, OUR KING

  My number is 174517; we have been baptized; we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die. —Primo Levi

  My father stands in front of the meter where his maroon Chevy is parked. His American clothes hang on a wiry frame, plaid jacket, artless brown trousers.

  He checks his watch again with a jagged flick of his wrist. Is he waiting for someone? An illicit, uncatered affair? Heniek Palovsky shtupping Stella Markovitz? Ha! My father never looks at women, young, old, chesty, a succulent Jewish piece of ass. Only at my mother, whom he bosses and belittles: “Genia, you’re stupid. Do you understand? Your mother doesn’t know nothing,” he tells me.

  Her handsome prince, who smothers his black curls in her torn stocking. He wraps it around his head to straighten his hair, which makes him look like a shrunken head.

  All Genia’s ideas of working out of the house are crushed like cigarette butts. “I’ll pay more taxes than you can earn.” She turns her immense energies terrifyingly toward me and burns my father’s dinners. But he struts with rooster pride when she drapes the mink stole he bought around her white shoulders. When she leaves for several days to visit the thinnest branches of her dead family tree, he goes hungry, unshaven, pines for her like a stray.

  What is he doing? What am I doing? I’ve come home to visit. I stand rapt at the corner of 161st Street and Fort Washington Avenue, as I did when I was a child, watching my unknowable father.

  He worked long hours as a factory foreman. Sometimes, late at night, I saw a phantom stalk heavy-footed past my room to the toilet.

  Daddy! “Why aren’t you sleeping?” Daddy! “Genia, make her go to sleep!”

  I hid from him in the hallway closet that was deep and dark, a forest of coats, shoes and boots below. “I know you’re in there. Open the door! Zosha! Before you make me mad.” I slowly opened the door. A crack. Dad? I held my breath. Suddenly, he leapt up, waving his arms wildly, shouting, “Ah ha!”

  As I stand here, time burns. Burns. Burning. The two quarters between his finge
rs like wheels going nowhere, the hot metal as if he could make fire. He glances at the silver parking meter with its crucifying arrow, edging to the red zone. In eight minutes, time will run out. Then Heniek will be free. He drops the quarters back into his jacket pocket. Genia fixed it, but the weight of change rips the lining again.

  Last week, he got to the parking meter five minutes late. He checked his watch. But the cop got there first, waiting for the moment when the quarter ran out in the parking meter. A woman with black shoes. She shook her head as she wrote the ticket. “License number?” she demanded. “This is my license,” he answered. He undid his sleeve, showing her his mark: B48356.

  “I don’t care if you got a tattoo.”

  Bitch. Sometimes they were the worst. Kicking where it hurt, their laughter the hiss of ice. They weren’t actually women. They didn’t have what all women have—hearts. His sisters, Rutka and Perele, who was pregnant. He looks around himself. Where are the fancy people with their doormen and dogs that get better than him? All the world is a hotel for transients in Harlem.

  He peers down the street. You have to have the cunning of the camps around here. A black junkie hawks his kid’s schoolbooks. The man who paints the missing hairs on his scalp with bootblack, playing a set of invisible drums with wooden sticks. “Gene Krupa lives!” he shouts. A madhouse. Cops marching around like Gestapo with their nightsticks, pistols in black leather belts. And they’re great writers. Like Jack London! Writing tickets of twenty-five, fifty, even one hundred dollars while people are murdering each other down the street. They can even take your car away.

  Then how would he work? How could he earn enough money to feed his family? It tires him to think of it. So tired. I am a man who has seen suffering. He does not sleep at night except a few minutes before he must awake. Luckily, the ticket was for only twenty-five dollars, which he’ll pay. He can afford it. Six minutes only.