The Holocaust Kid

by Sonia Pilcer

  I removed them firmly. “I don’t have any wall space.”

  She stuck them back into the basket, covering it with her arm so I couldn’t reach them. She was fierce.

  Continuing down the aisle, Genia studied a blue cardigan, put it down, swinging the hangers as she searched.

  “I could use this in Poland,” she said, holding up a white knit sweater with small pearl buttons. “Sometimes it’s very cold at night.”

  Her face was younger, prettier as she buttoned the white cardigan. “How does it look on me, Zosha?” she asked dreamily.

  There was no messiah. Only the metziah. A bargain.

  THIEVES

  Why should I feel a thief? Genia hangs up her coat in Zosha’s closet, straightening out a tweed blazer slipping off a bent wire hanger. She enters the kitchen, puts on the yellow rubber gloves she has brought, begins to wash dishes. She knows Zosha isn’t happy when she lets herself into her apartment. But she doesn’t mind to find the place clean and neat, like only her mother can do it.

  For several moments, Genia stands motionless in her daughter’s small apartment. “Zosha, how do you live?” she says aloud. “With nothing. A few books and records. Your used clothes from thrift shops. Why can’t you buy decent things?” Then she begins to scrub a frying pan caked with egg.

  Her tiny kitchen with peeling white paint. Everything quiet except the hum of the refrigerator. Too quiet. Only the pilot light is alive. No potholders, colorful dish towels, calendars, recipes. Knickknacks make a place friendlier. Nothing but glasses clear as ice, mugs hanging from copper hooks. And the Rosenthal china teapot she gave her from Landsberg. Genia picks it up and notices a thin crack. Water bleeds from the cut as she fills it.

  “Kalecka,” she mutters. Clumsy one. Always everything breaks with her. Kalecka, always falling, hurting herself. Wherever she stepped, glass flew in the air, nails cut her, her knees black with cracking scabs and iodine.

  Genia begins her slow walk around the apartment.

  Who is this stranger with her books everywhere? Important friends, editors, she calls them. The machine that mocks her. “Hi, it’s Zoe. Glad you called but I’m not here. If you leave your name and—” Never. She hangs up, will not talk to a machine. Her name is Zosha Hanna, after both of their mothers. A stranger, her daughter.

  Genia’s eyes fall on the portrait of Zosha, the one the German photographer took. “Ya pamientam. I remember. We were famous. Everyone stopped to look at her in the photo shop window in Landsberg. People said she could be Elizabeth Taylor’s sister. It took your breath away. Her eyes so blue, her perfect mouth. Zosha is still good-looking, but who knows what she does, who she goes out with?”

  When we look at each other, does she remember? How we lay in rapture. I cradled her in my arms, our eyes never leaving each other. She started to cry. I tickled her tummy, softer than peaches, made sounds so she’d giggle. Her laugh, a surprise, the tinkle of high-strung chimes, her little mouth too small for a spoon.

  I don’t even know how I knew to make such sounds. I taught her to see colors, naming each one so she’d know. The red wool of her doll’s hair, and I sewed a special dress, yellow with blue stars. Like the mittens I knitted for Jesse—before they were taken away. Yellow wool with tiny blue knots. Zosha’s doll’s eyes opened and closed. A-leep, Zosha’s first American word.

  Genia walks into the other room with her desk and the big bed. Too big for one person. Why three pillows? The bedspread she sewed from curtains of Zosha’s old room, black roses on white velour. Clean sheets. Her closet full of jeans and sweaters thrown together like a shlump, wrinkled.

  Genia suspects that she has lovers, but this is something she cannot bear to think about. How they use her daughter for their pleasure. And does she burn for them, her body contorting to allow their invasion?

  As she folds Zosha’s sweaters, placing them in one stack and jeans in another, she argues, “Zosha, I don’t see why you had to leave. Everything was perfect—” Her fingers pluck each hanger with the aplomb of a harpist. She pulls out one of the dresses. Blue gray with small circles on the hem. Genia holds it in her arms, dipping at the waist to a Strauss waltz.

  Will she ever know what it’s like to have such a child? Everytime I looked at her, I felt happy. Like a contessa, she seemed, when Zosha wore it Yom Hashoah. I lit a candle for all of them, especially my Jesse. Her black hair swelling in waves at the shoulders. The long tapered legs of Zosha, which are not mine, nor her gift for words. They were always like from a book, so fine, better even than born Americans. And to see Zosha’s name on the masthead in an American magazine. And her own maiden name too! I’m famous! Genia smiles wickedly.

  “I don’t know the words you know, college graduate. I sound funny, I know, your matka, the greenhorn . . . ”

  A flowered woolen scarf covers Zosha’s electric typewriter. Genia lifts it, running her fingers over the keys. If only she could write her stories. So they’d know. Where she comes from, not a shtetl, their beautiful house on Mokotowska, her family, educated and cultured, not like the others from shtetls, her mother’s uncle Lolek, a doctor.

  Zosha’s large dictionary, golden letters in black shiny arches on the edge. Roget’s Thesaurus. What’s that? Genia opens it, glancing at a random page: “78-80 Abstract Relations. Inclusion. Generality. Specialty.” She shuts it hastily. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. An ashtray. Genia empties the butts into a wicker basket. There are two empty beer cans and crumpled sheets of paper.

  She reaches inside for one of the sheets. Straightening it out, she struggles to make out her daughter’s handwriting. The crossing out. Words on top of words. She pulls another sheet from the basket. The same thing, a few different words. Another sheet with typing. The same thing. Why does she write it so many times? Slowly, lips moving, Genia begins to read the scrawled page. A poem! What her Zosha wrote.

  I haven’t seen it,

  but I know it’s luminescent,

  not like moonlight, but teeth

  without gold fillings, fingernail moons.

  It was hidden in a hole

  in the wall of their basement.

  The house lasted the war.

  My mother’s father’s cigarette case.

  She returned to the house,

  the hole, and found her mother’s diamond ring,

  the family’s savings in a cup,

  the cigarette case of her father.

  She spent the silver coins on a fling.

  She made the diamond ring mine,

  and to her uncle, who saved her life,

  she gave her father’s cigarette case.

  He stopped smoking in his sixtieth year

  and hid the cigarette case in a safe place.

  His wife wrote it into her will

  to be left for her sister’s children.

  My mother heard her father’s voice:

  “Genia, Genusha, my little Genska,

  give to yourself, give to yourself

  as I wish I could have given to you.”

  She wrote a letter to her uncle,

  asking for her father’s cigarette case.

  It arrived soon afterwards, without a fuss,

  my mother’s father’s cigarette case.

  She’s crying, I know it,

  into her father’s cigarette case.

  Salt is spilling on the linoleum!

  My mother lies down in the water

  Floating to where her mother waits.

  Momma is wearing her seal-collared coat.

  Tata, her father, stands next to her.

  And Jesse waves, hands warm in his mittens.

  Genia is breathless when she finishes. It means so much that Zosha takes an interest. Many of her friends’ children don’t even listen to the stories, but her Zosha always wanted to know everything. And Genia told her as much as she thought was right.

  But she asked so many questions. How did your mother die? How did your father die? Did your brother cry? Did they tort
ure you? Did they torture Daddy? Did you have any boyfriend before Daddy?

  There are several school notebooks on Zosha’s desk. What a good student she was. An honor student. Genia opens one. Full of her daughter’s jagged black handwriting. Who can read it? Hieroglyphs! She narrows her eyes but is unable to decipher the words.

  Genia opens a drawer in Zosha’s desk. Pens, pencils, paper clips. What she uses. The file drawer sticks, but Genia tugs at it. Inside, hidden under papers and folders, she finds a stack of typed sheets.

  As she reads the first page, her breath grows short, her heart pounding. Like a real book from the library. If Zosha writes a bestseller, Heniek and me will be immoral—forever.

  She sits down on Zosha’s bed and begins to read. At first, it is difficult. So many thoughts and feelings rush through her. So fast.

  I am named Zosha Hanna, after both of my parents’ murdered mothers. I spent my first year with hundreds of Jewish refugees, orphans of large families and communities, in the American Zone of the Displaced Persons camp in Landsberg, Germany. Polish and Yiddish swelled the air.

  We came to America. I forgot my Polish. I was an American girl with no accent. I had friends, my own life, which I longed to grow into like a pair of oversize shoes. When I left home, I intended to create a self that had nothing to do with my parents’ past. But I wanted to be a writer. A dangerous vocation.

  It is our way to tell tales, bug-eyed people of the Book. We become writers and therapists because we believe in the power of storytelling. As if the right arrangement of words could release us.

  As a child, my parents’ stories held me with the power of prehistoric myth. Such stories. Lives saved by split-second decisions, coincidences that strained credibility, amazing reversals. One of my parents’ friends had been in the showers when the gas failed and her execution was postponed. Another had been dropped in a mass grave, pretended to be dead, and climbed out in the dark.

  Then there were the unlucky ones, the man who lit a cigarette and was shot, the young mother who was taken away, leaving behind her little boy, Izo. My mother and several women in the camp hid him in a hole in the wall. Somehow he knew not to cry. They watched fearfully as Izo grew larger, knowing he would soon be discovered. One day they returned from work and he was gone.

  “Izo!” Genia whispers his name. “Ya pamietam. I remember.”

  I don’t ever remember not knowing. I believe I sucked the knowledge in my mother’s milk. It gave me a secret inner life that was as voluptuous as it was tortured.

  Then I saw my first footage of the camps. Maybe I was eight. I had walked in as my parents sat in front of our black- and-white Westinghouse television. I watched hundreds of naked bodies, more bone than flesh, dumped in the bottom of a huge cavity. The skeletons dropped like debris into the mass grave. I observed close-ups of faces with vacant, wide-eyed stares. I stood there as my mother wept. My father peered intently at the television set as if he might recognize someone he knew. Neither noticed me.

  “No. It’s not true,” Genia argues. “I always noticed you.”

  We call ourselves 2Gs. Group shorthand for Second Generation, the survivors’ children. We have organizations with names like the Generation After, support groups and kinship meetings, well-attended conferences in the States and Israel. There is even a group, One to One, which joins children of Holocaust survivors with children of Nazis.

  While the survivors seem to have the ability to go on with their lives—the bar mitzvahs and weddings of their children are huge, festive affirmations of life—it is their children who spend much of their time, not to mention money, talking to Ph.D.’s, and MSWs. In unaccented, well-reasoned English, we speak of anger, guilt, trying to separate ourselves from our parents and their Holocaust past. Secretly, we believe that nothing we can ever do will be as important as our parents’ suffering.

  Enough! Genia wants to stop but sits there like a prisoner, reading. The words jumping off the pages. Her daughter’s words, picking at her like sharp-beaked birds.

  There is a hierarchy of suffering. Treblinka survivors feel superior to the ones who were in Terezin—summer camp in comparison—who are above those in labor camps, who supersede the escapees to Sweden, Russia, and South America. The key question being: Where did you spend the war? The more dire the circumstances, the more family murdered, the greater the starvation and disease, the higher the rung in this social register.

  Most of my life I’ve been urged, goaded, and beseeched to remember. I even receive letters that begin “Dear Survivor” and end “We serve notice to the world that the Holocaust can never be forgotten, must never be repeated. Your commitment to bear witness must go on. We are not a people who forget.”

  Parrotlike, the Second Generation echoes the injunction of memory, the commandment Zachor. Remember. Remember what? Lives extinguished? Privates mutilated? Dead grandparents? Nonexistent uncles, aunts, cousins? Childhoods, entire countries and cultures lost? I knew no one. I had seen nothing. I had no personal experience of the war. Yet I was born on the other side, lived my first year in a refugee camp. My father had numbers, my mother nightmares, and I, their fierce, anxious love. I had almost not been born but for a whim, a white scarf, and an impulse to run into the forest.

  “How can she write this about our family!” Genia cries out. “How dare she? Little stinker. Pisher. My Zosha! I gave her everything. And she does this? Humiliate all of us. In front of the Americans.

  “It is our privacy! Zosha has watched us, taken notes, pinned Heniek and me to the page like butterflies, picking apart our wings to see the machinery.”

  Genia stands up, dropping all her daughter’s carefully typed pages so they fall like white and black lies, fanning in a hundred directions.

  “Let me tell you something, big shot. We’re not the ones who go to psychologists. The world was crazy, not us. After liberation, the Red Cross sent all kinds of doctors to inspect us. For typhus, tuberculosis, malaria, lice. You name it. Mental illness too. One day they sent this American doctor. I remember he looked very important, with a black beard, smoking a pipe.

  “So he examined us. And you know what? He said he couldn’t find a single crazy person except for one. ‘There’s a woman sitting in front of a piece of a glass,’ he said, ‘combing her hair with a broken comb.’ Someone said to him, ‘Did you offer her a good comb and a mirror?’”

  Slowly, as if on her shoulders is a heavy package, Genia gathers the poison what her daughter writes, straightening the pages out carefully.

  “It’s true. I don’t sleep well.” She shakes her head back and forth. “I’m nervous. And yes, my Heniek is maniac, sometimes. Don’t you think I know this? But this is nobody’s business.”

  She stacks the pile of typed pages, laying them under the papers and manila folders. Making sure the drawer looks untouched, Genia kicks it shut with the heel of her shoe.

  TRAUMA QUEEN

  I wore black, of course. This was downtown, Seventeenth Street, corner of Second Avenue, an elementary public school where immigrants’ children like yours truly, who spoke Yiddish or Polish at home, learned all the words to “Climb Every Mountain” and got a fierce case of the American dream. Abandoned, the building became a crack house for years until some artists cleaned it up, turning it into a gallery and performance space. A real New York story.

  As I climbed two flights of dimly lit stairs, I checked out the walls, plastered with posters advertising an Eric Bogosian play, psychosexual dance, a poetry slam, living theater, and women’s mime.

  A small crowd milled outside a door with a poster of a yellow Star of David twisted around a swastika. Underneath it:

  EXORCISMS

  Rituals of Remembrance qnd Revenge

  MARYSE EHRLICH

  Maryse had approached me after hearing me read my poetry. Told me that she was 2G too, that her mother had killed herself, and handed me a flyer about her piece Exorcisms. At the time, I was less than curious. Now I stood in line at the box office.
Checking out the competition.

  “Have you read any reviews?” a woman with kinky blond hair whispered to her friend, a petite brunette in large red-framed glasses.

  “Supposed to be very interesting,” her friend answered. “Besides, I got TDF vouchers so it’s half price.”

  When my turn came, I gave my name. The balding young man found it on a list and handed me a pair of comp tickets. I looked around to see if I could share my extra ticket. Oh shit! I groaned inwardly as I gazed across the lobby.

  There stood Uly Oppenheim in his full, arrogant glory. Herr Holocaust Professor. Herr Fucker, talking to some woman in tight blue jeans. Hastily, I turned in the other direction.

  We had not spoken since our one-night explosion. Afterward, he mentioned a wife who had converted and lit Shabbos candles. Of course, he’d be here.

  Finally, the doors opened.

  The crowd began to push forward. A pale man with bad skin, wearing a military coat and boots, stood at the door. He stopped each person, taking her ticket, then handed out a program and an envelope. He pointed silently inside.

  White cushions lined the floor. Awkwardly, I dropped down, trying to find room for my legs. Inside the envelope, I discovered what looked like a nametag. There was a single hand-lettered word: AUSCHWITZ.

  Holding it up, I turned to the woman sitting next to me. “Do you have one of these too?”

  She showed me hers. RAVENSBRUK.

  What’s going on here?” I asked.

  “I suppose we’ll find out,” she said, turning to look around herself.

  She was attractive in a nose-job sort of way. Whiteskinned, petulant mouth. She was like Veronica in the comic strip. Snooty, imperious as hell. Was she 2G?

  Instinctively, I looked around the room. My 2G Geiger counter rarely erred. That’s what we called each other. The ones whose parents survived the war. I thought of 3G. My progeny, if I ever reproduced.