Among the Reeds

by Tammy Bottner

Well, this piano caused a lot of problems. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but let’s just say the piano never arrived in Haifa. I don’t know what happened exactly, but I do know that Tante Sarah sold the damn piano and kept the money. And that caused a big family rift. It took me years to forgive the Gildengorens for robbing us.

  But back to our journey. We made our way to the port of Marseilles, and onto the ship that was to carry us away from Europe. The ship, the Negba, was built to hold 700 people but over 1,800 passengers, all Jewish refugees, crowded the vessel. Many people slept on the decks. The food was terrible. One day I found a worm crawling in my dinner, and I barely ate another morsel for the rest of the seven-day crossing. Luckily the weather was fine. We had smooth sailing and blue skies as we crossed the Mediterranean.

  I bunked with three other women. Genek was in a bunk with men. I kept Bobby with me, and Genek took Irene with him. It seems strange to tell the story now. You would think I’d have kept my girl and Genek would have bunked with his boy. But I didn’t want to sleep with Irene, nor she with me. She was seasick and I couldn’t stand the smell. No, it was better for her to be with her father. Bobby, almost eight years old, slept with me. Anyway, there was no privacy aboard the ship. The women I bunked with were annoyed that I had a boy with me. They yelled at Bobby to turn around every time they wanted to change their clothes. As if he cared about their middle-aged bodies! Poor Bobby – no wonder he spent most of his time on deck.

  But we met some nice people on the ship. One particularly was a pleasant young man, maybe nineteen years old. He was traveling by himself. Genek and I befriended him. As we talked, he confided in us that he had a very bad feeling. He knew that when he arrived in Palestine he would be drafted into the Haganah. He was a young male, and the Jewish army was at war with the local Arabs. All young Jewish men were expected to serve in the military, and right away. But this nice boy, he had a bad feeling that something would happen to him. I don’t think I’ll come out of this, he told us, I have this feeling that I’m going to be killed over there. It was unnerving. We tried to reassure him, but he just shook his head. And don’t you know, he was right. A few weeks after we arrived we heard that the poor boy had in fact been killed. I have his face in my mind’s eye, but it’s terrible, I can’t recall his name. Very sad.

  At one point, maybe a day or so outside of Haifa, the Negba came to a halt. We noticed the quiet when the ship’s engines shut down and, sure enough, we were soon drifting in the sea. Everybody was speculating, worrying about what was going on. Were the British going to board the ship? Would we be sent to Cyprus? To our relief, after a few hours and with no further explanation, the Negba resumed her journey.

  I remember, as we approached Haifa we could see sunken ships littering the waters. Masts and broken hulls protruded from the sea, testaments to the fighting that had gone on in the preceding months and years. But we were very lucky. For some reason the British let our ship into Haifa. As we came into harbor I strained my eyes, searching for my sister. Inge was supposed to meet the ship. To my great consternation I couldn’t find her.

  And of course as we got off the ship there was bedlam. Ecstatic people kissing the ground of the Holy Land, people singing and dancing, and everyone milling around looking for friends and relatives. It turned out Inge was now in the Haganah, and because she was military personnel she couldn’t come out to the harbor while the British were patrolling. Eventually Bobby found her. She was among a group of Jewish soldiers in a long bus convoy just adjacent to where we disembarked. Inge and I fell into each other’s arms and cried and cried. We had survived, we were reunited, and we were in the land of Israel. It was a very emotional reunion. I don’t know how long we clung to each other.

  So we arrived in Palestine, and my sister was there, so that was wonderful. But we were not yet free. We were loaded onto buses and the British soldiers escorted us to a nearby detention center, a tent village outside Haifa. We were processed, registered, and issued armbands stating that we were refugees. We lived in those tents for, I don’t know, maybe ten days or so. Thank God it was not much longer than that. The place was primitive – no showers, communal toilets – and the heat was oppressive.

  Eventually my cousin Miriam, Tante Paula’s daughter, who was a native of Palestine, came and vouched for us, and we were released. Miriam brought us back to her house in Nachlat Yehudah, a village just south of Tel Aviv. Miriam had a lovely home. In the backyard was a shed, and Genek and I and the children moved into that shed. We could hear a lot of gunfire and bombing. The children were scared. Once again Irene climbed into bed with Bobby when she needed comfort. We stayed there for about three months.

  On May 14, 1948, the country of Israel was born. But despite that wonderful news, the war between the Arabs and Jews went on. The fighting was not over. We still heard artillery and gunshots. Irene still quaked and trembled every time she heard a shot.

  Eventually we found our own place to live. It was a farm house in nearby Rishon Le Zion. The owner, Assah, lived upstairs, and we rented out the bottom half of the house. It was very small, but at least the children had their own bedroom. The kids loved it. It was basically like living on a farm, with animals and vegetable gardens and such. It was not at all my cup of tea. The worst part was the thousands of chickens living maybe thirty feet away. They smelt pretty bad in the heat of summer. But even worse, in the winter, when it rained, the mud mixed with the smell of chicken shit was revolting. Really unbearable.

  There was a saying in Israel in those times, a word – tzenah. Tzenah means austerity. People had to get used to living austere lives. There were no luxuries. The place was primitive. It was oddly easy for me to minimize the horrors I had lived through in Europe, and to instead remember the cultured luxury that existed there. As I looked around the muddy unpaved roads, the animals living beside me, the squat cement buildings, the crude food, I asked myself, had I made a terrible mistake in coming here?

  The crate we had shipped from Brussels miraculously arrived with all our luxuries. So we had an electric refrigerator; we were the only ones around to have that. And Bobby had a bicycle with big balloon tires that was his pride and joy.

  But now we had to make ends meet. Genek was a furrier. There was absolutely no chance of him working in the fur business in Israel. So I decided to open a business, a small cafe which I opened together with my mother on Rishon’s main street, Rothschild Street. But that business didn’t last long. It was a poorly conceived idea. We weren’t in Brussels or Antwerp anymore. In newly established Israel people had not the time, the money, or the inclination to buy nice cakes and sip coffee. So we folded up shop and came up with another plan.

  Genek and I opened a vegetable stand. Really, it was ridiculous. What did we know about vegetables? Nothing. But we couldn’t think of anything better. The infrastructure of the country was a mess, and Genek was the worst businessman. Every day was chaos. The deliveries we ordered didn’t always arrive. So sometimes we had vegetables to sell, and other times we didn’t. And there was rationing at that time. So we had to redeem people’s ration cards when they shopped with us, allotting them three kilos of potatoes, one kilo of tomatoes, whatever it was. But Genek, he was a Galiciana. He didn’t care about the rationing system. If he liked someone he gave them a lot more than he was supposed to. And if he didn’t like someone he gave them a lot less. It caused a lot of problems.

  Sometimes he lost his temper. Once a woman nagged him, and he took her by the collar and physically threw her out of the store. It was really bad. She complained to the police, and then they came and interviewed Genek about the incident. I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was going to be arrested and put in jail. The man was a wild animal, a wilde chaye, I’m telling you.

  Food was scarce. We had vegetables from our store, of course, and the chickens from the farm, and eggs. Luckily, my first cousin, Jackie, a tall and strapping soldier, came to visit us often for Shabbos. Jackie would arrive in his army truck carrying a
big burlap sack. From the sack he inevitably produced great hunks of meat for me to cook. He pilfered the meat from the army. So that is how we lived.

  I felt terribly guilty, but I absolutely hated living in Israel. I wanted to like it, really I did. I supported Israel a hundred percent. Who knew better than me how important it was to have a Jewish homeland? And my family was there – my mother, my sister, my cousins. Eventually even my brother Nathan arrived. But the reality of living there, at that time, with my temperament, was just a terrible fit. And economically we were doing terribly, barely able to pay rent and keep the children fed.

  We stuck it out for four years. But I never did learn to love the place. In 1952 we left Israel for Canada. We left behind every family member we had and moved to a country ten thousand miles away where we knew no-one. Everybody was mad at us for leaving, especially Nathan.

  But something had broken in me during my life. Maybe it was the constant upheaval, the years of stress and anguish, being married off at age seventeen to a man I didn’t love, I don’t know. Maybe it was just my nature. But it seemed my destiny was to keep moving for the rest of my life. Friends, community, stability – those were never concepts that I was able to incorporate into my being. I wanted them. I just never achieved them.

  END

  Reflections on a Calamity

  Epigenetics: The Effect of Trauma on the DNA

  In the introduction I talked about how the relatively new scientific field of epigenetics is producing a new understanding of genetic inheritance. It holds that, while it’s true that our genetic makeup is determined entirely by the blueprint that we inherit from our parents, the way that those genes are expressed can be affected by our life experiences. And this leads to changes which we pass on, in turn, to our children.

  Think of your genes as a very, very long row of light bulbs. Each bulb represents one gene, and we have millions. Interspersed among these light bulbs are switches. The switches represent points where changes can occur; they can be turned off or on, dimmed or brightened. Those switches are where epigenetics comes in.

  Let’s pretend we have two identical twins. And let’s say one of them smokes two packs of cigarettes per day for thirty years and the other twin doesn’t smoke. After thirty years we look at the two and compare them. Remember, identical twins have the same exact genetic makeup. The smoker appears older than his twin, his skin tone is different, and he is ten pounds thinner than the nonsmoker. Why? Because the effects of the cigarettes caused some of his genes to be turned off, others to be turned on, and these changes resulted in different proteins being made in his body. Proteins are little messengers, and so the smoker’s body received different genetic messages than that of the nonsmoker twin. What is truly fascinating is that, as a result, the smoker’s children will inherit different genetic material than will the nonsmoker’s, even though the twins had identical genetic makeup when they were conceived.

  So as we go through life, our experiences – stress, happiness, trauma, diet, medications, illnesses, sun exposure, radiation, toxins, exercise patterns – almost everything – affect our genetic expression. On a cellular level this happens because methyl groups bind to certain areas of the gene (the switches), turning it off or on. And the genes can be further affected by histones, the spools around which the DNA is wound. Histones may wind the DNA either tighter or looser, which changes the way the gene is expressed. We can think of histones as the dimmer switches, which can change how brightly a particular light bulb is glowing.

  In other words, our environment changes the way our genes are expressed. The old nature versus nurture, or genetics versus environment, question is too simplistic. What we do, how we live, what happens to us, changes how our genes affect us.

  And it gets even more interesting now that we know that the differently expressed genes can be passed on to the next generation. The fact that certain lightbulbs have been dimmed or turned on or turned off, results in those modified genes being passed on to the offspring in their slightly altered state.

  This is really mind-blowing. What my grandparents experienced in their lives changed their genes. These altered genes were passed on to their child, my father. He, in turn, went through further trauma, food deprivation, and social isolation, further affecting the on/off switches and dimmers, further altering the expression of his genes. And these methylated or altered genes were then passed on to me. So even though I was born in a time of peace and plenty, nonetheless, some of that baggage is literally imprinted in my DNA. And very likely I have passed it on to my own children.

  It’s not all bad news. The good news is that positive experiences, a healthy diet, exercise, even being in love, can also change our genes – for the better. So even if one inherits a lot of “bad” baggage, what one does in one’s own life can modify the effects to some extent. And these positively affected genes are also transmitted to the next generation.

  Most people are exposed to a mixture of some good and some bad experiences in their lives. But some people – like the Jews who lived in Europe during World War Two – experienced unprecedented and extreme levels of stress and anxiety. Five years of fear, of hunger, of sensory deprivation, of losing loved ones, of homelessness – five years where each day’s survival was an endeavor, five years when stress hormones were sky-high, as they had to be in order to survive – exacted a serious toll on the people, like my family members, who experienced this trauma. And the cumulative effect of this prolonged trauma no doubt created some very significant genetic modifications.

  Psychologists and sociologists have studied children of survivors, and found that they exhibit certain behaviors, have more anxiety, than their controls. This finding could be the result of living with traumatized parents (environment). But further studies show that most children of survivors actually have altered cortisone levels (stress hormones), regardless of how they were parented. We can now understand these findings not just as a result of these children having grown up with a parent who had experienced trauma, and having “learned” certain behaviors that resulted from this trauma, but at a genetic level.

  There is still much that science has to figure out. Why do some survivors and their children do well, while others suffer from PTSD or other psychological or physical ill effects? There is no easy answer at this point. Studies show that whether one's mother or father underwent trauma, as well as what age they were, affects the progeny's outcomes. And if one looks at grandparents' experiences, it matters whether it is a paternal or maternal grandparent. Strangely, for example, if one's maternal grandmother was severely underfed as a child, one is more likely to develop diabetes but, conversely, if one's paternal grandfather was underfed, the opposite is true. And if one's father was underfed as a child, one is relatively protected from heart disease, but if one's mother was underfed, one is more likely to develop heart disease. The science behind epigenetics and its effect on resilience and health is still in its infancy. But the mere fact that we now understand that life experiences can have an effect on future generations' health is a major step forward in our understanding of how genetics and environment interact in determining our health outcomes.

  So, science seems to support quite strongly the hypothesis that I, a child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, inherited altered genes that affect my cortisone levels, and predispose me to anxiety. Could this predisposition have affected me when my son was born? The time after giving birth is certainly a vulnerable one for most women, so it makes sense that I was affected then. What we don't know is whether there is some kind of collective unconscious memory that is embedded in my DNA, leading me to “remember” the trauma my grandmother Melly was experiencing when her son, my father, was born.

  What Made the Holocaust Possible?

  The Nazis invaded Belgium in May of 1940. Soon afterward they began issuing a systematic series of decrees to rob the Jews of their rights. As they did in every country they invaded, their goal was to make the country Judenrein, absent of Jews.
This goal was a central tenet of their political strategy. At the time of the invasion, about ninety thousand Jews were living in Belgium, most of them (up to ninety percent) refugees from other countries (Poland, Germany) who had fled ahead of the Nazi occupation.

  The big questions, of course, and the ones that are so devastating, are why and how. Why did the Jews become Hitler’s scapegoat? How did he succeed in recruiting so much help in his effort to annihilate the Jewish people? Why did so much sadism exist, and why was it turned against a minority that tended to keep to itself and rarely bothered anybody?

  There is no ready answer to these philosophical questions, of course. Perhaps, because they were perceived as keeping to themselves rather than integrating into the local population, Jews were an obvious target. Thinking of a group as “other,” as lesser, as nonhuman, is a prerequisite for crimes against humanity. Xenophobia is a prerequisite for genocide of a group perceived as racially “other.” So a group that lives outside the general community in any way is of course at high risk. Hitler decided that “Jewish blood” was antithetical to his vision of Aryan supremacy – and it didn't matter whether a person practiced Judaism or not. His rabid hatred zeroed in on Jews with laser intensity, and he was able – through persuasion and intimidation – to convince millions of followers to go along.

  Jewish people, with their history of valuing education and intelligence more than physical strength, tended to do well economically, at least in Western Europe. Since the Middle Ages, when one of the only professions open to them was banking (money lending), Jews had been associated with money. After World War One, as Germany suffered through a terrible economic depression, the ground was ripe for Hitler to rise, claiming that the Jews were the source of all the Germans’ financial troubles, and that getting rid of them would make all their problems go away.