Then it was our turn. Beginning in August 1946, the filthy POW barracks of Stalag IX-A and Internment Camp 95 became DP Camp 95-443 Ziegenhain—our new home. My guess is that we must have arrived right about the time the POW camp became a DP camp, because my birth certificate—the falsified one, the only one—indicates that by September 8 of that year we were there.
In 1933, the town had only fifty-three Jews. Now there were thousands of Jews, including about two thousand in our camp.
Ziegenhain is the backdrop for my earliest memories. Or perhaps these are my earliest memories because I have so many photographs and have heard so many stories about this time and place. I was, as I suppose I should have been, oblivious to the narrative that had brought us here, accepting of our conditions, focused on my family and my many new friends, my white rabbit coat, and my tricycle. In these photographs, I look happy and beloved—and I surely am.
Ziegenhain is also close to my heart because of my fictitious birth here, and when I see the photographs of my birthday parties at the camp, I can’t help but wonder which of the dates my parents chose to celebrate.
There wasn’t any privacy in the old barracks where we lived. Bathrooms and kitchens were shared, and there were holes in the wall between our space and the one next door. Before going to bed—in a military cot, as there were no cribs when we first arrived—I would peek through the wall and wish our neighbors a gute nakht, “a good night” in Yiddish. These neighbors were my parents’ closest friends in the DP camp: Ruchel and Aaron Brenner. At least one benefit of this sort of communal living is that close, lifelong friendships were forged. Aaron was my father’s business partner in the DP camp, and Ruchel was my mother’s closest friend. Mine, too: In many of the photographs, I can be seen walking between Ruchel and my mother, holding both of their hands. In other photos, it is just Ruchel and me, arm in arm.
In the beginning, food, clothing, and medicine were in short supply. Instead of being able to go to the local markets to buy fresh produce and meat, which the local Germans could do, my mother got packaged food from the American military and Jewish agencies. There were things she had never seen before. In one disbursement, there were boxes of a packaged powdery substance. My mother stared at it in confusion. Brightly colored, it tasted sweet. Apparently this food item was called Jell-O. She had no idea what she was meant to do with it.
The definition of normal life is elastic, and even under these difficult conditions, vibrant makeshift communities emerged. There were DP schools and theaters and even newspapers. There were also many marriages and, unsurprisingly, numerous births—a reflection of the fact that most of the survivors were in their twenties, the older and younger generations being less likely to have made it through the war alive. These young refugees wanted to start over, and the most affirming way to defy Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews was with new life—and new life was everywhere. The DP camps had the highest birth rate of any place in the world at that time.
My life also had a certain normalcy to it because my father—he of the shoes with hollow heels—was a shrewd businessman who knew how to make a buck. He didn’t want to live like a prisoner. He wasn’t one to sit around and wait for handouts, so he turned to the black market. For some of the DPs, this was a way to simply get better food and clothing. For others, like my father and his four partners—one of whom was Aaron, our neighbor through the hole in the wall—it was a way to accumulate portable wealth for use when they were finally resettled. The partners traded everything: food, cigarettes, jewelry, coffee, and chocolate, all of which were in short supply. My mother remembered large trucks pulling right up to the camp to deliver supplies for their black-market business. Needless to say, this all went on much to the annoyance of the American military, yet somehow or other, shady commerce thrived.
Years later, in Israel, I would visit Ruchel and Aaron and learn more about our time in the camp. They told me that on one occasion, Aaron and my father had some black-market goods—gold or jewelry—laid out on one of the cots. We were all in the common space when a soldier arrived unexpectedly to do an inspection. According to Aaron, I was an eager partner in crime: I went back into the room with the cot, took the goods off the bed, and hid them underneath. Nothing was discovered. My mother didn’t remember this, but I choose to believe that it is true.
It was only recently, in talking about this with my children and watching my grandchildren, that I was able to appreciate the emotional complexity of this act. Even as a child I was eager to oblige and understood that my role was to bring joy, even when that meant being complicit in breaking the rules.
Sometimes I wonder how my parents must have felt, giving up what seemed like a reasonably good, cosmopolitan life in Lodz, with a nice apartment and the freedom to come and go, for what would become almost three relatively difficult years, with an uncertain future and life on hold. That said, I suspect that my father’s business savvy likely enabled us to enjoy more comforts than most of our fellow DPs. It seemed to me that I had plenty at the time—that tricycle was certainly the envy of my playmates. I had my own little toddler-sized leather suitcase, black with brown leather trim. I carried it proudly when we later traveled across the Atlantic. Now a bit battered, that suitcase is still one of my most prized possessions.
Cash did not solve every problem, of course. I had several health scares while we were in Germany, including a handful of asthma attacks—a condition now shared by two of my grandchildren. I sometimes wonder how I survived what can be life-threatening attacks. It wasn’t simply that the remedies available at the time were probably unsophisticated, but medical care in postwar Germany involved German doctors, of whom Jewish DPs were often rightfully suspicious. On one occasion when my parents took me to a clinic for my breathing difficulties, they were told they would have to leave me there overnight, alone. My parents refused. On another occasion, my mother took me to a doctor who demonstrated his inner Nazi by telling her to slap me when I was crying, so that I would shut up. We left quickly. My friend Gina Roitman, born in a different DP camp, in Passau, Germany, produced a 2013 documentary about a Nazi midwife who deliberately killed Jewish newborns by pressing down on their fontanels. The mothers were told their babies died naturally during childbirth. When the American military began to realize that an alarming number of babies were dying, they exhumed the bodies to conduct autopsies. They wound up prosecuting the Nazi midwife, but by then she had killed more than fifty Jewish babies—and this after the war had ended.
According to my mother, I never crawled. Instead, at the age of nine months, I simply stood up and walked. Considering the physical conditions of the camp, I can imagine why no one would put a child down on the floor to crawl. There’s an easy analogy to be made here: If you wanted to survive, you had to pick yourself up.
Walking came with its own set of dangers. Once, I was playing with another toddler in the communal kitchen while someone was using a hot plate to make porridge. Somehow the boiling gruel got knocked over and landed on my head. My mother became hysterical, and my father, enraged. She had never before seen him so upset. Apparently, my hair either fell out or was burned off, and it was so traumatic an event that I briefly stopped walking. In the photographs that follow this incident, I have very short hair and might be mistaken for a boy, my protruding ears on full display. To this day, I have a small bald spot where the hair never grew back.
Recently, I came across a New Year’s greeting card from our DP-camp days. Written in Hebrew and wishing people a happy Jewish New Year, it features palm trees and, remarkably, a picture of my mother and me set inside the shape of a heart. We are propaganda, poster children for the Jewish National Fund, which sold these cards to DPs, urging them to explore a future in Palestine.
Alas, Palestine is not where my mother wanted to go. She’d had enough struggle, and she knew that DPs en route to Israel on illegal ships were often intercepted and sent to detention cam
ps in Cyprus. Besides, she wanted to be with whatever family remained. Her first choice was Brazil, where one of her mother’s sisters and two brothers lived. One of them—her uncle Solomon Weinberg—promised to help us emigrate. My father’s closest cousins were in Israel, however, and I suspect that would have been his first choice, but he went along with my mother. There are so many what-ifs in my family narrative, among them how different our life would have been if we had ended up in Israel or Brazil.
I recently found, among my mother’s stash of papers, a pile of letters from her Uncle Solomon and his wife, Chana, sent to my mother while she was in the DP camps, as well as one sent after she arrived in the United States. I think he was the first close relative to be in touch with us. I spent several days with my mother translating the letters as best we could. If my mother received other letters from relatives abroad, she didn’t save them.
These letters, which span May 1946 to December 1949, are instructive of Uncle Solomon’s intense desire to connect with family and to help, and also of how difficult it was for Jewish refugees to find a new home. Uncle Solomon had apparently sent money to my mother in Kolki, but that letter was returned. His relief in learning later that she had survived, remarried, and had a baby is palpable. They sent gifts to us at the camp, including a handmade silk embroidered dress for me, which I never wore because my mother said it was inappropriate for the DP camp. They did everything in their power to help us emigrate to Brazil. But it also became clear, as my family stagnated in Germany, that the barriers to entry had become increasingly difficult and, in the end, were impossible for us to surmount.
Also telling was Solomon’s sense that what had happened to the Jews in Europe could happen again, elsewhere in the world. When my mother tried to connect Solomon and Chana with some Christian refugees who received permission to go to Brazil, he admonished her: “I didn’t think you were so blind….You know well that we lost six million of our best and dearest. The only reason they were killed was because they were Jewish. Your writing is so foolish when you tell me that Christians you met are going to Brazil and you sent regards with them. I don’t want to see them, and, for you I have all of the paperwork guaranteeing that you will have work, that I am in good financial circumstances so the Brazilian government won’t have to help you, and you are not able to get permission to come here.” He added that Brazil let in only a few Jews, who, according to Solomon, pretended that they were Christian.
He went on at length about this, encouraging my mother to go to Israel: “All Jews who have the privilege to go to Israel shouldn’t waste one minute.”
His next letter came to us in the United States. He wrote that “I am very very happy you have finally found a place to end your wanderings,” but added the warning that “there is also anti-Semitism in the beautiful good land of America.” Uncle Solomon made another impassioned plea for Israel, apologizing for what he calls his Zionist passion. “If another Hitler will come they will try to do the same thing. If Israel is strong it won’t happen again,” he predicts.
And then, poignantly, “Write all of the time. I will answer. There are so few of us left. We must maintain our contact.”
6
Just a few months before that last letter from Solomon arrived, in August 1949, my family boarded the USS General Stuart Heintzelman, a military transport ship filled with refugees traveling from Bremerhaven, Germany, to New York City. Toting my small leather suitcase, I was en route to my third country, a place rumored to have streets paved with gold. It would take time, but it would become our home. For my father, though, the distance of an ocean would not be enough to quell the suffering of his past.
I was too young to have many memories of our voyage, but I do know that my mother and I were both seasick for much of the Atlantic crossing, and we spent most of our time on deck taking in the fresh air, as did many of our fellow, equally green DPs. Apparently, I was dazzled by the bottles of soda in the vending machines, as well as by the oranges and bananas. Whether this was truly the first time I had seen fresh fruit or learned of these exotic carbonated beverages, I don’t know, but clearly they made an impression.
Because the Heintzelman had originally been built as a World War II transport ship for the U.S. Navy, there were not proper accommodations for families. Men slept in one part of the ship, women and children in another, which meant we didn’t see much of my father, but at least we were reunited for meals.
Years later, when I tried to find a record of our journey, the only manifest that I could locate from the ship’s August voyage was a list of crew members and “aliens employed on the vessel.” Although the ships were built to transport 3,000 GIs, they now carried 700 to 800 refugees on these unique voyages. We were a special lot. From the manifest I counted 173 U.S. crew members, including cooks, waiters, butchers, and engineers. There was also a surgeon and four nurses, all of whom were clearly brought on board for this mission, because the manifest indicates they had been with the military for less than one month. Also on board were eleven “aliens” who were part of the International Refugee Organization, among them a Latvian doctor, dentist, three nurses, and escort officials, as well as Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian nurses, presumably the mix of nationalities intended to facilitate communication with passengers who did not speak English.
Since I couldn’t find any listing of the passengers on board, I started to dig for information about the ship. I learned that on its first voyage in October 1945, the Heintzelman carried 3,000 troops to Yokohama, Japan. Less than a year later, in June 1946, the Heintzelman began the work of transporting refugees—its first trip was from Bremerhaven, loaded with 843 displaced persons en route to Australia. At that time, the United States had not yet opened its doors to Jewish refugees, but at least it provided transport to more hospitable countries such as Australia.
Finally, with the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, the United States cracked open its doors, albeit slightly and with strict immigration limitations. The initial DP Act said that 200,000 people could be admitted between 1948 and 1950. The act was then extended for two years, allowing approximately 400,000 displaced persons. It was blatantly anti-Semitic; only 80,000 of those admitted were Jews, while it has been said that as many as 10,000 former Nazis were able to come to the United States under this act.
President Truman told Congress that the act “in its present form discriminates unfairly against some displaced persons because of their religion, land of origin, or occupation. These provisions are contrary to all American ideals.” But he nevertheless signed the act. To be eligible for U.S. admission under the act, a DP had to have been in Germany, Austria, or Italy by December 22, 1945. Most Jewish survivors from Poland and the Soviet Union had not yet had time to migrate that far west by the end of 1945. My parents were still in Poland in 1946, where I was born.
The act discriminated against Jews in other ways. For example, it stipulated that 30 percent of immigrants admitted to the United States had to be farmers. This was another subtle way of discriminating against Jews, most of whom were not allowed to own land.
The documents that I have from my mother and those available through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum provide an incomplete and inconsistent story. Most of the important documents my family needed for entry into the United States under the DP Act were created and certified by officials in Ziegenhain in March, April, and May of 1949, just in time for our exit from Europe. My ever-resourceful father even managed to get himself certified by the International Refugee Organization in Kassel, Germany, as a farmer—and “a first-class worker” at that.
What is most likely is that my father knew people in Ziegenhain who could provide false papers both for me and for my parents, providing whatever dates were required. It is almost certainly the case that my parents decided that acknowledging my birth in Poland in March 1946 would have hurt our chances of immigration to the United States. What I have for a birth certificate is
a document certified and stamped on May 4, 1949, by a registrar in Ziegenhain that says I was actually born September 8, 1946, in Ziegenhain. It makes sense that my birthplace was changed from Poland to Germany, but why from March to September? I will probably never know the answer for sure. Though the logic isn’t always clear, the result was.
We disembarked in New York City on August 14, 1949, and I stepped off the ship still carrying that suitcase, which now sits on a shelf in my dining room. Inside is a copy of my false birth certificate and an intricately knit blue sweater vest made by our dear friend Ruchel Brenner as a farewell gift. The vest is monogrammed with my initials, “ES,” and it ties at the waist on each side with matching pom-poms. The tiny suitcase, now somewhat battered, also contains a business card for a curator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, who wants to add it to their collection of artifacts used to tell the stories of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Eventually I will donate it, but I’m not quite ready; I am still using it to tell my story to my children and grandchildren.
Although my parents were not supposed to bring much with them, they arrived bearing gifts for the family that was taking us under their wing. Not just token gifts, mind you—they came bearing silver Kiddush cups and a silver menorah, as well as vanity sets with fancy mirrors and combs, and jewelry for my mother’s two maternal aunts, Chia and Jean, and for her cousins. Clearly whatever my father had been up to both in Lodz and later, in the DP camp, had continued to be profitable. He carried a leather briefcase and brought with him a Leica camera, which back then was reportedly in high demand in the United States. In addition to the expensive gifts, my mother had a large diamond ring, probably hidden in a shoe or in the lining of a coat. Presumably my father also brought a fair amount of cash, because he seemed to have begun his life in America with more than the ten dollars refugees were given for their voyage and the five dollars handed out to each of us by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) when we arrived. However he managed to transport his wealth, he was lucky to have not been caught, since Allied occupation laws governing currency were strict. DPs were not allowed to possess foreign currency, and German currency could not be exchanged outside the country. Immigrants could use their German currency to purchase food to bring on the voyage but were only allowed whatever luggage they could carry along with the ten-dollar stipend.
I Want You to Know We're Still Here Page 6