From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  The oldest boy, Sam, was a real go-getter. At age fourteen, he got a job as a mail clerk at the Classy Coat Company in Manhattan’s garment district and was soon taking care of his younger siblings. “He became our father,” recalls his sister Pearl Bronstein. Sam was rising quickly through the ranks of the garment trade when he went to a social club in the Bronx one evening and met Norma Kass. Norma’s father was also in the garment business, but her family was not pleased with her new beau, who had been raised in an orphanage and seemed to have no family background. Norma’s grandmother was particularly upset, and today, more than sixty years later, Norma can remember the old woman complaining, “Who is he? Who’s his family? What’s what?”

  Sam was not about to be thwarted, so he asked his aunt Miriam, my grandmother, to come with him and meet Norma’s family, to show them that he did have relatives of his own, that he was somebody. So Abe and Miriam made the trek to Norma’s house in the Bronx, and things started stiffly, with the grandmother sitting over in the corner and not saying much. But Miriam was a gregarious person and the group fell into conversation about the old country and where they were all from. Finally the grandmother broke in and started asking questions: You say you’re from Eishishok? Your name was Wasilsky? (Weiss was the Americanized version.) Your father was Max the bookbinder? Please. Just a minute.

  She went upstairs and after a while brought down a book, a book inscribed to her in Yiddish by a young man many years before. The grandmother was Bodonna, the girl who left for America and never saw Max again. She had never forgotten her lost love. She still had the book he had given her, a book he had bound with his own hands. And now their grandchildren had found each other. There was much rejoicing. All was forgiven. Bodonna gave her blessing and Sam was embraced. Soon they were married, at a synagogue on the Grand Concourse, a large boulevard running through the middle of the Bronx. After the wedding, the guests trooped to a restaurant around the corner for a meal, and Norma remembers how happy her grandmother was that day. “She was so excited, she went around telling everybody” the story. And the match was a good one. Sam and Norma were married for sixty-three years before he died in 1998.

  There is a footnote to the story: Sam wound up owning his own business and hired his father-in-law to run one of his factories. He was so respected in the garment trade that after his death, a scholarship was named in his honor at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Norma, who insists that Max gave Bodonna a Bible, not poetry, does not know what happened to the book, but that’s all right. To me, his gift will always be a book of poems, and I know where it is. In my heart.

  Lilly and Ludwig Friedman: A White Wedding Dress

  If you buy a wedding ring from Lilly Friedman, she won’t charge a commission. And sometimes you’ll get more than you bargained for. “I tell them stories,” says Lilly, sitting in her tiny jewelry shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “When a young couple comes to me, I’m always very excited if I see that things go well.”

  Lilly has quite a story to tell, but you wouldn’t know that just looking at her, a shy, soft-spoken woman of seventy-five who is about to become a great-grandmother. It is a story of one woman’s strength and spirit, of her refusal to give up her dreams, simple dreams, really, of a home and a husband and a white wedding dress. But they were not simple in Czechoslovakia, not in 1944, not when the Nazis were doing everything possible to exterminate her family and her future.

  Lilly was born and raised in the small Czech village of Caricha, where her ancestors had lived for generations. There were only twenty-five Jewish families in the whole place, “but we lived very good,” she remembers, baking their own matzoh and building their own synagogue, where Lilly’s father presided as the rabbi. Things changed in 1939, when Germany’s Hungarian allies occupied the area and “made our lives miserable.” Jews were forced to wear yellow stars and barred from shopping in stores, traveling on trains, or running their own schools. Lilly’s older sister, Celia, had gone to America in the mid-thirties to live with an aunt, and the family was desperate to join her. “We always wanted to go out but we didn’t have a chance,” says Lilly. Celia sent tickets for her father and two brothers, but when they got to Lisbon, they didn’t have the right papers for America and the boat—one of the last escape routes from Europe—left without them and they had to return home.

  In 1944, the Gestapo moved into Czechoslovakia and Lilly and her whole family were put on a train for Auschwitz. “But we didn’t know what to expect,” she recalls. “We never heard of Auschwitz, we never heard of the crematoriums.” At the camp, her father and two brothers were separated out and never seen again. Lilly, her two younger sisters, and a cousin were dispatched on a work detail, where they basically moved rocks from one place to another, and were then sent back to Auschwitz. By this time they knew what to expect and “we were sure we wouldn’t survive,” she says. But they did for one reason—the Nazis needed healthy workers—and the four girls were assigned to a weaving factory that ran twenty-four hours a day.

  By January 1945, the Russians were advancing from the east and the Germans retreated, taking their workers with them, marching through fierce winter storms and shooting anyone who faltered. One of Lilly’s sisters, Fayge, couldn’t walk, so the three other girls carried her most of the way. Czech villagers living along the route would sometimes hide vegetables in the snow for the Jews to eat, but by the time they got to the camp at Bergen-Belsen, most of the survivors were half-dead. “From here we don’t go,” said Lilly’s cousin. “Either we die or get liberated.”

  So many people were dying so quickly that the corpses were just stacked in a corner of the room where the prisoners slept. Lilly remembers being told to remove a pile of clothes from one room and finding the bodies of dead babies wrapped in the bundle. “I became hysterical crying,” she says, “those babies are always with me.” Somehow, all four of the girls made it through: “We held on to each other and we helped each other however we could. If one of us got a piece of bread, we cut it into four and everybody got a piece.”

  On April 15, Bergen-Belsen was liberated, but as Lilly remembers that day: “We were so sick when the British came, we couldn’t walk. We had typhus, our hair came out, everybody had sores and frozen toes.” After getting emergency medical care, and enough food to regain their strength, the girls were moved to a displaced-persons camp near the German town of Celle. “It was a very sad life but we all wanted to live,” says Lilly, who was then twenty years old. “We lost everything, we lost everybody, but we still wanted to go on with life.”

  Soon Lilly started noticing a tall man who worked in the camp kitchen: “We were so thin we were always standing in the line, and he was also very thin, because he was also liberated on the fifteenth of April.” The man’s name was Ludwig Friedman, although Lilly now calls him by his Hebrew name, Aaron, and as they started talking, they realized their home villages were only thirty kilometers apart in Czechoslovakia. “At night he used to bring a little more food for me and my sisters,” Lilly recalls. “I felt so sorry for him. I didn’t see how thin I was but he was tall, six feet five, and he was so thin. He had a pair of sneakers, some kind of white shoes, and I said, at least don’t wear those white shoes, you look terrible in them.”

  At first, Lilly was not taken with Ludwig: “I said to my sisters, ‘He looks terrible,’ and my sisters said, ‘What do you care? Food he brings us. So?’ I couldn’t see how I could fall in love with him.” But time passed and Lilly changed: “We went out, we talked, we both had very little education, so we talked about what we would do, what kind of jobs we would have. Most of the time we were with the girls, with the family, and little by little, I started to see he doesn’t look so bad as I thought.” Little by little, other survivors were also regaining their health and vitality. Some who were musicians before the war begged and borrowed instruments and occasionally played for dances, often after synagogue services. Lilly was a quiet girl, but Ludwig was a good dancer, so when the young people
got together, he was the “life of the party” and Lilly liked that about him, he brought out her fun-loving side. “Sometimes he made me jealous, he would dance with other people, and I didn’t like that,” she admits. But when other boys tried to dance with her, “he would not let anybody near me, he was terrible about that.”

  Soon they were getting serious. “We were religious people, you can’t just hang out,” she says with a laugh. “We went for a walk in a park, and on the way home he says, ‘Look, Lilly, why are we schlepping around? Why don’t we get married? I would like it if you should be my wife.’” Such boldness would have been unthinkable back in Caricha. Lilly’s father probably would have arranged a match for her. If not, his approval of her choice would have been essential. But the village life Ludwig and Lilly once knew was gone forever, and he felt free to tell her: “I wouldn’t dream of this before the war, but now we could get married, we could be very happy, we’re entitled to it.” The young couple was discovering what all immigrants realize: one way or another, the old rules don’t apply. They had no parents to ask permission from, no community to please but their fellow survivors. They could make their own decisions, and when Ludwig proposed, Lilly was eager to accept: “I felt very much to have a home of my own. I didn’t want to be in camp. I wanted to make a home for me and my sisters.”

  But this was still 1945, only one other wedding had taken place in the camp, and Lilly asked Ludwig: “How will we get our wedding together? Do we just go to the rabbi and get married?” He answered: “No. I get you a beautiful dress, a white gown, and I give you everything you really wanted. We’re going to be married the way you want.” A hard promise to keep, but Ludwig was a clever and resourceful fellow. He’d made friends with an English sergeant, a supply officer for the camp and something of a fixer, the sort of guy who could get you anything—for a price. And when the sergeant told Ludwig he had a German parachute for sale, Lilly recalls her husband’s reaction: “Right away it hit me—this could be made into a gown!” Money was worthless, the local economy operated on a barter system, and Ludwig established a price with the sergeant: two pounds of coffee plus some cartons of cigarettes. (Lilly and Ludwig didn’t smoke cigarettes or drink coffee, so when those commodities were included in relief packages sent from abroad, they would always save them for use as currency. They were better than cash.)

  When Ludwig showed his purchase to Lilly, she exclaimed: “Oh, my God, where did you get this?” And he replied: “I bought it, maybe you could do something with this.” Indeed, she could. She brought it to a friend named Miriam, an accomplished seamstress, who said: “We could do something with this, definitely.” She worked for two weeks, Lilly remembers: “Everybody was very excited, so everybody went to look for the dress. I said she will never finish it if people will be interfering all the time.” In fact, when Miriam finished the dress, she had enough material left over to make Ludwig a shirt. “I don’t think I could describe the feelings I had about that dress, that gown,” Lilly says today, fifty-four years later. “It was something a young girl dreams to have.”

  The wedding was set for late January of 1946 and the preparations began, helped immeasurably by a British woman named Lady Rose Henriques who had come to Germany to help care for the survivors. “We cooked, we baked delicious pies,” says Lilly. “We couldn’t get nothing, but that Lady Henriques, she could get it for us. It was beautiful how she helped out. Everybody helped out. We set beautiful tables, and we had guys who used to play, so we had music.”

  Ludwig borrowed a truck from the English sergeant “and went to ring bells to bring people to the wedding.” Somehow, at a local hothouse, he found Lilly a bouquet of white lilacs, her favorite flower, to carry at the ceremony. The wedding was held in a makeshift synagogue, located in an old house. And then the couple and the guests marched through a snowstorm to a kosher restaurant that had been set up to feed the religious Jews. “Soldiers were marching, people were marching, whoever went along joined the wedding party, it was very exciting,” says Lilly. “It was a joy to have the wedding. This was a survival, really something we wanted so much to have.” Over four hundred guests were still celebrating when the curfew came at eleven and the restaurant closed down, so the party moved back to the camp. “We had music, we danced, we danced all night.”

  The wedding set off a “chain reaction,” says Lilly. About two thousand girls from Czechoslovakia were housed in the camp at Celle, and as she remembers with a laugh: “There were a lot of boys liberated, too, so the chances were good. Boys and girls started to date, to go out and get married and live again and not think about what happened to us. Because if you thought about it, you couldn’t go on with life.” Lilly’s younger sister Fayge met a Polish Jew named Max and wanted to get engaged, but Lilly was concerned. Her sister was only nineteen, but Fayge retorted: “I feel like a hundred years old, not nineteen, and I love Max and I want to get married, too.” Besides, the old rules didn’t apply to Fayge either. She told Lilly she’d get married anyway, whatever her sister said, so Lilly gave the couple her blessing.

  But there was also the issue of the dress. Many brides wanted to wear it, but Lilly said, no, Fayge gets it first, then others can have it. Lilly took up the hem a bit, the dress fit Fayge “very nice,” and then it started making the rounds: “It just went from one to the other; they didn’t even bring it back to me.” She stopped counting after about eighteen brides, and Lilly figures more than twenty women wore her dress. Each one took it in or let it out, made it longer or shorter, and for Lilly, the gown took on symbolic meaning: “When they asked me for the dress, I told them, I would like that this dress should represent a beginning for us, for the survivors. We got married and we want to live and build Jewish homes and show that Hitler didn’t succeed in what he wanted to succeed.”

  Meanwhile, Lilly had lost touch with her sister Celia, the one in America. She enlisted the help of a Canadian soldier who was going home on leave, and he put an ad in the Forward, the Yiddish newspaper in New York, telling Celia that her three sisters were all alive and looking for her. A friend of Celia’s saw the ad and the family was reunited by mail, but Lilly was desperate to see the sister she had not seen in twelve years. Her daughter Miriam was born in 1947, and when President Truman agreed to take in a hundred thousand additional refugees the next year, Lilly pressed Ludwig to go to America. He preferred Israel, but agreed to her wishes, and Celia sent the baby a little sweater and a hat with pom-poms to wear on the journey. “If I don’t recognize you,” said Celia, “I’ll recognize the baby.”

  The family settled in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and Ludwig found a job in construction, but after he hurt his back and couldn’t work, he opened a kosher butcher shop on Flatbush Avenue called “L&L,” for Lilly and Ludwig. Two boys were born, and as Ludwig’s dream of moving to Israel faded, the family moved to a nicer neighborhood in Sheeps-head Bay. After the children went to school, Lilly started working in the jewelry business, where she had a relative, and it turned out she had a talent for selling. Eventually Ludwig closed the butcher shop and joined her selling jewelry, and he died in 1992 after almost forty-seven years of marriage. The tiny shop she still runs today is also called “L&L,” in honor of their years together. Celia is also dead, but the three sisters who survived the war together, Lilly, Fayge, and Eva, are all still alive and living within a few blocks of each other in Brooklyn. Lilly has seven grandchildren, and the oldest, Miriam’s daughter, is pregnant. “My God, my fourth generation,” says Lilly. “I couldn’t believe it. When I was in the camp and struggling to survive, to live, I’d just ask God for a piece of bread. And now I have a home and children and grandchildren and I’m expecting a great-grandchild. It’s the biggest gift God gives me.”

  And what of the wedding dress? When she came to America, Lilly put it away in a closet, protected by a plastic box. “Every time I cleaned the closet, I’d say, what’s going to be with that gown? This is not even good for a garage sale.” But she was wrong. One
of her nieces told a curator at the Holocaust Museum in Washington about the dress, and it’s now part of an exhibit detailing the history of the displaced-persons camps in postwar Europe. Lilly is very pleased because putting her wedding dress on display completes a journey she started in 1944, when she first got on the train for Auschwitz: “We wanted to live, and to tell the story, this was our most important thing. To tell the story that happened, so that it shouldn’t happen again.”

  Chapter Five

  OUR LIVES

  COMING HOME

  FAMILY HOUSE

  “Coming home” is one of the most resonant phrases in the English language. It means returning to comfort, to security, to familiar people and places and things. Cokie had moved into the house on Bradley Boulevard when she was eight years old. We had some of our earliest dates there and were married in the garden. Now, eleven years, three cities, and two kids later, we were very different people. We knew we belonged at the grown-ups’ table at Christmas. But coming home has another meaning. Comfort can lead to constriction, familiarity can mean a loss of freedom and privacy. Family can feed your spirit and fuel your anxieties, open windows and impose obligations. These were the tensions we faced as we moved back to America, back to Washington, back to the old house and the old neighborhood. Back home.