by Vic Shayne
Yossel brought out a card table and four chairs. He sat down, removed a deck of cards from their box, and started to shuffle. Then he said to me, “I’ll play partners with Doris, and you play partners with her sister Ida.”
I looked at Yossel and said, “Joe, no. You play partners with Ida.” Then I pointed to Doris and said, “I’ll play with Doris, because she’ll be my partner for the rest of my life.”
Everybody stared at me. Their jaws dropped. Doris smiled and Ida looked at her sister to gauge her reaction. Yossel dealt the cards and Doris became my partner.
It’s a good thing Yossel’s renter had a wrinkled shirt, because just a few months after this chance meeting, Doris and I were married in Manhattan—two Holocaust survivors without parents, in a new world eager to forge a new life together.
Doris and her sister Ida were in Germany during the fateful event that history calls Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass in 1938—when Nazi storm troopers started a frenzy of hate that culminated in looting Jewish businesses, smashing in shop windows, terrorizing and beating Jews on the streets, burning synagogues, and lighting the fuse that set off the Holocaust. Barely escaping Kristallnacht and its aftermath of killings and deportations to concentration camps, Ida and Doris took the Kindertransport from Berlin to England. As the war began, they were present during the blitz on London, with bombs falling all around them day and night.
Doris and I were married in the spring and settled down in the Washington Heights area of New York. In 1952 we had our first child, our wonderful daughter Miriam. We gave her the middle name of Esther, after my mother. Five years later we had a son, Stuart Michael whom we named after my father and Doris’s father.
My cousin Larvey found work for me in H&H Butler, one of the largest clothing stores with 4,800 outlets. I went to work in the shipping department but soon after realized that there was very little hope of advancement. However, for the time being at least I was earning a living and had settled down in New York.
Next, my cousin Morris gave me an opportunity. Morris worked in a factory that made women’s hats, and I learned the business very quickly. I ran all parts of the enterprise, from operating the equipment to sales. I was earning a good salary and had enough money to meet my expenses. But making money wasn’t enough; I saw bigger opportunities in the business world on my own. After five years had passed, I got together with a friend and we decided to start a company. We put up two thousand dollars each and grew a thriving company with salesmen working for us all over the country. We did quite well for several years until fashion began to change and hats for women were no longer en vogue.
And that’s when I came upon another means of earning a living. Doris had an uncle who was quite well-to-do. He owned a number of apartment buildings from the Bronx to Staten Island and needed someone to manage them. I was his first choice. Because there were so many people in these upscale residences, I came to know hundreds of them, from prominent entertainers to underworld figures. It was quite a colorful scene, and my work schedule had me coming and going all hours of the day and night.
By the time Miriam was able to speak, she begged me for a puppy, so I bought a beautiful, well-trained Doberman pinscher that we named Daisy. Three times a day I took Daisy to Central Park not far from my office on 58th Street. Daisy loved to run, but with the command of my voice she would come sprinting back to me and sit at my side like a statue. The city of New York’s Central Park mounted police officers came to know me quite well. They’d sit in their blue uniforms and white hats, watching as I brought Daisy to the park. They admired how well behaved she was, like the best of their police dogs. Then one day I walked Daisy to the park bench where I was going to take a seat and eat my lunchtime sandwich. We were under a tree and the park was relatively empty. The mounted police weren’t anywhere in sight. In those days Central Park had a reputation for being a dangerous place, depending where you were. There were so many muggings that the comedians used to make jokes about them. With my dog, though, I could go anywhere and not be bothered.
I sat down and Daisy sat beside me with her ears perked up as she paid attention to everything going on around us. Nothing escaped her senses—squirrels, leaves blowing on the grass, honking cars, or voices in the distance. She was a sentinel. As I unwrapped my sandwich, I noticed a woman quickly walking across the park. It was around noon, and I supposed she was heading to or from a nearby office. At about the same time, I saw a man coming up behind her. He lagged slightly behind her then started to run. The mounted police were on the far end of the park, so the man made his move and grabbed the woman’s purse. She screamed as he fought with her then began to run away with her pocketbook, wallet, keys, and everything else. With one word I told my dog, “Daisy, go.” I barely even spoke above a whisper and off my Doberman went at full speed. In seconds, tearing through the grass and jumping over obstacles, Daisy ran the burglar down and pinned him to the ground just as the police came to the scene to rescue him. When the police had everything under control, I gave a little whistle and Daisy came running all the way back to me and sat down at my side.
This incident gave me and the police a lot to talk about over the coming weeks. In fact, I came to know one policeman quite well. His name was Jim Curry, a tough, strong Irishman on horseback. Officer Curry and I struck up an immediate friendship. Months went by and every time I went to the park Jim Curry and I talked. We were about the same age, so we talked about family, the future, politics, and the news of the day. I found out that Jim was born and raised in New York, went off to war with a group of friends, fought in the army, then came home to join the police force. I, too, related my life’s experiences, leaving out the details that still caused too much pain to retell. But Jim was a hardened soldier, so he understood what it was like to keep some things unspoken. Jim and I became good friends. Doris and I invited him over to our home for dinner and we met his wife, Jeanette. In time, he reciprocated and Doris, Miriam, and I had dinner at the Curry’s home. We shared a lot of laughs and personal stories. Doris told the Currys about how her brother in Berlin was taken away in the middle of the night, never to be seen again, leaving her and Ida to fend for themselves. The Currys listened with great interest about the days Doris spent in air-raid shelters listening to German bombs falling all around her in London. Jim, in turn, told us of the day he landed in Normandy and, afterward, fought through all of France and into Germany, losing his closest friends along the way. I related what my Polish neighbors did to my family, but, again, I spared everyone the details. When conversation grew too heavy, we changed the subject to lighter topics, with Jim asking Miriam what she was learning in school. Or we’d talk about the motion pictures or how the Yankees were faring.
Within a couple of years Doris and I bought a summer home on Long Island and we’d have Jim Curry and his wife over for barbecues. We had a great relationship that continued to grow. When we came to Central Park, sometimes Jim would pick Miriam up and take her for a ride on his horse around the park. When Jim and his wife had children, we all got together for family festivities. Our get-togethers continued for many years, even after Doris and I left the city and moved permanently into our Long Island summer home. The Currys used to come out for an entire day to visit, and our discussions eventually drifted away from the past and all its ugliness.
Like all other ex-GIs, as well as the Holocaust survivors, with all that we had experienced left far behind, we chose to look ahead, raising families and building lives. More than anyone, we focused on the present and the future. This was something to toast when we got together. Our experiences during the war years were still a very painful and fresh subject that we chose to avoid, except among ourselves in very small circles. Even then, the memories were too terrible to discuss. Little do people know, but we Holocaust survivors are all plagued with nightmares and visions that never leave us. So, if we speak about what we have been through, we can never escape the pain. While we couldn’t control our disturbed sleep, the least
we could do was avoid revisiting our past during our waking hours.
While “normal” people slept soundly in their beds at night at the end of a long day of work, I could find no rest. Over and over and over again, I would be tortured by the memory of my family and what was done to them. Faces from the past—Polish neighbors—would terrify me in my dreams and nighttime thoughts. I would toss and turn in mental anguish over the atrocities that replayed in my mind until I screamed out in the darkness and drowned myself in tears and sweat. In the recesses of my mind dwelt a living hell that would not leave me. Other than a friend here and there who was also a Holocaust survivor, there was nobody to talk to about this. It was driving me insane. I didn’t know what to do. I could not control these nightmares that visited me every night and several times a day. I thought at times that I was mad; I couldn’t predict when my mind would go blank, America would disappear, and I would be in Maitchet watching the most horrible things. I would be walking down the street or standing in my kitchen and my mind would be in another world, back in Baranowicze, then running through the woods, then imagining my family buried over in dirt and choking on the prayer, Sh’ma Yisroel. Why? Why? Why? No answers came to mind; there was no reason and no rest. It was so hard to bear that I found a psychiatrist in Long Island who gave me a prescription for strong pills to help me sleep. And sleep I did.
The sad fact is that my mind became more and more numb the longer I was on these pills. They were ruining my life. I was forgetting not only my past but much of the present as well. My mind grew less sharp and I was losing my sense of self. I was unable to remember my mother’s and father’s faces. They were disappearing and we were drifting permanently apart. My memory was dissolving. I was even forgetting the things I had done in just the recent past; I was finding it hard to remember the names of my friends in Palestine and Italy. The pills that were restoring my sleep were also disintegrating my very being.
One day I sat on the edge of my bed and tried to remember what my mother looked like. I called out to her and concentrated but to no avail. Now she and the rest of my family had not only died in Maitchet but they were almost dead to my memory. This was too much for me to bear. It put me into a panic. I worried that part of my mind was gone, and what would I be if I could not see my mother’s eyes? What if I could not remember holding Zayde’s hands or sitting in Bubbie’s kitchen on Shabbos evenings? What if my father and my little sisters were torn from the recesses of my mind? I feared that this kind of loneliness would put an end to me.
I told Doris that I would no longer take the pills. I decided on the spot that I would rather live with the horrible memories if the alternative was to forget the good ones of my family. I told Doris that I was going to flush the bottle of pills down the toilet, which I did without thinking any further about it. I resigned myself to live with the painful memories, that I would take the bad with the good. Without my past, I did not exist.
So, to this day I still suffer from nightmares and a mind that wanders into the past. I sweat and cry and become lost in despair as my memories come to haunt me. Doris and I go to the grocery store, and while she is putting food in the basket and I am beside her, suddenly I am standing at the edge of the forest in Maitchet beside Shmulek Bachrach, looking into a bottomless pit of souls. When Shabbos comes around, I stand in the synagogue next to the Torah, and while the entire congregation sees the rabbi, I am seeing Zayde, in the kalte shul, running his fingers over his beard and changing the pages of his prayer book. As the ark is opened, with my eyes wide open, I am in Maitchet hearing the screams of my sisters Peshia and Elka. I close my eyes to shut out the thoughts, but even with my eyes closed tight, they stay with me. I have to wait until the visions pass. When my eyes open, I do not know where I am, as if waking up from a deep sleep. I stand in the shul, but each of my feet is in another world.
Today I remember Maitchet, Mauthausen, Polish neighbors who turned into murderers, starvation, beatings, torture, Bubbie’s baking, Shabbos at Zayde’s, and my little sisters cooking with Momma. Good and bad. I embrace it all. Each memory is a double-edged sword that I cannot bear to let go of.
To cope with my past, I continued to stay in touch with fellow Holocaust survivors who were as determined as I was to preserve the memories of all those we lost. Some time in the 1950s, my cousins Charlie (formerly Chonyeh) and Morris (formerly Moishe) Samuels, from Maitchet, helped form a survivors’ group with several others and me. With the help of Myrna Siegel in Chicago, whose family owned the flour mills in Maitchet, we New York–based survivors, as well as some who were now living in Israel and Argentina, eventually pieced together a Yitzkor (remembrance) book of our shtetl, which was published at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial organization in Israel. Our goal was to try to keep the memories of our families, friends, and shtetl alive for posterity. Like this book you are now reading, our Yitzkor book is a bridge to another time and place, whose pages are glued together with the most disparate substances—our troubled memories as well as our best wishes for a better tomorrow.
Years later, in 1995, Myrna Siegel and her husband, Shael, traveled to Maitchet and visited our lost world. At the edge of the forest, in the midst of the underbrush and beneath a canopy of trees, she found and videotaped the gravesite where nearly my entire family was buried—most of them alive—among the 3,600 other Jews in the summer of 1942, the majority of whom were refugees fleeing from other towns. There is a plaque covering the mass grave, but there is no longer a single Jew living in Maitchet. When Myrna sent me her videotape of my shtetl, I immediately popped it in my video player and sat on the edge of my living room chair in stunned silence. A flood of memories came to me as I saw familiar streets and buildings, including the Greek Orthodox Church where the kind priest and his family were murdered across from my house. When the Siegels came upon the site of the mass grave in the forest, Shael began to read the kaddish prayer for the dead. In my living room I stood up and recited the kaddish along with him with tears rolling down my face and my heart burning in my chest. I sobbed and sobbed until I couldn’t utter another syllable. Maitchet, once one of the most vibrant shtetls, was now the resting place for the dead. May my family, friends, and neighbors forever rest in peace.
Like in other shtetls throughout Eastern Europe, the townspeople with whom Myrna spoke continue to deny their role in the murder of the Jews in the early 1940s. They readily blame the Germans or are quick to point fingers at others, but those of us who were eyewitnesses know who the murderers were. We remain on their consciences even as they use our Jewish gravestones as slabs for their kitchen porches and as sidewalk stones around their churches. The good Poles of Maitchet reluctantly allowed a Jewish commission to erect a small memorial, but you must search through the woods to find any trace of the town’s rich Jewish past. By chance you might bump into the two plaques that stand as the only evidence that Jews ever existed in the shtetl. And to this day, the biggest fear shared by the Poles is that the Jews might return to reclaim their homes and property.
Time for Reflection
Doris and I permanently moved our family to our summer home in Long Island right around the time that Aunt Frieda was mugged in an elevator in Queens on her way home from the bank. She was badly injured and I decided it was no longer safe for her to live by herself, so Doris and I built a cottage next to our house just for my aunt. After all she had done for me, I was glad I could provide for her. My goal was to keep her safe, happy, and cared for. Aunt Frieda lived out her retirement with us until she passed away in 1989.
Doris and I lived in our Long Island home for close to twenty-one years. The most tragic portion of our married lives was when our son, Stuart Michael, died at age eleven. We continue to visit his gravesite in New Jersey to this day.
In the years that we made Long Island our permanent home, Doris and I sought out the Jewish community, joined a synagogue, and took an active role in all of its programs. I was honored many times by teaching children Judaism, training bar and b
at mitzvah boys and girls to sing their Haftorah portions, giving lessons of the Holocaust and the birth of Israel, passing along wonderful stories I had learned as a Yeshiva bocher in Maitchet, and helping our synagogue grow and prosper with a variety of enriching programs. The cantor of our Long Island shul, coincidentally, was the son of a Holocaust survivor whom I knew from Poland.
During the time we were living in Long Island, I was asked to speak at a local synagogue about the Holocaust. After my speech, at the end of the evening, a man named Max, about my age, came down the aisle as I was gathering my papers. Max stopped me and was crying. He said, “I’m so happy to see you’re alive.”
I felt like I was back in Salzburg, Austria, in the convalescent hospital. I remembered that I was approached by another man who gave me the same introduction: “I’m so happy to see you’re alive.” But this was a different man now, yet he had the same message and same look of astonishment on his face.
“How do I know you?” I asked.
Max answered, “We used to call you the rabbi in Mauthausen and we saw an American soldier carry you out. You don’t remember me? I remember you.”
Max went on to describe where our barracks were and what bunk I was made to sleep in—the bunk in the back on the left, in the barracks across from the guard tower, he said. I could see in this kind man’s eyes that he was amazed that I was still living and breathing; he wondered how I ever recovered among the skeletons of the concentration camp. Although I did not remember him, he accurately described our Mauthausen experience. In no time, Max and I became friends. Sadly though, Max died only a few years after this reunion. Still, his words haunted me as years went by—“I’m so happy to see you’re alive.”
By the time our daughter Miriam was married, Aunt Frieda sprung the greatest of surprises. She was cleaning out her things one day and remembered that she had a lot of photographs packed away. She gave the pictures to Miriam who then showed them to me. I had to sit down and catch my breath. The photographs were of my family. There were images of my mother, my father, all of my grandparents, friends from Maitchet, townspeople, and portraits of my sisters and myself. There were group pictures of Maitcheters all dressed up in costumes during Purim and photos of friends who joined the Zionist groups and left for Palestine before the war. And there was a letter in my Zayde’s handwriting still inside his original envelope with stamps bearing the name Molczadz, the Russian name for our shtetl, Maitchet. My mother, Aunt Frieda told us, sent these photographs to New York before the war. This little act of foresight preserved at least some of my past for me, and in them Momma came back to me.