Remember Us

by Vic Shayne

  My friend, Jim Curry, a retired New York police officer, a tough ex-soldier who survived the invasion of Normandy on D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, and fought his way through the deadliest battles of the war, just sat in stunned silence on the other end of the phone. He could not bring himself to speak. Again I waited for him to collect himself.

  “I was in Mauthausen too,” Jim said. He could hardly get the words out.

  I didn’t understand him. Did I hear him correctly? I asked, “Jim, how could you be in Mauthausen? You’re not Jewish.”

  Jim said, “I was in the 65th Infantry Division. We are still sick over what we saw. What we saw over there was horrible; piles of skeletons lying in ditches. There were bodies everywhere. Bones. I can’t even describe it. We were walking around completely in disbelief. . . . ”

  Now Jim Curry’s entire past was opening up. We were sharing a part of our lives that we both held secret from each other for nearly four decades. We were friends who never spoke of this, the most impressionable experience of our lives—but no more.

  Jim went on, “Then we went in to see the barracks. I went in with my army buddies. The smell was beyond terrible. The stench is something you don’t forget. There were skeletons in there and we were on our way to get out. We had to get out of there. All of a sudden I heard something; I turned around and there was a skeleton with an open mouth and eyes barely open, like he was trying to tell me something. He was seventy, maybe seventy-five pounds. I picked him up and took him to the ambulance.”

  The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I broke out into a cold sweat and sat down. My eyes began to well up with tears as if I knew what Jim would say next. I couldn’t believe this. I was afraid to hear what he would tell me, but at the same time I wanted to hear.

  Jim told me that the man he carried to the ambulance was lying on the floor next to the third bunk on the left from the back of the barracks across from the guard tower. He had precisely described the barracks I was in. He told me that he lifted this human skeleton in his arms like a child, his legs and arms just dangling, his head cradled in the crook of Jim’s elbow. “I could see he was still breathing,” Jim said. He told me that he quickly carried this body to the ambulance, hoping that he would live. He wanted to save this poor man.

  “Jim,” I said almost too softly for him to hear, “that skeleton you saved . . . that was me.”

  More silence.

  God had answered my prayers. He sent my best friend, Jim Curry, to be my Moshiach.

  I Remember

  Perhaps by now you will begin to understand how unbelievable life can be. A few months ago Doris and I were out to dinner with our family to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I sat with my wife and looked out over all the happy faces smiling back at us.

  In the midst of all the lively conversation going on, I put my little great-grandson on the table in front of me and my mind, as it so often does, drifted far away. My entire past came over me, then I returned to the busy restaurant. I posed an impossible question to God: “What kind of life is this where everything that was ever important to me—everyone I loved with all of my heart—was taken away in the most terrible way, and yet here I am blessed with a family sitting around me now so filled with love?” I looked at the baby I held in my hands, and I cried. I realized at that moment more than ever that I was a man who truly lived with my feet in two worlds.

  We may never discover the “why” of the Holocaust, perhaps because there can never be an excuse that would explain how neighbors and friends can turn into heartless killers overnight. All we can do now is remember. For the sake of all that was lost, all that used to be, and all that could have been, all we can do is remember.

  Maitchet is no more but lives in detail in my mind. In my memory, there exists a world that pains me to revisit. But I must look at it; I must remember. I do remember. I remember as I speak to university students and church groups. I remember as I carve out images of the past in my artwork. I remember as I look into the faces of my new family. And I remember with an indescribable mixture of reluctance and readiness as I write my poetry and relive an anguish and sorrow inside of me that will never pass:

  In my mind’s eye I freeze.

  I freeze in time only to see a little hill;

  A hill of memories and so much pain;

  A place where I was born and raised.

  I see the houses. I see the trees.

  I see the streets where I was playing.

  Now the streets are full of naked people;

  Men, women, children, young and old;

  Friends, relatives.

  I also see my Momma, my Papa and my two little sisters.

  Naked.

  Holding on to each other, screaming, crying, praying for their last walk on this earth.

  To their graves.

  They walk to their own funeral.

  They walk to a place where no one comes back.

  I scream out in pain:

  Oh, God in heaven, how can you watch this horror?

  Do you hear their cries?

  Now I wake up, but this is not a dream.

  It is all real; very real;

  The slaughter of my town, the slaughter of my people, my dear ones, my very dear ones.

  Gone forever.

  Just memories.

  What is left now?

  Pain in our hearts;

  A pain in my heart that grows with time, calling so loudly in silence: “Remember us.”

  It has been said time heals all wounds. But for a Holocaust survivor, time just makes things worse. The pain grows. The mind is tormented as it tries to make sense of the senseless. We cannot comprehend the magnitude of the loss; thinking and remembering brings us no closer to peace. The cry of “Never again” takes on the most personal of meanings. Never again will the mind rest in peace; never again will we share our lives with those who were taken from us. Never again shall the world be the same.

  There is a part of my life that will not be forgotten. I don’t want to forget, though I am haunted by my own memory every waking and sleeping moment. But I am saddled with a responsibility to remember. I want to remember. I want the pain and yet I do not want it. I dare not forget. I have nothing else to give to my family but my will to remember.

  With all the goodness and yearning of my heart, I am here to say kaddish. I am here to answer the pleading, voiceless voices who live on through my memories as they simply beg of me, “Remember us.”

  Epilogue

  by Miriam Small Saunders,

  Martin Small’s daughter

  I still remember the commotion. . . . The sound of the police car rounded the corner. Then the siren wailed. We had just walked into our Washington Heights apartment in New York City—both of my parents fell to the floor. It was only a police car. I must have been about six years old. Seeing my parents on the floor, one under the coffee table and one between the end table and the couch looked very funny. I started to laugh. A few minutes later they got up and sternly ordered me to go to the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to my mother and father talking loudly to each other—some parts in English, but mostly in Yiddish. As I sat on the edge of the bed, I knew not to ask any questions. I knew there would be no explanation. I just knew it would be a long time until I got to come out of the bedroom.

  Another time, my mother and I were walking to the park. The park was on 173th Street in Washington Heights, across the street from the elementary school. There was a lot of construction in the park that day, so my mother decided we should go to the other park because my brother wouldn’t be able to sleep with all that noise. The other park was quite a walk. Once we got there, my mother sat on the bench with the carriage and I looked for someone to play with. I saw two girls sitting on the swings looking at us. In the old park, all the families with kids knew one another. I went over to the girls on the swings and asked, “Can I play with you?” The girl with the longer blonde hair said, “Go back to your Jew park.” I
went back to my mother and innocently asked her, “What is a Jew park?” My mother jumped, grabbed my hand, held it to the carriage, and we walked as fast as we could home. Once inside our apartment, my brother, Stuart, was put in his crib and I sat on my bed in our shared bedroom. The Venetian blinds were closed; the door was closed. I could hear the shades in the living room being pulled down. There was no explanation.

  In the middle of many nights, I would awaken to the sound of my father’s screams. He would be crying, sobbing. I could hear my mother trying to calm him down. “It’s only a dream,” she would say. Nobody explained to me what was happening and what troubled my father so.

  Like many kids in other neighborhoods, we didn’t have two winter coats or two pairs of play shoes. But these were minor similarities. However, living in Washington Heights in the 1950s, I knew we were different. I had no grandparents. And my parents weren’t born in the United States. Europe was not spoken of as a vacation place. And no one in my family ever talked about “the good old days.”

  My mother told me stories about her father, mother, brother, my Aunt Ida (her sister), and herself. I loved listening to her stories, but they were somehow incomplete. Pieces were missing. My Auntie (great aunt) Frieda told me stories about her sister (my father’s mother) and how they used to trap pigeons outside the window for dinner. My father never told me stories. The only thing I remember, later in my teenage years, was overhearing my father and Izzy (a Romanian Jew) in our kitchen. They would be discussing the war, camps, my father being in a ghetto, and Hitler. By this time we had moved to 58th Street in Manhattan. Where were the details of my parents’ earlier days? There was no explanation. After I moved to Colorado and started my own life, my father began to speak—not with words at first but through his art. His rich, expressive paintings and his skillfully carved and painted wooden pieces revealed stories of his past; stories you could see, giving you a glimpse of his pain and the people of his past. My father started to express himself in poetry as well. And in this poetry I first understood the screams of his nightmares. In these extraordinary wooden art pieces, he told chapters of the demented, brutally evil regime of the Nazis and the suffering and bravery of common people.

  My father went on to speak at universities and other places as one of the last living Jewish Holocaust survivors standing before them. Gradually, he began to speak more and more, allowing his story to unfold. His pain, his loss, and his suffering were forever entwined with a family and life he was forced to leave behind. He spoke publicly about bits and pieces of a period of time for which there is still no explanation.

  Now, at long last, this has been my father’s story.

  Afterword

  by Vic Shayne

  As we all know, the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling, year by year. As a student of this tragic history for the past thirty-five years, I recognize the importance of publishing all that we can to not only remember what has happened to all the victims of the Holocaust but also to validate their experiences. Why? Because, as fellow human beings, we should care. This is true especially in light of the fact that there are always forces trying to rewrite history, diminish the scope and breadth of atrocities, purvey anti-Semitism, and find excuses for the inexcusable.

  Martin Small, born Mordechai Leib Shmulewicz, was a Yeshiva scholar fluent in ten languages who bravely spoke about his experiences during the Holocaust, though it pained him to no end to do so. Past the age of ninety, Martin refused to succumb to defeat, as he not only spoke out about the past but also expressed his trauma through unique artwork that remains on display in his home in Colorado, in New York, in Israel, and in the Holocaust memorial in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

  The story of Martin Small is one of three lives, like a play of three distinct acts. First there was his life of relative peace, happiness, security, and love—a life immersed in rich Yiddish culture steeped in centuries of tradition and practice. This chapter of Martin’s life spanned from his birth through his upbringing, and includes his studies as a Yeshiva student under the tutelage of his loving grandfather, and as a productive member of a great, extended family and community. The second act was a period of great darkness, of loss and suffering and of unending cruelty and pain; a chapter that seemed to have no end, one in which everything was taken from him. It was a time when Martin Small’s world of the shtetl, of family and friends, of long hours of study and all things familiar and enriching went up in smoke. This was a period of the unimaginable and the unthinkable. It was an era that witnessed an unprecedented, unforeseen volcanic eruption of horror, hate, and torture on a scale that the world never knew prior to the Holocaust and has not known since. Martin’s was a world of day-to-day survival marked by human slavery and degradation, at times spent on the run in the forests of Poland and eventually in a hell called Mauthausen concentration camp. Martin Small found himself in a hopeless nightmare constructed and managed by a regime whose leaders were no less than sociopathic in their every action. Martin’s loss is often too heavy for the average person to consider, yet he lived with it day and night.

  The second act of Martin Small’s life at long last gave way to the third, bringing him from Liberation in 1945, when the Allied forces freed the survivors of Mauthausen, to life as a displaced person and eventually through to the present. This was a proactive period wherein Martin Small fought for the rights of displaced persons, struggled to create a Jewish homeland, and settled down to live the American dream.

  Martin Small was one of millions who experienced untold suffering and loss in the years of the Holocaust. In all of its breadth and width, it was a very personal event that should never be reduced to mere statistics and military strategies as the study of history is wont to do. Martin Small’s journey is that of a single person caught up in a time of unspeakable tumult and state-sanctioned criminality. He was an individual whose story is unique, especially when we think of the few in number who managed to survive the Holocaust.

  Martin Small spent the Holocaust years trying to survive just one more day, one more hour, in the hopes—in the remotest of hopes—that somehow he would at last be rescued from the fate of millions of others, including all members of his immediate family, at the hands of mass murderers. To Martin Small, the hope for a Messiah—the Moshiach—that he came to understand in his years of Jewish study would be the most personal of dreams.

  When you looked into the eyes of Martin Small, you could see the ocean, the sky, and distant lands. He was often lost in thought over who he was, where he had come from, what had happened to his loved ones, and why he survived. He could find no answers to any of his questions. He would be sitting with you, but you probably would not realize that he was, in his own words, “a million miles away.”

  “I am in two worlds,” Martin would tell me. One world was a place that no longer existed except in his heart and mind. His entire family dwelled there, and though it pained him, he would not allow himself to forget even a single detail of that world. The other world was that which began after the liberation of Mauthausen concentration camp by personal Messiahs dressed in the uniforms of the United States Army.

  In his advanced years, acquaintances and friends came to know a reflective Martin Small, traumatized by all the indelible images burned unwillingly into his mind. And out of this, we knew him as an artist whose sculptures, paintings, and artwork were expressions of what he had suffered. He carried his trauma with him, both because he would not, dared not, forget. And because he could not forget. In my estimation, Martin Small was a hero. He was the embodiment of the mythical icon in “the hero’s journey,” having faced the crucibles of fire and water, having lost all, and having arisen like the Phoenix. He bore witness to that to which even his fellow Jews are apt to turn a deaf ear because the pain of his story is too great of a burden for the psyche to absorb. Martin Small was a silent witness by his own definition. He had witnessed that which cannot be described. He was silenced by a failure of words or images to communicate all that h
e had seen and experienced. He was unable to fully tell his story, for the emotional aspect—which is the most impressive and burdensome—could not be put into any tangible form of communication. This, for Martin Small—one of the most intelligent, insightful, witty, communicative, and exuberant people I’ve ever met—must have been one of the most frustrating realities of all.

  In the preceding pages, to paraphrase the words of Auschwitz survivor, writer, and Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, we share Martin Small’s personal journey not so that you will understand but so that you will know you can never understand.

  Appendix

  Gentle Snowflakes Falling

  Evidence of the Holocaust can be found in hundreds of thousands of places, with the most obvious being in museums and the least obvious in private collections stashed in dark corners of closets. Most of the testimonials have never been written and remain in traumatized memories. Many have been passed along to close friends, wives, daughters, sons, grandchildren, and, occasionally, therapists. The trauma of the Holocaust is a worldwide phenomenon, not just a Jewish one. To think otherwise is to invalidate the suffering of others and to be ignorant of the enormity of the war and all of its victims, from soldiers to partisans and from concentration camp inmates to resistance fighters and from rescuers to civilians who lived through hell on earth.

  Some of the most awe-inspiring testimonials were recorded by the American soldiers who came upon the Nazi death camps across Europe. There were privates, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, colonels, majors, and generals (Eisenhower and Patton are most notable), as well as military medical personnel.

  George S. Maxwell, MD, a retired orthopedic surgeon, wrote the following when he was with the 131 Evac Hospital and came to Mauthausen in May, just days after the liberation:

  Upon approaching, we were met by MPs who had preceded us by some hours. We were told to enter on foot, no vehicles in the camp. The forbidding iron entry gate, now propped open, led to a complex of large ugly brick buildings two to three stories high surrounding the central open area. There was an eerie silence, no talking or commotion of any kind, just the buzzing of millions of flies. The ground was covered with liquid feces which we learned was the ubiquitous starvation diarrhea. The smell was powerful. I recall battle hardened GIs vomiting. I too was sick.