Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss

by Unknown

  That is the feeling I had again, more powerfully than ever before, at Birkenau and Auschwitz. We were rising above the defiled and tortured and abandoned. We were free Jews singing to God, responsible for one another.

  Am yisrael chai. The people of Israel live. The Israeli flag was around us and we knew how great was our need for a place of refuge, wanting to trust, but learning the bitter lessons of history. We Americans felt how special our country is, a country where a Jew could become a senator, and where his wife, a child of survivors, could be chosen by the president to participate in the commemoration of the liberation—the destruction—of the planet of death.

  I had to go. No matter how much you read and how much you hear about it and how much you talk to your family and parents—even if you are as close to the Holocaust as the child of survivors—you have to go there and see this horrendously evil, evil, evil place that stinks in its profanity, that is so ugly it shakes your belief in everything, your belief in mankind and your faith in God. And you won’t understand. But you will know.

  Now, home with my family, I look forward to the day when I travel to the grave of my father in New Jersey and place the stone from Auschwitz on the ground that contains his remains, confident that his spirit survives in eternity, never again to live on a planet of death. Never again.

  HADASSAH FREILICH LIEBERMAN was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1948 to Rabbi Samuel and Ella Freilich. Both of her parents are holocaust survivors, her mother of Auschwitz and her father of a Nazi slave labor camp. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1949 and settled in Garner, Massachusetts. Mrs. Lieberman graduated from Boston University in 1970 with a bachelor's degree in government and dramatics. She received a master's degree the following year from Northeastern University in international relations and American government.

  Mrs. Lieberman’s professional work has been in the area of health care. More recently she has dedicated her efforts to women's health care issues, particularly promoting awareness and prevention of heart disease. She serves on the Board of Directors of Best Friends, a youth development and character building program for teenage girls; Meridian House, a nonprofit educational institution that promotes international understanding; and the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, which memorializes victims of the Holocaust.

  Hadassah is married to Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. They have four children: Matt who is married to April, Rebecca, Ethan who is married to Ariela Migdal, Hana, and two grandchildren.

  Chapter 4: It Isn’t Easy Being Happy by Kim Masters

  Sidonia and Salamou Eberstark in about 1940

  To Nicholas Winton,

  organizer of the Kindertransport,

  and the courage of the families who

  entrusted their little ones to him.

  Kim Masters is one of my favorite contemporary journalists. I was delighted when she agreed to write a piece for this book about her trip with her parents to their hometowns in Czechoslovakia. From the first sentence to the last I wept. She writes from the heart. –MW

  The first time my mother passed through Prague she had just turned fourteen and she didn’t get off the train. It was 1939, and the breath of the Nazis was so hot on my grandparents’ necks that they had put their children on a children’s refugee transport out of the country, flinging their three young daughters to the uncertain mercies of strangers in a faraway foreign country.

  What dubious comfort the Kindertransport must have provided. The oldest girl was not quite sixteen—just old enough to make the cut. The little one was ten—so much the baby that my grandmother put her on the train, pulled her off the train, and put her on again, finally relinquishing her to an unknown that seemed safer than whatever lay ahead in Czechoslovakia. The unimaginable horror.

  The three dark-eyed girls wore identification numbers on boards hung around their necks. They were bound for England, destined for a children’s home in the country. Strangers had signed for each of them, guaranteeing that they would not become young burdens on the state. For a time, my mother received letters from home, including a desperately optimistic one at Passover. The last one was dated March 1942.

  As I grew up in America, my mother’s village of Trstena seemed like some Eastern European version of Brigadoon: a mythical place that had vanished into the mists of the Tatra mountains. It simply eluded me that the town still existed in some form. My grandparents were phantasms to me. My mother, who never got a chance to see them through the angry eyes of adolescence, could only describe them in childlike terms. In her hagiography, my grandmother was an utterly selfless woman who struggled to make a few coins buy the groceries each day. When all the family took turns bathing in a tub in the kitchen, she would go last, immersing herself in the grimy water. In one early photo she looks astonishingly pretty. The last pictures show a somewhat pot-bellied matron in a matronly white-collared dress. She was forty-four—a year younger than I am now.

  My grandfather was even more shadowy to me. In the few photographs that survive, he seemed to be almost a Chaplinesque figure, with his little mustache and his dapper hat. But my mother described him as a stern figure who demanded strict religious observance. Once, there was an exotic treat in the village: a film was shown on a Friday evening. It was the Sabbath, but somehow the girls got special permission to go. Then there was a power failure and the children started romping and shouting in the dark. In a terrifying moment, my grandfather appeared in the doorway, furious that his children were making such a display on a night that should have been devoted to prayer. That is the only story that I know about the bald man in the sepia-toned pictures.

  My grandparents’ fate was sketchy to me for many years. They had died in a concentration camp, we were told. I didn’t know what a concentration camp was, and for many years I never asked. I knew it was a place from which they had never emerged, but I also assumed, with a child’s logic, that any place described as a camp might not be entirely bad.

  Years later, long after I had learned just how sadly wrong my assumptions had been, we suddenly decided to visit Trstena. It struck me with a strange force that this was something we could actually do. I was to fly in from Los Angeles; my parents made the trip from Washington, D.C. We met in Prague and embarked on a long train ride.

  The fabled Trstena of my mother’s youth was a green, beautiful place where children gathered tiny, perfumed strawberries growing wild in the deep woods. I never imagined that there was winter there at all. Now, as we drew near, I couldn’t picture the real Trstena at all. We rode on the train for mile after mile, passing fields of brilliant yellow flowers. It almost seemed that you couldn’t get to Trstena after all. Hours passed, and we had hours yet to travel.

  We got off the train stiff-legged in Zilina, a town my grandparents had passed through on their way to Auschwitz. We thought we would be able to rent a car there. The Slovak government had offered a brochure promising half-a-dozen agencies. But Zilina was a run-down, seamy-looking place. And we were warned by a surprised but friendly stranger who helped us drag our luggage up the steep steps of the train station that we wouldn’t find any cars for rent here.

  Finally we hired a cab driver to take us on the two-hour trip to Trstena and help us find a hotel there. The countryside became rugged; steep hills covered with fir trees rolled past. It was beautiful country, dotted with little houses made of stucco or logs. Stout old ladies trudged along the road wearing head kerchiefs and long, dark skirts. In the fields, one or two people worked the land by hand. Every now and again, we passed a village with a gray, communist-era housing project planted near the town square. We passed one such place, Dolny Kubin, where my mother had taken a long train ride every day to attend an advanced high school. Until the advent of the Nazis. After that, her parents didn’t send her there anymore. She sat glumly in classes at the vocational school in her home village.

  It isn’t easy to be happy if you’re a Jew. Perhaps it isn’t easy, either, if you’re from Cambodia or South Africa or G
uatemala, but it certainly isn’t easy if you’re a Jew. It seems a dangerous proposition. Still, it was hard not to feel a bit giddy as we returned to Trstena. And I did feel that I was returning, though I had never been there before. When we finally saw a sign marking our arrival in the town, I was so excited I jumped out of the cab to have my picture taken.

  And what did we find? Another village, with a main square, a couple of churches, rows of little shops along the street. But this was our village. My grandfather played cards there in that rather ornate coffee house—just an empty storefront now, with frosted-glass signs promising pivo (beer) and teple jedla (warm meals) still visible in the streaked windows.

  The Soviets had been busy here, and the outlines of the original village were a little blurred by an ugly, looming apartment building. But Trstena was still just a collection of a few streets in either direction. Not a place where one could get lost, even now.

  We went straightaway to the spot that we most wanted to see—the house that my grandfather had built with his own hands. A beige stucco structure on a corner, just as it was in the brown photos. It had been new when my mother left for good; now it stood, more than fifty years later, dilapidated but occupied. I knocked—boldly, I hoped—but no one was home. A low wall stood in front with a strand of barbed wire hung across. My mother was shocked by the house’s condition, but I was amazed to find it still there, however forlorn it looked.

  The backyard was chockablock with bricks and lumber and building materials. I had seen pictures from the time when there was a small barn there—a photo of my grandmother standing on the spot where I now stood, posing beside the family’s cow.

  Across the street was the play yard of the elementary school where a maid used to bring the pan of eggs that my mother hadn’t eaten at breakfast. A few doors away, the pharmacy where my mother fetched leeches for her grandmother. Nearby, the little two-story synagogue, now a blank-faced, empty structure with tablets on the façade scrubbed clean of their Hebrew letters.

  I took pictures of everything—the house, the synagogue, the school, the pharmacy—attracting stares from the villagers. Were we imagining things or did they know who we were? Their gazes made us uncomfortable, but we were determined to ignore them. This was our place, after all. Some of these very people, I supposed, had helped themselves to my grandmother’s linen and cookware and finally to the house itself. Were we the intruders?

  If so, I still felt a sense of triumph, even as I recognized how absolutely powerless we would have been had we simply stood on that spot a few decades earlier. We were tourists now, prosperous tourists, and we hadn’t died. We weren’t exterminated, after all. We had returned to look down our American noses at the gray post-Soviet squalor of this run-down little village.

  The cemetery was almost invisible from the road, up a steep hill just outside the town. The cab driver was baffled. What we would want with this place? This is a Jewish cemetery, he told us in a confidential tone. We nodded and set off to climb the wet, grassy hill.

  Behind a broken wall, we found the overgrown gravestones. Most were engraved in Hebrew, which we couldn’t read. None was dated later than 1942. Many were smashed or toppled; the good citizens of Trstena had tried to murder even the ghosts, it seems.

  Somewhere there was my great-grandmother’s grave. My mother remembered how her own mother prostrated herself with grief on the spot. But we couldn’t find the stone. What would my stern grandfather have thought of that? His American grandchildren had never learned Hebrew, didn’t observe the Sabbath—some of us had even married outside the faith. In the cemetery, there was only the chirping of birds.

  Back in Trstena, we found just one hotel, and when we took a closer look it seemed to be a brothel, too. There were brightly colored condoms for sale at the cash register, and gilt-framed drawings of couples in romantic embraces graced the bedroom walls. We would not be sleeping in Trstena that night.

  When it was all over, there were still no answers to many of my questions. Who were we? Who had we been? What did we become because of Hitler, and what in spite of him?

  I still didn’t know my grandparents at all. There was never an inch of film to bring them to life in my imagination. The few flat photographs and my mother’s childlike recollections weren’t nearly enough. I had only a taste of the faraway world in which they lived, and I felt the wonder that anyone got out of there at all.

  Did they take comfort in having saved their children— did they even suspect that they had succeeded before their grim journey came to an end? Or did they despair that they had brought new life into the world?

  It isn’t easy to be happy if you’re a Jew. As you float along on your happiness, the fingertips of the six million brush you from beneath, like kelp reaching up from the bottom of the sea. You can hear their whispers. Some say, “Remember!” Others say, “Beware!” But some, perhaps including my grandparents, say, “Go with God.”

  And sometimes, I think, some might even say, “Thank you for living.”

  KIM MASTERS is the daughter of Alice Masters, who left Slovakia on the Kindertransport, and Peter Masters, who escaped from Vienna as a youth and chronicled his wartime service in a secret British commando unit in his book, Striking Back. Kim Masters is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine and a correspondent covering the entertainment industry for Inside.com. A former reporter for the Washington Post and Time magazine, Masters has written two books, The Keys to the Kingdom: How Michael Eisner Lost His Grip and Hit & Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

  Chapter 5: Kicking and Weeping by Deb Filler

  To my loving mother, Ruth,

  survivor of a survivor

  Deb Filler, a great comedian and playwright, uses her humor to master tragedy. No one else has the power to make me laugh and cry at the same time. –MW

  Usually when people hear I was born in New Zealand they ask, “Reeeeeally? There are Jews in Noo Zeeealand?”

  There aren’t a lot of us: my mother, my sister, and my cousin Lenny. There were twelve tribes of Israel, and they wandered.

  Noo Zeeealand. Third island on your right, past the Wendy’s. Can’t miss it. If you drive past a pink house with a palm tree and a Caddy in the drive, you’ve gone too far. You’re in Florida.

  And God said, “Send a tribe to ‘Noo Zeeland’!

  No, I’ve changed my mind. Send two people.

  And they shall be known as Ruthie and Solly

  and their tribe shall be known as Ki-brews,

  Kiwi Hebrews.”

  New York, 1990

  I was living and studying in the Village. The Lower East Side is very different from New Zealand. There are a lot more Jews. My apartment was in a building where hundreds of immigrants before me had made their homes, directly above The Cauldron, a kosher-macrobiotic restaurant where Allen Ginsberg and his friends ate. Each week I bought a delicious golden kosher-macrobiotic challah, baked by a Polish woman with a number tattooed on her arm. Abe’s Kosher Meats, Moishe’s Bakery, and Schacht’s Deli were within a half block of my doorstep, God forbid I should be hungry. The Tisch School of the Arts, Cohen’s Optical, Felder’s Pharmacy, my landlord, Mr. Wertenteil, was Jewish. Even the owners of the Guatemalan crafts shop next door were Jewish. I was home!

  I had to find a way to live, to survive. While I studied theatre, I worked as a singing waitress at Sammy’s Famous Roumanian Steakhouse. I delivered futons to hundreds of Manhattan walk-ups, schlepped furniture throughout the tristate area, and drove a car service for Martha Graham, Judy Collins, and Leonard Cohen. I performed in Lower East Side storefronts, and saw as much theatre, art, music, film, poetry readings, and performance art as I could get into. Whether I “second acted” or paid in full, I was becoming a New Yorker, with all the chutzpah that entails.

  I’d learnt chutzpah quickly. My first under-the-table job was as the temporary maitre d’ at the Second Avenue Deli. I learnt to
use my elbows in half a day. The nice little Kibrew went underground. We’re talking survival.

  The manager of that first deli job reminded me of my father. He had a wonderful sense of humor, a thick Jewish accent, and a number on his arm that looked eerily familiar. When I called to ask my father whether he knew Issy, he became very excited.

  “Issy? Issy Lefkowitz? Does he have red hair? Is he short? Is he funny?”

  Yes! It turned out Issy had been in Dad’s barracks at Auschwitz. Dad was in faraway New Zealand and had no idea what had become of Issy or any of his other landsmen.

  My parents came to visit. Within an hour of our reunion my father was standing outside the Second Avenue Deli window, hands up against the glass, squinting to see inside.

  “Is that him, Deborah? Dat chappee dere with the pastrami? No, Deborah you got it wrong. Dat’s not Issy. He’s not here.”

  “Dad, that guy’s Luis, he’s Puerto Rican.”

  “What about da one with the turkey? Dat’s not him, dat chappee is too short. You got it wrong, he’s not here.”

  “That’s Mohammad you’re pointing at, Dad. He’s Bangladeshi.”

  We lined up outside the restaurant for what seemed like an excruciating amount of time. Once inside, Dad scanned the room. Suddenly he shouted, “Issy,” and ran across the restaurant.

  Issy didn’t remember my father. Dad tried to trigger his memory.