by Unknown
“Remember da chappee with da hunch back? Berish Grinbaum? Yeah? I slept right next to him. What about Srulik Fuchs, the messenger? You remember? He smuggled an apple from one of the Poles and split it four ways with you and Moshe Schertz and me and it was full of worms? Dat was me! Okay, what about when that bastard Zundel beat me to within an inch of my life and meshuggeneh Haim Diller was laughing? You remember! And I asked him why he was laughing. And he said, ‘It could have been worse, it could have been me!’”
But Issy didn’t remember. To compensate, he sent over enough food to feed a committee, a big committee.
Now, ten years later, I was making headway in my career. I’d outgrown my job as a singing-telegram bubbie. (A singing-telegram bubbie demands skills only the most highly trained actors can accomplish. Costume is very important. The thickest pantyhose available, marked with ballpoint pen for varicose veins, eighteen-inch Cabbage-Patch breasts, long and drooping with large red nipples strapped to your chest. Once the bubbie housecoat is removed, you perch precariously on the knee of the embarrassed middle-aged man whose birthday it is. At this point I seized poetic license and told dirty jokes to the assembled company. It was excellent on-the-job-training. Training for something, I’m not exactly sure what.)
That was all behind me now. I had already played Sophie Tucker’s mother in an off-Broadway musical. The actress who played Sophie was ten years older than I, six inches shorter, and in spite of the fact that she could belt as loud as Sophie Tucker herself, was completely tone-deaf, but who cared? Now I had my Equity card.
I was developing a new solo show. The cast included Charlotte von Rottenberg, a superficial, club-going, German video artist who talks incessantly about art in Euuuuu’wope; Pattie, a Midwestern housewife whose obsession with food is only briefly interrupted by a hijacking that occurs on the plane she is on; Dame Diggy McClean, self-proclaimed poet laureate of Australia; Natalie Hennyyoungmanoff, the only Jewish comedienne in Russia; and, finally, a large family of deliciously rich Jewish characters at a bar mitzvah.
I performed at clubs throughout downtown Manhattan. One club had no roof in the backstage area, the dressing room was a tent, the heat provided by fuel-burning lamps.
No matter, each day was wonderful. Each day seemed to present a more resplendent parade of freaks, screwballs, nuts, eccentrics, and geniuses for me to use as material. There was no end to the cavalcade of dingbats, aliens, and village idiots that made up the cornucopia that is New York.
May 1990
Invited to perform my show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in the midst of preparations, I received an unexpected phone call. It was my parents, offering me (in their words), “The trip of a lifetime! A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!”
This wasn’t a regular vacation. That’s not our family. It was a whistle-stop, whirlwind tour of Eastern European death camps. Just my dad and me.
My parents had already undertaken a postwar journey to Poland. Fifteen years earlier, in 1975, the same year I studied drama, the same year of my adult awakening, they had made their way to the forest in Brzozów, Galicia, to visit the site of the massacre of my father’s parents.
And now, fifteen years later, my father wanted to return. Here they were, both my parents on the other end of the phone, breathlessly awaiting my reply.
“How’s about it, Bebbski? We could go and visit camps, ghettos, prisons. We can go to Brzozów, to the forest. It’ll be fun!”
Brzozów. How often had I heard that word? Soccer games, before the war, the family bakery, the river, the school, the Jewish club, the forest.
Would I accompany him to the forest for the unveiling of the long-awaited memorial? It was at the exact same time I was due to go to Edinburgh.
There had never been an official count. No one had known exactly what happened to the eight hundred Brzozów Jews on August 10, 1942.
But in 1975, when my parents nervously made their way through the forest, they were approached by a nun from the nearby orphanage. My mother immediately became highly alarmed. She panicked, certain they were about to be murdered. Instead, the nun delivered the first eyewitness account of the Brzozów genocide since the war.
Eight hundred Jews assembled at the side of the road, marched through the forest, into the woods. That summer morning a young boy from the orphanage silently climbed a tree. He saw the large, freshly dug pit and then watched in silence as German soldiers, aided by Polish collaborators, unleashed a volley of submachine gun bullets into the Jews, into my grandparents and seventy of my relatives.
How could I say no? What about Edinburgh? I couldn’t disappoint my father. I suggested we visit the memorial two months later, in October; my father agreed. He wanted to go back again.
Our route was planned. We’d begin in Prague, visit Theresienstadt concentration camp, and then drive through the Czech Republic to Poland, stopping at Auschwitz, Krakow, and finally Brzozów, where Dad’s journey began. Then we’d drive back to Prague and fly home.
October 1990
Our hotel and rental car were booked in Prague. We each had a visa for the Czech Republic. On board the Lufthansa overnight flight out of Newark (one survivor I know unwittingly refers to Lufthansa as “Luftwaffe”), my father turned to me and said, “Deborah, I want you to behave yourself while you’re here on da trip.”
“What do you mean, behave? Dad?”
“I don’t want you to cry on da trip. Control yourself.”
I agreed to behave myself.
The walls of the Prague airport appeared to have the nicotine residue of all of Eastern Europe. It felt as though we were stepping directly into the past. Aeroflot prop planes, Czech guards smoking on duty, an entire country standing on the quivering new legs of democracy. The tram ticket into the city was one and a half cents. We drove past block after block of ugly apartment buildings, erected alongside noble, crumbling homes, trees, cobblestone streets, the old railway station, graffiti, vandalized statues of Lenin.
When we arrived in the old city, the sun was barely visible above the crisp autumn morning. Our hotel elevator could hold only three. It had a creaky iron gate. After we napped under feather beds in our rooms, we walked through the city and found ourselves in the old Jewish Quarter.
The Alteneuschule is the oldest synagogue in Europe. We knocked on the door. A highly nervous old man with no fingers cautiously opened the side door of the synagogue. He spoke only Yiddish. No words were needed. We understood who he was and where he had been.
As I looked through the narrow slits behind the mechitza, the thick wall that divides men from women in any Orthodox synagogue, I saw my father reading from the Torah. I felt emotions flow freely from me through the thick stone. The absence was palpable. Once the center of one of the proudest and richest Jewish communities in Europe, now there were barely enough people to complete a service. I sobbed silent tears behind the thickest wall in Prague.
We ate our oversalted duck at dinner the first night in Prague, my father suggesting a tour the next day to the Theresienstadt camp, where he was liberated.
I resisted the idea. I didn’t want to share our visit there with anyone. It was private. My father insisted, “We have to let a professional guide show us.”
The following day we were on a bus, getting a guided tour of Theresienstadt. The first thing you notice before actually entering the gates of the camp are hundreds of graves. These are graves of survivors who died after their liberation by the Russians. Dad’s only surviving brother, Ben, had almost died of typhoid here. Somehow, miraculously, he’d survived. I tried to understand that. Had he died, I would never have known him or my cousins in Sydney.
I could feel my heart beating loudly. How had they survived? I sat in the back of the bus, looking out the window as my father took the microphone and began telling yet another story. Surely the people on the bus understood this manic behavior of his? I skulked in my seat. There were two German tourists on the bus. Why were they there? What did they think? Had they seen my father’s n
umber?
At the defunct crematorium in Theresienstadt the old custodian showed us through the building. Someone asked him why he worked there. The old gentleman said he felt it was his privilege to spend his sunset years working in the old crematorium. He was a gentile, a Czech, himself a former inmate of Theresienstadt. Many of his close Jewish friends had died there. It was an act of respect. What overwhelmed him was not the morbid surroundings, it was the never-ending trail of German tourists who, upon seeing the crematoria, asked him why the photographs on exhibit had been fabricated. Germans and other revisionists who repeatedly insisted no one had ever died here. Spoke of their disgust at the deliberate lie they said was being perpetuated.
We returned to Prague in silence. I felt completely exhausted, overwhelmed, deeply grieved. As soon as we stepped off the bus, Dad suggested we visit the Jewish Museum, the Jewish Children’s Museum, the Jewish Town Hall, the Jewish cemetery. I wanted some hot soup, to write in my journal, to meditate and reflect on my experience of that morning.
My father argued, why rest? We only had five days in Prague. Time is short!
I was firm. I needed my emotional strength for the camps ahead, for our journey together. He relented, reluctantly.
We tried to get into several restaurants. There seemed to be many empty tables, but no room for us. We hadn’t realized the “schemer” method of access, the rubbing of palms to acquire a meal? Finally we actually found a restaurant where we could get hot soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. I was happy we had finally found somewhere to sit. I headed for the ladies’ room. There was a long line to use the facilities. Since I’d been living in New York for ten years I knew exactly what to do. I walked into the empty men’s room. The porter was furious. No disobeying rules! She berated me loudly and angrily. Disgruntled and dejected, I waited ten minutes to use the ladies’ room and finally returned to our table.
“I hate the authority, the abuse, the rules, the acceptance of the status quo. This place is miserable!”
“Deborah, you have to do as you’re told here. If you didn’t behave yourself in the camps, they’d shoot you!”
I was incredulous. I looked at him, and said, “Dad, we’re not in the camps!”
He seemed surprised.
Later, in my hotel room, I wrote an account of the day in my journal. I did not “behave” myself. I could feel years of grief being tapped. I let it flow freely, surprised at the same time by the depths whence it came.
I dried my eyes. They were red and puffy. My father looked at me closely and said nothing. We walked back to the Jewish quarter and toured the Jewish memorials. My father seemed satisfied.
We spent five days together walking, sightseeing, eating salty food when I managed to make a reservation, visiting museums, taking the subway, buying crystal glasses, taking in the spectacular city of Prague. It was the first time we had ever spent any time alone together, and it was a great adventure that we both enjoyed immensely.
Five days later, we drove out of the Czech Republic into Poland. At the border crossing my father chatted with a Polish driver whose car was filled with goods. I was nervous, fantasizing about being stuck at the border in 1939. Where would I have run? We pulled up to the Polish barrier. Our Czech visas were taken away by the officious Polish border guard. We’d overlooked one very important thing. We had needed two Czech visas each, not one, because we were making two separate entries to the Czech Republic. For a moment there seemed no way to return to Prague.
My father panicked.
“Oh dearie me, Deborah. We’re in trouble now. What are we gonna do? How are we ever gonna get back? We’ll have to leave the car by the side of the road. We’ll have to fly from Warsaw. You’ll have to forget your birthday in Prague, Deborah. You’ll have to cancel that restaurant you booked from New York. You’ll have to have your birthday in Gliwice, at the Holiday Inn.”
He was panicking, I was trying to reassure him, but the thought occurred to me, “What if he’s right? What if I get stuck in Poland for the rest of my life, with Dad?”
After a quick overnight detour to Sosnowiec, the next day we drove to the Czech Consul in Katowice for our visas. Getting new visas was no problem. My father was incredulous. How could it be that easy? How did I find my way? I was annoyed by his negativity, pleased by his compliments. He saw problems around each corner; I had the job of being perky, the problem solver. I understood how difficult my mother’s job had been.
We found things easily. People were approachable. I had expected Poland to be cold, gloomy, gray, macabre. Though sunlight only appeared through the smog at noon and disappeared by four o’clock, parts of the Polish countryside were picturesque and beautiful. This was not what I had imagined. People still drove horses and carts. In the cities there was a powerful residue of communism, gray concrete buildings, depressed-looking people, a few empty stores with little merchandise, and bad roads. When we needed directions, drunken taxi drivers and townspeople were not infrequent.
However, the downfall of communism had brought about a fledgling economy. Entrepreneurs were everywhere. We were weary tourists and, in many places, the only tourists.
I’d had a vision of Poland as filled with Jew haters. On our second day I met a kindly woman in a bakery who sold us ponchkehs, fresh donuts with plum jam. She herself seemed very sweet. I tried to imagine her betraying Jews and couldn’t. The photographer who took our visa photos seemed harmless, too, although we didn’t see much of him under the fabric of his very old camera.
That night, a friendly hotel waiter plied us with vodka, the Polish national tonic. I began to relax a little. Perhaps the thing to do was to drink our way through the countryside. That seemed too extreme, but I enjoyed the novelty of getting drunk with my father a couple of times.
The next day, en route to Auschwitz, I asked Dad about the fields we were driving past. Was that corn we could see growing? He looked out of the window, far away. He remembered a young woman attempting escape from the trucks en route on the deportation to Auschwitz from the Krakow ghetto. She had been caught in what looked to him exactly like these fields.
“The guard made her kneel down, put her hands behind her head, and then he shot her in the back of the head. Phew. You’re a lucky girl, darling, lucky not to see things like that.”
I looked at the fields once more and no longer saw the corn.
As we drove through Poland. Dad was constantly worried we would run out of gasoline even if we had only filled the tank a few hours earlier. No matter how much gas we had, he remained on petrol alert the entire trip. His worst fear was to be stuck in Poland.
Stories rolled out of him, his memories reawakened. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if he even knew I was present.
I wanted to share so much with him. I wanted to tell him why I’d cried in my room the day we visited Theresienstadt, how frequently I’d imagined meeting his parents, to speak about my childhood fantasies of murdering Hitler. I wanted to tell him that, somehow, his Holocaust was my Holocaust, too.
Instead I told him other stories of my own survival in New York. My singing waitress job in the rat-infested steak house with the abusive boss, the power-hungry acting teacher, moving furniture to one mafioso’s summer home in the Hamptons.
My father knew none of these tales. He was riveted, impressed. Had he known the abusive boss was cussing me out, he said he would have punched the bastard right in the face. I was incredulous. My father was finally championing my vulnerabilities, albeit through past stories.
I had hidden tears from him all my life. Tears proudly held in my chest when I fell off my bike, scraped my knee, got into a fight at school. Invisible behind the walls of the Prague synagogue, kept carefully hidden in the old Krakow ghetto where my father and his brother slept in sewers. And again when he showed me the town square in the same ghetto where one man, a father, selected for life in the ghetto, chose not to be separated from his children and was gunned down with the children on the spot. I saw the entire scene through my
father’s eyes and contained an ocean of tears. Held at bay in Auschwitz amidst the victims’ hair, locked tight in my throat when he showed me his bunk in Birkenau. There, as we walked through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, past the old barbed wire fences, into room after room of old eyeglasses, prostheses, suitcases, photographs, medical laboratories, torture chambers, tragedy, my tears were hidden from view.
While we were in the “museum” of the gas chamber at Auschwitz, a Polish teacher was taking a group of school children through. I wondered what my father was feeling.
We drove over to Birkenau. There we saw his old barracks, his old bunk, or where his bunk had been. An old stove was there now. He was disappointed. “Gee, they didn’t keep my bunk. Whaddaya know....”
He showed me where Issy slept.
It began to get dark. “Come on Deborah, let’s go! I got locked in here once before, I don’t want to get locked in again!”
Two days later, we drove into the Brzozów town square. That morning in the rental car I had finally asked my father for permission to cry at my grandparents’ mass grave.
“How long do you think you’ll cry?” he had asked.
“Fifteen minutes?”
“Okay, fifteen minutes is okay.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
We felt the unfriendly eyes of Polish townspeople in the square. What did we want? Hadn’t we had enough? A man with a beret recognized my father immediately, and Dad remembered both the man and his brother. This man had been a neighbor, later a slave laborer in Germany. He walked us past Uncle Mendel’s soda store in the direction of the old Filler house. Dad’s family had buried its fortune in U.S. dollars under the dirt floor in Uncle Mendel’s ice storage basement. When they went back to dig it up four years later it had all rotted.
We rounded a corner. A large apartment building loomed, three stories high. I was stunned. My father was from a respected family, the biggest bakery in town, but this was nothing like I’d imagined.
The family bakery was now a butcher shop, closed on this sunny Monday. Dad warned me, “Don’t go near, Deborah!”