by Andrew Potok
“I see. It was ours and yours. So after you helped yours, you tried to help ours? How did you do that?”
“You’d be surprised how many of us helped the Jews,” she said and offered us slices of a cake she baked for the occasion. I wanted to say that I was surprised how many did not, but said nothing. “What would you do,” she rightfully asked, “if you faced certain death if even suspected of helping a Jew?”
The moral rectitude of risking one’s life by helping another is unquestionable, a reason to believe in the possibility of true heroism. I wonder what I would have done in their place. I wish I could be sure of my answer. At this point in my life, I think I could act heroically. But what if I were young, even in middle age? In the lists of the righteous at Yad Vashem, Poland, with more than six thousand righteous, has the largest number among all nations. The number who helped send Jews to the death camps is not available, nor is the number of bystanders who did not care one way or the other.
Another day, we sat in the comfortable library of one of the important political dissenters, one of the few who returned to his Jewish roots. A yarmulke on his head, he told us that Polish anti-Semitism was no worse than French Jew hatred or anyone else’s, “but in Poland,” he said, “it is not disreputable. It is taken for granted.”
“You make it sound almost civilized,” I told him.
“I am in a bus, the yarmulke on my head, and I hear a group of young people discuss what this is on top of my head. One of them explains and then they stare at me as if I were a Zulu. Of course, they have heard of Jews from their parents but they’ve never seen one,” he told us, “and that is why I stay in Poland.”
A few moments of silence followed. I looked down at my hands and tried to understand the courage, compassion, and patience it must have taken to decide to live his life this way. “The anti-Semitism doesn’t bother you?” I finally asked.
“I can’t say that I like it,” he said.
“I’ve hardly ever experienced anti-Semitism in America. I don’t know why I feel that it’s in the air here in Poland.”
He seemed surprised, and I thought that perhaps I was just another paranoid Jew, ready to explode at the merest suggestion that someone does not like me. “Just because someone says he does not like Jews or a particular Jew,” he said, “it does not mean that he’s an anti-Semite.” We shuffled in our chairs. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I don’t like most Germans but that does not mean that I’m anti-German.”
I didn’t get it then and I still don’t. How many Germans does one have to hate to be an anti-German? Still, I’m not at all sure why I have become such a defender of the Jews, why I am so sensitive to every slight, every rumor, hint, or possibility of a slight. I didn’t learn it at home. Nothing Jewish was admitted to Moniuszki Four, not the cooking, not the cooks, not the unassimilated. In their fancy fur salon, strangely left with its unabashedly Jewish name, Apfelbaum’s, the showroom staff, the dapper salesmen, sleek models with little breasts and noses, were anything but Jewish. The Warsaw gentry would not have tolerated big noses or tits.
Toward the end of my last visit twenty-five years ago, I asked our taxi driver to take us to a school for small blind children. He could not believe what he heard. “Blind children, Mr. Andrew? You want to visit blind children?” When he parked on the edge of a lovely woods called Laski, he again told us that it was beyond his understanding that anyone would want to witness something as depressing as blind children. He turned the radio on to American country music and reached for his newspaper. “You must come back quickly,” he said.
Inside the simple building, we were met by one of the nuns who ran the place. When she opened the door to the large playroom, we were treated with happy squeals. Dozens of little kids were playing with large balls, blocks, and metal slides, and their laughter drowned the sad mood of everything else in Poland. Then one of the nuns gathered the kids to explain what my guide dog does. “This is Dash,” she said. “He helps Mr. Andrew walk in the streets.” In my very bad Polish, I tried to tell them that I hoped they would one day have a dog to help them too. The nun said something after I finished, undoubtedly translating my words into an acceptable Polish. All the children made an oooh sound that could only mean “how wondrous the world.”
“Do not be afraid of the dog,” the nun said, “and those who want to pet Dash, make a line starting right here behind Jacek.” One by one, they stroked my dog carefully, very carefully. These storybook nuns and children gave us the sweetest moment of our entire stay in Poland.
That was in 1988. No such luck this time.
3
HOTEL HELENA RUBINSTEIN
1.
“So,” Loie says now as we settle into the Hotel Rubinstein in the old Jewish section of Krakow, “are you surprised you had a panic attack at the airport?”
“Embarrassed, the stereotypical ugly American.”
“PTSD,” says my psychologist wife. “It’s all that old stuff coming back.” She hangs up our coats in the closet. “Plus blindness,” she adds.
“Picture this,” I say. “Disembodied voices come at me as in a nightmare.”
“It’s the cognitive brain—your reason—which turns off and all you have left is the very old feeling,” Loie says.
Maybe so, I am thinking, but there’s also this: the once defenseless child as bombs fell around him is now the man who cannot defend himself because he cannot see. Not seeing, a thick, soundless blanket of fear sometimes hovers about me, a dark cloud, a tremor in the ground. But here, there’s not only that, but also the vulnerability and fear of a Jew returning to Poland. “I never feel as Jewish as here,” I tell Loie.
“I know,” she says. “It drove my father and his parents out of here when he was a little boy.” She sits down to rest. “But the only anti-Semitism I ever felt in my life was growing up in Westchester County, both in school and from the parents of school friends.”
Before Loie, I thought PTSD was just a trendy Vermont badge of honor, trauma perhaps being one in a list of things awaiting serenity prayers. Everyone was recovering from some damn thing or another. Not me. I was in charge of me, no dipshit recovery needed here; but now post-traumatic stress disorder is supposed to be taking its place as one of the central themes of my life. Surely a tirade of emotion might support a diagnostic rationale, but the moment of such anger, such a desire for revenge, does not always hearken back to childhood pain. The fear of a group’s hatred of one’s kind is surely reason enough for rage, which is certainly more fitting than forgiveness.
At first it was called shell shock, the explanations supposed at the time to be certain and complete by almost everyone, including the headmasters of boarding schools I was sent to, where I often awoke screaming in terror. We arrived in New York in February 1940, and it must have been later in that month, or March at the latest, when someone—who knows who?—drove me across the East River to an Ethical Culture School in Brooklyn. With no English language, bombs still bursting in my head, I was alone in what must have seemed like Alaska—though I had never heard of Alaska. With a group of other boys, I was put out onto a freezing porch where, like brave warriors, we were to spend the night. The sheets were starched and icy, the door into the house closed. I must have fallen asleep and awoke screaming, the first of my black black nightmares. An ink black sky, a thick, dense blackness, closed in on me like an iron vise. Nothing could stop it. It was the end. It was massive, inexorable, an implosion of the universe. I screamed and screamed. My eyes opened and I didn’t know where I was. A woman was talking to me in a language I barely recognized while the other boys peeked out from under their bed covers. With my few words of English, I wanted them to see the airplanes that bombed me. Every one of them strained to listen. I didn’t know if they understood as I somehow came up with a story in Polish mixed with sound effects and theatrical gestures about a brother who tucked a hand grenade into his belly and threw himself under a German tank. My hunger for sympathy must have been voracious, and
I have no idea where the brother story came from. Eventually, everything settled on the freezing porch and, happily, I did not sleep another night in Brooklyn.
How could I not love the next place they sent me to, the Hudson School, a mansion and a few other buildings in a wooded part of New Rochelle, not far from the city. I greeted the sight of the big old houses and lawns with relief, sensing the possibility of belonging. Here, finally, was safety and solace, a place for me to discover the growing American in me, away from my distraught family, also struggling for a foothold in New York.
Not long after stepping into New York from the Bergensfjord and Ellis Island, I numbed out not only the sounds of bombs and bullets—all the terrors that soon found a home in my nightmares—but also the hugs and laughter of my family, of Solomon and Paulina, my long-dead grandparents. In all the schools I was sent to in America, I was the only one who didn’t have grandparents.
Even the American war became my war. Guadalcanal, not Auschwitz, not Treblinka, not Majdanek. While my war destroyed my family and home, I sat at the dining table of my little boarding school in New Rochelle, eating sweet sections of canned pineapple, listening to the swing and sway of Sammy Kaye.
At that wonderful little school, nurtured by its teachers and accepted by schoolmates, I sculpted a clay panther and glazed it black. Everyone told me that it was a marvel. Where did this panther come from? Mimicry of the world of objects and words? My body craved the language and the art. Nothing was more central to my existence.
My concentration focused on becoming American, taking charge, cutting the language bonds that tied me to my father and mother who, in their forties, were slow to learn English and spoke with heavy accents. I wonder now if my swallowing the English language whole in one great gulp was as much an act of defiance as one of self-preservation and a desperate rage for a new identity. Apparently, until the age of twelve, a child’s brain is wired to receive such enormous gifts as language. Suddenly, my hard Polish Rs were replaced by back-of-the-throat vowel-like American Rs, and my parents laughed when my Polish began to be compromised by softer Ls.
Even though my first eight years were happy ones, I have only one childhood memory of my mother. She had walked home from Apfelbaum’s in the middle of one day and stood with my governess in the hallway, awaiting my bowel movement as I sat in the small WC, straining to produce. When I emerged triumphant, she was there in her cold mink coat, fresh from the Warsaw winter. I must have, at one time or another, been in her arms, fed by her, maybe even taken into her bed and hugged, but I don’t remember any such occasion.
I didn’t realize how abnormal the lack of body contact between mother and son was until, at the age of ten or so, at the Hudson School, a boy named Stevie who lived in Massachusetts invited me to his home for a weekend. His father picked us up and we drove through unknown landscapes and arrived in a driveway with green grass on either side. A woman, his mother, ran out to greet us. She wrapped her arms around us both, startling me. Inside the house, all the lamps were on, making everything yellow and orange. My shoes sank into carpets so thick that it felt like walking on pillows. Stevie’s mama touched us, hugged us, and sang songs, I think in Italian. That night I woke up screaming as the universe, which took up the whole sky, descended on me, its enormous steel vise about to crush me, crush the whole collapsing world. I screamed and screamed, then felt the softness of a woman’s body: Stevie’s mama held me in her arms, rocking me and singing softly. I was enveloped by her warm, soft breasts, alive again and sleepy. Though I never saw Stevie or his family again, I will never forget that weekend, always yearning to re-create the loveliness of soft large women and breasts.
This was a very different warmth than the kind offered by my mother. Still, my mother and my uncle Max were the power in the family. They made things happen, while my father stewed and moaned, crying out for the help he never got, except, perhaps, during those weeks in Poland and America that he spent at various sanatoriums, places that furnished rest from contempt, the freedom to smile. I gravitated to the power, joining his oppressors not from cruelty, but self-preservation. Who knows the pain my mother suffered because of her husband’s malice and parsimony? Only in retrospect do I feel pity as well as sympathy, and even admiration for their ability to survive war, displacement, a new life begun in their forties, and, above all, each other.
Even though Uncle Max drove us out of the war to safety, it was my mother, a few inches shorter than five feet tall, who, in her quiet way, took charge when both Max and my father wanted to go back to Warsaw. She drove Max on, cajoling and flattering as she pursed her lips, looking straight ahead, not blinking, immovable. She and her brother rose to the occasion, Max yelling and complaining all the way, she insisting on “only New York.”
My mother lived her happiest years after Max then my father, Leon, died—my uncle in 1953, my father in 1966. More than twenty years of non-interference from their anger and depression allowed her to live quietly, work hard, buy the furniture and paintings she loved and could afford without being yelled at, and give of herself generously and fully, especially to me. She lived until the age of ninety and died free of pain or chronic illness. For no apparent reason, she decided to stay in bed from the time she stopped working in her late eighties. She believed she would join her brother in her version of heaven, which was probably ruled by the Old Testament God but may also have included images she received from a devout Catholic nurse who visited her once every two weeks to administer a vitamin B12 injection and talk to her about Jesus. One such time, I watched as my mother listened with pious intent to yet another Jesus tale, her eyes bright, her mouth open, looking like Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
Though she told everyone that she was quite ready to die, she ate a banana a day on her Upper East Side doctor’s insistence to ensure her daily intake of potassium. The night she died, more than twenty years after my father, I had flown down from Vermont to visit as I’d been doing every few weeks. Before I left for the evening, I went into her bedroom where she and her housekeeper, Emma, were watching the New York Philharmonic on television. I kissed her cheek and took a cab uptown to a friend’s book party. When I came back late in the evening, all was quiet and I went to bed in the guest room. Before dawn, Emma, near hysterics, woke me and led me into my mother’s bedroom where she lay on her bed, her hands folded under her breasts, no longer breathing. Soon, the funeral people wheeled a gurney into her bedroom, covered her, and strapped her body to the gurney. I stood and watched. The act of carrying her small sturdy body and laying straps across it was a violation of that small strong woman, an act that made no sense. They then rolled the beloved Madame Potok into the long hallway on the seventeenth floor, waited for the elevator and, as morning traffic sped up and down Fifty-Seventh Street, transferred my mother’s body into the back of their hearse.
Among the people who gathered in her apartment a few days after her death was a long-forgotten first PR lady hired by Maximilian Furs in the 1940s. As if she had never left the scene, she gushed about the arrival in New York of the Potoks and Apfelbaums. “I shall never forget this family,” said Rosemary, still the consummate PR liar. She cooed, “Not long after their arrival in New York, Madame and her fabulous brother, Monsieur Michel Maximilian, with their beautiful children next to them, sat like royalty among their fabulous minks, chinchillas, and sables.”
“What is that woman talking about?” I asked Anita who stood next to me, her mouth wide open, unbelieving. “We got off the goddam boat and lived in some Upper West Side hovel.”
My mother was a saint according to some of her friends and customers, always generous with advice, gifts of flowers, effusive compliments, always ready to take on discomfort in order to ease someone else’s burden.
2.
Some evenings in that love fest of a Hudson School, we kids sat on the plush carpet in the living room and our teachers talked to us about the sky, the earth, the birth of cities, often ending with requests for my drawings
, which earned the love of the little girls and even teachers. “I’ll trade you for a panther,” one of my little girlfriends whispered and, though I could not duplicate the ceramic panther, I did draw one and she let me stick my hand inside her shirt. Another little girl invited me to watch her pee for a picture of an apple tree in bloom.
When I told Loie about being coddled, loved, and praised for whatever qualities were discovered in me, and how drawing had come to me in what seemed like a single inhalation, she said, “You sly dog. How old were you anyway?”
“Maybe ten or eleven. But you should have seen the panther.”
“I think that getting laid is the reason most artists paint,” Loie said.
While I cavorted at the Hudson School, the grownups remade their fur business on Fifty-Seventh Street. After my two years in New Rochelle, my mother was advised by one of her new rich customers to send me to “a serious school.” I was shipped off to the Williston Junior School in East Hampton, Massachusetts, where my nightmares reappeared with a vengeance. They were soothed regularly by Mrs. Clare, the headmaster’s wife. She sat at the side of my bed and gently laid cool washcloths on my forehead. Some nights that year, I awoke knowing that terror was coming and tried to erase it by walking the halls of the dormitory. But I could not stop it. I saw no airplanes or bombs, but only a black abstraction deleting the universe.
In the middle of that first New England winter, I woke up one night, sat up in bed, and looked out the frosted window into the snow-covered street, lit by a single street lamp. My aloneness was sharply defined by the cold, the snow, the silence, the empty street. The scene outside the window was a reflection of me, a me that didn’t belong, not in East Hampton, Massachusetts, not with my parents in New York, not in my blue room on Moniuszki Street, not anywhere. From that night, aloneness and otherness were hardwired in my identity, taking their place among the well-learned social graces. At times loneliness surfaced as comfort, a home of its own, a center around which the panorama of my life unwound.