by Clara Kramer
Throughout the early 1950s, we kept in touch with the Becks with frequent letters. We included money because we knew how hard it was to make anything in postwar Poland. Beck couldn’t tell us how he felt, but I know how much this man, who loved freedom more than he could say, would hate every moment of living under the communists. He had become his true self during the war and his personal rebellion had saved 18 lives. I know he would love the sunshine of Israel and the bright blue Mediterranean. Most of all he would have enjoyed the cafés where there was always a good argument to be had, as much in his native Polish as in Hebrew. I hated that the Becks were suffering in the grey winter of communism and wished they could have come with us. When we received a kind letter asking us not to send them any more money, we knew it was because it put them in danger, and so for the next 20 years our communication was brief and sporadic. When Julia wrote that Beck had died, we felt that the world had lost one of the 36 righteous. We were devastated.
Manek, Rosa and her family and all my surviving relatives had settled in Israel. We had lived before the war as a pack and had become one again in Israel. When Zygush was grown he joined the air force, and Zosia married when she was a young woman. Sol became a supply officer for the Israeli police force. We were happy in Israel, but there came a time when Sol started to miss his family. We had saved a little money and he went to visit his parents in Brooklyn. When he came back, nothing felt right in Israel any more. He longed for his family. Sol was not a complainer and he had sacrificed ten years of his life, separated from his own family, so that I and my loved ones could heal and start a new life. His selfless love compelled my decision to move to America…It was very hard to leave my family, especially Zygush and Zosia, who had become more than brother and sister. I had helped raise them. They were my own children.
In 1957, we arrived in Brooklyn, New York. Sol went to work, managing one of the grocery stores owned by two generous brothers named Sam and Arie Halpern, both survivors. They hired him even though Sol didn’t speak a word of English at the time. Sam married my friend and cousin Giza Landau, who is now called Gladys. I don’t know why, but so many of the Gizas and Genias are now ‘Gladys’. No one could ever replace Mania, but Gladys has tried every day of her life to be the sister I lost. She’s the first call I make every day. I love her like a sister.
In 1959, we received a letter from Ala telling us that Julia had died. We mourned her passing and the fact that we weren’t able to go to the funeral.
In 1960, when Sol and I saved enough money from working for Sam, we opened a small luncheonette in Brooklyn, five booths and a counter. Sol had been terribly spoiled by his mother and when we were married couldn’t even butter his own bread. I asked him, ‘How are we going to run a luncheonette?’ He said, ‘I learned the grocery business. You don’t think I can learn to run a luncheonette?’ Of course he named the luncheonette after himself. I wish I had pictures of him trying to flip the fried eggs. I cooked the food Mama made. I cooked the food my customers loved from before the war. My speciality was petcha, jellied calves’ feet. My clientele raved about it. It was very hard work to make, but I didn’t care. Because the ingredients were so cheap, the profit margin was high. It was the same with pirogis. Flour and potatoes. I loved the luncheonette with its chalkboard menu and the customers who ate their breakfast and lunch and answered the phone for the ‘to go’ orders when I was too busy to do so.
When the Halpern brothers started their construction business in New Jersey in the early 60s, they took Sol with them and made him a partner. They have been in business together for the past 42 years. We have been very lucky in our adopted homeland and are grateful, especially to the Halperns, who have become family.
Finally, in 1990, the communist regime fell. The first thing we did was contact Ala and arrange for her to come for a visit. She had two sons, and I had two sons and five grandchildren. Zygush and Zosia had children. Our families were reunited. The first time our children met each other, they wept as much as we did. The recognition that they owed their very lives to the Becks overwhelmed their senses as much as ours. We were closer than blood. Our families had been brought together in a crucible and had become one. At every important event, wedding, celebration or bar mitzvah, we were together.
In 1995, the Becks were honoured at Yad Vashem in Israel. Ala came from Poland and we and the rest of our family came from the United States. Lola, who had married Artek, came from Montreal with her two sons. Ala planted a tree in the Garden of the Righteous. More than the tree itself and the honour it represents, the generations they protected by their heroism is their true memorial. We had a dinner in their honour with over 200 people, the survivors of Zolkiew and their families.
Looking back at my life, I can be proud that I have tried to live a life worthy of the Becks and my sister. I have devoted my life to Holocaust education. In 1982, I helped found the Holocaust Resource Center, which in association with Kean University educates 1,200 teachers a year in Holocaust history and prejudice reduction. In recent years, we have struggled to combat genocide wherever it occurs. I still speak between 50 and 100 times a year about my life and diary. Unless there is a family event, I never say no. I donated my original diary to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, where it is kept in the archives. I am still amazed that the entire document was written with one blue pencil that Beck gave me in December of 1942.
In the past 15 years, I have taken three groups of family members back to Zolkiew, which is now called Zhukova, its Ukrainian name. The Becks’ grandchildren always join us on these expeditions. The last trip we made was in the summer of 2005. We had a bus filled with 30 survivors and their children and grandchildren, all wanting to know and see their legacy first-hand. The bus was stuck at the Ukrainian border for over six hours. During the delay, someone asked if I remembered any of the songs we heard in the bunker above us. I was sitting next to Rosa’s daughter, Mania. We started singing. Sixty-five years later and I still remembered the words and the music. The songs I had sung along to silently in duets with Norbert were imprinted into my mind. I realized it was the first time I had ever sung these songs aloud.
After 65 years, my house is still there. The factory has been rebuilt, but is still there. My school. The orphanage. The town walls. The churches. The castle. The church where Mania was caught. All there. The synagogue begs to be restored. The Lvivsky road still goes by the house, but now it’s been repaved and widened. The garden is still behind the house, but there are new fruit trees. The Jewish cemetery where Mania lay had been used as a market during Soviet years, but is now empty except for tyres half buried in the ground (it is used for a soccer field) and a half-built house. The owner stopped building. He said the field was haunted and built somewhere else. Out in the marsh, by the mass graves, the survivors had a memorial built. Nothing has changed there. The willows. The tall marsh grass and the bluebirds. To say Kaddish there, with the breeze catching the ancient words before they retreat into the silence, is a blessing. There is not one Jew left in Zolkiew to say a prayer even once a year.
Diagonally across the street from my house, and across the street from the 800-year-old wooden church whose gardens are still tended by the great-great-grand-daughters of the women who tended the garden when I was a girl, is the Melmans’ house. The scars and holes have been covered with new wood, plaster and mortar. The house is the true reason for the visit. It’s owned now by a Ukrainian couple, who let us in. They greeted us warmly. They’d been expecting us. Through the living room to the left is a bedroom. On the other side of the bed, he bends down and lifts up a wooden hatch built in the parquet floor. The bunker is still there.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many many people without whose help and inspiration this book would never have been written. Clara’s War came to life as part of a film project based on children’s diaries, the Holocaust and contemporary genocide with Artur Brauner, who at the age of 90 is still memorializing the Jewish experience in Wo
rld War II. Working on his 23rd film has been an inspiration. I am very grateful to have worked with him on our Holocaust film projects. Dee Dee Witman’s appetite for challenges led her to undertaking the enormous task of creating the apparatus that supported my work for the past several years as well as the infrastructure of the Children’s Diaries project. I am also very grateful to her husband, Dr Gary Witman, and their children, Samantha, Zachary and Amanda Rose, for their tolerance and affection. Alan Hassenfeld was the first to see the project’s possibilities and his sweeping generosity and leadership was our bedrock. I would also like to thank the Rhode Island Holocaust Education and Resource Center and in particular Selma Stanzler, Ellie Frank and Arthur Fixler. Our work would not have been possible without the ecumenical generosity of the community in my home state of Rhode Island as well as the generosity of so many others across the country.
Agnieszka Holland’s insight in the early drafts of Clara’s War helped ground the story in the reality of her native Poland. And without the partnership and friendship of Zlata Filipovic and Melanie Challenger and their eloquent book of children’s diaries, Stolen Voices, I would never have found my way to our wonderful agents and colleagues at Susanna Lea Associates. In particular, Mark Kessler, Jon Broadbridge and Susanna Lea, who is the wisest, most far thinking and committed of shepherds who has always brought her sheep to the greenest pastures. And especially Katrin Hodapp, muse with a capital M and friend who has guided the writing of this book with relentless dedication, talent and integrity and who was compelled to reach deep into the briar patch upon many occasion to pull this writer to safety. At Ebury Press, I would like to thank our editor Charlotte Cole whose belief has given Clara’s War life itself and whose gentle hand shaped the book with so much grace. And also to Mari Roberts, our copy-editor, who made so many saves she could be in the goal for Manchester United.
To Michlean Amir, Vincent Slatt, Caroline Wadell, Nancy Hartman and Andy Hellinger at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. To Shimon Samet, the editor of the Sefer Zolkiew and all the survivors, especially Joseph Rosenberg, who wrote of their experiences in this book which is a moving and factual memorial to the town and its inhabitants before and during the Holocaust. To Gershon Taffet, Clara’s Hebrew teacher during the Nazi occupation, author of The Annihilation of the Jews of Zolkiew, his account of the history of Zolkiew prior to and during the war. To Andrew Maximov, my guide in Lvov and Zolkiew who made history come alive. To Konbay Mykhajlo, director of the Zolkiew Historical Society and his prodigious knowledge of the town’s history and architecture. To Zygush and Zosia for their remembrances. To Lola Patrontasch for the generous use of her diary which allowed us to better remember crucial conversations and events in Zolkiew. To her son Solly Patrontasch for his many photographs. To the Dobriks, the couple that presently resides in the Melmans’ house and who proudly make their home available to anyone who wants to look at the bunker. To Dr Bruce and Reba Evenchik, Margo and Eric Egan, the Tooles, John and Dawn, for their friendship and safe haven. To Ryan, Jena, Johnny, Justin, Nathan and Garret at Lenox Coffee, where much of this book was written, for their good natures and the over 1,000 cups of perfectly brewed coffee it took to get the job done. And to Charisse Charbonneau, owner of Lenox Coffee, who graciously allowed me to monopolize my lucky table for such a long time. To Clara’s husband, Sol, for allowing me to interrupt his dinner almost every night for the last two years without a word of protest. To my brother and sister, Morton Glantz and Freyda Winick-Zeiff, and their spouses, Mary Ann and Norton, for their cheerful support over many years. And to my children, Jack and Harper, who have kept a sense of wonder alive in such an old dog.
And Clara. Words fail me. You’ve been more than an inspiration. It’s been one of the great honours of my life to be able to help tell your story. Thank you.
Stephen Glantz
About the Author
CLARA KRAMER (NÉE SCHWARZ) and her family were among the approximately five thousand Jews in Zolkiew, Poland, before World War II. At the end of the war, she and her parents numbered among the approximately sixty who survived. Kramer is the cofounder of the Holocaust Resource Foundation at Kean University. She lives in New Jersey.
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Credits
Jacket design by Allison Saltzman
Photograph of young girl courtesy of Art Resource, © 2009 Estate of Peter Fink/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photographs of Clara’s diary courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright
CLARA’S WAR. Copyright © 2009 by Clara Kramer and Stephen Glantz. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition March 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-186453-7
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