“Oh,” she replied with a dismissive flick of her wrist, “those bombs were just meant for the Jews.”
I felt so angry at her hatred and stupidity. Fortunately, I didn’t say what I was thinking: that I never knew bombs could be anti-Semitic.
As we sit over coffee I tell Herr Schweibold why I have come. I want him and Frau Schweibold to know that Junka and I are Jewish. His expression remains placid.
“I thought maybe that was so,” is all he says.
I don’t believe him, but I see there is nothing more I can do. And there is really nothing more that I need. I came and said what I had to say. I’m only sorry I couldn’t say it to his wife. I return to the station and tell my companions I was just walking around to see how everything looked since I had left. Now I am ready to look forward to where I am going, not back to where I’ve been.
Poland is now occupied by the Soviets so to get there we have to go through the Russian Zone, which we cannot legally do because we don’t have the right papers. So we get off the train near the border, walk in the forest following the tracks, and stop in little villages in Czechoslovakia. We feel bold and exuberant as we enter the bars and cafés along the way, singing and dancing and laughing. We feel as if nothing bad can happen to us ever again. Then we walk across the border into Poland and get on the train at the next station.
The train stops at the familiar station in Piotrków. My heart is beating wildly, my stomach is cramping. I realize that it is exactly four years since my mama died. I walk to the address Janek sent, a part of a neighborhood I am not familiar with. I knock and the door opens and I see what is left of my family.
Idek and Josek and Janek and Uncle Josef hug me and kiss me and we cry with happiness and relief. I tell them what I have heard about Hela and Marek. But we say not a word about the past. We can’t think or talk about the atrocities. We must try to forget our nightmares. We must try to move into our future.
Janek and I go for a walk. The lindens are in bloom and the smell is sweet. We find a bench in the Rynek Trybunalski. It is almost deserted, desolate. There are a few old Poles walking around, but there are no more Jews.
“Tante Sura?” I ask.
“The gentile who was hiding her was denounced by his neighbor and the whole family was turned in,” he says. “Mama and the Polish family were all sent to Auschwitz.”
I shiver.
“Tatte was luckier,” he continues. “The brave gentile family who hid him was never turned in and so he is still with us.”
“And Mendel and Sprintza and all the cousins?”
“Elkanah was at the glass factory until this January. He survived Buchenwald. All the rest are gone,” he says, looking at his feet.
“But how did my brothers survive?” I whisper.
“Idek and Josek were together at the slave-labor camp at Bugaj until the Nazis closed it and put all the male workers on a train to Buchenwald,” says Janek. “While changing trains, Josek made a run for it into the woods and walked to a farm where there was a Polish woman. Maybe she knew he was a Jew, maybe not. She said she needed someone to take care of her horse. Josek said that before the war he had spent his whole life working on a farm taking care of horses.”
I laugh. For the first time since I have gotten to Piotrków, I can laugh. “The closest he ever came to a horse was the one in our stable, and he never looked at it!”
“Of course,” Janek says with a smile. “Of course. So the next day, just Josek’s luck, the horse died! But the woman kept him on the farm anyway, doing all the heavy work. Idek wasn’t so lucky. He didn’t want to risk trying to escape, so he ended up in the concentration camp in Buchenwald. But he is lucky enough that he is alive.”
“And what do you know of Hela and Marek before the liquidation?”
“I know from Josek and Idek that Hela was protected by working with her brother-in-law, Abek, in the Nazi uniform shop, and then she, too, was sent to work at Bugaj. But a small child who couldn’t work was worth nothing and would certainly have been killed. So each day when they went to work, Idek and Josek took six-year-old Marek with them, hidden in a sack slung over one or the other’s back. Each evening they would bring him back to Hela at the barracks where they all slept. When they closed Bugaj, Hela and Marek were sent to Ravensbrück. It’s amazing that Hela, much less Marek, survived.”
* * *
I stay in Piotrków for a month, always carrying Sabina’s letter to Leon Reichmann in my purse, but never seeing or hearing word of him.
One day, while Idek and Josek are out for a walk, I go to the house of Pani Zbeingska, the Polish woman who kept our remaining possessions and sent Regina back to die. When Pani opens the door, I demand she return what she stole from my family. She spits at me and screams “Zhid!” and slams the door in my face.
Shaken by memories of my red-haired younger sister and this woman’s hatred, I rush to the apartment where we are staying and tell everyone what has just happened. Janek looks at us somber and upset. “Since I’ve been here, I’ve been hearing terrible rumors about the Poles stealing from and killing the returning Jewish survivors. Just an hour ago, I heard another sickening story,” he says. “Do you remember Ben Helfgott?”
None of us do.
“I suppose he was too young for you to have known him. He’s now fifteen. He and his twelve-year-old cousin miraculously survived Theresienstadt. Just after the Liberation, hoping to find some shred of family left, they tried to take the train to Piotrków but were stopped by two Polish policemen. They were taken to a totally deserted street with vacant buildings. The police took out their guns and told the boys to stand against the wall. Can you imagine, after all they had gone through, to come home to this? Ben started crying and begging for their lives. One of the policemen said to the other: ‘Okay, they’re just young boys.’ And turning to Ben he said, ‘But you are very lucky to be left alive. We have already killed many of your kind.’”
We are shaken and all sadly realize that Poland and Piotrków can no longer be a home for us. The loss, the memories, are too painful. And we see that the Jew hatred under the Polish Communists is even worse than the anti-Semitism we grew up with. Josek, Idek, and I decide to leave and go to the DP camp at Bergen-Belsen to stay with Hela.
On the day we leave, as I walk through Rynek Trybunalski, who should I see but Leon Reichmann! He looks like Gandhi, he is so skinny, but otherwise he looks well and I give him Sabina’s letter. I tell him Sabina and I are living in Munich. He says to tell her he will come.
Hela and Marek
During five years from my childhood I was in the hell of the camps, under the threat of death expected at any moment, lacking information as to what would happen at the next moment and I survived. I chose life.
The years of my childhood in the Holocaust left on me an ineffaceable mark. I drew from my strength of spirit resources which enabled me to cope and to win. The Nazis could not defeat me.
My memories from the Holocaust as a small child are a testimony to the resistance of the spirit against inhumanity, horrors, cruelty and the baseness of spirit of the Nazi Germans who saw themselves as cultural and spiritual people enlightened above all.
—Marek (Moshe) Brem, written in Haifa, Israel, 2007
AUGUST 1945
My brothers and I take the train from Poland through Czechoslovakia to Bergen-Belsen, getting off before the border, dodging the Soviet border guards, going to cafés and even a few cabarets at night. Trusting the German mail system more than the Polish, the minute the train stops in Germany I mail a letter to Sabina to tell her of the good news that I found Leon, gave him her letter, and that he said he would go to her.
The train arrives at Bergen-Belsen. I have no idea what I will find when we get off. Those first visions of the DP camp in Munich are seared in my brain. Will my older sister Hela look like those skeletons with dead, hollow eyes? Will my young nephew, Marek, have toothpicks for legs and the look of an old man?
But there they are
! Laughing and smiling and waving at us, looking thinner, but almost like themselves. We hug and kiss and cry and cling to one another; the remnants of our once large, happy family of Piotrków.
We stay with Hela and Marek in their room in a former German military barracks just outside what had been the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. So many Jews tragically died of typhus just weeks and days before the Liberation. For health reasons, the Allies had burned most of that camp to the ground.
I cannot stop staring at my sister and nephew.
“You look so wonderful, so healthy,” I say as I hold Marek’s plump, pink hand.
They both laugh and say, at the same time, “Potatoes!”
They start chattering together to tell their story of the potatoes. Hela says that the sweetest words she has ever heard were when a woman walked into their concentration camp barracks and simply said, “It is over.” They knew at last they were free. They had survived.
Hela says that she was just recovering from typhus and Marek was so hungry and thirsty he could barely walk, but somehow they were able to drag themselves to the gates of Bergen-Belsen. British soldiers gave them packages of food, a knife, a fork, and a pan, a pound of potatoes, and pointed to a deserted German barracks where they could stay. Hela immediately found a water tap, peeled the potatoes, and in their safe little room cooked the potatoes in the small pot. Marek is excited and says they were so hungry they couldn’t wait. He kept taking the potatoes out from the boiling water and eating them. His eyes light up and he tells me that the taste of those potatoes was the most wonderful taste of any food. He is sure that he will love simple warm boiled potatoes until he becomes an old man and I understand exactly what he is saying. I feel the same way about those glorious boiled potatoes and remember all the weight I gained in Ulm while I peeled potatoes and shared them with the pot.
Hela laughs again and says she has spent the months since the April 15 liberation of Bergen-Belsen peeling and cooking potatoes, and Marek and she still eat and eat because their stomachs cannot yet be filled up. Marek will not let her throw the boiled potato water away but drinks it with relish, like soup. Marek says the potatoes have ended the war for him, though not all its nightmares.
Marek takes my hand to go for a little walk. He says he cannot get enough of the blue sky and the sunshine and the freedom to just walk around. There are so few children for him to play with and he is the youngest by far. But he says he doesn’t mind playing by himself. He has spent so many years hidden alone, in the dark, afraid to say a word, afraid he would be taken from Hela. And now in the daytime he feels so calm and free. Nighttime is another matter, and he shudders.
“Auntie Gucia, remember that terrible German soldier, Wilhelm, with his dog? After you left, Wilhelm let the dog into Zayde’s house while we were eating supper, but Lulek and I ran to the armoire and crawled under it and the dog couldn’t get us. And did Uncle Josek tell you about the big bag? Uncle Abek always knew when there would be an Aktion. It was so terrible, so many people were forced onto the trains. Uncle Abek would come at night and Mamashi would put on some of Papa’s clothes with a big hat to hide her face and Uncle Josek would put me in a big bag with a little hole so I could breathe, and he would carry me on his shoulders. He told me we were playing the Quiet Game and if I made any sounds at all, I wouldn’t win. We walked very far and stayed in the house of the Persinskis. Do you remember them? The nice Polish people who worked for my Zayde Brem? We had to stay in their dark basement for days until Uncle Abek would come to get us and tell us it was all right to come home. At night, when there was no moon, the Persinkis would let us go into the fields, but we had to keep playing the Quiet Game. It was such a relief to come home and be let out of the bag.
“That happened many, many times,” he says, with a solemn look on his face.
I hug him again, remembering that cheery, pink-cheeked little boy with curly red hair. The curls are all gone and the cheeks are no longer plump and pink, but he still has his sweet, though now more grave, expression.
“Uncle Abek and Mama sewed for the Germans and Mama cooked for them, too. They loved her patés, onion rolls, and egg liquor. But when I was six, the Nazis took a lot of people to the Rakow Forest and shot them. Uncle Abek was one of them. Uncle Josek, Uncle Idek, and Mamashi were sent to the Bugaj Labor Camp to work at the carpentry factory. My job was to stay out of the way,” he says.
We stop walking and his face clouds over. “It was all right until they closed the factory and we all had to go on the trains,” Marek says quietly. “They made the men go away from the women and they tried to make me go with Uncle Josek. But Mama said that I would stay with her. She said what would be her fate would be my fate. She would not give me up and she held me tight,” he says proudly.
We start to walk again.
“They told Mama to take off her boots and throw them in a big pile with all the others. But at the station we found Uncle Idek, and he was furious at Mama. Didn’t she know that Zayde Brem had melted down all the family gold and put some of it in the heels of her boots? It was meant to save her and me! We ran back to the pile and searched and searched and, Auntie Gucia, I was only six, so I started playing with that great big pile of shoes. I threw them up as high as I could, and suddenly I found Mama’s boots. Imagine that! She was so proud of me. She says over and over again that those boots and what was hidden in them saved us many times from death and hunger.”
He speaks with fierce confidence like a little man, this usually quiet and modest child. What an incredible miracle he is.
“We were squeezed on a train for a long, long time. Mama let me climb on her shoulders so I could see out of a little window with bars. We got out at a place called Ravensbrück. When the women guards told us to take off all our clothes and leave everything outside in a pile and then go to the showers, Mama hid a tiny bit of the gold from the boots and swallowed the rest. She gave the guard the gold coin and we were able to take a shower in a private room and get our own clothes back. I was really disgusted with how Mama got the rest of the gold back. You can imagine how, can’t you, Auntie Gucia? And I was so very angry with Mama that she meekly allowed them to shave her head of its beautiful mane of strawberry-blond hair. Now that I am older, I understand what she had to do and I feel ashamed that I cried and raged at her for allowing herself to be so humiliated.
“I think it was late fall and the beginning of a cold and snowy winter. We were put in a long, dark, and cold hut, with wooden bunks three floors high, with pads, not mattresses. I was so lucky because I found a thin blanket and still had my own clothes.
“Every morning before sunrise we had to go outside for roll call. That was the worst part of the day for me. Every day I would grab both of Mama’s legs and make her promise she would come back after her work and keep me from the Germans. Then Mama and all the women had to go to dig potatoes from the frozen earth and put them in large crates to be carried to a large building. They worked until dark and I had to stay hidden all day in the dark hut. The lice were my only playmates and I learned how to catch them very well,” says Marek, smiling at his joke.
“Mama was able to buy tobacco with her gold. She met some Dutch girls in another part of the camp. They were allowed to receive food packages from Holland and Mama traded the tobacco for food for me and her.
“Just a few months ago, I remember it so clearly,” Marek says as he looks up at the sky, “during one of the roll calls, I saw a plane flying very low. I could see the blond, mustached pilot with his leather hat. Then there was a large squadron of planes. Some of the women said they were American planes flying to Berlin. But even this could not give us hope, standing there in the freezing, dark cold. A few days later, we were all rushed onto trains to here, Bergen-Belsen. I remember while we were waiting for that train, I saw a full moon, shining in all its glory, and I thought that some parts of this world still had true beauty.
“When we got here, they took us down to huts where we were crammed toge
ther with Gypsies and their children. We Jews were on one side; the Gypsies on the other. This time there were no pads or blankets, just a hard floor on which we tried to sleep. Mama still had a little gold left but the German guards had nothing themselves, and so there was not a lot of food to exchange for Zayde Brem’s gold.
“Auntie Gucia, that time was the worst of all.” He shudders and we stop walking.
I sit on the ground and he sits on my lap. I hug him tightly and it feels delicious to have his small warm body close to mine. “The Gypsies just turned their faces to the walls and died. Most of the time there was no water to drink. We had to use the dirty, melted snow. So many people got terribly sick and died. One day the Germans brought a few buckets of real water. I was so thirsty that I couldn’t stop crying and Mama rushed to get water for me. A German hit her so hard on her head she was bleeding. I felt so guilty. I promised myself I would never ask her for water again. Then Mama got so sick and hot, and all I could do was sit by her and kill the lice. And then the woman walked in and said, ‘It’s over.’”
And Marek gets off my lap and goes running through the fields with his hands outstretched, laughing at the sun and the sky.
I envy Marek. He still has his mother. She survived the typhus.
Remembering my own dear mama, I feel a deep, painful emptiness. Whenever I think of her, and I often do, I cherish the deep intimacy of those last days of her life as I tried to make her well. It was a chance to repay a little bit of all the love and care she had given to me. And now, sitting with Hela and Marek in Bergen-Belsen, I think that perhaps Mama’s death saved her from the later horrors of the emptying of the ghetto and the extermination camps that Tatte and Beniek and Regina had to experience. And I know that if Mama had been alive in 1942, I never would have fled the ghetto. I would have stayed with my family. I realize that Mama’s death gave me life.
Claiming My Place Page 17