Claiming My Place

by Planaria Price

  There’s a particular kind of impossible burden familiar to children of Holocaust survivors—to somehow make up for their parents’ pain, certainly not add to it; to compensate for the missing years and opportunities, the lost futures and dreams. I’ve seen this play out in some mix of two ways. In some families, a child might grow up feeling guilty and dutiful and behaving in an obedient or rebellious manner, depending on his or her nature. For others, the pressure was to be happy. A challenging and complicated business in either case, but I prefer the second and that’s what I had.

  My mother and I were very close. As a young child I understood that I could never lie to her because she could read my mind. But the fact is I confided in her with full trust and she never betrayed that trust. Certainly I felt loved and cherished, and I can say that never, even during the infrequent moments of anger, was she ever once unkind to me. But what I now understand is rare, though I took it for granted at the time, was the respect she showed me from the day I was born. She regarded me as, and so I felt, equally a part of her and a separate autonomous being with dignity and rights. She never talked about my personal affairs with her friends because that would have been a violation of my privacy.

  Not surprisingly, she raised me to think for myself and make my own decisions. The only restrictions she placed on me were those necessary for my safety and health. She was absolute about bedtime, no exceptions ever, no matter how annoyingly I pleaded every night for another five minutes. Not even once a year to watch Peter Pan on television. I was the only child in my class who couldn’t watch it through to the end.

  Eating was the other area over which we struggled. She was concerned that I was too skinny and was always trying to fatten me up, hence my total freedom at the candy and pastry counter in the store. Otherwise she took care in providing us with healthful and tasty meals, having improbably become quite an excellent cook. It was clear how deeply my parents cherished family, and so I loved all my relatives, most of whom I’d never met. These included the dead ones, most especially my grandmother and namesake, Hendla. This provided my mother with the most powerful weapon in her arsenal to get me to eat: “One more bite for Uncle Idek. One more bite for Cousin Marek. One more bite for Tante Sarka. One more bite for Tante Hela.”

  To me, this was not a game but serious business. I struggled to force myself to eat, believing that to refuse this food constituted rejection of the designated family member. (At that time, I hadn’t even yet met my Tante Hela, who lived in Israel. Years later I came to appreciate the irony in eating for her when I learned that as a teenager, Hela would squirrel away leftover food from the rest of the family for herself and her friends.)

  But other than that, I could do pretty much what I wanted and avoid what I didn’t want to do. Within reason. And I was a reasonable child. The way my mother saw it, life says no often enough to build character. She loved me, so of course she would wish for me what I wished for myself, provided there was no harm or disrespect to others. Her philosophy was that a child’s job was school, and done right that was a demanding job. Beyond that, children should be left free to enjoy childhood. Plenty of time later for chores and household responsibilities. It was up to me how and with whom to spend my time. Whenever I complained of being bored and whined, “Mommy, what should I do?” I never got an answer other than “I don’t know. What do you want to do?” She treated me as someone reliable, trustworthy, and capable of understanding at her level, and so I was. She cared what I thought. I recommend this as a child-rearing strategy.

  The only thing missing was a sibling. I desperately wanted a brother or sister to love and to play with. I also wanted a puppy, as did my father. But my mother refused, explaining you become attached to a pet, and then feel heartbroken when it dies. We know where that came from. Plus she knew she’d be stuck taking care of it.

  So when I was eight and learned that she was pregnant, I was overjoyed. Henry was born on October 3, 1956. My mother was forty. He was a beautiful, affectionate baby and we all adored him. A year later my father sold the store, bought our first car, and moved us to Washington, DC. He bought a liquor store, in partnership with another Holocaust survivor, working only half the hours while making a better living. And instead of working every day as she had in the grocery, my mother now went in to help my father only on Friday or Saturday evening, whichever shift he worked that week. So life did become easier.

  1960: WASHINGTON, DC

  Two years after we moved to Washington the bottom fell out. I was twelve, Henry was three, and I was told that since Henry was born they had been hiding from me the devastating truth that he had Down syndrome. I didn’t know exactly what that meant but I knew it was very, very bad. It was a moment of pure, inconceivable heartbreak. My mother and I were sobbing. This was one of the few times in her life, ever since her humiliation in first grade, that she wasn’t able to control her tears. What finally forced the issue was the need to prepare me for what was coming. They were incapable of raising Henry without help and in those days that meant moving him to a residential facility.

  When Henry was born my father had grieved and eventually coped. My mother had collapsed. She remained functional and responsible, but her spirit was extinguished and she sank into a depression on the order of her reaction to her mother’s death from typhus. It certainly couldn’t help her heal that for three years, in her efforts to hide all this from me, she had to try to act normal when she felt dead inside. Somehow she thought she could spare me, only nine years old, the pain of this hardship at such a young age. Better to wait until I was older, she thought, as though she could protect me from reality.

  Years later, she told me that during that time, any kind of joy in life was beyond her imagining. It made no sense to her when people around her laughed.

  One year later, when Henry was four, he was taken to live at the Forest Haven Children’s Center in Laurel, Maryland, forty-five minutes away. Try to imagine strangers coming into your home and taking away your cherished, loving, uncomprehending toddler. The pain for all of us was more than I thought it possible to withstand. After all they had been through, I don’t know how my parents ever got up off the floor. This was a blow to our family worse than a death, and most of all for my mother.

  Eventually Henry adjusted to his new life and we adjusted to life without him. We spent each Sunday visiting with him in the parklike setting of his new home, and gradually our world again seemed “normal.”

  For my mother, the key to this was the introduction arranged by our pediatrician to two other couples with children in the same facility. Joining us on our Sunday visits were Lee and Rubin Obarzanek, also Holocaust survivors, and Herman and Frances Finkel. Frances was the real savior here. She was a latter-day Sprintza, standing four feet ten inches, with a huge personality, a little spark plug. She had a great sense of humor and even my mother, who hadn’t laughed in years, couldn’t resist cracking up. Frances and Herman were my parents’ closest friends for the rest of their lives. They were like an aunt and uncle to Henry and me. My mother gradually came back to life.

  1960–1978: MARRIAGE

  My mother had rightly recognized my father as a strong man who would take care of her. He was outgoing, energetic, responsible, reliable, and had a gift for business. He was also a sharp dresser and a great dancer. My father was the more adventurous of the two and always had to work to get my mother to agree to any break in their routine, like taking a vacation. She always loved these new adventures after the fact, and remained just as reluctant the next time he proposed one. He would try any new food. My mother, not.

  “Basia, try this, it’s delicious!”

  “No, I don’t like it.”

  “But how do you know if you never tasted it?”

  “No, I don’t want to.”

  “Please, just one bite!”

  “No.”

  The occasions when my father got my mother to give in on this kind of thing were never.

  My father was generous,
both with money and time, and he was driven and proud. Because he grew up without a father, having lost his when he was just three, he had to figure out on his own what it meant to be a man. Success meant providing well, as he defined it, for his family, for which we would appreciate and respect him and the world would admire him. It hurt him that my mother refused a lot of his intended gifts. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a mink coat, and she got him to compromise on an Oldsmobile instead of a Cadillac. Showy status symbols weren’t for her, but he took it personally. It was no different than the leather boots and the puppy she turned down when he courted her in Munich, and why he complained to Sabina that my mother must not like him. So when my mother or I did ask for something, he was always glad to provide. He got as much from the giving as we got in the getting.

  My parents didn’t have the intellectual connection—my father had left school after eighth grade to help his mother run the family business—nor the easy compatibility she’d had with Heniek. But they did have the passion that she and Heniek were lacking. And like Heniek, my father made her laugh.

  As independent and self-reliant as she’d always been, she also yearned to be looked after and taken care of. This was so even before the war, and especially after. She wanted a strong country to feel safe in and a strong husband to depend on, and she got both. Theirs was a traditional European division of labor. She was in charge of the household and children. My father ran everything else. He was a decisive, alpha kind of man who provided for his family, handled all the finances, and through wise investments left her well-off. You could rely on his word like a law of nature; if he said he would do something, it happened. My mother had never learned to drive so my father did all the driving, which also meant all the grocery shopping and getting me wherever I couldn’t get myself on the bus.

  Inevitably, a marriage between two strong personalities, one naturally geared to taking control and one unwilling to be bossed around, will have its deadlocks. Being ordered around by my father in the grocery store, getting criticized for how she wrapped a piece of fatback, wasn’t the ideal arrangement for promoting marital harmony. This was what my mother hated most about those five years in the grocery store. At least in Washington she worked in the liquor store with him only one evening a week. Remember, this was a woman who realized she could never live on a kibbutz because she couldn’t stand having other people tell her what to do.

  My father was impatient and my mother was stubborn. He would escalate, she would resist. After his eruption, he would stop speaking and she would wait. She’d cook his meals and he wouldn’t eat them. Eventually the cold war would blow over; it was never clear to me how.

  Until one morning when I was about twelve, after a particularly nerve-racking few days of silent tension between them, when my father had been sleeping on the couch “because Daddy has a cold,” I woke up to find them standing together in their bedroom, all smiles, a look of sweet contentment on my mother’s face. So I guess that’s how they made up.

  It used to bother me that she wouldn’t fight back when he lost his temper, would let him get away with it. But she insisted that would only make things worse. Some years after my father’s death my mother told me the following story: She and my father were driving home from a vacation in the Catskills. Feeling particularly close and sentimental, he said to her, “You know, we’re very lucky and we should be grateful for these thirty years that we’ve had together.” “Yes,” she said, “but if you count all the times you weren’t speaking to me, it’s really more like twenty.” She said that from then on he never again gave her the silent treatment when she angered him. But what tickles me most about this story was her takeaway, which she told me in that droll, matter-of-fact way of hers: “I should have spoken up sooner.”

  1978: AFTER LEON

  My father died of a heart attack on August 4, 1978. He was sixty-seven and my mother was sixty-two. Now that she was on her own, my mother had to face her insecurities and learn to do for herself everything my father used to handle. Nothing was more challenging than learning to drive. My mother was a physically unadventurous person. Growing up she had never learned to ride a bicycle, and after an accident while riding with Heniek on the handlebars of his bike, she never would. My mother carried herself with poise and grace, but underneath her refined demeanor she never lost the heightened anxiety that was her legacy from the war. This susceptibility to nervousness was transformed from the occasional startle reaction into an abiding part of her personality by a trauma having nothing to do with the war.

  We were still living in Munich when she got news that her brother Josek had been struck by a car near Frankfurt and lay in the hospital unconscious. He had suffered brain damage, making it unlikely he would ever be the same, if he were to live at all. My mother left me with my father and Leah and rushed to his bedside. She and Hela and Idek took turns staying with him for weeks at a time over the three months that Josek lay in a coma. Once he woke up it took many more months of rehabilitation and healing to determine that there was no permanent damage to his physical functioning. Sadly this was not the case with his personality. Josek was never again the dynamic, clever, outgoing, and ambitious young man that he had been. I once asked my mother if she felt the war had changed her. She had survived the war and Sabina’s death the same person she had always been, but it was this event, she told me, that coalesced all of it into an ever-present, moment-to-moment sense of the precariousness of life always hovering just under the surface.

  Now, with my father gone, my mother faced a forced choice between two equal impossibilities: the abhorrent prospect of being dependent on anyone, including me, or facing her terror. She had always been resourceful about getting around on public transportation. (There had been two failed attempts many years earlier, when my father was determined to teach her to drive. Each campaign ended after one day, when they came home not speaking.) The one place she couldn’t get to on her own was Henry’s facility in Laurel, Maryland. Even though Herman or I drove her each Sunday, and were happy to do it, she wasn’t willing to “impose” on anyone. So at the age of sixty-five my mother learned to drive. She signed up with an instructor, took lessons every day for three weeks, got her license on the first try, and became a competent and confident driver.

  It’s hard to reconcile my mother’s basically cautious, risk-averse nature with the brave and dangerous chances she took during the war. My mother often said that she couldn’t quite believe it herself. It was as though that were some other person, she used to say. But she also said, “When I’m in danger, I’m not shy.”

  One Friday evening before my father’s death, when she was working in the liquor store, my parents were held up by two men with guns. As the robbers were leaving, having already emptied the cash register, one of them noticed the display case of Timex watches on the counter and grabbed a handful. “Haven’t you taken enough?” she blurted. “Shut up, lady,” he snapped, “or I’ll blow your f**king head off.” She was as affronted by the language as by the gun. I never heard a curse word come out of her mouth. The closest she came to foul language was exclaiming, “Uh cholera!”—the Polish equivalent of “Damn it!”—when she burned her finger on the stove.

  It took five years for my mother to adjust to losing my father and for life to once again feel normal.

  1993: SABINA’S SON

  Fifteen years after my father’s passing, having failed in several previous attempts to locate Sabina’s now-grown son, I tracked down his phone number in Seattle, Washington. I called, Joel answered, and I said, “My name is Helen West. Your mother and my mother survived the war together. Your mother and my father dated as teenagers before the war.” After a few moments of silence while he absorbed what he’d just heard, he said that he was in the midst of putting his two young children to bed—the younger was a three-year-old girl named Sabina—and he would call back in half an hour.

  We spoke for about an hour. I told him that my father had died of a heart attack at age sixty-
seven, and that my mother and I had wanted to find him for some time, because we imagined he hadn’t met many people who had known his mother. In fact, he said, we were the first. His father, also deceased, had been his sole source of information. His father had only known Sabina for barely a year, and his portrayal of her to Joel was filtered through his chronic depression. I told him what I knew about his mother. It was quite a different picture.

  Following our conversation, Joel called my mother and they, too, spoke for about an hour. I sent him copies of photos we had of Sabina: one of her, my mother, and several young men posing playfully in front of the Deutsches Museum in Munich just after the war and another of Sabina in the countryside standing next to a horse and looking healthy and happy. There was also a picture of him as a newborn, with his mother’s handwriting on the back, which she’d sent to my parents from the hospital.

  Our last contact was a letter from Joel thanking us for troubling so to find him and for providing the missing pieces. There was so much about his mother he hadn’t known, including the fact that she’d been married before. But what was most profound, he said, was gaining a sense of her not just as the lamented saint his father had described, but also as a real, live, flesh-and-blood human being who’d laughed and loved and actually lived.

  2007: ONE MORE BITE

  Until a month before her death, my mother and I brought Henry lunch every Sunday at his group home. By that time he was fifty-one, I was fifty-nine, and my mother was ninety-one. He still felt like our baby.