Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  From time to time, Russian friends (many of them survivors of Stalin’s gulag) would take me to meet non-Russian Jewish survivors who had, through odd combinations of circumstance, moved eastward instead of westward after their liberation by the Red Army. One of these Jews, who became a good friend in spite of the constrictions on relationships between foreigners and Soviet citizens, had what was, for me, the most resonant story. I tell it now, as she once asked me to, because she and her family are finally beyond the reach of any adverse official “consequences” (as she put it) from the now-defunct Soviet government.

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  KATYA STEIN MOROZOVA (her name has been changed) was born in Budapest in 1924 into a nonobservant, assimilated German-speaking Jewish family. Her father was a doctor, her mother a secondary-school teacher of German and English. When I met her, in 1969, she looked extraordinarily young for a woman who had spent her entire adult life in the Soviet Union, where women in their forties generally bore the marks of having lived through hard times and looked like American women in their sixties. This was all the more remarkable in view of the suffering that had preceded Katya’s life in Moscow.

  Until 1944, under the independent Hungarian government of the fascist Nicholas Horthy, Katya and her family, like most Hungarian Jews, remained relatively unharmed, a small island in a sea of Nazi mass murder. During this period, Katya’s father had the foresight to obtain forged papers for her, including a baptismal certificate bearing a non-Jewish name. Should the Nazis ever occupy Hungary, he thought, his blond, blue-eyed daughter would be protected by the documents. In March 1944, with the Russians advancing from the East, the Nazi army finally occupied Hungary. But the forged papers did Katya no good; she became prey for the Nazis not because she was a Jew but because she was a young woman. The beautiful twenty-year-old was scooped up by a German military police patrol while she was walking down the street and was then forced into service in a brothel for troops on leave from the front. This lovely, sheltered daughter of cultivated parents was sterilized without anesthesia.

  “I thought constantly of suicide, and I am sure it would have come to pass were it not for one young German soldier. They were each allowed fifteen minutes, and your worst fear was that a soldier would make a bad report about you, that you had not been enthusiastic enough. This young man came to me—he could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen, by then the Germans were throwing babies at the Russian troops—unzipped his pants, and climbed on. But he didn’t do anything. ‘Fräulein,’ he said, ‘please be quiet.’ Can you understand what that meant, being called Fräulein, told ‘please’ in a civilized way, in that place? He said that he could not do this thing, he was sure he was going to be killed in battle, and he could not go to be judged by God with such a sin on his conscience. But it had to look to the others as if he were taking his pleasure with me, or it might go badly for both of us. I understood, of course. In his mouth he had chocolates, and he passed them to me when he pretended to kiss me. This, too, was a miracle for the starving. He told me his name was Kurt, that he came from Stuttgart, and that I must try to live, to survive the war to tell people what the Nazis had done. No German could ever expect forgiveness in this world, he said, but he hoped for forgiveness in the next. I told him, ‘Your God’—this was a slip that could have revealed I was a Jew, saying your God rather than simply God—‘will surely have mercy on you.’ He thanked me—he thanked me—he left, and that was the end of it, but this moment of kindness gave me the courage to go on living. I tried to keep myself clean, so as not to catch a disease from the soldiers, and be shot or deported to the gas, if the weekly test showed I was infected. When people say that all Germans are monsters, as many people in Russia do, I know this is not so. At least one German was not a monster.”

  Katya served as a Feldhüre, as the Germans branded the women they forced into prostitution, until she was liberated by the advancing Red Army in October 1944. Almost unimaginably to the tormented women left behind by their Nazi captors, the Russian soldiers took up where the Germans left off and began a new orgy of rape. “Just when it looks like we are all going to die a second time,” Katya said, “I saw Misha for the first time.” Misha was a Red Army captain, and he soon put an end to the rampaging of his troops by ordering summary public executions for all soldiers who raped, assaulted, or robbed civilians. When he saw Katya, who by then weighed less than eighty pounds, it was apparently love at first sight. Standing six feet tall, he picked her up in his arms and carried her to a field hospital behind the Soviet lines. He must have had high-level connections, because he somehow managed to acquire sulfa (virtually unobtainable anywhere in war-torn Europe, much less Russia) to treat her pneumonia. When the war ended, Misha (who was not Jewish, Katya informed me at our first meeting) tracked Katya down in a makeshift displaced persons’ camp and they were married. He was twenty-two years older than Katya and had retired, by the time I met them, as a full colonel.

  In 1948, the couple adopted two Jewish children from an orphanage in Moscow. Katya’s parents and the rest of her relatives had all been deported to Auschwitz and gassed in Adolf Eichmann’s eleventh-hour roundup of Hungarian Jews, the last large surviving Jewish community in Europe, in the spring of 1944. “My husband and children reconciled me to life again,” Katya said. In Moscow, Katya learned Russian and followed in her father’s footsteps by studying medicine and becoming an obstetrician. It was the best profession she could have chosen, though her husband had worried that bringing babies into the world would be a painful reminder of her inability to have her own.

  “Just the opposite,” she said. “With each baby I helped into this life, I felt that I was repairing the ruined world. And if it was a Jewish baby, I felt this twice over. This was why I specifically chose Jewish children to adopt.” It took only a few minutes with Katya to realize that here was a great soul, one whose experiences had only served to magnify her compassion and empathy. “When Misha asked me to marry him, I at first said no because I was uncertain that I could ever be a normal, loving wife—you understand, after what had happened I was not certain I could ever happily be with a man again. He said he would take his chances, he had enough love for both of us. His wife had died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad, and their only son had been killed in the first year of the war. What I remember is the first time Misha and I were together, I wept when I realized, yes, I could still be with a man and feel happiness, and give happiness. I knew then that I had not just survived, I was still alive, and the Germans had not killed the thing inside that makes a chelovek (human).”

  Katya saw nothing ironic about the fact that her particular fate had been determined not by her Jewishness but by her womanhood. “Vsyo ravno (it’s all the same),” she said. “Once someone made the remark to me, ‘Well, your father made quite a mistake, didn’t he. You never would have been taken to the German soldiers if they had known you were a Jew.’ Such ignorance! What mistake? My family all went to the gas. I am here, having pirozhki with you, with a husband who has cared for me all my life, two beautiful children, and someday, maybe grandchildren. My father chose from the many bad choices available to a Jew in those days.”

  Katya’s husband, who had of course always known about everything that happened to her, was not happy that she had broken her silence of many years and felt what he saw as a mysterious “compulsion” to tell her story to carefully selected people. This was an understandable fear on his part. Katya’s account had many elements (not the least of them the behavior of certain Soviet soldiers during the liberation) that could do a Soviet citizen no good if the authorities somehow learned what she was saying. But Misha never tried to stop Katya from doing anything she really wanted to do, and he bowed to her wishes even though he was baffled by her need to dig up the past. Finally, Katya told me something I already suspected: the blond (now silver-haired) Red Army officer had a Jewish mother. Even though he was a graduate of the prestigious Frunze Military Academy and a much-decorated war hero, Mish
a would not have risen to the rank of colonel had he not used his father’s Russian “nationality” on his internal passport. (Soviet citizens of “mixed” backgrounds were allowed to choose the nationality of either parent for registration on their internal passports, mandatory identity cards used for everything from travel within the country to school enrollment. Most Russian half-Jews, mindful of official and unofficial anti-Semitism, chose to be registered as Russians.) Half-Jews with Russian names and Slavic features, like Misha, were extremely careful about disclosing the Jewish side of their backgrounds. They needed time to gauge the attitudes of foreigners (and, for that matter, other Soviet citizens), to decide whether they could be trusted, before revealing their true heritage.

  Katya was well aware of the emerging Jewish emigration movement in the Soviet Union. She herself would never wish to leave, she said, but she hoped that one day it might be possible for her children to emigrate. Although they bore the Russian name of their adoptive father, they looked Jewish and had been subjected to anti-Semitic comments, and physical assaults by “hooligans” (as Russians used to call teenage toughs), throughout their lives. Katya was extremely interested in my family story (what I knew of it at the time), for her own family in Hungary had been filled with Catholic converts. The intermarriage rate for non-Orthodox Jews in prewar Hungary was quite high; Katya’s father had four sisters, and three of them married gentiles. None, however, had escaped the Holocaust. Katya urged me, on my return to the United States, to try to find out more about what had happened to the Jacobys in the nineteenth century. “There are always consequences, consequences that can never be anticipated, for pretending that you are someone you aren’t, or you aren’t someone you are,” she observed when we met for the last time before I left the Soviet Union. Her own family’s attachment to German culture, and her aunts’ belief that they would be protected by their marriages to Christians, had led them to underestimate the nature of the threat from Hitler’s Germany. Katya herself had come to feel that Jews must never again be deluded into thinking that they could conceal their Jewishness through conversion or complete assimilation. This deepening conviction played an important role in Katya’s refusal to abide by her husband’s wishes that she keep her story to herself. What had happened to her as a woman, she emphasized repeatedly, had happened within the context of Jewish extermination. “Even in that place,” she said, “I knew things would go far, far worse for me if they ever found out I was a Jew. I tell my children, ‘You can’t write yourself out of Jewish history.’ ”

  Soon after I left Moscow, Katya’s husband died of a heart attack. She died of breast cancer in 1983, at the age of fifty-nine, but lived long enough to enjoy the company of her four grandchildren. In 1987, taking advantage of the looser emigration policies under Mikhail Gorbachev, her sons fulfilled their mother’s dream by emigrating with their children to the United States. I carried Katya’s story inside me for many years, mindful that in the absence of her protective and well-connected husband, Katya and her family might still be harmed by Soviet officialdom.

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  I HAVE THOUGHT often of Katya while sifting through the layers of conversion and assimilation that make up the Jacoby family’s history. I find it easy to imagine German or Czech or Hungarian versions of my father, aunt, and uncle embarking on their adult lives in the early 1930s in Berlin or Prague or Budapest. I see them marrying Christians and identifying themselves with the same cosmopolitan culture as their non-Jewish contemporaries. What would Uncle Ozzie have done in Berlin in 1935, had he already been married to a Catholic and fathered a son classified as a first-degree Mischling under the Nuremberg Laws? Would he have gotten out, right away, with his Catholic wife and son? Or would he have told himself, as Katya’s father and aunts did in neighboring Hungary, that this was the twentieth century and that it was quite impossible to imagine the repeal of Jewish emancipation—not to mention civilization itself?

  I asked Uncle Ozzie, after my return from Moscow, whether he had ever considered any of these questions during the period around the end of the war, when the full horror of what the Nazis had done to the Jews of Europe was being revealed. He cocked his head and looked at me as if I were asking him whether he had ever considered what it would be like to live on Mars. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he replied. “Like everyone, I found it hard to believe when the first news of the camps came out, how human beings were capable of doing what the Nazis did. But if you mean did I ever think, ‘That could have been me,’ or asked myself what I would have done if I’d been a Jew in Germany, the answer is no, it never really occurred to me. It didn’t really have anything to do with me, because my grandfather got out of Europe in the 1840s.” Uncle Ozzie may well have been the least introspective person I have ever known, but this conversation, which took place in 1975, suggests a degree of emotional obtuseness that still baffles me when I look at my notes. In some respects, Ozzie’s relationship to his own Jewishness was much more complex than my father’s, because he lived in two worlds and my father lived in one. Ozzie’s professional life on the tournament bridge circuit was spent among sophisticated and generally liberal people, who simply assumed that he (like many of them) was Jewish, while his family life in Dallas unfolded in a far more conservative environment than my father’s life in Michigan. Dad’s cronies at the Sip’n Snack in Okemos, who breakfasted together once a week after their early-morning golf game, were (like my father himself) middle-of-the-road small businessmen bemused by the social upheavals of the sixties but flexible enough to try to figure out what was going on with their children. Most were lukewarm postwar Republicans who had voted for Eisenhower in the fifties and for Richard Nixon in 1960 (though my father voted for Kennedy) but had found Barry Goldwater far too conservative for their taste in 1964. If they voted for Nixon again in 1968, it was not because they were opposed to the Democratic social programs of the era but because Hubert Humphrey was too closely identified with the Vietnam War. The main concern of these men was to keep their draft-age sons out of a war that disturbed them deeply—not least because, as veterans of what they all considered an entirely just war, they had never imagined a time when they would encourage their boys to avoid military service. If any of my dad’s friends suspected that he was Jewish, they regarded this as a matter of little consequence. He was one of them.

  The denizens of the Dallas Country Club, where Ozzie twitted his cardplaying cronies about their enthusiasm for Goldwater, were another matter altogether. Many of the club members were ultraconservatives who, as Ozzie himself told me, “were only sorry that Kennedy was shot because it gave Dallas a bad name.” Fifty years earlier, they would certainly not have allowed a Jew into their club. These were men who paid the closest attention to race, ethnicity, and religion, and it is highly unlikely that they would have let any Jew into their club unless he possessed some special traits—such as the fame and fondness for high-stakes gambling of my uncle. One thing I never understood about Ozzie was his ability to sit around a table and joke with men to whom words like wetback, nigger, and sheeny came as naturally as a taste for barbecue and neat bourbon. Ozzie was simply a master of compartmentalization: he took what he wanted from people (in this case, the free-and-easy Good Old Boy love of gambling) and ignored what didn’t suit him. My father would have flown into a rage—I saw him do it often enough when people made racist comments—if anyone had joked about the Kennedy assassination in his presence.

  Ozzie’s home environment, as a result of Aunt Mary’s devoutness, was also more Catholic than my father’s. It was always understood, for instance, that my cousins Jon and Jim would go to a Catholic college (they both did their undergraduate work at Notre Dame). I once asked Jim, who was thirteen at the time of the Nuremberg trials, whether he remembered having any of the kinds of conversations about the Holocaust that I had with my father while I was growing up. Although Jim remembered many discussions of battles, he could not recall anything special having been said about the concentration camps. �
��I knew that the Nazis had murdered millions of people in those camps,” he told me, “and I knew they were mostly Jews. But I didn’t connect it in any way with my father’s family. I never had any sense that you say you did, of something being left out of my father’s stories about growing up. But that may be because he wasn’t around as much as your dad was. I never thought of myself as anything other than a Catholic, because that was the way my mom brought me up. And it was very clear that she was the one in charge of raising the children.”