Such Good Girls

by R. D. Rosen

  But in reality normal was all Flora wanted to be. She looked at her fellow Greenwich Villagers on the street, longing to know how they managed. For all her ostensible competence, Flora felt she didn’t know how to deal with the real world—even the less dangerous one she lived in now—and she had no one to teach her. She didn’t feel she belonged anywhere. She didn’t know whether to go out with Jews or Christians. She was scared of being intimate with anyone because she felt she had nothing to give. Looking back decades later, she would think, I had post-traumatic stress syndrome. That’s what it was.

  At the time, though, there was no name for the feeling that her sense of self had been overwhelmed and fractured, and that it was her impossible job to fit the pieces together. She had serious memory problems; there were huge gaps, and her childhood was a fog in which she was still trapped. Something in her was always hiding, paralyzed.

  However confused in her personal life, she was quite organized in her work life. When she was hired as a file clerk at the Ford Foundation, she was so good at it that, after six months, her boss offered her a promotion to assistant bookkeeper. She turned it down and instead used her small inheritance from the Hogmans to enroll at New York University to finish college. She felt ignorant. In school in France, history class had only covered French history to 1936. Incredibly she had only a vague idea of the very events in Europe that had killed her mother and almost her. There was so much she didn’t know. Then Flora soon discovered something very interesting about herself: as uneducated as she felt, and as inarticulate as she was about her own feelings, hesitant and fumbling in her soft French accent, she wrote with clarity. When she was called on in class, she sounded clueless, yet when she sat down to write, she often turned in the best paper.

  That she finished college, let alone earned a Ph.D. in psychology, was remarkable. By the early 1970s she was working in clinics and hospitals with children—she was, not surprisingly, very sensitive to children—when she decided it was time to take a good look at her own history. But she realized that her path to understanding and integrating her own trauma would have to pass through the experiences of others like her. She decided to study the psychology of other child survivors of the Holocaust.

  There was no question in her mind that someone had to do it. That had become clear when she attended a meeting of the New York Psychological Association and heard a paper that portrayed Holocaust survivors as a bunch of basket cases. She was furious. What right did some psychologist who had not lived through the Holocaust himself have to label and dismiss a generation of broken but brave child survivors? For all her problems, Flora was hardly a basket case. She had struggled to learn to live in the world. She was in the process of finding a way, and she could help others too.

  Flora proceeded to do something that no one had done before: through Jewish organizations and her network of friends and colleagues, she identified eleven adults who had survived the Holocaust as children, interviewed them at length, and wrote the first psychological paper exploring what coping techniques they had used to survive the war and what techniques they used as adults to overcome problems related to their war experiences.

  “I had to make my trauma the subject of my work,” she would recall years later, “because I had to. I couldn’t do anything else. I was very upset about it. I wanted to be like everyone else. I didn’t want to think about the war. I wanted to go to the beach. I wanted to be a pianist. But the only thing I could do was be a psychologist and understand what the hell had happened to me. My history is so complicated, and I always felt everybody else had done better than I.”

  No one had thought to do what she had: look at the positive aspects of having survived the Holocaust. Flora presented her findings in 1977 at a conference in Israel called the Second International Conference on Psychological Stress and Adjustment in Time of War and Peace. Her paper, titled no more succinctly, was called “Adaptive Mechanisms of Displaced Jewish Children during World War II and Their Later Adult Adjustment.” She interviewed eight men and three women who had survived the Holocaust as children. In 1939, their ages had ranged from two weeks to eleven years old. Seven came from Eastern Europe, the other four from Western Europe, and they survived in a variety of circumstances, from roaming Ukrainian forests to being hidden in children’s camps to living in Auschwitz. By the war’s end, two had lost both parents and other family members, five had lost one parent, and the other three had lost several relatives.

  Flora found that the coping strategies used by all of the children fell into three categories, the first of which she termed “maintenance of some emotional link to their families.” Children in hiding, separated from both parents, maintained their connection by cultivating fantasies about them. The fantasies may have backfired later when they were reunited with their traumatized real parents, but during the war, the fantasies blurred their sense of loss. One of Flora’s subjects, hidden in a French children’s camp, reported that kids bragged about their families and made up stories in which the parents became younger and more beautiful. Absence made them heroic. Sometimes children assumed the role of a missing parent, taking care of the others.

  The second mechanism she called, simply, “defiance.” “The children,” she wrote, “may have retained a sense of self by mobilizing their rage constructively,” which took the form of taking any initiative to survive, from actual escape to simply buoying up others’ optimism. One twelve-year-old boy carried a weapon in hiding; another focused on recalling his father’s teachings from the Talmud to support his stoicism in the face of suffering; another, hiding in the forest, practiced long-distance running to prepare for his eventual escape from the Nazis.

  Most interesting, however, was the third coping strategy many of her subjects had used: “avoidance of full awareness of traumatic realities.” That is to say, their best friends were suppression and repression. In one case, a boy who discovered his dead brother and father proceeded to tell his mother that they had been taken away to work, and the mother chose to believe him, although she knew that he was lying. Older children reframed their fear and terror as adventures, not unlike what Roberto Benigni’s character did for his young son in the concentration camp in the movie Life Is Beautiful, when he convinces the boy that the camp is actually a game in which the most compliant and inconspicuous contestant will win a tank.

  The mechanisms Flora identified—fantasy, defiance, repression—involved strategies essential for surviving a horrifying existence. Flora’s most traumatized subject resorted to every strategy he could. At a Czech work camp, he transformed his fear into curiosity about the guards’ rifles, pestering them with questions. Later, in Russia, when his father and brother were shot, he simply refused to face the fact that they had died. Living later in the forest, he carried his wounded sister to safety, telling Flora, “I became a Tarzan during the war.” Incredibly he then found himself in Auschwitz, subjected to Josef Mengele’s medical experiments, which he tolerated through a combination of prayer, partial identification with his aggressors, and volunteering to help the other children.

  Of course getting through the war was one thing, but adult life was another. Conclusions reached on the page by a psychologist, even one who had been a hidden child herself, bore little resemblance to the very painful, long, and messy journeys hidden children were taking in real life. In her paper, Flora touched on all the lifelong repercussions for child survivors that would start to become a more familiar litany fourteen years later at the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II: distrust, shame, memory loss, isolation, anxiety, depression, marital and career instability, and an exaggerated need for safety and control. The survivors who found it easier to adjust were those whose parents survived, or who could recall and “describe harmonious family life before the war.”

  In regard to finding meaning in adult life, Flora wrote, accepting their Jewish identity was “the most powerful way to give meaning . . . to their suffering,” even though acceptanc
e involved reclaiming a heritage survivors had no memory of or had been taught to despise and pity. Similarly, in order to liberate themselves from the passivity of victimhood, survivors needed to overcome their resentment for problems that had been unfairly and harshly imposed on them—a process of taking responsibility for one’s life that confronts all adults, to some degree.

  In none of Flora’s cases was there “an account of a loss of interest in living after the war.” Her research had found not basket cases but people desperate to live like others. Trauma did not necessarily just create psychopathology; it could also launch new and stronger identities, not through dwelling on the disasters of the past, but by incorporating them into the conscious narrative of one’s present life. Courage became part of their identity. One important means of integrating the past concerned the search for work that was in some way related to hidden children’s war experiences. Her favorite example was a survivor who had never known his parents and who had spent his adult life in many unhappy jobs until he realized that he had a gift for handling emergency situations. Only when he became the head of a crisis intervention center did he begin to find himself.

  So it had been with Flora herself, who turned her own psychological emergency into a study of others like herself, allowing her to clarify her own murky sense of self while helping others do the same. She had found her place in the world.

  So when Carla Lessing asked her in the spring of 1991 to lead a workshop at the upcoming gathering called “Who Am I, Christian or Jew?” it hadn’t taken her long to say yes.

  SOPHIE’S CHOICES

  On the periphery that first night of the Gathering stood another woman in her fifties who had decided only recently to attend, even though she lived just a short train ride away in Great Neck, Long Island. Dr. Sophie Turner-Zaretsky had managed all these years quite well by refusing to peer too intently into the past. She had never been in psychotherapy because she felt that talking about the past would only make it worse.

  Sophie arrived in New York in 1963 for her internship at New York Polyclinic. Inspired by a radiologist there, she began a residency in radiation and radiation oncology at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, a hospital that had been founded in 1884 by leaders of New York’s vast Jewish community to treat patients with tuberculosis and other chronic illnesses. Her intelligence and devotion to her work paid off with the position of chief resident. Few people were privy to the original motivation behind the intensity of her drive. Sophie needed to be at the top. As long as she remembered, she had always had to prove herself. She couldn’t count on help from her family, because she didn’t really have one, or her background, which she really didn’t have, either. Colleagues might talk about their old neighborhoods in Brooklyn or the Bronx, or the uncle who had gone into medicine, but what did she have besides her mother? A few forgotten years of being a privileged Jew in Lvov, followed by the murder of her father and almost everyone else in her family, followed by six years as a Jew-hating Catholic schoolgirl, followed by years of confusion and near-poverty.

  The chief of the department, most of the staff, and almost all patients were Jews, but Sophie never went out of her way to identify herself as Jewish. Between her ambiguous religious identity and the British formality that had mirrored so well her own diffidence and reserve, Sophie found little in common with the city’s America-born Jews. As for the Hasidic Jews she saw everywhere in New York, they only reminded her of the racist caricatures promulgated by the Nazis.

  At work she was assumed to be one of the minority of non-Jewish doctors. She didn’t use any Yiddish words, and, in any case, her British accent would rob them of credibility. She didn’t wear a Star of David around her neck, although she’d received several as gifts. More painfully, she lacked the narratives of Jewish life and ancestry that bound her Jewish-American colleagues to the past and to one another. She could hardly join in the small talk about difficult fathers, troubled siblings, or loving grandparents.

  In her early thirties, Sophie took a big step out of the shadows of her past. One Yom Kippur, when a colleague at Albert Einstein asked her to cover for him, she heard herself say, “I’d be happy to, but I’m Jewish.”

  In 1969, she started work as an attending physician in radiation oncology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University. She developed a friendship with a German radiologist for whom she felt sympathy because, as a child, the woman and her family had been starving toward the end of World War II, when all of the country’s resources were diverted by the Nazis’ lost cause. Sophie could hardly bear a grudge against its innocent German victims. On the other hand, she felt uneasy when the German friend invited her to a party at her home and she arrived to find a gathering of other recent German immigrants—doctors, lawyers, educated people. Who were these Germans drinking cocktails and chomping deviled eggs, whose family secrets weren’t known, even by them?

  Now that she was publicly a Jew, the head of her radiology department came to her later with a touchy matter. He’d received an application for a residency from a German who had disclosed on his application that his father had been a Nazi. The man was an excellent radiologist, the department head explained, but if Sophie objected, he wouldn’t hire the applicant. Sophie studied the application and gave her consent, reassured by the man’s candor and reasoning that he had lived with a terrible burden and shouldn’t have to pay a price for his parents’ crimes. Sophie and he would go on to have a cordial relationship.

  In her work, she began extending herself a bit more for her Jewish patients, spending extra time with the older ones. It was not only a sign of her growing comfort level with other Jews, but also a way to connect with the older generation after losing so many of her own family members.

  In the 1970s, in an interview that her relative Alice Herb, Uncle Emil’s niece, conducted for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Sophie said, “I used to be envious of people who had a family with grandparents, and I’ve always liked old people for this reason. I get along with them. When I have old patients, really old patients, really leathery old people, I guess this is how I imagine grandparents. I always spend more time with them.” Radiation oncology—the use of radiation to kill cancer cells—was more than her occupation. “It’s almost like being a missionary,” she said as her career took off. “Maybe it’s a justification for living. I think that’s logically so.”

  If Sophie pushed herself to “be somebody,” it wasn’t in any mundane sense. In hard work and achievement she had found an actual identity, some solid ground to stand on from which she could more calmly look back at a remote childhood that didn’t quite figure into her calculations of self.

  By this time in her career, she had another reason to justify her life. Her serious romantic experience had been limited to one relationship with Monty in London, and another with a Mexican-born resident at Polyclinic during her first year in New York. That relationship had triggered the revelation that what she really wanted was to marry a Jew. A Jewish man, that is, who was neither Hasidic nor uncultured. She wanted—the thought had become conscious—to help rebuild the Jewish race and to deny Hitler his victory.

  She had both a colleague and a patient to thank for meeting her husband. Janet Pinner, an Englishwoman and colleague at Montefiore, threw a party at her little Upper East Side apartment in early 1970 and invited Sophie as well as another resident, named Marvin Rotman. However, her mother was visiting from Montreal, where she had moved to be close to Putzi. She insisted that Sophie go—“Don’t worry about me”—but Sophie wasn’t convinced she should until, the day before the party, she was examining an elderly black woman at Albert Einstein who was dying of cancer. As she often did during her examinations, she asked the woman a bit about her life.

  Concentrating to understand her thick southern accent, Sophie made out that the woman told people’s fortunes.

  “You can actually see into a person’s future?”

  “That’s what they tell me,” the woman sa
id. “Now let me see that hand.”

  As a woman of science used to stories with unhappy endings, whether in her own life or that of her patients, Sophie was extremely skeptical. Not once in her life had she ever visited a psychic or a fortune-teller. But this was one of her beloved patients, who was not going to live much longer.

  Sophie gave the woman her hand, which she grasped in the papery palm of her own. “All right, Dr. Turner,” she said, “let’s see what this hand says.”

  The woman ran her finger along Sophie’s palm and after a moment drawled, “You are very hesitant about something, Dr. Turner. I feel it’s an event, a party, you’ve been invited to. You’ve been invited somewhere and you’re not sure you should go.”

  Sophie felt a shiver go through her body.

  “But you should. You should go, Dr. Turner.” Then she added, “Yes, and there will be a lot of travel in your life.”

  Although that second prediction sounded stock, Sophie was so impressed by the first that the next evening she made her mother comfortable in her Manhattan studio apartment—where Sophie kept only a few relics of their life in Busko-Zdrój on top of her dresser: her catechism, rosary, and little Steiff bear, Refugee—and took a taxi to the Upper East Side.

  Janet Pinner’s small apartment was filled with men and women in their thirties and forties. Marvin introduced her to his friend, a somewhat older man named David Zaretsky, who was also Jewish. David, in turn, introduced Sophie to his neighbor, a tall, extremely good-looking man dressed casually in a denim shirt unbuttoned to his sternum.