Such Good Girls
Page 25
“I can’t remember. I can’t remember, Mother,” she would say. When Laura was moved into a nursing home, she had begun calling Sophie “Mother,” which only underlined how completely they had now traded places. Where Laura had once drilled Sophie on the catechism, Sophie now pressed her for information Laura could no longer retrieve, or had no desire to. Still, Sophie tried. But she could see that the past was disappearing forever, like a tarnished heirloom dropped overboard, descending slowly into the depths.
Every weekend she’d collect her mother from the nursing home and bring her to her house. One day Laura sat swaddled in a blanket in her wheelchair in Sophie’s backyard in Great Neck. Sophie, sitting next to her, tried one last time.
“Do you think Herr Leming ever suspected?” she asked her.
“No, Mother.”
“When we walked out of the ghetto in 1942, did no one stop us and ask us for our papers or where we were going?”
“No, Mother,” Laura said. “No more. I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Laura was crying suddenly. It was heartbreaking. Sophie had never, ever, not once, seen her mother cry.
In 2007 Sophie’s husband, David, died after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He had taught her how to show her love, just as she thought he would. The marriage had lasted thirty-seven years and provided Sophie with a big Jewish family to be part of forever, and David had lived long enough to sing to his two-year-old granddaughter, Emily. Three years later two events exposed yet another layer of the onion that was Sophie’s emotional memory. In quick succession, Sophie’s daughter-in-law Andrea lost her father, a survivor who had left Austria after Kristallnacht, and at the same time her granddaughter Emily (now the sister of a younger brother, Jack) turned five, the age Sophie had been when her father was murdered and she escaped the ghetto with her mother. If she thought she had mourned all she was ever going to mourn, she was wrong. Out of the blue, Sophie was bombarded by some of the memories she had tried to pry out of her mother. For the first time she was able to see herself at that age, and give flesh and feeling to what had been only skeletal recollections. Watching her five-year-old granddaughter, Sophie was overcome with compassion and grief for Selma Schwarzwald and Zofia Tymejko and their impossible journey. She had a hard emotional time with it, but she felt she was saying good-bye at last to the little girl she had been.
And through it all Refugee, the bear, had survived. It was the one toy, the souvenir of the childhood Sophie did not want to remember, yet it defied all her efforts to discard it. When her other memorabilia went into storage, Refugee stayed behind. Sophie never lost track of it as she moved from apartment to apartment in Manhattan, then to Neponsit, Queens, then to Great Neck, Long Island. Refugee sat on a shelf, then on her dresser, then in her dresser drawer, landing finally in a walnut armoire in Great Neck that Sophie had received as a gift from Flora Hogman.
Had she kept it as exhibit A of the past she suppressed and otherwise protected her children from? Or had she held on to it as most of us hold on forever to some emblem of our innocence? Sophie’s sons may not have known many details of their mother’s past in Poland, but they knew Refugee, the bear that had followed their mother since 1944.
The stripes on the little coat Putzi had made for him had faded from blue to pale gray, almost invisible, and Refugee’s plush coat was worn bare in spots, but he and his movable limbs were otherwise in surprisingly good shape. Sophie had once come close to throwing Refugee out in the late 1990s. Her grown sons were helping her do some housecleaning when she came across Refugee in the armoire. She decided it was time to let go of him.
“Absolutely not,” Jeffrey said.
“I’ve had him sixty years,” she said. “Enough’s enough.”
“Leave him alone,” Daniel chimed in.
“What am I going to do with him?”
“The same thing you’ve always done with him,” Jeffrey said. “Find a place for him.”
“But he looks so down and out.” Indeed he did—more than ever. “And some of the plush has worn off.”
“Whose hasn’t?” Jeffrey said. “He’s brought you luck so far, right?”
Of course it wasn’t the bear that brought her luck, but her mother. In addition to being smart, resourceful, and beautiful, Laura Schwarzwald Turner had been lucky, and her luck had been Sophie’s luck. The mothers were the real heroes, Sophie thought. The more she attended meetings at the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women, the more she understood that when conditions were overcome, it was the mothers who overcame them. When the mothers were strong, the daughters were strong too. When the mothers live, the daughters live. When women are educated, the world is a better place. And no one knew this better than Sophie.
Sophie had succeeded in not imposing her childhood on her sons, and the little she’d told them had been burnished into anecdotes about close calls and burned gooses, the stuff of any family’s folklore. But they knew a little, and the bear, she realized, would remind them that she was there, and that she survived it, and that was why they were here, and the grandchildren too. When they would hold Refugee in the future, they would be holding what their mother held as her mother had led her slowly out of hell.
But the new United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had other plans for the bear. The museum was in the process of collecting more than 16,000 objects from survivors of the Holocaust, and in 2002 Sophie donated her crucifix, her catechism, some childhood drawings, and Refugee to the museum.
Then, in 2006, space shuttle Discovery’s commander Mark Polansky, who is half-Jewish, chose a Refugee replica as one of two objects he carried with him on his December 22 mission. Refugee traveled 5,330,398 miles on the almost thirteen-day journey. Facsimiles of Refugee soon became one of the better-selling items in the museum’s gift store, a favorite purchase for the parents of little girls from Wyoming or Delaware or Alabama. The copies are eight inches tall, not three, and the replica’s off-white coat doesn’t bear even the faint marks of the Putzi blouse’s blue stripes. Nor is the bear a Steiff, but an inexpensive, mass-produced version with longer, softer hair. But the eyes—the eyes are uneven, just like Refugee’s.
Fastened to each bear’s paw is a folded tag that reads “My Name Is Refugee” on the outside, and on the inside reads:
I got my name from another bear owned by a Jewish girl named Selma. As a child in Poland, Selma lived during the Holocaust. Her father died during World War II. Selma and her mother had to hide from people who wanted to harm them. She even had to change her name.
It’s not a lot to go on, but there is only so much a child of five or six or seven can understand.
PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT
Sophie’s parents, Daniel and Laura Schwarzwald, on a beach in Zaleszczyki, Poland.
(United States Holocaust Museum, courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
Nazi reprisal execution of members of the Lvov ghetto Judenrat in September 1942, on the day that Daniel Schwarzwald disappeared.
(United States Holocaust Museum)
Document identifying Bronislawa Tymejko (the Christian alias of Laura Schwarzwald) as an employee of the Regional Agricultural Mercantile Cooperative in Busko-Zdrój.
(United States Holocaust Museum, courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
Herr Leming, the Nazi who hired Laura as his bookkeeper at the cooperative.
(Courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
Sophie and her mother hiding in plain sight in Busko-Zdrój.
(United States Holocaust Museum)
Sophie and her mother at her first communion in Busko-Zdrój, 1944.
(United States Holocaust Museum, courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
The agricultural cooperative where Laura worked.
(Courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
Laura, Sophie, and Aunt Putzi in Busko-Zdrój, 1945.
(United States Holocaust Museum)
Sophie’s bear, Refugee, today, still wearing the coat made for him by Aunt Putz
i.
(United States Holocaust Museum)
Sophie in the tutu Aunt Putzi had made for her out of tissue paper.
(United States Holocaust Museum)
Zofia Tymejko, the future Dr. Sophie Turner-Zaretsky.
(Courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
Laura in London with her aunt Rosa Hoenig.
(Courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
Emil Hoenig in front of his candy and tobacco store in London.
(Courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
Sophie with her son, Jeffrey, husband, David, and mother, Laura, at Jeffrey’s bar mitzvah.
(Courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
Sophie and David with their two sons, Jeffrey and Daniel, at Jeffrey’s wedding to Andrea Weinstock. Seated are Sophie’s brother-in-law, Kazimierz Rozycki, and sister, Putzi.
(Courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
Sophie and her husband, David.
(Courtesy of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky)
Flora Hillel and her parents in San Remo, Italy.
(Courtesy of Flora Hogman)
Flora and her mother, Stefanie, near Nice, shortly before Stefanie was taken by the Nazis.
(Courtesy of Flora Hogman)
Dr. Odette Rosenstock and Moussa Abadi, who rescued more than 500 Jewish children in the south of France, Flora among them.
(United States Holocaust Museum, courtesy of Julien Engel)
Flora with her adoptive parents, Andrée Karpeles and Adalrik Hogman, with whom she lived until she was twenty-three.
(Courtesy of Flora Hogman)
Flora toasting with shipboard companions en route to New York in 1959.
(Courtesy of Flora Hogman)
Flora in America, age twenty-six.
(Courtesy of Flora Hogman)
Flora at home in New York City today.
(Courtesy of Flora Hogman)
Two of Flora’s photographs, using reflections to express what she calls her “double life.”
(Courtesy of Flora Hogman)
Carla Heijmans as a schoolgirl in The Hague
(Courtesy of Carla Lessing)
A watercolor of Carla as a teenager in hiding in Delft, painted by her husband, Ed Lessing.
(Courtesy of Ed Lessing)
Ed Lessing (left) as a Resistance fighter in a forest hideaway near De Lage Vuurse, Holland.
(Courtesy of Ed Lessing)
One of Ed’s earliest drawings, of the Resistance fighters’ hut.
(Courtesy of Ed Lessing)
Corrie and Walter van Geenen, who hid Carla, her mother, and brother in their Delft home. In 1979 Israel granted them status of the Righteous Among the Nations.
(Courtesy of Carla Lessing)
The van Geenens’ house, where Carla and her family hid on the third floor.
Ed’s mother, Engeline, whose resourcefulness helped her entire family survive the war.
(Courtesy of Ed Lessing)
Margrethus Oskam, the small-town Dutch police chief who secretly headed the local Dutch Resistance and was instrumental in keeping the Lessing family safe from the Nazis.
(Courtesy of Ed Lessing)
The Lessing clan. Left to right: Son-in-law, Richard Fusco; daughter, Noa Lessing Fusco; son, Dan Lessing; grandsons Peter Fusco, Aaron Fusco, and Jesse Lessing; daughter-in-law, Stephanie Lessing; granddaughter Kim Lessing.
(Courtesy of Ed and Carla Lessing)
Carla today at the offices of the Hidden Child Foundation in New York City.
(Courtesy of Carla Lessing)
Ed Lessing today.
(Courtesy of Ed Lessing)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I am indebted to many books, memoirs, articles, movies, and documentaries for enriching my understanding of the Holocaust. The following list contains some of the most helpful and memorable sources and background materials.
Appleman-Jurman, Alicia. Alicia: My Story. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.
Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: Viking Penguin, 1967.
Breznitz, Shlomo. Memory Fields: The Legacy of a Wartime Childhood in Czechoslovakia. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Cahill, Thomas. The Gift of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. New York: Nan A. Talese/Anchor Books, 1999.
Carroll, James. “Shoah in the News: Patterns and Meanings of News Coverage of the Holocaust.” Cambridge, Mass.: Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1997.
Cohen, Roger. “For a Priest and for Poland, a Tangled Identity.” New York Times, October 10, 1999.
Coleman, Fred. The Marcel Network: How One French Couple Saved 527 Children from the Holocaust. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013.
Friedländer, Saul. When Memory Comes. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
Gruener, Ruth. Destined to Live: A True Story of a Child in the Holocaust. New York: Scholastic, 2007.
Gutenbaum, Jakub, and Agnieszka Latala, eds. The Last Witness: Children of the Holocaust Speak, vol. 2. Translated from the Polish by Julian Bussgang, Fay Bussgang, and Simon Cygielski. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005.
Hallie, Philip. Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.
The Hidden Child. Various issues of a newsletter published by Hidden Child Foundation/ADL, New York.
Hogman, Flora. “Adaptive Mechanisms of Displaced Jewish Children During World War II and Their Later Adult Adjustment.” A paper presented at the Second International Conference on Psychological Stress and Adjustment in Time of War and Peace, Jerusalem, 1977.
———. “Displaced Jewish Children During World War II: How They Coped.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 23 (1983).
———. “Role of Memories in Lives of World War II Orphans.” Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 24 (1985).
———. “The Press and the Hidden Children of the Holocaust—Reflections on Resilience.” New York State Psychological Association, 1991.
———. “The South of France—Summer of 1988.” Jewish Currents, a publication of Congregation Emunath Israel (April 1994).
———. “Memory of the Holocaust.” In Echoes of the Holocaust. N.p., Israel: 1995.
———. “The Double Edged Sword of Memory: Issues and Conflicts Faced by Survivors Remembering Their Holocaust Experiences.” Hidden Child Foundation/ADL Newsletter (2007).
Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Legacy Publishing, 2009.
Kaufman, Lola Rein, and Lois Metzger. The Hidden Girl: A True Story of the Holocaust. New York: Scholastic, 2008.
Kestenberg, Judith S., M.D., and Ira Brenner, M.D. The Last Witness: The Child Survivor of the Holocaust. Washington and London: American Psychiatric Press, 1996.
Klukowski, Zygmunt. Diary from the Years of Occupation. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Konner, Melvin. Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews. New York: Viking Compass, 2003.
Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Lessing, Carla. “The Vanished Communal Heritage of Holocaust Survivors: Its Impact on Survivors and Their Children.” Journal of Jewish Communal Service (1999).
———. “Aging Child Holocaust Survivors of Sexual Abuse.” In Kavod: Honoring Aging Survivors, an online publication of the Claims Conference, 2012.
Lev-Wiesel, Rachel, and Marianne Amir. “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms, Psychological Distress, Personal Resources and Quality of Life in Four Groups of Holocaust Child Survivors.” Family Process 39 (2000).
———. “Holocaust Child Survivors and Child Sexual
Abuse.” Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 14 (2) (2005).
Lipstadt, Deborah E. Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933–1945. New York: The Free Press, 1986.
Marks, Jane. The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993.
Millen, Rochelle L., ed. New Perspectives on the Holocaust. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
Mogilanski, Roman. The Ghetto Anthology. Los Angeles: American Congress of Jews from Poland and Survivors of Concentration Camps, 1985.
Moskowitz, Sarah, and Robert Krell. “Child Survivors of the Holocaust: Psychological Adaptations to Survival.” Israeli Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 27 (1990): 81–91.
Muller-Paisner, Vera. Broken Chain: Catholics Uncover the Holocaust’s Hidden Legacy and Discover Their Jewish Roots. Charlottesville, Va.: Pitchstone Publisher, 1995.
Prose, Francine. Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler. New York: Random House, 1998.
Rosenberg, Maxine B. Hiding to Survive: Stories of Jewish Children Rescued from the Holocaust. New York: Clarion Books, 1994.
Sherman, Judith. Say the Name: A Survivor’s Tale in Prose and Poetry. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
Sliwowska, Wiktoria, ed. The Last Witness: Children of the Holocaust Speak, vol. 1. Translated from the Polish and annotated by Julian and Fay Bussgang. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
———. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1992.