The Holocaust Kid

by Sonia Pilcer

  For a moment, our eyes met. Then he turned back to his paper. “I don’t trust you,” he said.

  The downstairs bell buzzed three times. I buzzed back, knowing that my friends would wait five minutes, then leave.

  “Please, Dad.”

  “Leave me alone!” he cried out. Then suddenly, he was screaming. “I survived for this? To see my own daughter turn into filth? I should have died in the camps.”

  “It’s my allowance, Dad,” I screamed back. “You owe me it!”

  His newspaper did not stir as they gathered at the wall on Riverside Drive without me, feet swinging as they slapped each other five, strutting their stuff to 181st Street where they headed for the balcony smoking section of the RKO Coliseum. My father was immovable.

  Finally, overcome by tears, I gave up. As I walked to my room, I heard a cheerless laugh. “Zosha, come here,” he called me.

  I turned to face my father. Two dollars dangled from his fingers. “Here, paskudnyak,” he said.

  As I tried to grab the bills, his hand withdrew. He repeated this trick. It amused him to watch his daughter leaping up and down like a seal.

  “What do you have to cry about?” he mocked. “I never had nothing, not even before the war.” He handed me two dollars. “Go to the stinking movies.”

  Running up the stairs, toes numb from my roach-killer boots, I found Cookie and Lola in the back row of the RKO balcony. They weren’t alone. This guy with a toppling pompadour had his arm around Lola. Both smoked cigarettes. On the screen, Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen were making out in Love with the Proper Stranger. So were Cookie and Jesus. And sitting next to Jesus—I couldn’t believe it—his gorgeous brother, Carlos.

  I, of course, sat down at the other end of the row. It was the only cool thing to do. Cookie beckoned me. “Hey, yo!” But I shook my head and watched what happened when Natalie Wood went all the way.

  I felt the heat of his presence before I turned. Carlos had slipped in next to me, his arm tactfully draping my seat. “Hi,” he whispered in my ear. “How you doin’?”

  “Fine.”

  Those were the only words exchanged. As we watched Natalie Wood discover she was in trouble, Carlos’s arm moved stealthily from the seat, grazing my shoulder, to firmly surround me. Soon his lips were teasing mine. I couldn’t resist. I wanted his lips against mine and then his tongue. I kissed him as hard as I could, thinking of how much I hated my father.

  We kept kissing, but he moved closer, holding me tighter, rubbing his knee softly against my thighs. I felt breathless. Meanwhile, Steve McQueen took Natalie Wood to get the “operation.”

  “How you doin’?” he whispered.

  “Fine,” I answered, my voice quaking. “You?”

  We just kept kissing, my lips bruising, but I didn’t care as he hugged me harder, rubbing his knee between my legs. I clutched his arms, pushing against him. I felt hot, my cheeks flushed, out of breath. Suddenly, I was panting like I might hyperventilate. Was this an orgasm? It was so different from when I did it alone.

  We were slipping out of our seats. I threw myself against his hipbone, his leg. More. “Oh, Carlos,” I sighed, trying to muffle my breathing. But he was panting too, pressing against me, grinding against my hip.

  “Mi caracita.”

  Suddenly, the flash of a light beamed on our faces. “What are you doing?” an outraged voice demanded.

  We pulled ourselves up to a sitting position, trying hastily to straighten out our clothes. “Nothing,” said Carlos, tucking in his shirt.

  “We won’t have this,” declared the middle-aged black woman in a navy bellhop suit. Her flashlight formed a yellow triangle around us. “You must leave.”

  “We paid our money,” Carlos said.

  “You leave right now or I’ll call the guard,” she threatened.

  “Fuck you and your family,” Jesus called out.

  “Punks,” the usher muttered, walking back up the aisle.

  “Yo, Carlos!” Jesus called from across the row. “What’s happen?”

  “It’s cool, man.”

  “Hey, spic and span,” an angry voice shouted, “Shut the fuck up!”

  “Your mother!” another voice called.

  As Natalie Wood wept desperate tears because she was in love with Steve McQueen but he would never respect her since she’d gotten pregnant when she went all the way with him, we felt the clamp of strong fingers on our shoulders. Carlos and I were ushered out of the theater by a short guy with incredibly muscular arms. “I’m calling your parents, you hoodlums.”

  “I don’t know what you do, who you’re with,” Genia said as we rode the bus to Yeshiva Rabbi Soleveichik on 185th Street, where my father insisted she enroll me. “It’s better here. You’ll be with Jewish children, not the goyim on the street.”

  But I despised Judaism. Lighting candles to remember the dead. Holidays and high holidays, which introduced yet more taboos. Why did they talk about shvartzes as if they were subhumans? As if Jews were a different race and we mustn’t consort with anyone else.

  My mother’s inconsistent rites of observation! Bacon and ham were okay, but no pork chops. Spareribs from the Chinese restaurant were okay too. The two-faced double standards for inside and outside the house. Every Saturday, my mother turned on the radio to listen to the “Make-Believe Ballroom,” watched the “Million Dollar Movie,” and so did I. But if I was going outside, I had to observe Shabbos and not wear pants.

  “You must look decent. They tried to destroy us,” she told me. “Now we must show how well we dress.”

  For my interview with the rabbi, my teased hairdo was forcibly reduced by fifty percent. My mother made me wear my blue pleated skirt with a white ruffled blouse—Israel’s colors, she reminded me. But I sported my black leather roach-killer boots. I was a slum goddess, after all.

  Inside the red brick building, all the boys wore yarmulkes. As they raced through the halls, their arms filled with books, the strings of their tzitzit streamed behind them like leashes. The girls walked quietly. Upon noticing me, they began to whisper among themselves. One boy grunted loudly, “Ugh.” As I seemed to scratch my head, I gave them all a subtle middle finger.

  In the elevator, my mother raised her slip. She then pulled down the hem of her blue wool dress. “All right?” she asked, turning around. “I copied this pattern from Vogue.”

  We entered a musty-smelling office, papers strewn over the old, scratched-up desk and on the chair, leather-bound volumes from ceiling to floor. As the rabbi looked up from the text on his desk, I could see his long, white beard, white peyes, and sharp blue eyes.

  He opened a book with large Hebrew letters. “Will you read these?” he said, pointing with his finger.

  “I don’t know how,” I said, staring down blankly while of course recognizing the aleph, bet, gimel, dalet, hay . . .

  “Haven’t your parents sent you to Hebrew school?” the rabbi inquired.

  I nodded. Our text, The History of the Jewish People, started with Abraham and Moses, through Disraeli, to Ben Gurion, Leonard Bernstein, and Bernie Schwartz, known to his fans as Tony Curtis. The teacher was a balding, dogmatic man who despised questions, especially from girls. A crocheted yarmulke with a black circle in its center was bobby-pinned to his short hair. When he turned around to write on the blackboard, I imagined shooting a rubber band and paper clip. Bull’s-eye!

  “Young lady,” the rabbi demanded, “Don’t make me angry. What’s the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet?”

  “Aleph.” I nearly spat the word.

  His blue eyes observed me from their pink pockets. “You don’t want to go to yeshiva? Why? Don’t you want an education?”

  Yeshiva meant four hours of religion in addition to regular school. I crossed my arms. “I’m an atheist,” I said, having come across the word in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

  “Don’t be rude,” my mother misunderstood. “She doesn’t mean that,” she apologized, cuffing me on the back of my nec
k.

  The rabbi studied me, shaking his head. “You speak because you don’t know. Is that what you want? To be stupid like the rest of the world?”

  “I don’t want to go to yeshiva,” I declared, wondering why Jews always thought they were so smart.

  “Do you think you’d be happier going to public school?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “You know there won’t be many white children,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “You like the colored?” my mother asked. “When they beat you up, you weren’t so happy.”

  In sixth grade, a group of older girls followed me after school. “Balloonhead!” they called. “Shake it, don’t break it, took your momma nine months to make it.” Their taunts grew louder. “She thinks she’s hot.” I walked fast, knowing Broadway wasn’t far. They followed on my heels. “Hey, girl,” someone called, “when I talk to you, you listen.” I started to run. Suddenly, a girl grabbed my arms from behind and threw me down. I landed on my knees, the concrete ripping my stockings. My knees bled as I made my way home. My mother had found my bloody stockings in the garbage.

  “Have you no shame?” the rabbi demanded suddenly.

  I stared at the ground to keep from meeting his stinging blue eyes.

  “After what your parents went through,” he said.

  I crossed my arms, not answering him.

  “Say something!” my mother urged. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I shifted my weight to the other foot.

  “We can’t force you to learn.” The rabbi shrugged. “She doesn’t belong here, Mrs. Palovsky.”

  My mother nodded. “I didn’t think so. It was my husband’s idea. In Poland, his family was very religious.”

  The rabbi was through with us, but Genia continued. “My family was assimilated. Still they took us away and murdered everyone.”

  “We must honor the memory of those who perished,” the rabbi said, standing up slowly. His dark jacket was stained. “May everything work out for the best, God willing.”

  “Are you happy now?” she asked as we walked out of the building. “Now you can rot on the street with your juvenile delinquent friends.”

  “They’re not juvenile delinquents,” I insisted. “They just like to dress tough.”

  “But Zosha, you belong with these people? Their families drink and the husbands beat up the wives. Paskudnyak! Why can’t you be normal—like Daddy and me?”

  REMEMBER 6,000,000

  “Oh, no,” I groaned, glancing at the clock. Eleven-fifteen. “I never sleep this late!”

  “Sunday morning,” Ludwig yawned, stretching his long arms. “C’m’ere.” He pulled me to his chest.

  “Uh-uh.” I disentangled myself. “I’ve got to be on the East Side at noon.”

  He looked blankly at me.

  “Yom Hashoah,” I said, beginning to open and shut drawers. “Remember? I told you?”

  “Oh,” he said, then grimaced, “right.”

  I looked down at Lud, my gentle gentile, my beautiful sheygetz, who lay on his back with his eyes shut. His hair, coltish brown, was profoundly straight. God didn’t have such straight hair. Another species from mine, dark and serpentine. And his skin, white, opalescent, nearly hairless except for the deep brown forest between his legs and a flowering around his collarbone that he called his third armpit. With his long brown hair, full mustache, and beard, he looked like young Jesus.

  I reached inside the closet, pulling out a hanger from way in the back. A blue-gray dress. As I slipped it on, I called to Lud. “Hey, open your eyes. What do you think?”

  “It matches your eyes,” my mother had said, handing me the dress some months ago. “I sewed it from a Vogue pattern. Very stylish.” I had never worn it.

  “Nice.” Ludwig sat up. “I’d go with you,” he said in his slightly German-accented English. “Except I don’t think anyone at the temple would be too happy to see me.” He cocked his head, grinning.

  I tried to imagine the scene. “I think you’re right.”

  “Let me help you with the zipper.”

  I sat down on the bed. “God, I don’t want to go.”

  The enormity of the event was hitting me like a bad trip. I had somehow forgotten, had hardly even thought of Yom Hashoah over the weekend. Talk about avoidance.

  “Then don’t,” Lud said softly.

  “As if I have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice, Zosha.” Hand on my spine, he drew me to him.

  “Yeah?” I resisted. Didn’t he know my family? A year ago, I had brought Ludwig to meet my parents. We had been seeing each other for eight months.

  After beef flanken and galuskas, potato dumplings, which Lud said were better than his own mother’s, over my mother’s cheese babka and tea, we told them we were engaged.

  “I love your daughter very much,” Lud added, squeezing my hand.

  My father sipped his tea. Then said, “Your people loved us so much that they pointed the way for the Gestapo.”

  “Lud didn’t do anything!” I responded.

  My father turned to me. “What do you know? They would sooner kill us than cross the street.”

  Lud had stood up. “You don’t have to say anymore.”

  “What about his family?” my father’s voice grew louder. “Do you know where they were during the war?”

  “Maybe if he converted to Judaism?” my mother mused doubtfully.

  “Are you circumcised?” my father demanded.

  “Dad!”

  “Of course not.”

  “You must be circumcised,” my mother said.

  “Never.”

  “We have nothing to say.”

  “I love him,” I said.

  “I don’t want you in our house.”

  “Stop it, Dad!” I screamed.

  “Are you staying?” Lud demanded.

  I had looked from his burning eyes to my parents. As I stood between them, the walls of my family’s home narrowed. I was in love and wanted to join Lud to live in the larger world outside.

  “I’ll be right back,” I had told him. I packed an extra pair of jeans, a sweater, some T-shirts, and my good underwear in a knapsack.

  My parents were in the kitchen. We could hear the water running. “I’m leaving,” I had called.

  My mother rushed out, wiping her hands on her apron. “Zosha,” she cried. “You’re wrong to do this. Your father didn’t mean—”

  “I have a mouth. You don’t have to speak for me.” He stood behind her.

  “Dad—” I began.

  “If you leave,” he said slowly, “I won’t have you back.”

  “Heniek, she’s your daughter!”

  “Are you ready?” Lud asked me softly. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I’m going,” I said, my voice shattering.

  “Zosha!” my mother cried out.

  “I don’t know her.” My father turned his back to me. “My daughter is dead.”

  Now I held on to Lud tightly, as if I might fall off some precipice. He cupped my breast in his hand, kissing it. I closed my eyes. We had both been born on the other side, in Europe, after the war, to scarred survivors. We shared wounds the way addicts shared needles.

  Lud’s father, a Russian soldier, had not returned from the war. The story was that his mother had walked from Russia to Germany with her two young sons, Ludwig and his brother, Heine. They were Volksdeutsch, whatever that was. Eventually, they ended up in Livingston, New Jersey. When Heine grew up, he returned to Germany, dying soon afterward from eating poisonous mushrooms.

  There was something else too. Ludwig had told me on our first night together.

  “I was fourteen, going through puberty. No father, etc. My mother and I lived in the upstairs of a house we shared with the town judge, if you can believe it. Anyway,” he had continued, “what I want to tell you about might make you walk out the door.”

  My stomach had gnarled in anticipat
ion. What could be so awful?

  “At that time, I was very interested in guns. I began to collect them. Also memorabilia from World War Two. I was always fascinated—you could say obsessed with the war.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I understand.”

  “I know that you understand,” he said, looking into my eyes.

  “Most Americans have no idea.”

  “Zoe, the story is that someone found out about the guns. They broke into our attic. They saw my collection. The fact that the judge lived downstairs turned it into a major scandal.”

  “What happened?”

  He had opened the drawer of a desk, taking out a photo album. Turned to a yellowed article. The Livingston Courier. May 1962. “NEO-NAZI FOUND WITH ARSENAL.”

  “Gosh,” I had said stupidly, trying to take it in. Neo-Nazi! Ludwig?

  “. . . A search of the attic revealed two rifles, a compressed air pistol, two sling shots, several knives and ammunition, as well as an old German war flag, newspapers from the Nazi era and a school notebook with the letters ‘SS’ written on it, the initials of the elite Nazi units responsible for wartime atrocities.”

  I had placed the album down with a thud. “I can’t look at this.”

  “I was fourteen,” Lud said. “And very confused.”

  “Why’d you show me?”

  “So you’d know. It ended there, Zoe. I swear. But I don’t want to have secrets from you. I respect you. I respect your parents’ experience. I don’t want to give anyone pain.”

  He was my Nazi. I loved him with a wild passion. I stared at him continually. I stared through him but could only see shadows. I never had any idea what he was thinking.

  “You’re a big girl,” Ludwig insisted now, as I was about to leave. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

  “Sure,” I said bravely, grabbing my keys off a hook near the door.

  “I’ll pick up some Chinese for later,” he called after me.

  In 1951, the Israeli Knesset proclaimed Yom Hashoah, the Day of Remembrance for the Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust. It came once a year, but I didn’t need a holiday. I remembered the Holocaust every day of my life. Never forget. That was my tattoo. Never forget.