by Sonia Pilcer
As I walked across Central Park, I dug into my pocketbook, finding a silver case with a mother-of-pearl cover. It had been my mother’s father’s cigarette case. I snapped it open, removing a joint rolled thin. Ah, holy weed.
I lit up, inhaling its delicious bouquet. This was my medicine. This was my religion. Slowly, I felt an opening of the gates. I could breathe. A peaceful calm descended on me as I walked past the pond. The trees revealed tiny red buds. I stopped to watch ducks competing with pigeons for bread crusts on the ground, thrown by a gleeful old lady in a gray bathrobe. I felt connected to them all.
I recalled a time when Ludwig and I had walked through the park. Winter was at its most bitter. As we strolled past chess players, the sun on our faces, we kissed.
Suddenly a tiny, gnomish man appeared next to us. He wore a plaid hat with a feather, just like my father’s. I knew it wasn’t my imagination. The man was staring at us. Finally he said, “You’re a Jewish girl, no?”
“What?” I asked.
“Jewish. You’re Jewish,” he had insisted.
I held on more tightly to Ludwig’s arm.
“What business do you have with him?” he demanded, pointing at Lud.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Ludwig asked.
“A Jewish girl shouldn’t be with one of them. It’s not right.”
I had pulled Lud’s arm. “Come on!” I urged. “I’m leaving.”
The man followed us for several more steps. “You shouldn’t be together,” he declared. “Go to your home, daughter of Israel.”
At home, Ludwig quietly filled his meerschaum pipe with Balkan Sobranie tobacco. He never said much anyway. I stared at him. He was so beautiful, so poetically deep to me. But what was he thinking? I loved him with a still-greater passion.
When the apple blossoms flowered, pink petals dusting the concrete, Lud gave me an antique gold ring with a jade stone surrounded by four tiny rubies. I wore it on my fourth finger. NEO-NAZI TO MARRY HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS’ DAUGHTER.
Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust. I said the words like a mantra to myself. Remember what? Six million, of course. That strangely rounded-off number. A downtown artist had painted six million red marks on scraps of wood, on tools and surfaces of chairs and tables. The number of dots was unfathomable. He called it Six Million Marks.
Remember. Made up of the Latin re, ‘back,’ ‘again’ and memorare, ‘mindful.’ Mind full of what? The heaviest, densest guilt trip in the galaxy. Was this survivor guilt? That’s what good Dr. Lipschitz told me. A solid classification. Survivor’s guilt. How could I have survivor guilt if I wasn’t a survivor? I was born five years after the war had ended. And yet. In my deepest, most involuntary place, my stomach, I carried the Holocaust. I had all the moves. I was born with the stealth, with the terrors.
Remember. There were times I forgot. Oh, shame. During sex, when the mind became completely body, animal, instinct. Dope gave me moments too. When I could hear other music in my head besides the mean finger-pointing, blaming, ridiculing, insulting voice.
Remember the dead. But I had never known any of them. Even their names were dead. As if they’d never existed. I pretended I was born like Venus on a seashell. Without a past. Without history.
I could hear the words of the Baal Shem Tov: “Forgetfulness leads to exile. Remembrance is the secret of redemption.”
Oh, gentle oblivion. I inhaled deeply. I imagined the smoke creating a bulletproof shield around me. It kept away demons, Nazis, the hater inside of me, protecting me as I walked toward the maw of the monster.
I snuffed my joint as I reached Fifth Avenue, returning the silver case to my pocketbook. I came out of the park at Seventy-second Street. I knew Temple Emanu-El had to be nearby. What was the cross street? In this nightmare, I walked up and down the most elegant avenue in the world, staring up at the white stone buildings, burgundy-uniformed doormen protecting their portals of privilege.
I must find my way. I was probably standing right in front of Temple Emanu-El. Surely it was a grand structure. But where the hell was it?
Finally, I approached an Orthodox-looking Jewish woman, wearing a fetching frum hat, with three children, and pushing an umbrella stroller with an infant.
She was hardly older than I was. A baby machine. A Jewish baby maker who produced only girls. But maybe one could draw a Talmud scholar who worked in the Diamond District on Forty-seventh Street. “Excuse me,” I said, “Do you know where Temple Emanu-El—?”
“It’s further south,” she cut me off. “I don’t really know.”
It occurred to me that Temple Emanu-El, mecca of Reform Judaism, must be anathema to her. A dark-haired little girl with large, blue eyes stared out at me.
An American flag flew at full mast at the entrance to Temple Emanu-El. I stood before it, startled by the immensity and grandeur. The most un-Jewish structure one could imagine, except for its modest Star of David within an immense circle of latticework.
I thought we were supposed to be people of the invisible god, I protested silently, who shunned ostentation. Not the yekkers, as German Jews were called, yukking it up with their red carpets and cushioned seats where men sat with women. Few wore yarmulkes, a shtetl remnant. This was wealthy, privileged Jewry, mostly pre-war arrivals whose refugee past had long been eclipsed by business and professional status.
For the Day of Remembrance, they opened their doors to the noisy, pushy DPs and greenhorns from uptown and the boroughs, like my mother in her dark coat with the fox collar. If they bought tickets, of course. These were successful Jews who lived on the East Side—that is, the Upper East Side, attended Metropolitan Museum openings and Sotheby’s, demanded private day schools for their children, who had complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. They were fervently, culturally Jewish. Every week’s mail brought the brown sleeve of The New Yorker.
A man handed me an offset program as I entered. “LET US REMEMBER THOSE WHO PERISHED IN THE NAZI HOLOCAUST,” it proclaimed. “JOIN US IN PAYING TRIBUTE TO THE SIX MILLION JEWISH MARTYRS. WE WLL NOT FORGET, WE WILL NOT FORGIVE. WE REMEMBER.”
I walked into Temple Emanu-El stoned, fucked up, half-fearing the spectacle of skeletal figures in torn blue and white shifts. Instead, I saw the well-fed survivors wrapped in fur coats and Florida tans, seemingly well-healed Jews who had their society and ceremonies, chattering excitedly in the aisles. “Oh, there’s Lola Rosenberg with her new husband . . . Look how handsome is Mayor Lindsay!”
In my worst moments, I hated the victims. They deserved it. If they’d been cleverer, stronger, less greedy, they wouldn’t have been stuck in Europe in the first place. Look at all the emigres. Einstein, Mann, Brecht. I hated the weakness and stupidity of the victims. Why couldn’t they have gotten out? Somehow. Like the rich German Jews, who brought over mahogany breakfronts and candelabras.
“I’m not the first generation,” a voice behind me boasted. “I’m the very first generation!” The highly rouged woman wore a navy silk suit with a black-and- white sticker on her lapel: REMEMBER 6,000,000.
Remember what? Parents with no parents? Uncles, aunts, cousins who are only names, and they are forgotten too? Remember to hate? Whom? Germans? Poles? Arabs?
The voice grew furious. It always happened.
To remember that we are hated, wanted dead? Were these our heirlooms? A large-scale model of Auschwitz, the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei arched over the gate.
One of my mother’s friends, Bella Gold, trapped me as I tried to be inconspicuous, walking down a side aisle of the temple. She had teased blond hair with wings. “Your mother made for you that dress? Very nice. Your parents are sitting on the other side,” she said, pointing. “It’s so good that you came. We need the Second Generation to know.”
I tried to free myself.
“My Hela isn’t interested,” she continued tragically. “Today she goes to a stupid baseball game with her boyfriend. On Yom Hashoah. Have you ever heard such a thing?”
I recalled that it was Hela who had coined the term “Lodz beige” to describe the strange color, never seen in nature, that transformed these women from Holocaust brunettes to Hollywood blonds.
Suddenly a nervous hush filled the sanctuary. The spotlight caught the dark, hollowed sockets of his eyes, the thin wisps of hair, a deeply lined face and gaunt body. Elie Wiesel.
Once, the New York Times had published a photograph of his Buchenwald barracks with a dozen blank-eyed skulls, a white circle drawn around his recognizable face. His number A-7713.
“Let us tell tales . . .” he began softly. Temple Emanu-El reverberated with his chilling voice. I closed my eyes. All I could hear were the words, spinning in a turbid soup of suffering. SURVIVOR REMEMBER THE UNSPEAKABLE NIGHT DARKNESS GOD SIX MILLION DEATH NIGHTMARES FORSAKEN SILENCE TO BEAR WITNESS LEGACY NOT FORGET SURVIVOR.
Survivor. Once we were DPs, despised by others, including American Jews. Certainly my parents thought of themselves as victims. I was the child of victims. The ones bullied in the schoolyard, decimated by pogroms, and then the Final Solution. They didn’t get out soon enough, when they still could. I never understood why a single sibling, aunt, or uncle in either of my parents’ families hadn’t packed up and left on the first train out of Poland.
“Tata wanted to go, but my mother said no. ‘What will we do with the furniture? We can’t just leave everything,‘” my mother told me. “Now I spit on things. We lost everything anyway.”
“Where would we go?” my father responded when I asked him. “You think in Germany it was better? Austria? Hungary? There was nowhere to go.”
“How about Russia?” I asked him.
“There were people who walked to Russia,” he answered. “It’s true. I know someone.” He shrugged. “Do you how many generations we lived in Lodz? We knew no one, we had no place to go.”
Some years later, history was rewritten, my parents anointed as survivors. Their perception of themselves as victims shifted, and they began to think of themselves with a new-found pride. But it seemed such a fiction to me. Now people admired my parents, and even me by association. Because I had parents who had survived concentration camps and I was Second Generation, capitalized like the word Holocaust. “We’re honored to have you in our home,” the host said, his eyes moist as he took my coat.
I sometimes questioned whether Heniek and Genia had truly survived—their youth, innocence, trust in the world, belief in humanity—pouf—extinguished like a light. I had inherited their original, deep sense of injury. I was still a child of victims.
The memorial candle-lighting was about to begin. The women in black huddled near the altar. Long white tapers lit up faces that were now deeply wrinkled.
The line began to move. My mother rose up the steps gravely. She floated across the stage in her good black dress with pearl buttons. Her black lace veil fluttered as she lit a candle for the Czestochowa dead.
Our eyes met for moment. I could see her tears. She was still the white-scarved beauty chosen from the Selection line to live, though her kerchief was black lace. My chest felt tight.
Afterward, she had joined my father. As I approached, she stared up at me. “I’m so glad you’re here.” She hugged me.
I turned away from my mother’s moist green eyes, which threatened to drown me.
Her voice was near worshipful. “I knew you would look beautiful in the dress,” she whispered.
I slipped into their row, taking a seat between them. “Zosha,” my mother sighed. Her mother’s name.
My father acknowledged me with a brisk nod, then turned his attention to the service.
The yeshiva day school children, dressed in white shirts, navy blue skirts, and pants, marched to the center. They began to sing. “Shtiller, shtiller—softer, softer, let’s be silent, graves are growing here . . . ”
I thought about how graves were marked not only to sanctify the plot of the dead but also to differentiate it from the land of the living. I sat there, sandwiched between my parents.
We were there, they nodded together. We were there. And I wasn’t. Yet as I looked from my mother to my father, I had a vision of a colossal stone statue, centuries-old. The imposing monarch, his smaller, narrow-hipped queen next to him, and, carved between them, a tiny slip of a princess.
FIRST STORY
In the beginning, there was comfort. Genia’s family spent every summer in the apartment on Alleya 1 in Czestochowa with Uncle Lolek, a doctor. There was a swing in the backyard, a clothesline on which Aunt Tusha’s enormous brassieres ballooned in the wind among the forsythia.
In 1938, her father’s shop on Mokotowska was looted by their neighbors, who resented his brisk business in custom-made suits. A week later, before the Aktion that would turn Warsaw into a filthy, walled-in Jewish ghetto, they arranged their escape to Czestochowa, still safe from the Nazis.
They packed their apartment, filling five wooden chests with clothing, her father’s tweed and plaid worsted fabrics from the shop, the carved headboard, a silver menorah with eight tiny lion heads, an iron pot filled with Momma’s cholent. Before they left, Father took Genia down to the basement. Raising a wooden floorboard, he showed her where the jewelry was hidden.
Her mother had sewn zlotys into her coat lining. She could feel the coins rustle behind her knees as the train shook. Paper money was hidden in the rolls of her pageboy. Jesse’s stuffed elephant held more dollars.
Czestochowa was a small town, known for its Black Madonna. Alleya 1 overlooked the market square. The family settled into the second floor of Uncle Lolek’s house. Six months later, Selection began. Left line, right line.
Her girlfriend Ruth’s family with the aging grandfather, the lame seamstress, Perla; Janusz, the butcher who couldn’t breathe—to the right. Grolek Stern, her young mathematics tutor, pushed a rusty wagon with one valise tied with cord, boxes of books, and his beloved mongrel, Bog. To the left. Genia watched from the attic window as the dog was shot. Grolek had started out of the line when the policeman turned his gun on him. He bowed his head and ran back into the line.
Her mother’s hair was dyed with black henna. She had rubbed her face with a beet so she blushed like a young girl, so pretty. False documents had been purchased dearly, showing that Genia had worked in an electric factory.
“But Momma, I want to go to gymnazium.”
“Spokojnie! Be still!” she said sharply. “Can’t you see what is happening?”
Genia began to cry. “But you said if I learned my mathematics—”
Zosia stroked her daughter’s shoulders. “My radish, you’ll go after the war.”
The morning of Yom Kippur, the clouds burst with rain. The Mauser’s butt hit the doorframe three times. Genia’s family carried cartons, cans of sprats, bedding, Father’s fabrics for barter. Slowly, they walked to the market square. Momma held Jesse’s hand. The night before, she had made Genia wash her panties and brown wool stockings. “We don’t know what will be. You must keep yourself clean, no matter what.”
Momma had tied a white woolen kerchief around Genia’s hair just before they left. A rough peasant weave, unfinished around the edges so it fringed, the wool made her head itch. She had tried to pull it off, but Momma insisted. “Genusha, please. It may be cold in the place we’re going . . .” Her voice trailed off like smoke.
As they stood on line, Genia suddenly heard the words: “Bialy szalik! Where’s the girl with the white kerchief?”
Genia had hidden behind her mother. The family was still together. She could see Jesse’s stuffed elephant. She grabbed his other hand. Maybe the policeman wanted to steal her new fur-lined boots.
The Polish policeman found her. åShe had dropped to her knees. “You!” He commanded, pulling her by the arm. “The other line.”
“Momma!” she cried, holding on to her waist. “Don’t let them take me!”
The policeman, who wore tall black boots, pulled her away. “Idz!” he commanded. Go! Her family only seve
ral feet away. She wept, not even feeling the fingers grabbing her, scratching her hand with sharp nails, until she heard a hushed “Genia.”
It was Clara! Uncle Edek’s daughter, one class higher in the gymnazium. “Why’d they take me?” she cried. “I want to be with Momma and—”
“Stop it.” Clara’s eyes were savage. “Look at that line you want to go to so badly. You see the mothers with babies? The men? Either children or old. Sick ones, cripples. They say they are taking them to a larger place.”
“Momma and Tata—”
“Sure.” Clara spat the word. “Their grave.”
“What about Jesse?” She whispered her baby brother’s name.
Genia kept the white kerchief through the war. Even when it was torn like a shmatte, she kept it, holding it under her nose when she slept so she could smell the wool, so much like her mother’s skin. She kept it until they were liberated by the Russians.
In one moment, she had a family, then she lost them all. Her whole family was taken away. Pouf! She never saw them again.
After Selection, Genia was sent to a labor camp in the outskirts of Czestochowa, Hasag Hugo Schneider. Month after month, she stood in an assembly line, cleaning gun shells. She was always hungry. Filthy water with turnip and potato peels, the piece of stinking bread only made it worse, but she forced it into her stomach.
Genia found a lager “husband,” Janek, who worked in the men’s section with dynamite powder, which had blinded his left eye. She lost her virginity on a typhus-infested mattress in Janek’s barracks. The other men were there, their eyes open but unmoving. He said they couldn’t hear even though one, Srolek, lay below them.
It was the first time for everything. No graduated fondlings: begin with breasts and if that’s permitted, stomach and thighs. Each step an opening of the heart, cheeks flushed, heat pumping through the body. Hers was done and it was rudimentary. Afterward, Genia had to pee in the pushka, a metal can, and all could watch her squat. But no one did. Not even Janek.