Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  Their saga continued. After the Vilnius ghetto was closed, the Germans loaded the survivors onto trucks, shipped them north to Estonia, and put them in slave labor camps. The surviving Kamenmacher women left the Stutthof camp three weeks before it was burned to the ground because of a typhus infestation. In these camps, they were lucky if they ate. “What she described was just hair-raising,” Norman said. “Walking barefoot in the snow carrying heavy railroad ties. Fixing railbeds with just one layer of clothing. It was real slave labor..… Somehow, the three women survived.” On May 8, 1945, when the Germans surrendered, the Russians liberated the Estonian slave labor camps. Bluma, Feiga, and Sarah were sent to Föhrenwald, a “displaced persons” camp south of Munich.

  Misha Berman’s path to Föhrenwald was equally harrowing. His father owned a grain mill in Ukraine. In 1936, when he was eighteen, Misha was inducted into the Soviet army, where he served for five years. When, in 2010, Norman visited the town where his father grew up, he encountered a place that time forgot. “The streets were muddy,” he recalled. “It looked like 120 years ago. There are wagons being drawn by horses, just a couple of cars.” He found a ninety-two-year-old man, supposedly the oldest person around, and asked him if he knew the Bermans. It turned out the man had worked for Norman’s grandfather at the mill. He drove a team of horses and transported grain. “They had the general store over there,” the man told Norman. “They had a beautiful house over here. These are his fields.” Norman thought that sounded charming. Then the man told him a story of what happened in 1941. “One day the local police showed up with trucks. They had guns. They said, ‘Everybody get on the trucks.’ There was this panic and screaming and some people ran across the fields and they were shot, and the rest were gathered into the trucks and they took them away, all of them.” To Norman, the man’s demeanor was so matter-of-fact he could have been describing a fender-bender. “They were nice people,” the man continued. “It’s too bad.”

  Those murdered included Misha’s mother and father, his two older brothers, and some cousins. “There was a whole network of his family that basically just was wiped out,” Norman said. Misha was spared only because he was still serving in the Russian army. At one point afterward, he was given a leave from his service and returned home to find that his family was gone, strangers were living in his home, and the mill was confiscated. “When he started asking around,” his son continued, “he was arrested and he ended up in a ghetto at the very next town over. He spent six months in that ghetto. He escaped and he spent the rest of the war pretty much in hiding. He was in the forests of Ukraine.” After the Germans surrendered, Misha also found himself in Föhrenwald, the largest displaced persons camp in Europe.

  Misha and Bluma were married in a Jewish ceremony on October 22, 1946. Between them, they could identify seventy relatives who were murdered. As part of starting over, Norman Berman was born in the Föhrenwald refugee camp on May 6, 1948. “When we were in the DP camp and I was born, I mean it was like the second coming of Christ,” Norman said. “It was like there might as well have been halos—‘Oh, I was able to conceive, I was able to give birth to a child. This child must be magic’—and that was a lot of my experience growing up. I would screw up, but I could do no wrong. Everything Norman did was wonderful.”

  To leave the camp, the choices narrowed down to two: Israel or the United States. Misha Berman’s mother’s sister had moved to New York City before the war and the two sisters had been in contact, by letter, after it, enabling the Berman family to get on the list for the United States. They took a retrofitted troop carrier to Boston, then a train to New York. They settled in a first-floor apartment in the Bronx. Misha worked in a luggage factory; Bluma again worked as a seamstress. He earned seventy-five cents per hour; she earned twenty-five cents per hour more because she was skilled labor.

  Their lives were hard but they were alive. “They were overwhelmed,” explained Norman. “They came off the farms. They couldn’t speak English. They spoke Yiddish.… We’re living in a slum. It was awful.… One night in fact the ceiling in the bathroom caved in. There was a gas leak.” Not surprisingly, there was bitterness and resentment, despite the fact that they had survived Hitler’s extermination efforts. “They cursed Hitler whenever they had a problem,” Norman said. “My grandmother especially. She suffered from arthritis so she would have an ache or something and she would curse that Hitler. ‘He did this to me.’”

  * * *

  AFTER A FEW YEARS OF LIVING in the Bronx, the Bermans were convinced that there was a better way of life awaiting them outside New York City. That was also the view of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a wealthy industrialist, and the Jewish Agricultural Society, which he founded in 1900 to encourage Eastern European Jews to resettle themselves away from American cities into rural communities. Hirsch believed that part of why Jews ended up being persecuted was because they’d end up in the cities and become successful businessmen, resulting in inevitable envy and jealousy. Thanks to aid from the Jewish Agricultural Society, in 1953 Misha and Bluma bought a sixty-acre dairy farm in rural Moosup, Connecticut, with a brook running through it, and moved out of their tenement in the Bronx. There was a seventy-year-old farmhouse and an empty dairy barn. The idea was to convert the dairy barn to a chicken barn, buy day-old chicks, and go from there. At first it would be a chicken farm, and over time the Bermans would become egg farmers.

  As the family settled into Moosup, Norman remembered how especially nervous his mother was. They were alone in the middle of nowhere. “The first night when they came it was almost dark and it was a little rainy and raw,” Norman recalled, “and she walked out onto the field and she looked around and said to herself, We don’t know anybody … We don’t know the language. We don’t know the customs. We don’t have any money. How are we ever going to survive?” She was twenty-five, and scared to death.

  At the chicken farm on Snake Meadow Road, they eked out a life. “They didn’t take vacations,” Norman said. “They didn’t spend money. They didn’t improve the house. They didn’t buy clothes.” In 1955, the three Bermans became naturalized American citizens in Hartford. And they contributed to the creation of Temple Beth Israel, in nearby Danielson. The Bermans were not hugely religious but they observed the Sabbath and High Holy Days, and kept kosher. They were somewhat skeptical of the concept of God, especially given what they’d experienced during the Holocaust. A favorite mantra was: “There’s a God? Where was He when we really needed Him?” Still, they believed the community needed its own synagogue. There was some concern about how their Yankee neighbors would react to the building of a Jewish temple in a rural Connecticut town—“They’ll come and shoot us just like our neighbors did back in Poland,” Norman recalled them thinking—but instead something surprising happened. “They found support from the neighbors,” he said. “And when they put out the word that they were going to build a synagogue, churches got together and they said, ‘Why don’t we see if we can’t raise some money to help you out?’ Banks, businesses, chamber of commerce—they said, ‘Yeah it would kind of be neat to help these people get back on their feet. We know what happened to them.’ There was actually a coming-together within this community and they built this beautiful synagogue.”

  One day, a few weeks before Norman was to celebrate his bar mitzvah, he was outside after school, washing the family’s car. Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain near his elbow. At first, he thought it was a bee sting. But that did not seem right. “It was piercing, piercing pain,” he said. “I had no idea. There wasn’t a lot of blood initially.” His father took him to the local doctor. “He’s examining and poking, and he says, ‘You’ve been shot!’” Norman recalled. It turned out he had a big chunk of a twenty-two-caliber bullet lodged up against the bone in his forearm. To remove the bullet was a fairly involved surgery, and it left Norman was a large scar on his forearm. To this day, he still feels some numbness where the bullet entered. There was an investigation, naturally, and it revealed that the b
ullet came from the direction of his neighbor up on the hill. One of Norman’s closest friends from the town had a twenty-two-caliber gun and was playing around with it. The friend explained to the police he was out target shooting. But he denied that he had deliberately fired the gun in Norman’s direction when he saw Norman washing the car. The boy was from a prominent family in town, and he and Norman used to strip down old cars in the woods, get them running again, and race them around. Norman believed it was an accident. “I think he was trying to scare me and hit something near me that would frighten me,” he said. “I don’t think he was trying to hit me, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t.” Still, their friendship was a casualty of the incident, especially after Norman’s uncle Izzy accused the boy’s family of trying to cover up what Izzy thought was a deliberate act. “Things were pretty awkward,” Norman said.

  * * *

  JACK WAS BORN IN 1957, when Norman was already almost ten. “As much as my birth was a miracle because here they are having lost everything, this was like the American dream,” Norman said. “It was almost like my parents relaxed and had sex again.” By the time of Jack’s birth, the Bermans had ten thousand chickens. Norman said his parents were content. He said their thinking was, “We’re fortunate to be independent. We’re fortunate to be free. We’re fortunate to live in this country.” They voted in every election. They were proud citizens. They read the newspapers. They were very frugal, and were able to save a few thousand dollars each year for their retirement. They were uneducated farmers and at peace with that life. “Their highest grade was fourth grade,” he explained. “That was their education.” Norman essentially raised his younger brother since he was the only one in the family who could translate and interpret for Jack both the horrific experience of the Holocaust and the feeling of liberation being in America. “You have to understand,” Norman explained, “we were on a farm in rural Connecticut. Our closest neighbor was one half mile away. Our closest Jewish neighbor was over three miles away.… We were isolated. So having a little brother was a gift. We were together always.”

  Norman mentored Jack and taught him the ways of the world. “He could do no wrong,” Norman said. “He was just this magical child. He was sweet, sweet, sweet, earnest, honest. I don’t know that he had a devious bone. What you saw was what you got.” They played together. They fished together. From a young age, Jack seemed infinitely curious. He hung on every one of his brother’s words about the way the world worked and always had more questions. “We would just go for hours,” he said. It was obvious to Norman, his parents, and his teachers that Jack was gifted academically. Once he could read, Norman used to take Jack to the local library and check out books. He’d take out twenty books and read them all. Norman decided to up the ante. After each book that Jack read, Norman made Jack record details of the story on an index card and what meaning the book had for him. When Jack was in the fourth grade, the Moosup library gave an award to the student who read the most books over the summer. Jack read forty-two books. Norman made Jack write a report, on the index cards, on each book. “There is something about a little brother that brings out a sibling’s sadism,” Norman said. In fifth grade, Jack won first prize in the regional spelling bee. In sixth grade, he started a newspaper and served as its editor, reporter, and business manager. “It was a first for the school and a great success,” Norman said. “The paper folded when Jack left.”

  * * *

  UNLIKE HIS BROTHER, JACK didn’t have to work in the barn collecting eggs. The proximate reason was that he seemed to be allergic to dust. But the real reason was that his parents wanted Jack to focus on his studies, not on farming. Norman explained, “My mother said, ‘Look, it’s enough that you’re doing it. He’s the real intellectual. Let him stay in the house. He can do music. He can study. He can read. He can write.’” This was a little frustrating to Norman. “On the one hand I felt I was getting a raw deal,” he said, “but on the other it was like okay, he is the smart one.”

  After Jack completed sixth grade at the Moosup Elementary School, his parents decided to send him to the Hebrew Day School in Norwich, twenty miles away. Norman, by then a student at Boston University, wasn’t consulted. (Norman later put himself through law school at night and is now a litigator in Boston.) The idea would be for Jack to spend half the day studying math, English, and science and the other half studying Torah, the Talmud, and other prayers. In an essay written when he was eighteen, Jack reflected back on the decision to go to the Hebrew Day School. “So began a period in my life during which arose a near-certainty that I would become a rabbi,” he wrote.

  At first, Jack seemed to be at a disadvantage at Norwich Hebrew. The other students had been together for six years, were close, and knew the ropes. Jack did not. He was an outsider, even among his own people. They “were well ahead of Jack,” Norman explained. “Within one year, Jack had caught up and become the group’s leader and spokesperson.” He quickly mastered the translating of Hebrew texts. “The rabbis, the teachers, were just in awe of him,” Norman continued. “He was running circles around some of the older kids in terms of memorizing portions of the Torah.” All this study gave Jack headaches. His reward for excelling was more study. “Recesses and physical activity were not considered viable parts of the educational experience,” Jack continued in the essay. “But to further occupy me through the cold mornings of winter I was stuck in the closet, and told to wade through the essays of rabbis and scholars that nobody else in the school got to read, on rattling subjects like assimilation and marriage, mixed marriage and heaven. Hell.”

  In February 1971, when he was in eighth grade, Jack reported in a school application that he was five foot five, weighed 135 pounds, was the son of parents neither of whom had gone to college, and was a straight-A student. But Jack displayed his natural talent for Judaism on nearly a weekly basis at Temple Beth Israel. Alan Cantor, a friend of Jack’s from rural Connecticut who also ended up at Andover with us, remembered how the synagogue could not afford a rabbi of its own, so each Friday night the Sabbath service was run by men from the congregation, including both him and Jack, after they both had had their bar mitzvahs. Here they were at fourteen years old leading the Friday-night service, singing the haftorah. Jack and Alan used to exchange letters when Alan was away at summer camp. “He used to write very ornate and funny letters,” Alan said. “I always felt like he was way smarter than I was.” He recalled how one time Jack felt the need to correct the way he pronounced the word indict, which of course is not pronounced the way it is spelled. “I think I might have been more intimate with him if he weren’t so intimidating intellectually,” Alan continued.

  After two years at the Norwich Hebrew school, Norman, still away at BU, figured if Jack kept on this path, he would end up at a yeshiva and become a Hebrew scholar or a rabbi. He knew his brother had a broad range of intellectual interests and talents, and feared that the life of a Hebrew scholar was too narrow and isolated for him. “He needed to be doing other things as well,” Norman said. “He needed sports. He was getting chubby.”

  There were family arguments about what was best for Jack. “I started fighting with my parents about it,” Norman said. “There were a lot of family meetings and fights.” Finally, Bluma wondered what Jack would do if he didn’t go to a yeshiva. “He should go to the best school in the world,” Norman blurted out. “He should enjoy and take advantage of the best that there could be.” Norman contacted an association of secondary schools, in Boston. “I’ve got this genius brother and he’s at a point where we need to find the right school for him,” he said. The brothers decided Jack should apply to Andover, even though it was already February. “With my inexperienced guidance, Jack applied to Phillips Academy at Andover after admissions had closed and after financial aid had been allocated for the year,” Norman said.

  Norman returned to the farm, from Boston, and took Jack back up himself to Andover for his interview. “Not only do you have to let this kid in but you’ve got to h
elp him pay for it, too,” Norman told the admissions officer. Although the school was about as far removed from the Berman family’s experience as could possibly be imagined, it still felt right to the two brothers, especially to Norman. “This was beautiful,” he said. “We were in awe.” Jack was a bit nervous about the whole thing but quickly came around, too. “We bought into the American dream,” Norman said. “If you’ve got the smarts, then you should be able to write your ticket, the world should be at your feet … this is the land of opportunity. All you’ve got to do is work hard and be smart, and get your education. Obviously, the pedigree matters. If you can go to a school like Andover, then you can go to a good college. This is what we want. This is what we dreamed when we were in the barracks in Poland, in those god-awful work camps.”

  Or so went the theory of the case. In practice, Misha and Bluma were as nervous as ever about the prospect of Jack going away to Andover. There were long debates, in Yiddish, about the wisdom of the decision. Norman remembered his parents’ logic: “This is not us. This is not for us.… How’s this Jewish kid going to get kosher food? Or what’s he going to do for the holidays?… Aren’t they going to beat him up? Isn’t it dangerous there? Are there any other Jews?” Norman told his parents everything would be fine. “If he can run circles around the other Talmud scholars and master chapters of Hebrew, I have a feeling he’ll figure out what he needs to do at Andover,” he explained to them.

  * * *

  JACK WAS FOURTEEN YEARS OLD. He would be attending Andover on a half scholarship. He had never lived away from home. “He was scared out of his wits at first,” Norman said. He remembered the image of Jack being dropped off at his dorm at Andover with only a big green canvas duffel bag, filled with his belongings. “He’s standing there on the sidewalk with this huge bag and my parents are saying goodbye to him,” Norman said. “You know, ‘Study hard. Be careful.’” The Bermans understood the import of the moment—how far the family had come in one generation, from the concentration camps in Poland to the steps of one of the most prestigious schools in the world—but what it would mean on a day-to-day basis for their son eluded them.