From This Day Forward (27 page)

In 1944, the Gestapo moved into Czechoslovakia and Lilly and her whole family were put on a train for Auschwitz. “But we didn't know what to expect,” she recalls. “We never heard of Auschwitz, we never heard of the crematoriums.” At the camp, her father and two brothers were separated out and never seen again. Lilly, her two younger sisters, and a cousin were dispatched on a work detail, where they basically moved rocks from one place to another, and were then sent back to Auschwitz. By this time they knew what to expect and “we were sure we wouldn't survive,” she says. But they did for one reason—the Nazis needed healthy workers—and the four girls were assigned to a weaving factory that ran twenty-four hours a day.

By January 1945, the Russians were advancing from the east and the Germans retreated, taking their workers with them, marching through fierce winter storms and shooting anyone who faltered. One of Lilly's sisters, Fayge, couldn't walk, so the three other girls carried her most of the way. Czech villagers living along the route would sometimes hide vegetables in the snow for the Jews to eat, but by the time they got to the camp at Bergen-Belsen, most of the survivors were half-dead. “From here we don't go,” said Lilly's cousin. “Either we die or get liberated.”

So many people were dying so quickly that the corpses were just stacked in a corner of the room where the prisoners slept. Lilly remembers being told to remove a pile of clothes from one room and finding the bodies of dead babies wrapped in the bundle. “I became hysterical crying,” she says, “those babies are always with me.” Somehow, all four of the girls
made it through: “We held on to each other and we helped each other however we could. If one of us got a piece of bread, we cut it into four and everybody got a piece.”

On April 15, Bergen-Belsen was liberated, but as Lilly remembers that day: “We were so sick when the British came, we couldn't walk. We had typhus, our hair came out, everybody had sores and frozen toes.” After getting emergency medical care, and enough food to regain their strength, the girls were moved to a displaced-persons camp near the German town of Celle. “It was a very sad life but we all wanted to live,” says Lilly, who was then twenty years old. “We lost everything, we lost everybody, but we still wanted to go on with life.”

Soon Lilly started noticing a tall man who worked in the camp kitchen: “We were so thin we were always standing in the line, and he was also very thin, because he was also liberated on the fifteenth of April.” The man's name was Ludwig Friedman, although Lilly now calls him by his Hebrew name, Aaron, and as they started talking, they realized their home villages were only thirty kilometers apart in Czechoslovakia. “At night he used to bring a little more food for me and my sisters,” Lilly recalls. “I felt so sorry for him. I didn't see how thin I was but he was tall, six feet five, and he was
so
thin. He had a pair of sneakers, some kind of white shoes, and I said, at least don't wear those white shoes, you look terrible in them.”

At first, Lilly was not taken with Ludwig: “I said to my sisters, ‘He looks terrible,' and my sisters said, ‘What do you care? Food he brings us. So?' I couldn't see how I could fall in love with him.” But time passed and Lilly changed: “We went out, we talked, we both had very little education, so we talked about what we would do, what kind of jobs we would have. Most of the time we were with the girls, with the family, and little by little, I started to see he doesn't look so bad as I thought.” Little by little, other survivors were also
regaining their health and vitality. Some who were musicians before the war begged and borrowed instruments and occasionally played for dances, often after synagogue services. Lilly was a quiet girl, but Ludwig was a good dancer, so when the young people got together, he was the “life of the party” and Lilly liked that about him, he brought out her fun-loving side. “Sometimes he made me jealous, he would dance with other people, and I didn't like that,” she admits. But when other boys tried to dance with her, “he would not let anybody near me, he was terrible about that.”

Soon they were getting serious. “We were religious people, you can't just hang out,” she says with a laugh. “We went for a walk in a park, and on the way home he says, ‘Look, Lilly, why are we schlepping around? Why don't we get married? I would like it if you should be my wife.'” Such boldness would have been unthinkable back in Caricha. Lilly's father probably would have arranged a match for her. If not, his approval of her choice would have been essential. But the village life Ludwig and Lilly once knew was gone forever, and he felt free to tell her: “I wouldn't dream of this before the war, but now we could get married, we could be very happy, we're entitled to it.” The young couple was discovering what all immigrants realize: one way or another, the old rules don't apply. They had no parents to ask permission from, no community to please but their fellow survivors. They could make their own decisions, and when Ludwig proposed, Lilly was eager to accept: “I felt very much to have a home of my own. I didn't want to be in camp. I wanted to make a home for me and my sisters.”

But this was still 1945, only one other wedding had taken place in the camp, and Lilly asked Ludwig: “How will we get our wedding together? Do we just go to the rabbi and get married?” He answered: “No. I get you a beautiful dress, a white gown, and I give you everything you really wanted. We're going to be married the way you want.” A hard prom
ise to keep, but Ludwig was a clever and resourceful fellow. He'd made friends with an English sergeant, a supply officer for the camp and something of a fixer, the sort of guy who could get you anything—for a price. And when the sergeant told Ludwig he had a German parachute for sale, Lilly recalls her husband's reaction: “Right away it hit me—this could be made into a gown!” Money was worthless, the local economy operated on a barter system, and Ludwig established a price with the sergeant: two pounds of coffee plus some cartons of cigarettes. (Lilly and Ludwig didn't smoke cigarettes or drink coffee, so when those commodities were included in relief packages sent from abroad, they would always save them for use as currency. They were better than cash.)

When Ludwig showed his purchase to Lilly, she exclaimed: “Oh, my God, where did you get this?” And he replied: “I bought it, maybe you could do something with this.” Indeed, she could. She brought it to a friend named Miriam, an accomplished seamstress, who said: “We could do something with this, definitely.” She worked for two weeks, Lilly remembers: “Everybody was very excited, so everybody went to look for the dress. I said she will never finish it if people will be interfering all the time.” In fact, when Miriam finished the dress, she had enough material left over to make Ludwig a shirt. “I don't think I could describe the feelings I had about that dress, that gown,” Lilly says today, fifty-four years later. “It was something a young girl dreams to have.”

The wedding was set for late January of 1946 and the preparations began, helped immeasurably by a British woman named Lady Rose Henriques who had come to Germany to help care for the survivors. “We cooked, we baked delicious pies,” says Lilly. “We couldn't get nothing, but that Lady Henriques, she could get it for us. It was beautiful how she helped out. Everybody helped out. We set beautiful tables, and we had guys who used to play, so we had music.”

Ludwig borrowed a truck from the English sergeant “and
went to ring bells to bring people to the wedding.” Somehow, at a local hothouse, he found Lilly a bouquet of white lilacs, her favorite flower, to carry at the ceremony. The wedding was held in a makeshift synagogue, located in an old house. And then the couple and the guests marched through a snowstorm to a kosher restaurant that had been set up to feed the religious Jews. “Soldiers were marching, people were marching, whoever went along joined the wedding party, it was very exciting,” says Lilly. “It was a joy to have the wedding. This was a survival, really something we wanted so much to have.” Over four hundred guests were still celebrating when the curfew came at eleven and the restaurant closed down, so the party moved back to the camp. “We had music, we danced, we danced all night.”

The wedding set off a “chain reaction,” says Lilly. About two thousand girls from Czechoslovakia were housed in the camp at Celle, and as she remembers with a laugh: “There were a lot of boys liberated, too, so the chances were good. Boys and girls started to date, to go out and get married and live again and not think about what happened to us. Because if you thought about it, you couldn't go on with life.” Lilly's younger sister Fayge met a Polish Jew named Max and wanted to get engaged, but Lilly was concerned. Her sister was only nineteen, but Fayge retorted: “I feel like a hundred years old, not nineteen, and I love Max and I want to get married, too.” Besides, the old rules didn't apply to Fayge either. She told Lilly she'd get married anyway, whatever her sister said, so Lilly gave the couple her blessing.

But there was also the issue of the dress. Many brides wanted to wear it, but Lilly said, no, Fayge gets it first, then others can have it. Lilly took up the hem a bit, the dress fit Fayge “very nice,” and then it started making the rounds: “It just went from one to the other; they didn't even bring it back to me.” She stopped counting after about eighteen brides, and Lilly figures more than twenty women wore her
dress. Each one took it in or let it out, made it longer or shorter, and for Lilly, the gown took on symbolic meaning: “When they asked me for the dress, I told them, I would like that this dress should represent a beginning for us, for the survivors. We got married and we want to live and build Jewish homes and show that Hitler didn't succeed in what he wanted to succeed.”

Meanwhile, Lilly had lost touch with her sister Celia, the one in America. She enlisted the help of a Canadian soldier who was going home on leave, and he put an ad in the
Forward,
the Yiddish newspaper in New York, telling Celia that her three sisters were all alive and looking for her. A friend of Celia's saw the ad and the family was reunited by mail, but Lilly was desperate to see the sister she had not seen in twelve years. Her daughter Miriam was born in 1947, and when President Truman agreed to take in a hundred thousand additional refugees the next year, Lilly pressed Ludwig to go to America. He preferred Israel, but agreed to her wishes, and Celia sent the baby a little sweater and a hat with pom-poms to wear on the journey. “If I don't recognize you,” said Celia, “I'll recognize the baby.”

The family settled in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and Ludwig found a job in construction, but after he hurt his back and couldn't work, he opened a kosher butcher shop on Flatbush Avenue called “L&L,” for Lilly and Ludwig. Two boys were born, and as Ludwig's dream of moving to Israel faded, the family moved to a nicer neighborhood in Sheeps-head Bay. After the children went to school, Lilly started working in the jewelry business, where she had a relative, and it turned out she had a talent for selling. Eventually Ludwig closed the butcher shop and joined her selling jewelry, and he died in 1992 after almost forty-seven years of marriage. The tiny shop she still runs today is also called “L&L,” in honor of their years together. Celia is also dead, but the three sisters who survived the war together, Lilly, Fayge, and Eva,
are all still alive and living within a few blocks of each other in Brooklyn. Lilly has seven grandchildren, and the oldest, Miriam's daughter, is pregnant. “My God, my fourth generation,” says Lilly. “I couldn't believe it. When I was in the camp and struggling to survive, to live, I'd just ask God for a piece of bread. And now I have a home and children and grandchildren and I'm expecting a great-grandchild. It's the biggest gift God gives me.”

And what of the wedding dress? When she came to America, Lilly put it away in a closet, protected by a plastic box. “Every time I cleaned the closet, I'd say, what's going to be with that gown? This is not even good for a garage sale.” But she was wrong. One of her nieces told a curator at the Holocaust Museum in Washington about the dress, and it's now part of an exhibit detailing the history of the displaced-persons camps in postwar Europe. Lilly is very pleased because putting her wedding dress on display completes a journey she started in 1944, when she first got on the train for Auschwitz: “We wanted to live, and to tell the story, this was our most important thing. To tell the story that happened, so that it shouldn't happen again.”

COMING HOME

FAMILY HOUSE

“Coming home” is one of the most resonant phrases in the English language. It means returning to comfort, to security, to familiar people and places and things. Cokie had moved into the house on Bradley Boulevard when she was eight years old. We had some of our earliest dates there and were married in the garden. Now, eleven years, three cities, and two kids later, we were very different people. We knew we belonged at the grown-ups' table at Christmas. But coming home has another meaning. Comfort can lead to constriction, familiarity can mean a loss of freedom and privacy. Family can feed your spirit and fuel your anxieties, open windows and impose obligations. These were the tensions we faced as we moved back to America, back to Washington, back to the old house and the old neighborhood. Back home.

 

CR: My mother could not have been more accommodating. She threw us a big welcome-home party with Greek food and decorations on what turned out to be our eleventh wed
ding anniversary. She turned over her room to Steve and me and moved into my old bedroom with Becca. She gave us her closets and dresser, and put all her stuff under the bed she and Becca shared. It was more than a little strange for me, with Becca in my old room, Lee in my sister Barbara's old room, and Steve and me in my parents' room. The house had not changed since my father had died; some of his things were still in their bedroom, even though it was almost five years since his plane had disappeared. My mother's mother had been living there, with a full-time housekeeper to help look after her, so Mamma had not even thought about leaving the big house in the suburbs for something more convenient downtown. But the previous April my grandmother had died, and Mamma was reaching a point of decision about the house. She knew that I loved the house, had always wanted to live in it, had in fact picked it out when I was eight years old, but she didn't want us to feel pressured to move in. She encouraged us to look at other houses, and we did.

 

SR: We had so many things to do and buy. We needed two cars! We bought one real jalopy, which lasted about three weeks. I needed new clothes because I hadn't gone into an office regularly for nine years. Fortunately, the neighborhood public school was a good one, so the kids' situation was easy to settle, and we had waited until almost the first day of school to arrive in Washington so they could plunge right in.

 

CR: House hunting was a real shock. When we had left the area, many people who worked in the
New York Times
bureau lived in my family's neighborhood, and usually on only one salary. By the time we got back, there was no way on earth anyone could do that. The growth of the government during the sixties and seventies had drawn all these well-paid lawyers and lobbyists and consultants to town and they had driven real estate prices through the roof and interest rates were at
an all-time high. It became clear that to live in what was just a regular house, we had to have more money and that meant I had to find a decent job, not something to occupy and amuse me. The obvious place to start was CBS, since I had worked for them in Greece, but the bureau chief crisply told me that foreign stringer was one thing, Washington staffer quite another. I made the rounds of the networks soon after we arrived in town, but it was Steven who found me a job.

 

SR: I had worked in the
Times
bureau thirteen years before, but there were many new faces, including the one at the desk next to mine. I introduced myself and she said her name was Judy Miller and that she had just started working at the newspaper. I asked where she came from, and when she said National Public Radio, my reaction was “What's that?” Public radio was then about five years old, but for four of those years we'd been in Europe and I had no idea what she was talking about. When Judy described public radio, I said, “I've got a wife crying herself to sleep every night. I'm desperate about finding her a job and that sounds like the perfect place. What do I do?” Judy said, “I know they're hiring because they are replacing me. Call Nina Totenberg.” Nina knew friends of ours and had heard we were coming to town and agreed to help, at least partly because she wanted to make sure NPR hired more women. It was the first time I'd seen the old-girl network in action, but not the last. So the next morning I brought Cokie's résumé downtown with me so she didn't have to make a special trip, and Nina came downstairs and met me outside the NPR offices. Since then, she's become one of our dearest friends. A few years later, in another gesture of female solidarity, Cokie was an usher—an usher, not a bridesmaid—in Nina's wedding.

 

CR: Nina got me in the door. But NPR still didn't hire me. For a while I was on a weekly retainer. None of it was certain.
In fact, even though I was filing stories almost daily, I wasn't hired for a long time. I remember Steve's sister got married in October, and when we flew up to Boston, I cried the whole way. I couldn't see how any of this was ever going to get resolved. Nobody was hiring me, we couldn't afford to live anywhere, I felt like I was a child in my mother's house. It was all a mess, though I loved the work itself. When I was finally brought on staff in February 1978, it was at the lowest-level reporter's salary. That made it tough in terms of buying a house, but we were eager anyway to get that settled. By that time we had been living with my mother for six months. Her things were still under Becca's bed, ours were still in storage, and the situation was unnerving for everyone.

 

SR: At first we didn't think we'd move into the family house, but soon we realized that it made the most sense. It was in a good school district and the kids loved it. In fact, they told us that they had always seen that house as their home base as we traveled around the world—something we had not fully understood. Also, of course, there were many fond memories and a few ghosts—most of them friendly, Casper-like.

 

CR: And it was a very special place to Daddy, so it was hard for Mamma to give it up. But it was also time for me to be mistress of my own house, with my own things around me. No matter how generous and wonderful my mother was, and she was incredibly generous, we didn't want to be camping out. If this was going to be our house, it had to be our house.

 

SR: Something had to give. And finally, our sister-in-law Barbara intervened just the way my brother had intervened years before and helped my parents accept our determination to get married. She went out and found Lindy an apartment.

 

CR: Which my mother never liked.

 

SR: And basically handed her the keys and said, “You're moving!”

 

CR: It wasn't quite that bad, but almost.

 

SR: Almost. For us, though, it was a great relief to finally be settled, particularly in a place that meant so much to us. It was springtime, and I realized there was an unwritten clause in the deed of sale that I would take over the gardens. Hale had focused on the vegetables, while Lindy had put in lovely perennial beds. The vegetable gardens had not been planted for years and I felt a powerful obligation, and even more a desire, to revive them. But I didn't have a clue about how to start, and I remember that first spring walking out and looking at the bare ground and thinking, “What the heck do I do now?” Fortunately, there was a man named William Barnes who had worked for my in-laws for many years, and essentially I apprenticed myself to him. Slowly and patiently he would teach me about this piece of land, and that gave me a great sense of continuity. He had worked with my father-inlaw, he knew and loved the place, and we still had a lot of my father-in-law's tools, which had rested idle in the shed for years. I learned from William, but in many ways I was also learning from Hale. I felt a very strong connection to him when I worked in the garden, and I still feel that way all these years later. That's where his spirit is most alive, and in a way I feel that it's still his land. I'm just a caretaker.

 

CR: Well, I think you qualify! You've been at it twenty-two years.

 

SR: Some of my fondest memories of Bradley Boulevard involve Hale and his garden. I asked him for Cokie's hand in the tomato patch. Many of the earliest dinners I had there were in the summer and included his vegetables. Half the talk was
about politics, the other half about vegetables, and that's still true. That first spring I planted tomatoes for the first time but I had no idea how big they would grow. Like a pupil seeking approval from the teacher, I went running over to William: “Come look, come look.” One glance and he burst out laughing: “You've got to take every other one and dig them up because they get much bigger than you think. You've got to plant them much farther apart.” Every Saturday, William and I had our rituals. During the morning we'd work together, and he would teach me things, and then we'd come in for lunch. Every Saturday I would offer him a beer and every Saturday he would say no. But I offered him one every week. He died much too young. But he stayed alive long enough to pass on his wisdom to me. I even have a few, just a few, of my father-in-law's tools. There are two old watering cans of his that I still use. Galvanized steel, they'll last forever.

 

CR: The kids were delighted that we had finally settled in and they had their things around them again, though Becca missed snuggling at night with her MawMaw. Lee had been sleeping in an antique four-poster with brocade spread and dust ruffle. He couldn't wait for his bunk beds to arrive, and for me to cover the brocade valances with NFL football fabric. Aside from missing their stuff, though, the kids had had a good adjustment to America. Since they didn't know anybody, I thought it was important to send them to the same school, one in the neighborhood where they could meet other kids. At the time we had no decent child care. A high-school boy named Anthony came for a few hours in the afternoon until we got home. But he needed to leave at a certain hour and I was always frantically trying to cover in case we were late, which we often were. Fortunately, my niece and nephew, Tee and Hale, were in high school and able to drive, so they were a big help. But sometimes everybody's signals got crossed, and the changing of the guard that was supposed to
happen didn't happen. Lee once ended up standing on the curb for hours waiting for Hale to pick him up from soccer. At one point we were broadcasting the Senate debate on the Panama Treaty live on NPR, where I was still very much proving myself. I asked Steve, who was also working on the Hill, “Could you please call Tee and ask her to get over to the house and relieve Anthony.” Steve said he'd do it but he didn't. He was working and just forgot. I was furious. Anthony stayed but was all bent out of shape. The hassle was constant. Finally, after about a year, Rosie Nowak, a Scottish woman who had been the kids' last baby-sitter in Greece, came over from Europe and saved my life.

 

SR: It was taking me some time to realize that for the first time in our marriage our jobs were comparable. We had moved three times for my work, really four times. To New York in the beginning when Cokie gave up her TV show. Then of course to California and Greece and then back to Washington, with my work dictating every decision. Through those years Cokie always worked, but we were not equal. Now that was changing. It was changing because we needed her income. It was changing because she was working full-time. It was changing because she had responsibilities. That caused a big adjustment.

 

CR: Huge adjustment, for the whole family. And the whole family also had to adjust to the fact that Steve was now home, not traveling a sizable percentage of his time. I was used to making very simple meals when he was away. The kids loved Spaghetti-Os. I would sit down and visit with them and pick at something to eat and then get everybody to bed early. It was a much more organized life when Steve wasn't there. His coming home was almost a holiday. So it was a big change to have a full-time man in the house. It meant a big meal on the table every night. I was incapable of doing something really simple with Steven home.

 

SR: Which was partly your problem. Often you'd insist on doing something complicated when I wasn't expecting it.

 

CR: I would come in from work and start making these time-consuming dinners and we'd finally all sit down exhausted at the dinner table at eight-thirty or nine o'clock. The kids were pretty good about it. When they got older they told us that they hated it when we'd call assuring them, “We'll be home in a half an hour,” and then call back: “Actually, it will be an hour.” They were expected to adjust their schedules to us. They thought that wasn't fair and they were right.

 

SR: Yes, they were right. We didn't mean to be negligent or thoughtless, but we were both covering news stories and couldn't always predict what was going to happen.

 

CR: And we wanted to be with them, we wanted our family dinner, so we'd ask them to wait for us to get home rather than eat early without us. Years later they told us that they sometimes shared an early meal at a friend's house and then had another dinner with us. Our motives were good, but we sometimes made their lives more difficult.

 

SR: Often we were commuting together and that meant operating on the latest common denominator. If one of us was done early, often the other was not. And it got worse when NPR started
Morning Edition,
which meant that after Cokie filed for the evening show,
All Things Considered,
she had to start all over again for the morning. Even so, we enjoyed commuting together, and it helped our relationship. On the ride to work in the mornings we'd make plans and coordinate schedules. On the way home at night we'd have half an hour in the car to catch up on the day before we walked in the door.

 

CR: A couple does that anyway even with the kids around; I've watched it with other people, too. At the end of the day
the husband and wife catch up with each other. If the kids are there, they want to be part of the conversation, but the couple tends to exclude the children until they've finished exchanging the news of the day. By the time we finally got home, the kids had our undivided attention.