Rena's Promise (2 page)

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Authors: Rena Kornreich Gelissen,Heather Dune Macadam

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical, #test

BOOK: Rena's Promise
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Page 1
Tylicz
 
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I drive steadily uphill into the North Carolina mountains on a Saturday morning in January to meet a woman I have only spoken to twiceRena. We've been putting off this meeting for two months now, but with the holidays finally over we have no more excuses
.
My thoughts tumble across one another; I'm uneasy about the task I'm about to undertake. I hope that I can help Rena tell her story without either of us drowning in the undertow of painful memories, but I'm concerned. Since I was a child I've read stories and biographies of Holocaust survivors. I've worked as a volunteer in a hospice grief counseling center, and I've been personally involved with people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, but I'm no psychologist. I'm afraid that I'll come up wanting in her eyes because I am not Jewish, because I am not Polish, because I am American, because I am young. Maybe I'm not the best person for this job
.
The first time we spoke on the phone I was cooking pierogies and kielbasa for dinner
.
"Are you Polish?" she asked excitedly
.
"No," I told her, "I just love pierogi. We used to eat them at an all-night diner called the Kiev, on the Lower East Side in New York."
"I think I'd like that place."
I laughed. "I'm sure you would."
Rena's house lies in a small valley, with a pasture full of grazing

 

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cows behind it; trussed across the horizon, hemming us in on all sides, are the voluptuous rolling hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I try to organize my thoughts and my book bag before stepping out of the car. It is a glorious day. The air is cooler up here, but the sun is shining and the wind, although it has a nip of winter, has none of its cruelty
.
Inside, I'm greeted warmly by her husband, John. We shake hands and he calls Rena
.
''You're so tall!'' She smiles as we greet each other for the first time
.
"I am?" I laugh. "I'm the short one in my family."
"I'm the tall one in mine." Her eyes twinkle
.
"Heather, come see Rena's linen closets'!" John waves to me
.
"Jan, no!" She starts to reprimand him in Dutch, then, for my benefit, adds in English, "You're embarrassing me."
"You spent all day yesterday straightening them, at least let Heather see your hard work. How else will she know?"
"That's not true," she says, aside. "They're always this neat." Showing me the beautiful linens she's collected over the years, she says quietly, "I didn't have any linens or heirlooms from my family. So I collected my own. I've stayed up til three in the morning scrubbing a stain out that somebody else thought was impossible to remove."
"There. Now Heather knows how neat and clean you are. Heather, are you going to clean out your linen closets when we come to visit?" John teases
.
"I don't have linen closets." I laugh again. "You'll be lucky if I dust."
Rena takes my arm. "Don't you dare clean for me! I clean too much. When I get nervous I can't stop."
In the basement, where we will spend many hours over the next year exhuming the past and embracing ghosts, there is a gas fire

 

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flickering. The room has a rosy glow from the pink sheers she has hung over the windows
.
I'm led from the pink room with its fire into an adjoining room where the family photos are on display. The wall is divided into two sections: the Gelissen family, from Holland, is on the left; the Kornreich family, from Poland, is on the right. In the middle are Rena and John's wedding photo and pictures of their children
.
Rena tells me that she wouldn't have any prewar photos if her eldest sister, Gertrude, hadn't emigrated to America before the war. She shows me her mother's wedding portrait. A Victorian lace collar wraps high up her neck and her hair is piled so gracefully on top of her head that one cannot tell she's wearing a wig
.
"What was her name?" I ask
.
"Sara." Rena kisses her hand, touches the face in the photo. "You know, when we moved here I thought to myself, I've had my number removed, no one here knows me, I can leave it all behind. That's when I decided I'm not going to talk about it ever again. It's not worth it."
"Why did you tell Corrine?" I ask her, naming our only mutual friend
.
"I don't know!" She laughs. "It was the strangest thing." Her eyes are wide as she recounts the story that has led to this meeting
.
"I dialed a wrong number but the voice on the other end of the line sounded familiar. 'Is this Corrine from the tennis club?' I say. 'Is this Rena?' she asks."
Rena does the voices, acting out their conversation as if it were occurring in front of me
.
"I was calling somebody else but got her instead. We both thought it was so funny, because she'd been out of town for several weeks. 'How're you doing?' I say. 'I haven't seen you in a while.' 'I've been going through a tough time,' she tells me
.
"She said something about her past being painful and the next thing I know I'm saying, 'I know about that. I had bad things happen

 

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to me, too. I was in Auschwitz.' I told her I'd been writing my story for fifty years in my head but I couldn't get it on paper. 'I need someone with kind eyes to sit across from me, listen to the whole thing, and write it down for me.' And she says, 'I know just the person.'
"And here you are! All because of a wrong number." She pats my knee. "Did I tell you what I thought the very first time we spoke on the phone?" I shake my head. ''That you eating pierogi was a sign that you're the right person for my story." She laughs and I join her
.
We settle on the couch in front of the fire. Quietly, I click on my tape recorder; it's time to start
.
My original approach to interviewing Rena about her story was to get her to start at the beginning and go to the end, from point A to point B. I thought it was a good plan; I would listen with my eyes, my ears, and the prickling of my skinshe would talk, I would write. But the mind does not move linearly, it plays hopscotch and jump rope with our memories. Point A was not as simple as I thought, and somewhere during our year of excavating, sharing, and writing, point B became Z
.
"I have a lot of books on the Holocaust." She jumps up. "You want to see them?"
"Not now. Let's talk first."
"Okay," She looks at me warily, resignedly, before sitting down
.
I feel like a dentist about to extract a tooth
.
"Where do you want me to start?"
"Auschwitz?" I ask
.
She looks disappointed. "Wouldn't you rather hear about my childhood first? I had a wonderful childhood. I could tell you about my sister, Danka, and Mama and Papa." She looks hopeful and, realizing my mistake, I nod willingly
.
She launches into her family history with relish, making sure that I understand the lifestyle of Orthodox Jews and diagraming the family dynamics for me. She speaks quickly; animated and alive, her hands gesture, her eyes smile
.

 

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Rena's father, Chaim, believed that a woman's place was to bear the children, keep a kosher kitchen, and know how to pray. But Rena's mother was determined that her girls know Hebrew. "I'm not going to have my girls embarrassed like I was, when they get married in temple, because they can't read from the prayer book." She made such a fuss that in order to placate her, the elders of the synagogue decided that in this one instance they would allow Sara Kornreich's daughter to attend the cheder, the Hebrew school for boys, after her regular school day. Her mother paid the melamed, the teacher, with eggs, butter, and milk so that Rena could sit on one side of the room (the boys sat on the other side) and learn Hebrew. After class Rena would take the lessons home to teach Danka
.
"What am I doing?" Rena exclaims. "I'm starting in the middle without the beginning!" We backtrack
.
Rena was born in Tylicz, Poland, in 1920, when Sara was in her late thirties and Chaim in his late forties. The family was split between the two children of their youth and the two children of their later years. Gertrude, the oldest, was sixteen years older than Rena. Then there was Zosia, who was two years younger than Gertrude. Danka, the youngest, was born when Rena was just two years old
.
I remember looking in Danka's cradle with Mama. She was so delicate, so small. When she was just a few months old she got the croup. It was awful. She coughed and coughed all day and all night, then there was no more coughing. The silence was terrible.
Mama began to lament. I had never seen her so distraught. Slowly, she covered Danka's head with a white sheet and her baby blanket.
The stillness in our house was so sad . . . I was only three, but I remember wanting to wipe away Mama's tears and I prayed to God in heaven to bring my baby sister back to Mama.
Then there was a wail from beneath the blanket. First there was terrora ghost, an apparition, something unknowable had entered our house. But the wailing did not stop. Mama ran to

 

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Danka's side, threw back the blanket, and there she was, red-faced and breathing and not at all happy about being covered up.
Our baby was alive!
From that time on, even though I was just two years older than Danka, I was the big one and Danka was the little one. She was always more fragile and Mama fussed over her because she had come back from death's portal. "Watch the little one," Mama would say. "Take care of the baby." It was my favorite job.
Rena could speak all day about Tylicz and her childhood. It wasn't just the memories she treasured, but the closeness of the community, her Jewish and Gentile friends, and the simplicity of their life
.
The underlying question in my mind when we first started talking was, How did Rena keep her mind, heart, and spirit intact for three years and forty-one days of virtual slavery in Nazi concentration camps? At first she seemed to want to avoid talking about it, preferring to describe her childhood, her family, and the friends she grew up with. After our first weekend together we had barely touched on Auschwitz, skirting the issue like nervous thoroughbreds. Still I waited and listened, looking for the pattern, and perhaps the purpose, behind it allthere was a reason she was telling me her whole story and gradually I realized that in her own way she was answering my question
.
When we were growing up I had a crush on Andrzej Garbera and he had a crush on me. I was just five years old when Andrzej pushed a wagon over the mud pies we'd made. Needless to say all our hard work was ruined and, being a boy, he didn't care in the least, preferring instead to laugh at our misfortune. His sole purpose, as a boy, seemed to be to torment us girls. He used to throw snowballs at us on our way to school, but then one day he was not throwing snowballs or being a general irritation anymore, instead he just said, "Hi."
So I said "Hi" back and that was the beginning of Andrzej and me . . .

 

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