Such Good Girls (28 page)

In her book Broken Chain: Catholics Uncover the Holocaust’s Hidden Legacy and Discover Their Jewish Roots, American psychoanalyst Vera Muller-Paisner, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors whose first spouses and families had been murdered by the Nazis, recounts the dilemmas of several newly enlightened Polish Jews. Poles who learn they are Jewish and decide to embrace it have resources to help them in the form of educational programs sponsored by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, in particular a Jewish “camp” in the countryside, run by an American-born rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who started working in Poland in 1990 and is now the official rabbi of Poland.

Nothing, however, protects them from ostracism, persecution, and the traumatic effects of being identified as Jewish. The friends of one teenage girl who learned when she was fourteen that her father was Jewish called her a “Jew who should be thrown to the gas.” Another teen lost his friends after a yarmulke was spotted on the floor of his family’s dining room. After a fifteen-year-old girl who learned her mother was Jewish decided to keep kosher, her father stopped talking to her and eventually became estranged from the whole family. One mother who thought she was dying told her child that they were Jewish, but, once recovered, insisted she was “delusional.” In a country still as anti-Semitic as any, and with virtually no separation of church and state, many “new” Jews were fearful that being Jewish meant no longer being Polish. One person wondered, “Because of prevailing anti-Semitism I find myself also anti-Semitic. How do I get rid of it?”

Even for older hidden children survivors who always knew they were Jewish, organized religion can seem like a necessary mirage, a wavering vision of safety in an existential desert. Judaism is simultaneously embraced and rejected, a set of inconsistent rituals that nonetheless give meaning to their devastated childhoods. Many survivors (and victims) of a genocide based on religion were not observant to begin with; the beliefs, rituals, and traits for which they were targeted for extermination were often as alien to them as to the Nazis. For some survivors, Judaism lost much of its remaining religious meaning after the war, leaving its cultural, historical, and sentimental values to cling to.

Poet and writer Judith Sherman was hidden in Czechoslovakia and Hungary before being shipped at fourteen to Auschwitz in a boxcar that gradually filled with the dead during four days without food or water. Because of the recent arrivals of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, Auschwitz was unable to accept the living contents of Sherman’s train on that particular day and she was sent on to Ravensbrück, where she, unlike her parents and most of her relatives, survived the war. There were days, she writes, “when I was surrounded by more dead people than alive ones.” Why did she live to enjoy her grandchildren and write, after a long silence, a beautiful, moving memoir, Say the Name? The answer, she knows, can be found in a thousand tiny contingencies, and yet nowhere at all.

On a spring day in 2012, the energetic eighty-two-year-old sat in a coffee shop on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan and tried to explain her difficult relationship with God, whom she treats like a stubborn, irrational, and cautiously loved father. She had just returned from an annual two-day event in Scranton, Pennsylvania, for which the Jewish Federation and Catholic Marymount College bring together 1,800 students and numerous survivors to discuss the Holocaust. While on a panel there, she had been asked by a student about forgiveness. “I don’t really know what that word means to me,” she replied. “Does it mean I forgive the Nazis for killing my father, mother, etc.? I can’t visualize forgiveness. My days are not consumed with rage and hatred and vengeance, but forgiveness is not part of my thinking. I have never heard a Nazi express remorse or regret for his crimes, so what ‘forgiveness’ is that student asking for?”

God was central to Sherman’s childhood in Kurima, Czechoslovakia, and although she never believed she was anything but Jewish, she has retrofitted her surviving faith in God with paradoxes and provisos that fit the emotional realities of her life. She attends Sabbath services, but reads the prayers phonetically in Hebrew—a language she doesn’t understand—because “I cannot read words like ‘The Lord is good to all. He hears their cry and saves them and upholds all who fall.’” As she writes in Say the Name:

With the images I carry I cannot utter such words of praise. God, such words of praise uttered by this Ravensbrück prisoner—number 83621—should be disdained by you. An insult to you. My unanswered struggle continues. On Yom Kippur I get up early, have a big breakfast, and then spend the day in the synagogue. My act of defiance. I will not go hungry for God. But I will pray. Today I say Kaddish, the memorial prayer, whenever Kaddish is said during Services. Silently I say it. I do not stand up as required—how would I explain the frequency of this reciting to fellow congregants?

“Having God is having someone to rage against,” she said over coffee. “Where else will I go with that? God is strong enough to take it, like a strong parent. My railing is not only against God, but also against man. Where was God? Where was man?” When she talks to schools now, the focus is on the Nazis and on their victims—“I order the Nazis to ‘say the name’ six million times”—and on God—“God, please see to it that every name is accounted for.” In one of her poems, Sherman writes,

God, would you come down that ladder

that ladder Jacob climbed

I will not deal with angels

I’ll wait till you arrive.

when You come down

that ladder—that ladder

Jacob climbed

then I will take Your hand

and I will be Your guide

and I will show You sights

not fit for Godly eyes

She has maintained a relationship with God because it is in her childhood DNA to do so. She has also turned him, in a sense, into a victim of the Holocaust as well. “God needs us,” Sherman said. “We should not abandon him. We must not leave God unattended. Nor us. Nor us.”

So what of Father Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, who at thirty-five hears the call of Judaism, a faith to which he belongs by birth but by no other lived experience, and sets out to become a Jew in Israel at the age of sixty-seven? What is happening when Jakob Popofsky, knowing he is Jewish, decides to become a priest but continues to be tortured by that knowledge and, only at the age of thirty-five, comes out of hiding? What is happening when Sophie, who knew herself only as an anti-Semitic Catholic until she was eleven, is determined as an adult, despite her ambivalence toward Judaism, to marry a Jew and raise Jewish children? What is happening when Flora, whose Judaism was buried under successive waves of Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, and atheism, celebrates Passover and is drawn to her Israeli relatives?

Do these individuals simply want to alleviate their guilt at turning their backs on their religion, even if they did so involuntarily? Do they feel an abstract intellectual commitment to rejoin and propagate their original and historically persecuted minority? Do they want to lay claim to their rightful portion of their legacy of revolutionary Jewish humanism? Or does the discovery of denied Judaism strike some deeper nerve, provide a potential missing piece to the puzzle of their souls, and resonate with some rejected strand of their genetic selves?

Could it be enough just to ask these questions?

However well the hidden children get along in the world, they are reminded of the Holocaust by the things they must do, the things they must avoid, and the thoughts that have lives of their own. To this day, Sophie has to eat before bed so that she won’t wake up hungry. She has a furniture-rearranging compulsion, a relic perhaps of the need to alter and control something in her terrifying environment. When she used to visit her Aunt Putzi, Uncle Kazik would offer to pay her not to move their furniture around. As for Aunt Putzi, she would never throw a piece of bread away, no matter how stale, and left the radio on all night to erase the silence she remembered too well from coming home in 1942 to find her parents gone, never to be heard from again. When Putzi’s son Henry was ten, he already knew how to protect her from her past; when The Pawnbroker was shown on television, he stood in front of it to block her view during the concentration camp flashbacks.

Today Carla becomes very irritable when people talk about dieting. Not her psychotherapy clients, of course, but when others ramble on about all the things they’re not eating, it offends her experience during the war, when for years she often went hungry. How can people obsess about not eating when there’s so much food available? Carla is often afraid she’s going to run out of things. If she finds a pair of shoes she likes, she’ll buy a second pair, because you never know… .

Flora is preoccupied with her inability to remember enough of the past. “I had so many losses, so many identities,” she says. Questions about her childhood are met with frequent disclaimers about her “terrible memory.” “I have trouble remembering things,” she complains, or “My problem in my life is that I don’t remember. I forget everything. It’s a pain in the neck in my studies… .” However, one thing Flora remembers all too clearly are the first pastries she ate after the war: meringues and baba au rhum. “It was my introduction to plenty,” she says. They are still her favorites.

Survivor and poet Judith Sherman can’t tolerate hunger. She has lunch at ten-thirty in the morning. In restaurants, the only starch she orders is potatoes, in honor of a food once so precious it made the difference between life and death. Another superstition: until she wrote her own book in 2005, she had never read a book about the Holocaust. Maybe most chilling of all, though, is this: in supermarkets she refuses to select fruits and vegetables, taking only those that happen to be on top. “I cannot engage in ‘selections,’” she writes, “because of Auschwitz—because of Mengele.”

Such post-traumatic behaviors haunt the adult lives of hidden children, but the therapeutic value of meeting other hidden children was well established by the effects of the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II. Not long after the Gathering, Carla told author Jane Marks for her collection of interviews, The Hidden Children: Secret Survivors of the Holocaust, “Part of my personality was almost dead, but now it was coming to life… . People say my whole demeanor is different now, that I’m jollier, more outgoing, more relaxed.”

The Gathering had also popped the lid off her husband Ed’s reluctance to deal with the Holocaust. He started reading the books on Carla’s Holocaust shelf, the books he had avoided for decades. He began to speak to hundreds of schoolchildren every year, surrounded by enlarged photos of the chief of police who saved his life, himself as a teenage Dutch Resistance fighter, and the all-Jewish Boy Scout troop in The Hague, of which he was one of only three Dutch boys to survive. In the 1990s, Ed volunteered to conduct fifty videotaped interviews with survivors in the suburbs of New York City and the Bronx for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He started his own local hidden children newsletter.

The Gathering also emboldened Flora to take her private Holocaust public. In addition to her speaking engagements, Flora taught a course at the New School for Social Research that examined how different countries and religions struggled with the Holocaust. It helped her to see how others had suffered outside of herself. The Gathering seemed to substantiate the conclusion she drew from her pioneering study of eleven child survivors back in the 1970s: hidden children could be remarkably resilient, and trauma created not only psychopathology, but also the foundation for a stronger identity once the unthinkable and unspeakable past was consciously incorporated into the narrative of the survivor’s life.

Survivors must deal with nonsurvivors in their daily life. Ordinary conversations carry the potential for unwanted sympathy and self-censorship. When Flora met a visiting chorus of college students from Cologne, Germany, she was quite conscious of saying nothing to them about her experiences at the hands of their countrymen sixty-five years ago. “I didn’t want to ruin their evening,” she says. “On the other hand, I couldn’t be myself.”

“It’s a conversation stopper,” Carla says. “When I talk about it, the expressions change dramatically. People get that worried face. It brings them closer to a horrible world.”

The reach and enormity of the Holocaust can make the mere mention of having survived it deeply disturbing for others. Its commercialization (in treatments both dramatic and satiric, from Schindler’s List and Sarah’s Key to Life Is Beautiful and Inglourious Basterds) has fixed it in Western consciousness as, one hopes, the outer limit of evil on earth. It will always be caught in history’s throat. The mention of the Holocaust by a survivor can suddenly make the listener choke on his or her moral assumptions about the world. It doesn’t simply bring the listener disturbingly closer to Carla’s “horrible world,” a world that exists outside of our familiar ethical categories, but to death itself. As a participant said at the Hidden Child Congress in Amsterdam in 1992:

The survivor reminds the psychically “healthy” (including the psychoanalyst) of his/her mortality, of the precariousness of all human existence, of the ignominies and barbarity with which untold millions of innocents have met their death… . This reminder is intolerable, its suppression is a central function of all that passes for contemporary culture… . The very witnesses of the pathology of modern society, whose testimony could shake us out of a once again dangerous complacency about the state of the world in which we find ourselves, are stigmatized as neurotic, are treated as a new field of research for the psychiatric PTSD specialists, rather than as a group of people who have something of great importance to say to us all.

For many people, survivors are emotional lepers; no one wants to catch their misery, however presumed or real. Today the Holocaust is talked about more freely than before—Carla gets a fair amount of casual “Oh, you’re a survivor! So where were you?”—but a survivor can never know in advance how well informed or empathetic a listener is.