Such Good Girls (30 page)

But whether memories of having been sexually abused were simply repressed until now, whether victims withheld the information until they felt their loved ones would not be so burdened by it, or whether children of survivors were simply afraid to ask, for fear their mothers had been raped, the recall of sexual abuse in hiding brings not only great pain, but acknowledging it can also threaten to undo the trust in others so carefully rebuilt over the years.

One of Valent’s patients, “Anne,” told him about her hiding father’s regular invitations to join him in his bed: “I did not know all this was wrong, because a child has to be told something is wrong to know it is wrong. Obviously I did not respond well, because he always became angry, angrier and more violent each time. I had bruises everywhere. I was blue.” “Anne” may not have known it was wrong, but she knew it wasn’t right. “And when I mentioned to the lady of the house something of what was going on,” she told Valent, “she called me a liar, opened the wall oven and said she would throw me in there if I lied again.”

She was eight.

Sophie is back in the city now, a very active widow in her seventies, living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, not far from where she first landed in New York City. She has two sons and two grandchildren.

Carla and Ed Lessing are both in their eighties, but they have the air and energy of people twenty years younger. They have a son and a daughter and four grandchildren.

Flora also seems younger than her years. Like Carla, she still sees psychotherapy patients, but she has started a second career as “a perfectly imperfect photographer” who uses reflections in her photos to express her double life. In the spring of 2013, she had her first exhibit at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village and another one in the Catskills in 2014. For more than thirty years, she has lived with her Japanese companion in a building less than half a mile from Flora’s first apartment in 1959. Flora and Sophie continue to be close.

The hidden children survivors are all senior citizens now, many with children and grandchildren. For many of the children of hidden child survivors—“2Gs” they call themselves, for “second generation”—the Holocaust burns brightly. In October 2012, at the annual conference of the World Federation of Holocaust Child Survivors and Their Descendants, fifty children of these hidden child survivors gathered in a meeting room of the Cleveland Renaissance Hotel. More and more come to these conferences, both to honor their parents and to find comfort for the pain that their parents’ experiences have inflicted on them. While a few 2Gs in the group were reticent, many had a hard time containing themselves. Bursting with the need to testify about their parents’ suffering, they rattled off towns, dates, relatives, and losses until the recitation of atrocities became numbing.

After an hour and a half of “introductions,” the leader had to cut off a few of the well-rehearsed accounts. The group had already heard about the mother who was on the first train to Auschwitz and survived four camps while her entire family perished. The mother whose immediate family was all killed before a priest hid her. The mother who thought she’d lost all seven brothers and sisters, only to find one of those brothers many years later. The woman pulled alive from a mass grave by a Russian soldier who later became her uncle. The parent who was the only survivor of the Katyn massacre. The parents who were married before the war, then separated at Auschwitz, and reunited after.

It’s in rooms like this, not in books, that the human toll of history is most intimately felt. The present never seemed so tightly and hauntingly bound to the collective past than when it was the turn for the son and daughter of a Dutch survivor to speak. Their mother, they said, had been at the birthday party in Amsterdam for a girl named Anne Frank, where her father gave her a present: a diary with a red-and-white plaid cover.

Through the 2Gs, and increasingly the 3Gs—“the designated candles,” some call them—the ugly history simmers. Through the survivors’ books, the particulars are recorded for posterity. Elsewhere in the hotel, a long table offers a sampling of melancholy titles: While Other Children Played, Against All Odds, Denied Entry, How We Survived, Chased by Demons, Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust, Amidst the Shadows of Trees, Bitter Freedom, No Time to Mourn, I Have My Mother’s Eyes. Open any one of them and you’re in a secret passageway that leads to the malevolence that not even a survivor’s own words can adequately express.

Over two hundred hidden child survivors came to Cleveland, many with their spouses, children, friends, even grandchildren. A few came from as far away as England, Holland, Poland, Israel, and Peru. The World Federation, which had its origins in the late 1980s as a small gathering of hidden children at a motel in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has been meeting for twenty-four years in various cities around the world. This time the weather, unfortunately, was as depressing as the stories shared at the conference. Hurricane Sandy was just two days from landfall and on this cold, gray, windswept October weekend, the city had a decidedly forgotten look, its stores mostly dark, its wide avenues virtually devoid of people, its many parking lots only dotted with cars. Inside the huge hotel, the attendees schmoozed, easily identifiable by the red pouches hanging around their necks that contained their meal tickets.

These survivors are members of an exclusive club with a dwindling membership that no one ever wanted to be part of. They shy away from the publicity that attended the 1991 Gathering. Journalists must carefully plead their case. Under no circumstances are outsiders permitted to observe the intimate workshops, such as “Abused as Children,” “Intermarriage within Our Families,” and “Have We Developed Strengths in the Process of Overcoming Our Pasts?”

The term “family reunion” describes the form, but who can describe the content? Child survivors are like victims of a rare, incurable, ambulatory disease with no visible symptoms. They take their stories for granted, but how can an outsider understand what they themselves cannot convey, except to those few others who walked through the fires of the Holocaust and were not incinerated? As Sophie told her cousin years ago, “I don’t think anybody who doesn’t go through it can really understand at all and no amount of words or films or description will ever tell them.” In Cleveland, one hidden child survivor—now an older man in an expensive suit and tie—buttonholed an outsider by the hotel’s bank of elevators and suddenly said, “How can you describe the hunger? To live with hunger day after day? You can say we were hungry for years, but that”—he tapped his own chest with bunched fingers—“cannot tell you what it was like.”

In fact, many of the stories told, and retold, are almost too uncanny to be believed. One old German-born Jew, like Ed Lessing a member of the Dutch Resistance as a teenager, told of being recruited after the war as an interpreter by the victorious British and personally placing Albert Speer under house arrest. He had to restrain himself from shooting the architect then and there. In America, he became an actor. His first role? Playing a Nazi in Stalag 17 on Broadway.

Then there is the woman who owes her life to circumstances so horribly ironic that not even a demonic O. Henry could have imagined them. While hiding in a bunker with her terrified family, a sympathetic Gentile informed them that the Nazis knew of the bunker and that, to save their lives, they should all escape to another bunker nearby. The Jews who were crowded into the second bunker rejected them, and they had no choice but to return to their own and await their deaths at the hands of the Nazis. There they received a second visit from their Gentile friend, who informed them that he had been mistaken: the Nazis had discovered the other bunker, whose eleven inhabitants had by now been slaughtered.

It is not a stretch to say that gatherings like the conference in the Renaissance Hotel have helped saved the lives of the remnants of this generation’s doomed cohort. Ed Lessing, attending with Carla as well as one of his brothers, Fred, a Detroit psychotherapist, can hardly believe that, before 1991, he lived without the comfort of his child survivor “family.” “It’s like oxygen,” he said. He and Carla have attended almost every conference in America since 1991. “I so look forward to meeting old friends,” Ed said in Cleveland, “the ones who always know what we all went through and can never forget. Life demands so much attention to daily issues, but the Holocaust candle is always there, although it burns at a low, wavering flame.”

During an interview for this book, Ed, the primary designated candle in his family, happened to mention that his other younger brother was rather militantly opposed to dwelling on the Holocaust, during which he was hidden by different families. I was astonished when Ed told me that Arthur, or Abba, as he is known, had lived in my hometown of Highland Park, Illinois, for the past twenty-five years.

How improbable that this book had beaten a path back to my childhood neighborhood, that Highland Park should be “hiding” one of my subject’s brothers. I arranged to interview Abba on a visit to my hometown in the summer of 2012. My parents had now been gone for two years and the house had been sold, fortunately to a couple who had no desire to raze it to build something bigger. They hadn’t moved in yet, and when I pulled my rental car into the empty driveway, where I once spent uncountable hours pitching tennis balls against the garage door, I didn’t suffer the anticipated surge of sentiment. I could almost feel my brain fending off the nostalgia.

I wondered if it was because Highland Park, the precious bubble that enclosed my childhood and where my parents remained for more than forty years after my escape from it, will never truly recede into the past for me. I’ve remained close to several childhood friends who settled in the neighboring suburbs as adults, and every time I visit them, I have the eerie feeling of having time-traveled to the past, especially when our conversations focus on ancient athletic exploits or memories of our favorite teachers, or we resume teasing each other about our teenage foibles. I’ve always treasured these old relationships, but this time, as I thought of the destroyed childhoods of Sophie, Flora, Carla, and Ed, these friendships struck me as a sweet privilege.

I met half a dozen of these friends for lunch at a local Jewish deli, where I struggled to see us as diners at the other tables must have—just another group of graying suburban guys stuffing corned beef sandwiches into our mouths, not the main characters in a timeless saga we would always be the center of. When I mentioned my interview appointment later that afternoon with Abba Lessing, and explained its significance, it felt like an intrusion, requiring too abrupt a refocusing of everyone’s attention. The others barely registered what I said, or the coincidence it entailed. I pursued the subject only long enough to ask if they, like me, were unaware of the Holocaust as children? Yes, they were, they said—and then the conversation settled back comfortably into our personality assessments of old classmates and the problems with the Chicago Cubs’ pitching rotation.

After lunch I drove over to Abba Lessing’s house, not even half a mile from my childhood home. Abba, the middle of the three Lessing boys, was waiting for me on the porch of the stucco house to which he moved twenty-five years ago from Lake Forest, where he had been a professor of philosophy at the college for half a century. Like his two brothers, Abba is robust for his age, seventy-eight, and the owner of an enviably lush head of hair, crowned with a knit kipa.

“My mother walked into our playroom in 1942 and told my little brother and me that we were going to go into hiding, to take off your yellow stars, and that we were going to walk out of the house in ten minutes,” he remembered as we sat on his sun-dappled porch, listening to a pulsating chorus of crickets and the tinkling of wind chimes.

While his two brothers have been active in the world of hidden child survivors, giving talks to schoolchildren and interviewing other survivors, Abba has pointedly avoided any public role as a victim of the Holocaust. For many years, Abba didn’t have anything to do with Jews either. He took refuge from his childhood experience in philosophy classes at Wesleyan University, his cello (he is an accomplished symphony musician, as his father was), and marriage to a Christian. At Tulane, where he received his Ph.D. in philosophy, he defended Martin Heidegger’s unapologetic Nazi affiliation as “unimportant.”

Israel’s Six-Day War in 1967 shook him out of his indifference. Abba embraced his Judaism, began reading Martin Buber, and realized that being a Jew was something to be proud of. And, while still acknowledging Heidegger as one of the twentieth-century’s most important philosophers, he stopped teaching him at Lake Forest College. He and his second wife, who is Jewish and a psychotherapist, joined one Highland Park synagogue (my own childhood temple), then another.

But at every stage of his evolution as a Jew, Abba rejected the mantle of victimization. He went out of his way not to inflict his traumatic experiences on his four children. Of course, had he not survived in hiding, rarely separated from one or both parents—had the Lessing family, indeed, not been the only one of a hundred Jewish families in Delft to survive the war intact—perhaps Abba would not have enjoyed the same resilience. He knows that, had the family tried to go into hiding twenty minutes later, they might have been caught, and he might not be sitting on a porch on a shady street on Chicago’s North Shore, referring to other survivors who cannot leave their pasts alone—or behind. His luck has provided him with the luxury of philosophical perspective.

In the last few years, Abba Lessing has found a kind of home in the Highland Park chapter of Chabad, an Orthodox Hasidic movement and the largest Jewish organization in the world. Chabad allows him to have “a private, almost secretive relationship with God, without the interference of any social pressure to belong. No membership dues, no building fund.” Even there, though, he’s a bit of a misfit; he protests the Orthodox segregation of men and women on separate sides of the synagogue by praying with one foot on either side of the aisle. As for his private relationship with God, he’s not even sure he believes in him, citing Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation that not only does God not exist, but he couldn’t exist. What Abba believes in is paradox, especially his own; “I can’t explain,” he says, “how I am an existentialist and a Hasidic Jew.” It is, in the end, his own version of the hidden survivor’s simultaneous embrace of, and escape from, Judaism.