You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (20 page)

But I didn’t bring it up until we were deep in the shit. For most of that awful year, I was under a spell of naiveté. I really thought they’d rescue us. I thought managing your life and fighting your battles was enough of a contribution from me. I thought we all stuck together.

More practically, I didn’t know how much the final amount would be, as you’ll see, or that I was allowed to front you the money. I was blinded by the high walls of a bureaucratic maze and couldn’t see the
possibility of a relatively simple solution. But maybe it’s better that it worked out the way it did. How else would I have learned what it takes to be a good Jew?

I gave you the outlines of the saga while it was happening, but not the details. You were in no condition for details. Maybe you aren’t today, either.

But you should know all of it. Every good Jew should.

All the nuttiness you’d ever displayed became magnified. This time, you wouldn’t bounce back after a night in the hospital. Your doctor said you needed companionship, possibly an assisted-living facility, but not yet a nursing home. You were still driving, still shopping and cooking for yourself on good days. On the bad days, you’d sit in your apartment with the heating pad over your chest. Your primary food groups were rice and pills. The only indication that blood still flowed through you was the
Victoria’s Secret
catalog on your coffee table. But I knew your depression was fixable. We’d been here before.

I talked with your doctor about increasing your antidepressants. He agreed that you needed a medication adjustment, but he wanted you to see a psychiatrist first.

“You always telling me to go to the shrink,” you said to him one day in his examining room. “Like the shrink will take me to the moon.”

Then you turned to me.

“If I didn’t go cuckoo in the camps, I’m not going to.”

That was your way of saying no.

Just get out of your apartment, we both said. Eat dinner in the community dining room of your building once in a while.

Again, no.

I started calling agencies. Maybe we could get someone to cook for you. Maybe there was an elderly day-care program that would ease you back into the general population. Maybe you’d eat Meals on Wheels.

“It’s dog food,” you said after the first delivery.

I looked at one of the disposable plates of brown goo that you had left on your counter and couldn’t argue.

The doctor increased your pill dosages. Nothing. He threw new pills at you, stuff for pain and anxiety and heart attacks and sleeplessness. Nothing.

I called people who never called me back. I called people who required paperwork before they would tell me they couldn’t help you. Someone sent me a list of housekeepers, but they needed a financial report before they could figure out a fee. Someone else gave me the name of an agency that could help with Medicaid paperwork. The “help” that the volunteer offered was given in the form of a reprimand. She told me to read the forms.

“You can read, can’t you?” she said.

“Yes, I can read,” I said. Then I hung up on her, just like I’d learned from you. It really does feel good.

The doctor got sick of both of us. He suggested you pour brandy into your coffee. That old-school medicine only turned you nostalgic. You called to instruct me to engrave your tombstone with my name, David’s name, and the phrase “best friends of Aron.”

I called the Jewish family service organization and they connected me with the Hakalah program. The program is funded by the Claims Conference, which is funded by settlements with Swiss banks, German corporations, and other guilty parties. It’s supposed to pay for “clinical assessments, emergency assistance, home care, assistance with compensation, and restitution claims, advocacy, case management, and free dental care for Nazi victims.”

As soon as I started telling the social worker our problems, I knew I’d found a savior. Her name is Ellen, and I could tell she was listening and taking notes. She said all the right things about getting you the care you needed. She cooed and clucked at the right moments in the story. She told me she’d speak to your doctors and talk to lawyers about my power-of-attorney rights. She made me feel like I had an ally, a friend even. We made an appointment for her to meet you. I believed, with
chorus-girl optimism, that she’d see how bad you were doing and take the steps to make you better. Ellen would fix everything.

I told you a lady was coming to help us.

“Vhat lady?”

“She’s a friend of mine,” I stretched, “but this is her job.”

“Oh, okay, a friend.”

“So make sure you’re wearing clothes.”

On the day of the appointment you were back in the hospital, so I canceled. But before we could reschedule, Ellen my savior called to tell me that helping you was “beyond the parameters of my job.” She passed us along to a caseworker from a different department.

That lady was nice enough, and I’m certain she was trying her best. But her best included ignorance of the system and fear of upsetting people she should have been pressuring for results. She was also pretty good at insults. She once accused me of trying to warehouse you to ease my burden. Maybe that was because she didn’t see what I saw. You probably put on the charm when she visited. I wouldn’t be surprised if you hit on her.

That was the problem with trying to fix you: You weren’t always broken. Once you convinced the supermarket to resurrect their delivery service just for you. When I called that night to nag you about getting out to socialize, you answered the phone from your kitchen.

“Visit people? I got chicken on! I’m a busy man.”

The next morning you were hooked up to an EKG again.

One day you took a walk and ate a hamburger. The day after that, you were back on your couch in your underwear, your jaw covered with whiskers, your stomach filled with pills, your suicide plans formulating.

In the wee small hours of the morning, I try to imagine myself in those camps. I lie in my soft warm bed and pretend it’s hard and cold. That I’m starving and terrified. Someone could kill me tomorrow, or the next day. Something hurts, beyond the hunger. Many parts of me have
been wounded and some haven’t healed properly. How could they without food or rest? Now, I tell myself, try to make it.

I never could.

I don’t even ski because I get too cold. I can’t imagine skipping the cold cereal I eat for breakfast every morning, never mind the nutritious meals. I’m as soft as soft can be.

I play this game when I’m showering, too. What if I couldn’t shower for years? Or the only showers were cold trickles of water without soap? When I forget to replace my dirty bath towel and have to pat myself dry with a small hand towel instead, I stop my internal whining by imagining having no towel and having to run wet from shower to bunk during the winter. I play the game when I’m walking outside during the winter. Pretend you’re barefoot, I challenge myself. Pretend you have no coat. Try to make it.

Never.

I even think about it when I’m cleaning my house. I ask myself how little I could live with. If someone came and took all of my stuff, what would I really miss? I might not survive any of the physical deprivation that you did, but I’m pretty sure I could walk away from the stuff. Especially if I could take a bag, like your mother did when she left home for the ghetto. This leads to another version of the game: What to take? One pot, one towel, and some soap. Medicine for my kids; at least antibiotic ointment. A book or a journal? A pen or a pencil? A thick blanket, or a thin one with a pillow? What outfit would keep me warmest in the winter but be bearable in the summer? Should I bother packing makeup?

All this is my way of mentally preparing for it to happen again. A lot of Jews must test themselves like this. It’s not that hard to imagine being where you were. Take away the ocean and a fistful of decades and we’re right there in the cattle cars. And while I don’t think it will ever happen again to the Jews, mainly because we’re sitting on our rockers with rifles across our collective laps, just in case, it’s good to be ready for the worst.

At least while the whole wide world is fast asleep.

Primo Levi might have fallen.

That’s what some people believe. He tumbled over a third-floor railing in his apartment building by accident, they argue, citing evidence such as his good moments prior to dying, and how easy it would have been for him to lose his balance.

Others point out that he was depressed and had written about never shedding his Holocaust demons. It must have been suicide, they say.

I suspect the second group is right. It definitely spoils the survivor fairy tale, though.

Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist who landed in Auschwitz after voluntarily joining a partisan group to fight the bad guys. He survived Auschwitz and went on to write world-famous books about his ordeal. He reunited with his mother after the war, got married, and had kids. His writings seemed optimistic. People were shocked when he died because he’d seemed to have been a champion at surviving.
Why now?
they asked.

Watching you go through old age gave me a hypothesis. Levi was sixty-seven. He’d recently had minor surgery. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe he decided he had earned the right to never again feel sick, to never again be so out of control of his own body. So he decided to control the outcome himself.

Or perhaps he prayed for an accident, as I sometimes request action that will stop your body from imprisoning you.
Enough
, I sometimes say to God.
Make him feel perfect or let him go
. Maybe that’s the conversation Primo had, too.