You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (27 page)

I couldn’t get her all the way to your table because there were too many wheelchairs in the way, so I stayed with her in the doorway of
the dining room. But you saw her, smiled, and waved. I called you over, but you wouldn’t move. You must have been afraid you’d lose your seat. I stomped my foot and pointed to the floor, giving you the international sign for
Get over here!
You still didn’t move. Now I was getting embarrassed. You were acting like a third grader. I excused myself and went to your side.

“Go see her.”

“No.”

“She came all the way to see you.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can. You’re being mean.”

“So, I’m mean.”

“You’re hurting her feelings!”

You started to stand and I tried to help by pulling on your bicep, but neither of us was strong enough.

“Tell her I’ll see her when I have more time,” you said.

“What else should I tell her?”

“Tell her bye.”

Charming.

“How about you love her?”

I know I shouldn’t have been scripting the scene for you, but I couldn’t stand watching you treat her like a stranger.

“Yeah,” you said.

I gave you a look of disgust and began to walk away, but you weren’t done talking yet.

“Tell her she was the best woman ever.”

They called me after you hit an aide, threw applesauce at someone, and bent back the fingers of your favorite nurse. “We need you to come,” they said for the first time. “No one can handle him.”

I jumped in my car and sped up the same road I took to get here today. It was easier that night, because after dark there isn’t much
traffic. When I arrived, you were in your wheelchair clinging to the handicapped bar on the wall. It was bedtime, but no one could get near you, never mind coax you to bed. You kept threatening to hit people away.

I was a little scared you’d get violent with me, too, so I approached carefully. You let me get whisper-close.

“You got to go,” you warned in a panic. “It’s not safe.”

You told me the nurses were trying to kill you and that they’d kill me, too, if I didn’t get out of there.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked.

You looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Yeah, you’re Zoo,” you said.

You were not happy that I was wasting time with such foolishness. I had to leave, you warned again. It was kind of sweet, the way you were trying to protect me.

You said you wouldn’t go to sleep because you thought they’d put poison under your bed that would gradually snuff you out during the night.

They, I presumed, were the nurses on duty who seemed to think your behavior was another ploy for attention.

I’d dealt with one of these nurses before. In 2009, you developed a cataract in the eye that hadn’t been blinded by the Nazis, making you effectively sightless in both eyes. The staff knew you needed the cataract removed, and I’d been told the procedure had been scheduled, but it seemed to be taking forever to get it done. Maybe they didn’t realize how not seeing was diminishing you. You’d been genuinely falling a lot back then, sinking back into anxiety and walking around with food caked on your pants, which you would never have allowed if you could have seen it. Maybe they didn’t know about the other eye. I went to the nurses’ station to ask when the surgery was scheduled. It wasn’t. The stern, stocky nurse was on duty.

“Everyone has cataracts,” she snapped at me. “It gets scheduled when the physician decides it’s necessary. When it’s ripe.”

“He can’t see out of the other eye, either,” I said.

“It’s not an emergency,” she said before turning her back to me.

And I once saw her scold you harshly when you dared to leave a chair she’d confined you to so you wouldn’t wander the halls. Put the right uniform on her and she could easily pass for a female Nazi guard. I could see how you’d woven her and her team into your daymare.

I kept telling you that we were both safe—that no one was going to hurt us. You eventually agreed to let go of the railing and go to your room if I sat with you until you fell asleep. I had to get something from my car first—probably my phone—and I told you I’d be right back. I jogged to the main doorway that I’d entered and exited through every time I’d visited for years. Freely entered and exited.

The door was barricaded.

I couldn’t get out.

Holy shit
, I thought. Maybe you were right; they
were
trying to kill us.

I laughed at the thought, but also rushed to find another exit. Later I figured out that Security must routinely lock down the lobby after nine, but I’d never been there that late to experience it.

When I returned you were calmer. You let the nurse whose fingers you’d bent help you into pajamas. You let yourself fall asleep while I watched. The next morning, you were fine: not poisoned, not deranged.

That probably reinforced the nurses’ belief that you’d been faking it. But the psychiatrist knew you hadn’t. He said you’d experienced a psychotic episode that was probably caused by a post-traumatic flashback.

You didn’t remember any of it.

I used to believe every death threat.

Last year, I was helping you get into bed for a nap. I held your water cup while you drank because your hands were shaking so badly.
When you finally laid your head down, you held out your hand to shake mine.

“I’ll say good-bye now,” you said. “I won’t see your face again.”

I didn’t know what to say. Were you serious?

“You’ll still see me,” I said.

“I’ll see you on the other side.”

Then you looked me in the eye with pure earnestness before closing your lids.

A week later, you were laughing with Max and asking if he had a girlfriend yet.

Your mind may have been wobbly, but your body was tenacious.

“His vital signs are stronger than mine,” the nurses would say.

Your heart and lungs were strong even as you started to outlive your teeth.

I’ve always been so proud of your teeth. Their durability seemed like proof of your strong constitution. Tough guys don’t need dentures.

Then right before you turned ninety-one, I noticed that the corner of your mouth was bloody. Or was that chocolate? Nope, blood. Your teeth had started to splinter and turn into pointy stubs on the bottom, so the dentist pulled the four front incisors, leaving only a string of stitching for your tongue to fondle.

But nothing on the inside seems splintered.

After I read a study that said some people may have a gene for old age that protects them against cancer and heart disease and other fatal stuff, I suggested you might have that gene and live another twenty years. You weren’t thrilled with the idea.

“People pray to get old, but it’s no good,” you said.

Your grandmother, the one who knew Hebrew, used to pray that she and her grandchildren would get old.

I couldn’t decide how to play it. Was it selfish to pray for you to live just because I dreaded living in a world without you in it? Did that mean I wanted you to continue suffering? It was as if you were continuously slipping on ice, suspended in the panic that moment contains,
but you were never allowed to hit the ground and be done with it. Shouldn’t I want that to stop?

Come on, God, I’d think, make a decision.

Whenever you bounced back, laughing and joking and flirting, I thought she’d decided to give you peace on Earth instead of in it. You still thought she was going the other way.

“I am very sick,” you said to me over the phone one Wednesday morning.

I was in Rhode Island at the sticky beach house we rented, but you didn’t know that. The staff noticed that you got extra anxious and needy whenever I went away, so they asked me not to tell you if I was out of town. I hated lying to you about my whereabouts, but I didn’t want to add to your anxiety, so I went along with the plan. As long as I still visited you regularly and was always available by phone, you wouldn’t figure it out.

“What doesn’t feel well?” I asked.

“Very sick. I can barely move the feet.”

“But you
can
move them.”

How many times had we replayed this conversation? You get to ninety, you have a little stiffness.

I told you I would visit at the end of the week.

“I wish you could come today,” you said.

“The end of the week is better,” I said, fighting against the hurricane of guilt blowing through the phone.

“I’m very sick,” you repeated. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

I decided to risk it.

“Or Friday or Saturday,” I said.

You were already at the dinner table when I arrived. Same seat, same position, same stare at the paper placemat. It was 3:45 on a Sunday. Dinner isn’t served until 4:30 p.m., but almost all the tables were occupied. A movie was playing on the big TV, and the aides were busy
passing out bibs, which added an illusion of life to the room. Still, most of the people appeared pretty close to death.

I placed a big box from Macy’s in front of you.

“Happy Hanukkah!”

“What is it?” you asked. “Cookies?”

I told you to open it; you told me to open it, so I did. I showed you the slippers, nonskid on the bottom and wide enough to fit your feet, which look like rising dough that’s overdue for a punch-down.

“Thank you very much,” you said, affectless.

I showed you the flannel PJs.

“What size?”

“Large.”

You nodded.

Next order of business: the check. Now that there are two Nazi checks—one from the opening act (the ghetto) and one from the feature (the camps)—it gets confusing. You’d signed a check last week. Now another?

You asked me to read the amount—they’re getting smaller, though I don’t know if that means our economy is better or Germany’s is worse—then, with a shaky hand, you signed the eight letters of your name. You hesitated after the L. Had you forgotten what comes next? Were you going to sign
Libfrajnd
, your original name, instead of the one Bibi chose? Because making an error like that would have fit with the theme of the day, which seemed to be Yesterland.

“Were you in my town?” you asked. “Zychlin?”

This question came after several minutes during which you spoke words that I either couldn’t hear or understand. Just words that didn’t add up to cogent thoughts. Streams of consciousness. You’d turned into James Joyce.

“No,” I said, “I haven’t been to your town.”

“How’s your mother?” you asked.

“She’s dead,” I said. “How’s yours?”

“How’s your mother-in-law?” you replied, as if you’d simply inquired about the wrong person.

“She’s dead,” I said. “How’s yours?”

Someone listening to us might have found my responses rude, but I knew what I was doing. Sometimes you need a dose of snarkiness. It’s like when the Fonz whacked the broken jukebox. A bit of snark usually whirs you back into operation. You met my eyes and grinned.

Hello again.

You were back, but our conversational path was still meandering. Somehow we got on the subject of tall women. You remembered that in Zychlin, men preferred short women. A tall woman, “no matter how much money she had,” wouldn’t attract a husband. Which led, in your mind, to the most lonely girls of all: those in the camps.

Shaved heads. Skinny. Then some Joycean mutterings about their clothing, their monthlies, the rare possibility of getting pregnant.

“They’d get hanged,” you said.

And black memories poured forth. You said something about a French Jew getting hanged, about Gypsies being killed, about Jews turning other Jews in, about pregnant women getting killed with their babies.

“Maybe if they were good-looking they’d give them to the Germans?” you asked.

Were you remembering this or speculating?

The topic jumped to your tattoo.

“The number. So if the Jew ran away they could find him and capture him.”

An aide filled an unbreakable cup with apple juice. Another poured OJ. Someone on the other side of the room gagged for at least thirty seconds.

You thought about the Gentile prisoner at the camp who gave the tattoos.

“I don’t know what happened to him.”

You showed me on your plaid shirt with your finger how the man punctured your skin with a row of dots. Dot, dot, dot, you poked over your sleeve. After, you said, “the arm was all swollen.”

A lady in a satin dress sang on the TV. The image was black-and-white.

“Aren’t there any Christmas shows on?” a nurse asked.

Your words kept spilling out. They were quarters. We were in Vegas.

“The best was Sunday. We had pea soup.”

And then something about your brother taking a bowl used for beating eggs, filling it with soup, and hiding it under his bed. Your eyes twinkled. What wacky times you had in the camps! Or was this back in Zychlin, before the war?

A nurse served you a paper cup full of pills. After you sucked them down with some water, I wiped congealed saliva from the corner of your mouth with a napkin. You had more of them stuffed in your shirt pocket, of course, like silk handkerchiefs, and tucked into the waistband of your pants, like pistols. Collect enough napkins and you turn into Al Capone.

An aide rolled a tall silver cart full of hot food past us. You nudged my arm.

“Okay now,” you said, pointing your chin at the windows. “Go before it’s dark.”

I hugged you tighter than usual. What was all that purging about, that final testimony? I thought I’d heard all of your memories, but new details kept seeping out. Maybe you needed to be thoroughly wrung dry before you could surrender.

I left you to dinner, to bed, to new slippers.