Memoirs
of Someone Born at the Wrong Time in History
but
in the Right Geographical Place
As I have grown up to realize what the world I was
born into was like, I am aware that I was very lucky—what else can one call
it?—to have grown up as a Jew during the Holocaust but was safe in
America. In my attempts over the past
more than twenty years to write out a personal history of those times, often in
what I have called “almost true stories”, I have tried to see and hear beyond
what a small child could be aware of in the adults around him as they became
aware of and increasingly frightened by the events occurring in Europe during
1940 to 1945, that is, from the time of my birth until I was five.
At times, I created Yiddish voices, comical faces
and farcical actions that made the fictional persons more aware than they
actually were, or could have been. All
this acted as a protective filter or I would not have been able to continue
probing my memories. But because all
other efforts to make sense out of my memories were confounded by a lack of
proper chronology and the incoherence of narrative “facts”, these “almost true
stories” also seemed the only way to grapple in words with the unspeakable,
unimaginable and inconceivable reality of the Holocaust.
However, for the sake of my own children, my one
grandchild and any great-grandchildren that may yet be generated, I will
attempt here to put down the evidence insofar as my memory allows. Someday someone perhaps may be able to verify
the facts and distinguish between fact and fancy.
The Romanian Connection
After my mother died in 1970, my father remarried a
neighbour, a widow, Anita. She was
Romanian and told us she had been hidden in a Catholic convent during the war,
thus surviving the Holocaust. Though I
had known her as one of my best friend’s mother most of my life, she was not a
very pleasant person. Nevertheless, when
Martha and I went to Bucharest in 1972, we met some of Anita’s family and they
helped us out, at least gave us an occasional time and place to relax during an
otherwise very tense situation. What we
didn’t find out until much later was that after each of our visits to the large
flat shared between three families, Uncle Ile and his wife, Uncle Moise and his
wife, and a younger son and his daughter, the place was thoroughly searched by
Securitate—for what I cannot yet imagine.
Anita’s Family in Bucharest had been long-time members of the Communist
Party, been in jail for that during the 1930s under the Antonescu regime and
then by the Nazis as political prisoners, but for a while when the CP took over
they were on the Central Committee and been chosen as the first Romanian
ambassador to China, something which didn’t last long because of their age—or
as Tanta Nora said, who wanted to live in China?
The old people told me some stories and I didn’t
know enough then to probe. Life was too
difficult from day to day until eventually we managed to get out of Romania three
or four months before schedule on New Year’s Day 1973. The main thing I remember was Uncle Moise’s
account of what happened in Cluj-Napoca in the early 1940s. Jews were marched through the streets, and
then taken to an abattoir where they were hung on meat hooks and tortured to
death. I have seen this event mentioned
elsewhere and yet am not sure whether Moise had seen it himself or even been a
victim who escaped. All his other
stories were about how the Russians took over the country, helped the
Communists into power and cut deals with former Fascists and
collaborators. His only further remark
on the Nazis was how they turned their anti-aircraft batteries on the city as
they left Bucharest.
Of course, my real blood connection with Romania
comes through my mother’s mother, Grandma Molly (Malka), whose father she would
always proudly proclaim to have been the Grand Rabbi of Dorohoi. His name was probably Krasner and he may have
been born and educated in Czernowitz.
Either he or his father (my great-grandfather) wrote a pamphlet in
Yiddish “proving” he was a direct descendant of King David. On the one hand, this is all a bubba meysa,
and everyone—not just Jews—if you go back sufficient generations and not all
that many, is related to everyone else.
On the other hand, there are two interesting happenings which make one
stop and think. First concerns the visit
of Queen Marie to New York City in the mid-1930s. Grandma Molly was invited to tea with Her
Majesty. It was, to be sure, along with
several dozen women who had some important connections with the kingdom and the
royal family, and thus would seem to confirm that Rabbi Kasner was treated as
having a certain noble status in the Jewish community at the end of the
nineteenth century.
The second event that lends some sort of credence,
not to the historical connection with Dovid haMelech, but with Rabbi Kasner’s
claims and its recognition by old people in the Jewish community, came when my
wife-to-be and I went to see my father in hospital about August 1964. My father had had a severe appendix attack
and was operated on in Maimonides Hospital (originally called Israel Zion, the
place where I was born in 1940), so that Martha’s introduction to our family
came when she was asked to give blood on his behalf. My mother, notorious for gossiping and
telling everybody about her past, had let it be known that was a daughter of
Rabbi Krasner of Dorohoi. When I
arrived, several elderly gentlemen, quite feeble it seemed to me, got out of
their beds and were preparing to kiss my feet as the latest incarnation of King
David. Needless to say, I skeedaddled
from the room as quickly as possible. If
I had more presence of mind and could have restrained my embarrassment, it
would have been interesting to hear stories from them.
Now back to the Old Country and my
great-grandfather and my grandmother. The
rabbi had been murdered, along with his wife and his other children, in one of a
series of pogroms in 1909, at which time, luckily—and luck does seem to be a
trait of some of us our family—Molly was travelling overseas with a nurse,
nanny or companion. While in North
America she received a telegram telling her not to return. She must have been about eighteen at the
time. She had an older sister, Leah, who
lived in Montreal, and perhaps went to stay with her. There were also relatives in Philadelphia,
but the story goes cold here, perhaps because of some bad feelings. In any event, it seems that she is next known
to have been in California where she
married a Mr. Goldner. They then
returned or went to New York, and he died soon after Molly gave birth to a son
who may have been named after him, Jack Goldner, my Uncle Jack. My mother used
to tell me that Goldner Square in Lower Manhattan was named after him, but that
somehow the title was taken from my grandmother. Not long after that, Molly married a widower,
Moses Hermann, and he also had a son, my Uncle Bertram. My mother was born as the only issue of this
new couple. More of these people anon.
The Hungarian Connection
Grandpa Moe, a cloth-cutter, came from Hungary, but
there are no other details. He had been
married and was a widower, with a single son named Bertram, thus my mother’s
half-brother. In the 1930s Bertram
joined the US Navy and was in Honolulu at the time of Pearl Harbour on 6
December 1941. The family received a
telegram that he was missing-in-action.
Despite repeated attempts to find out more information over the years,
nothing was ever disclosed. Even into
the 1950s, my mother kept writing to the War Department (before it changed its name
to the Defence Department), and every time she would see a sailor in the street
she expected it to be her lost brother; she often fainted.
The Ukrainian Connection
Then on my father's side, the background is in Poland and the Ukraine.
Grandpa Dave was actually born in America in the early 1880s. His father
was one of three brothers from the Ukraine, probably from the town or district
of Simnowa, and though he was supposedly born a Djimnabowski, he took the name
Simnowitz (supposedly more Polish to please my Grandma Ida). The three
brothers were all from a family in the timber trade: they and a saw mill,
travelled up river to purchase fresh hewn logs, and then floated with them down
to their mill. Apparently there was a very rich and large, extended
family of Jews called Simnowitz, with perhaps each smaller unit having their
own surnames. The brothers had been taken away for forced labour to build
the Trans-Siberian Railway, and when they came back were threatened with being
drafted into the Czar's Army, for twenty-five years among (of all things) the
Cossacks. They then ran off and ended up in Hudson, upstate New York,
where Grandpa Dave (Mendel) was born. I
have written about his life in another place.
The Polish Connection
Grandma Ida, from Lomza in north-eastern Poland, was
known as Rosenberg until my Uncle Will told me that she changed it from Czarda
or Chacha when she arrived in America about 1910. Her brother was Abraham
Rosenberg, one of the founders of the ILGWU, and who was shot by the Pinkerton
Men after the great Triangle Building fire that killed so many working girls in
1911. His face was on a banner at the head of the May Day Parades in New
York for years, and during World War Two a minesweeper was named after him.
But Ida's family had come from Lomza in north east
Poland. But nobody knows any more, at least no one left alive in our family,
which was never very large. In fact, by the time either my sister or I
were mature enough to be interested, virtually everyone was gone, or too sick
to be seen—and more than that, I was at the other end of the world. My
sister is a professional storyteller and writes books of her own or other tales
she collects, and when she mentions our family it is in terms which are--so far
as I can tell--completely fanciful and "mystical". Except in
one children's book (which won prizes and was listed on the NY Times
list for a while) in which every name is changed except mine, and in the days
when I could travel and met her friends--or anyone who knew "Rotten
Teeth"--they simply assumed I was the absurd character in that book.
America in the Holocaust
My father was thirty-three years old when enlisted in the Army in 1943,
when he was given the choice of being drafted or volunteering and becoming an
officer. He was a dentist. The story of his war time service is
appropriate in another place. Suffice to
say that he went first to Europe, then to Asia, and did not return until late
1946. When he came back to New York, he
was a stranger to me.
As for the rest of the family left in "The Old Country"
(Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary) and who were murdered in the Holocaust, all
I know is that I was brought up to be at once the "new American" who
would be free of the old "tuchas-warmers'" superstitions and the
replacement for all those rabbis, scholars, tailors, woodcutters or whatever
they were. Aside from my stepmother Anita (the woman from Romania whose
family we visited in Bucharest), no one ever spoken of or perhaps even knew
what happened to the "old people" left behind. When I look
back, I think there are hints and signs, and these are what I have developed in
my short stories and poems. In one of
these fictional recreations, the three or four year old protagonist watched his
grandfather becoming sicker and sicker, dying in a long drawn-out way, becoming
depressed when he reads the Yiddish newspapers and talking to friends from the
Old Country. Everyone is also whispering
and signalling not to speak about “such things” in front of “the kid.”
The Almost Very True Stories of Boro Park
The closest the actual events
impinged on my life is in a “distant cousin”—that’s all I can recall--who came
to live with us about 1947 or 1948. He was a survivor, someone who could
not face having lost his wife and children "over there"—and who hanged
himself in our attic. Nobody ever spoke about him to me or explained what
happened. My family was "shtum" on almost everything. I
was too dumb or numb to ask. Later, of
course, I wrote a wrote an almost true story in which I tried to imagine what
he was feeling and why was driven to suicide; this could only be done obliquely
and by drawing an analogy to a silly prank played by my friends and I one
Christmas Eve in a downtown department store.
Another little story deals with
childish incomprehension of young boys when they go into a little grocery run
by recent migrants from Hungary and tease them because the family do not
understand English very well, are full of pity and anger at the lack of
sympathy they find, and try to hide the numbers tattooed on their arms. The narrator (myself) is told off by his
father.
Still another story tells of a boy
who plays at destroying ant nests in the garden with fire crackers, until
suddenly, as he gloats over the piles of incinerated bodies of the dead
creatures, he realizes what he has done, and then spends the rest of the summer
holiday trying to rebuild the little world he destroyed, bringing lumps of
sugar to make amends, building new paths through the grass, and weeping
uncontrollably at what he does not understand.