“Have you ever heard of Auschwitz?” he asked, uncovering a large tattoo on his forearm.
I didn’t say anything. I simply rolled up my left sleeve.
“You are my family now”, he wept.
He clenched my hand as if he’d found a lost treasure and we cried together.
I don’t often share my past with my clients, but sometimes I do when I feel it’s appropriate. For the next year, I made home visits to the lawyer where we discussed not just his grief, but also his strength. He passed away in a nursing home. In his will, he left me a beautifully carved family heirloom desk that he had brought from Hungary. It came with a note: “From my family and for my family. Keep it always and remember me”.
The desk is in my home in Highland Park. I sat there as I worked on this book. The desk will stay in my family as a reminder of the lost generations.
A few years later, during my autumn visit to Israel, I went to see another man who was alone with his memories: my father. He had lost his second wife, Sonia, three years earlier and was very lonely. I missed my return flight back to the US and, fortunately, was able to spend an unexpected additional twenty-four hours with him. We went to the bank together and then the cemetery, where he showed me his plot. With nothing else planned, we passed the rest of the time just talking and reminiscing.
At one point, he went to the bookshelf and reached for a heavy leather-bound volume. The spine was nearly three inches thick. Still vigorous at seventy-two, his fingers had no trouble pulling the Yizkor book clear, even though it weighed nearly ten pounds. A low evening sun streamed through the window of the small apartment in Tel Aviv. Dust particles sparkled in a shaft of light, illuminating his favorite chair. Outside, the traffic hummed as always. Papa placed the book on the armrest and sat down heavily.
I sat down opposite him and smiled. Smart in a V-neck sweater and blue shirt, he hadn’t changed clothes since we’d visited the bank manager a few hours earlier.
“This is my only daughter”, he had told the man. “Please treat her well if something should happen”.
I knew why Papa was troubled. He was six months shy of his seventy-third birthday. When he was ten years old, a gypsy, as the Roma were then known, predicted that he would die at seventy-two. The prophecy had sustained him through the war. In his darkest moments — and they were legion — Papa clung to the belief that he would survive. If he could avoid being killed, then maybe he could save the lives of Mama and me. Protecting us was his abiding motivation for staying alive and guided every decision he was forced to take.
My father opened the book and looked at me with sadness. I have Mama’s eyes. I reminded him of her. She was his great love.
“Read it to me, Papa”, I said.
Papa opened the cover. His fingers felt for the edges of the well-worn pages in the middle of the book. He had read this segment many times before. He still had that mellifluous tenor voice that had sung popular melodies and delivered fine speeches when he was an actor in his youth. It was no longer as powerful — age had added a brittle edge — but it was still easy on the ear.
Papa swallowed hard and his eyes moistened. I looked at him and my own eyes prickled. He had been alone with his terrible memories for so long. I was glad I was there to share them. And to remember as well.
He began to read aloud in Yiddish. His delivery and intonation were perfect. It was almost a stage reading.
“We were cut off from the outside world. Any sort of travel to a nearby town or village was strictly forbidden… There were rumors that the deportees were sent to labor camps in Germany. The word ‘concentration camps’ was also heard…a feeling reigned that something terrible was about to happen. Something compared to which, life in the ghetto was child’s play”.
Dusk was falling hard now. But Papa read on without the need for electric light. Tears trickled unchecked down the creases of his cheeks. My face was damp as well. Neither of us wanted to stem the flow. Together, we yielded to the torrent, springing from the groundwater of our past.
My father didn’t finish reading the complete story. We sat in the dark for a while. Then he stood up, went to the kitchen and brewed some tea. His sadness lifted a little.
“There’s a woman I rather like”, he said. “I am thinking about asking her to marry me. I’ve been so lonely since Sonia died three years ago. I can’t stand the loneliness, especially with you living so far away. I’m not going to ask her yet. I’m thinking of spending the holidays in a hotel with friends”.
“Papa, I’m so happy for you”, I replied. “I wish I could spend the holidays with you, but I have to go. My plane leaves at midnight”.
The taxi came and took me to Ben Gurion Airport. It was the last time the two of us saw each other. The Roma prediction came true. Born in 1910, my father died in 1983, aged seventy-two.
Mourning my father, I threw myself into my work. Several years later, I became the director of a smaller, financially strapped Jewish Family Service providing a wide range of programs. It was one of the most satisfying experiences of my professional life. The board of directors and I were constantly creating innovative ways of fundraising to keep our programs going, including counseling, services for the elderly, jail visitations, employment services and mentoring programs. The Jewish Family Service’s Café Europa program, for example, enabled lonely, socially isolated Holocaust survivors to connect with each other and find companionship.
As a former refugee, I was keen to help other fugitives from tyranny. Seventy-five refugees escaping life-threatening anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union were given shelter, food, English lessons and toys for the children. We sprang into action when Albanians and Serbs fought a brief war in Kosovo. Some arrived with nothing but a plastic bag of essentials. Always at the back of my mind was the image of me as a child entering New York Harbor on the refugee ship from Europe. This new generation of asylum seekers deserved the same opportunities as I had.
In 1998, I received an urgent call from my doctor. I had stage-two breast cancer, required surgery and needed to start treatment immediately. Though I had experienced life struggles before, this was a completely new battleground for me. My own body was attacking me this time. With excellent medical care and family support, however, I was able to go into remission within a year and return to full-time work. I felt as if I’d survived again.
Days after the shocking attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, our small office was flooded with young Jewish and non-Jewish families fleeing Manhattan, trying to find shelter in New Jersey. We offered counseling and helped them figure out new lives. One young woman was clutching the hand of her three-year-old daughter. “I was picking up my daughter from the nursery across the street from the towers as they crumbled and people were jumping to their deaths”, she said. “I thought the US was under attack. Just in case my daughter and I would be separated, I put her name and my phone number on her back in lipstick so she could be found”. We found her temporary accommodation and psychological support, until she was ready to return to New York.
A week after the attack, together with a colleague, I went to Manhattan to ease the anguish of other survivors. We’d been asked to help fifteen male executives who were traumatized after identifying the remains of their coworkers. In common with every other American, 9/11 was an unbelievable new experience for me; warfare at its most unconventional, but warfare just the same. At first, I stood in front of the shell-shocked ensemble, not knowing what to say. But then I began to talk about my war and what had happened to me, to let them know that I understood what they were going through.