The Couple From Auschwitz and Me

A personal account of a child's experience with survivors of Nazi death camps and a discovery of lost family history.

The Couple from Auschwitz and Me  

         

© Rachael Ary �" DeRozza  ~  2010

         

When I was in the second grade, at a parochial school in Montreal, my teacher called my parents.  She was worried about me.  I was taking a wooden pen with a sharp nib �" the kind we all had at school in those days �" dipping it into the inkwell that fitted into the little hole on our desks and scratching the letter ‘A’, followed by a long string of numbers on my inner forearm. 

Everyone got upset, but I myself did not see what the fuss was about.  I was quite calmly and methodically giving myself a ‘tattoo’, actually my idea of a ‘brand’, like the one I had seen on the arms of some people we knew.  After a few days, it would wear off, and then I would scratch a new number into my arm again.  

I was sternly told by everyone to stop making these ‘marks’ on my arm, but I would not listen.  No one knew how to make me stop, or what to say to me.  I got curious and worried looks from all the grown-ups, but no one ever asked 'why', or sat down and talked with me.  So I kept doing it.

This is how it started:  After the war, around 1948, my parents had taken in a family of three -- a couple with a baby.  They were holocaust survivors, refugees, and they needed a place to stay, so my parents agreed to share our tiny flat on St. Dominique Street.   

The family moved in, with their bundles of badly fitting, donated clothing and they all stayed in one room, crowded in with their few belongings.  The adults had crude blue marks which looked like tattoos with long numbers on their arms and they talked about being in Auschwitz and what had happened to them at the hands of “die Deutchen”.   

Regina and Kalman Feitlovitch lived with us for some time.  They had a little girl, Minka, a sweet, pink-cheeked child, only 10 months old, who was born in the DP �" the Displaced Persons - camp, where the refugees of the war were sent after they were first liberated. 

I remember watching Regina at the kitchen table, as she tried to get Minka to eat more, more and yet more of everything.   Little Minka who was a fat baby already, would turn her head away and squeeze her tiny lips tight.  But Regina kept stuffing food into the child’s mouth.  “She must get fatter,” she told me in Yiddish.  “If anything happens, she’ll be able to live much longer that way.”

Many times, when I came home after school, Regina would sit with me on my bed and draw scary pictures on my little school slate of what a “Deutch” looked like.  She told me about beatings, about people getting tortured and shot, about all the sick, starving people, the people sent to the gas chambers and to the ovens where they were burnt up.  I couldn't get enough of these stories.  My parents were never around when she told me things like that and had no idea about it.  

Every night, after supper, Kalman and Regina sat in the kitchen with my parents, sipping “a glezelleh tay” (a glass of tea) through a sugar cube in their false teeth. They talked for hours.  My bed wasn’t far from the kitchen and of course, I heard many things, even more terrifying than what Regina told to just me alone. 

For many years, even after I grew up, I had frequent frightening dreams about getting ‘caught’ and being beaten or shot by the Nazis. Those dreams were so vivid:  I could feel the cuts of a Nazi whip, could hear their horrible, demonic sounding laughter and I actually felt what I imagined a bullet was like, piercing my body, like an electric shock that burned into me.  It gave me a little cold rock of fear deep inside my stomach.  

Eventually, the Feitlovitches were able to move out.   My parents, who were at about the level of lower-working-class, had provided food, shelter and clothing for this family for about a year and a half.  

Decades later, I found myself thinking about them and then of my father’s family, in Bialystok, Poland, who did not survive.  I knew nothing about them.   My mother’s parents were already in Canada.  They had come from Russia, and had suffered there in many ways, and then lived in deep poverty in Canada.   But at least they had gotten away from the Nazis and the ravages of the war.  At least they were alive.

Yet no-one ever said a word about my father’s relatives.   I had seen only a couple of old, worn photographs that I had been told were of some family on my father’s side.   I remember that I used to ask my father about them, but he would wave me off with an impatient motion of his big hand.   So, finally, I stopped asking.

My father had a huge admiration for the New World - that was the typical immigrant’s combined vision of Canada and the United States �" and he spoke in glowing terms about “Die Goldeneh Medina - the Golden Land”.  I smile even now as I remember how �" when there was a news item about something the President of the United States had said or done that was criticized or questioned by the press �" my father would always say, resolutely: “The American President doesn’t lie.”     

I grew up, married an American and moved away to ‘the states’.   Many years later, when my father was sixty-five, and perhaps contemplating his ‘old age’, he suddenly began writing about his early life.  The stories poured out, with detailed descriptions about his mother, Malka, his father, Khaim Mordecai, his grandparents and friends. 

These stories were hand-written in Yiddish, my father’s beefy hands holding a pencil and notepaper, laboriously writing out the events and people of his childhood and youth.   Suddenly it all came to life �" the old world of the Yiddish characters of the Bialystok streets, good and bad, funny and tragic, all of them lost in those terrible years of war.

My uncle translated some of the stories and then he asked me to take over the job, as my father was writing constantly, and my uncle had no time or desire to keep up with it all.  But I didn’t feel I could do it.  When I was little, everyone spoke Yiddish to me all the time, but I had not spoken or heard much Yiddish for so many years! I really felt I had lost it.  I had married an American, I lived in California; we did not speak Yiddish at home.  

But, my uncle insisted I could do it.  “It will come back!” he said.  I thought about it �" I still understood Yiddish well.  But translating is never easy.   My father was writing feverishly, and my uncle called me several times, telling me to get going on it.  

I was sent packets of pages, from Canada, and I began the task.  I got a Yiddish dictionary.  I inched my way along the words and phrases and wrote it all out, in long-hand, smoothing out the literal phrases that didn’t work in English, getting advice at times from my uncle or calling home to ask my father about what I didn’t know.

As I did this, I was stirred by the realization that I had come upon a path to my own roots, one that had been hidden for all these years.  I was spell-bound.

The stories were at once wonderful and terrible.  Wonderful, because they were a record of a time, of so many people and places that have vanished except in the memories of some very old folks and in the works of writers like Sholem Aleichem, Itzik Manger and Isaac Bashevis Singer.   Terrible, because I knew that all the human beings that were so alive in those stories �" the good, the pious, the ne’er-do-wells, the innocent, the devious, the comical �" had all disappeared into the vast nightmare of the holocaust. 

Now I felt I knew why my father would not talk about his family.  Several of the stories about close relatives ended with a plain, stark statement of how they were all herded into the wooden synagogue in the town of Bialystok and burned to death by the Nazis.  How strange and horrifyingly lucky my father must have felt to know that by a twist of fate, he was made to leave Bialystok as a young man, so he was far from the inferno that swallowed everything and everyone he knew as a child. 

Of course, he must have felt guilty, as did many who were not killed, about being allowed to live while so many perished.  Now I thought about the motives and emotions that must have gone through my parents’ minds about the family we took in, the survivors of Auschwitz.  I also felt a pang about myself, about the times I scratched those numbers into my arm, and finally understood why.  

My parents had done a good thing.  It taught me, as a child, that we are responsible for others, that there is a kinship among all human beings.  We all hope for good things to come.  My parents, by helping Regina and Kalman and little Minka, showed me that hope is like a sweet cup of life’s promise for its own future.  I learned that it is always worth drinking from that cup.

 

It is now 2012.

The stories were translated long ago and several were published.  My father had some moments of recognition and then it all faded.  In 1998, he died.   He had written twenty-four wonderful short stories and several songs. 

Lately, after seeing a performance of "Fiddler on the Roof", I again wondered about the people who lived in the Bialystok stories.  They deserve to ‘live again’, I think, but what could I do?  I had to leave it alone, let it all rest. 

But out of the blue, a couple of years ago, I got a phone call from a fellow named Eli Herscovitch, in Winnipeg, Manitoba -  a musician, a friend of my sister’s.  He said he wanted to put music to and do readings (in English) of my father’s stories.   It sounded intriguing to me and I agreed to work with him.

 

Eli has been researching, exploring, doing performances of my father’s stories, and he has even gotten a small grant in Canada, to develop this project. 

 

Some time ago, he sent me an email which had a link: “Partial List of the Martyrs of Bialystok”.   I clicked on it. 

 

I am jolted.  I see the list of names �" ARY, ARY, ARY �" Mordecai, Malka, Moishe, Toiba, Genya, Rivka, Zlata, Haim, Eliezar, Avraham, Azser -- a long row of lost people �" people I feel that I know somehow because they lived in the stories my father wrote.  

 

I sit looking at my computer screen, this marvel of electronics and modernity, staring at the names of my grandparents, my relatives from the old world, all of whom were murdered.  I feel a pang in my heart and tears spring to my eyes.  Their faces �" what I can only imagine they look like �" swim before my eyes.  But somehow, I am happy, hopeful.   It all connects.