Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss Read online

  I check into the Forum Hotel in the city. Leaders from all over the world are arriving...ambassadors, presidents, kings, prime ministers. Security measures are being put into place. Metal detectors assembled. Dogs are brought in. I find real irony in the contrast: here it is, fifty years later, and all the forces of authority are being marshaled for our protection, whereas before they would have come to sweep many of us up.

  All the security precautions also remind me of my mother’s concerns for my safety. I don’t feel threatened personally, but I begin to realize what she was talking about. I understand we have to be careful, and I know what she felt about my coming here, and how horrible it would be if something happens to me where so much had happened to her. The double-suicide bombing in Israel occurred just days before, reminding us that, for Jews, the world can still be a very dangerous place.

  News of the alternative ceremony has been spreading by word of mouth, and interest in it grows. Originally planned by Jewish organizations and Israelis, it takes on a life of its own, and suddenly includes everyone; not only the American ambassador and other delegates from the American group, but every delegation from around the world decides to send representatives.

  And so I go to Birkenau, fifty years after my mother left.

  No one bombed the tracks. No one “knew.” No one seemed to care or reach out. And now, all the nations of the world are represented as the buses travel to Birkenau. We travel with the Israeli delegation in front of us, escorted by heavy security. Elie Wiesel; Ambassador and Mrs. Rey; Jan Nowak, who tells me he will go because he must go as a Pole and a Catholic. He was one of the first to alert British leaders to the tragedy of the Holocaust during World War II.

  Our bus pulls into a large parking area and we exit along with hundreds of others. We begin to walk in our own groups. I walk with Elie Wiesel, the Ambassador and his wife, and the others over the rocky, muddy ground. I am arm in arm with Sigmund Strochlitz of Birkenau and Connecticut, a friend of Elie’s. He reminds me a little bit of my father.

  Where are we? I look around and there are mobs of people around us walking in stone silence. We were warned about the coldness at the camps. But the weather is warm in Krakow...until we walk farther into the camps, and then the coldness begins to set in—a different kind of coldness, eerie...heavy. Suddenly, I realize we are walking near railroad tracks, and Sigmund begins to speak: “This was where the train ran into the camp. The train was able to take people straight to the end—to the crematoria.” This is Birkenau, a death camp. An enormously vast space that was devoted to murder. I thought again of what my mother had told me, vague, disorganized references to gassings, chimneys, SS, Kapos. Her entire family exterminated...sweet nieces and nephews murdered.

  My mother’s house was one of the homes the Germans occupied in the 1940s. They put in phone lines and set up headquarters for the Carpathian mountain town of Rachov. They posted notices throughout the small town telling the Jewish inhabitants that they were to report to a local public school. They could take with them whatever they could carry in their hands.

  They then left for the Hungarian ghetto, Mateszalka, where my mother remembered a German beating her sister on the head. They were then told to line up alphabetically to board trains to Koschow. When some of the local people saw the trains go by, they shouted, “You’ll never return!” She still remembers the children’s screams for food on the four-day train ride. They wanted to throw her off the train, and a woman who now lives in New Jersey asked them to “let her be, she is a beautiful young woman.” Today my mother says, “Half of me doesn’t want to remember so that I can remain alive.”

  She told me that when they came to Auschwitz, some of the Jews who worked at the trains said in Yiddish, “You are fools to have come here.” She remembers how they sent her family in different directions; she was sent one way and the rest of her family went the other way. As soon as her mother realized, she sent an older sister for Ella. “Find her.” And when the older sister found Ella, she joined her in the line of life and the two of them remained alive. They sheared everyone’s hair...my mother remembers the screams when they were sent to a shower that they thought would be gas and there was a “mistake” and they remained alive. She remembers the piles of bodies left in their clothes, a kapo’s beating, the heads and the feet in the bunkers. She remembers falling deathly ill from eating soup that had human bones in the bowl.

  For my mother, Auschwitz was not a final destination. She was sent to the Stuttgart vicinity to the Wehrmacht Febrik, where she worked as a slave laborer at night and slept during the day. When a Nazi asked her what her greatest wish was, she was surprised to hear herself answer, “sleeping one night.” He put her into the office to work with other women who knew different languages. Eventually, she was liberated from a sub-camp of Dachau, and took a train back to Prague. In the days following her return, she and hundreds of others would run to the train station whenever a new train pulled in, desperately searching for family, friends, familiar faces. They were never there. And then she stopped running. For two years or more, she would go to the basement and cry until she couldn’t cry anymore. She met my father in postwar Prague, and they soon married. Not long after I was born, they traveled to America, sensing—correctly—that the new Communist rulers would not be so kind to Jews.

  I knew all of this—the nightmares, the casual references like, “They all died,” the guilt in remaining a survivor, the questions. I think again of the soil she wanted me to bring back. “They have no graves,” she told me. “It would have been better if the mothers were separated from the children so they didn’t have to see them murdered in front of their eyes.” I should have been prepared, no? I should have been ready. Although we never talked in any great detail about the camps, I was totally aware. I always knew about my background. I was always so aware of the Holocaust. I bear some of the hidden scars of a survivor’s child. So why was I so shocked? Why? Why is the walk into Birkenau so terrifying? Let me take you with me.

  First, we crowd together as delegates for the most part, others from the survivors’ community. I notice a group with a banner that seemed odd. I ask Sigmund, and he tells me that this is the banner of “Mengele’s children,” the survivors of Mengele’s experiments—his “children” and his “children’s children.” Then Sigmund shows me where Mengele had stood to make his selection. He shows me the women’s and men’s barracks. We keep walking forward. The “survivor” in me stands in awe of the kind of world my parents had lived through.

  I have arrived at a different planet. This is not the moon. The moon has been explored. This is a distant planet, and those who journeyed there for the entire trip are now dead ashes near the crematoria. The others had to repress, to black out, to forget, in order to go on. This planet is one of surrealistic impressions. The smokestacks. The endless fields with numbered barracks. The latrine house with round holes for toilets in two rows, each nearly touching the next but with enough space for a sadistic kapo to walk down the middle and whip the women who took too long to defecate. The bunks with beds...eight or nine in each small slab. We continue to walk.

  I feel the people around me, walking down this frightful road. The American ambassador to Poland had chosen to walk with us for this “unofficial” event. The American in me is yearning to believe and hope that the world will stand united against cruelty of this proportion. The Jew in me is fearful of the repetitions of history. I am the wife of a United States senator, proud to be part of the American delegation, led by Elie Wiesel, bearing witness to history.

  We continue walking until we arrive at the crematoria. What can I say? I hold Sigmund’s arm tightly. What can I say? I came unequipped to the planet of death, of torture, of “endless nights,” as our delegation leader describes it. Everything in front of me told me you could never believe after this place. “Where was God?” I remember my father asking. “Where was God?” and he, a rabbi, believed deeply in Him. How could you ever believe again? “Faith was the
cornerstone of our existence,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It was inconceivable to us that a merciful father could ignore the pitiful pleas of his children. When we were delivered to the Nazis and the redemption did not occur, we fell into despair; life lost meaning....We became an orphan people without a heavenly father.”

  All of these people around me walk in silence. The program takes place, people speak, people shout. Kaddish is said, and we think perhaps it would have been better to keep our silence—just Kaddish and no words. But then we sing “Hatikvah” and march back to the buses.

  Auschwitz is next. A tour of one hour. I find a stone for Dad’s grave. I decide not to bring the soil back with me. I had brought a plastic bag, thinking I might. But I decide not to. I will not bring soil from the planet of death. Several people tell me about the bones found in the soil fifty years later, some of them the bones of babies. If one is a believer, then the souls have ascended to heaven, and what is left should be left behind in peace. These people, the unsuspecting, the victims, the k’doshim (the holy) were not left behind in peace. I will not take their soil. I don’t want any part of that soil.

  Yet a rock endures from the beginning. It waits silently, protectively, coldly. The rock was there before and the rock is there after and the rock bears witness. This egg-shaped rock will go on my father’s grave. It is small, Daddy, but it is tough, like you. It survives. And remember, in your memoirs, when you asked: “who should say the mourner’s Kaddish?” Daddy, we said Kaddish as we stood at Birkenau...our voices, the young, the old, the victims, the onlookers stood together.

  Elie Wiesel’s friend, Pierre of France, goes with me to Auschwitz. A large, burly man, somewhat irreverent, quite cynical and sarcastic, takes me to his father’s place at Auschwitz. Block 11—the death bunker was the destination of his father who knew twelve languages and served as schreiber (translator) for the place. He tells me his father’s story. When his Hungarian father was in Auschwitz, a young, beautiful woman was brought in. He helped her for the night. Somehow they managed to fall in love, and as she left she told him where she was from in Paris and that she would meet him in Paris after the war. When he survived he went to the address. They met and married.

  Short stories, sweet, bitter, unreal. We are shown an enormous room filled with suitcases that are all labeled with the names of the people to whom they once belonged. We see piles of hair. Eyeglasses. Wooden legs. Prayer shawls. It reminds me of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where similar exhibits exist. I would wonder from time to time why Washington should be the site for such a museum. What is appropriate about the nation’s capital? But here in Auschwitz, I see the answer. I understand the importance of keeping evidence of the evil on display, and I also understand that there is a better chance of such a museum remaining open in Washington than in almost any other place in the world. Who knows what will happen here at Auschwitz in years to come? We already know how the Communists kept a lid on the enormity of crimes against the Jews. We do not know what the future will hold, and so it is right for us to have a museum of the Holocaust at the center of the world’s oldest, greatest, strongest democracy.

  Thursday night we are taken to a concert at the Slowacki Theatre in Krakow, where we hear an orchestral piece written for the occasion by a Pole. It is so jagged and jarring—deliberately created so, because it was about the camps—that I want to get out of there. I had gotten through the day and I want to run. It is so stifling. Finally it is over and we think, oh God, let’s just sit down and have some life, so we go to the Ariel Café. Let me sit here and be a part of life again. Elie Wiesel is there, and I recall how often he talks about night, and we’re in the land of night and we have to keep a certain part of ourselves in the night so that we don’t lose it. Elie writes from the darkness, yet wants us to hope for the future, for children. Surrounded by the light and life and sights and sounds of the Ariel Café. I want to be lively and have hope, but it is too hard.

  Friday, January 27…

  Auschwitz

  On Friday we take buses that go directly to the crematoria area at Auschwitz. I see Vaclav Havel on my bus. When we arrive, there are so many people packed together, walking forward, that it is hard to stand without being pushed. I think to myself, irreverently, that after fifty years, people are pushing to get to the front of the line. I think, too, that we could have been those people fifty years ago, told to undress, having our hair cut. It was people like us who walked into this camp.

  I see all the world’s media gathered together, pushing for position, for the best views, wanting to hear every word, and I think, “Where were you fifty years ago when you were truly needed?” How different things might have been had film been smuggled out and played on movie screens around the world!

  After a few minutes, the crowd settles in. I stand near Richard Holbrooke and Jan Nowak. The program features representatives from many delegations and religions, including our own delegation leader, Elie Wiesel. I am moved when I hear the ceremony begin—after all—with the Kaddish and another Hebrew prayer for the dead, El Maleh. This is a change resulting from a meeting Elie had with Polish President Lech Walesa the day before, as was a reference to Jewish deaths in Walesa’s speech.

  The formal tribute begins in the increasingly colder air. A poignant moment occurs when the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of Poland walk around to give the people hot coffee. The elderly, in particular, reach out for cups. Watching these very young children working so charitably fifty years after the Holocaust somehow gives us a warm feeling about the present and the future, even as it conjures up memories of all the other young children, in different kinds of uniforms, who died at this place. There was the story of the little boy who jumped off a train bound for a concentration camp with an apple in his hand. The train was at a station, and the SS caught him, took him by his legs, and bashed him against the train until he was dead. A few minutes later, one of the murderers was eating the apple. And there was the story my father told me of the parents who tossed their babies from the trains into the arms of strangers along the tracks, hoping against hope that those families would make a new home for their children.

  Tears come to my eyes as I contrast the moments. An international display of solidarity, tribute, apology. Late, painful, and yet a moment of hope. Then it is over, and together we walk to our buses in the mud, past those in prison uniforms, national costumes, and, mostly, plain street clothes. All shoes and boots are covered with mud.

  Friday night and Saturday, January 27 and 28…

  Shabbat… Krakow

  When I learned before the trip that I had to remain in Poland for Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, alone and far from my family and synagogue, I worried about what I would do. But I am not alone, and, as it turns out, staying in Krakow becomes one of the most special Shabbats I have ever experienced. After the marches, the ceremonies, the journey to the other planet, to stop for Shabbat and to share the special moment with people from all over the world gives meaning to us all. And so we sit together on Friday night with the chief rabbis of England, Poland, Ukraine, and Italy, and Jews from England, Germany, Krakow, Warsaw, Israel, America. Rabbi Avi Weiss is with us, the activist who protested the original plans for the ceremony and who has become so much of a celebrity that when the police arrested him in Poland for tearing down a sign that said, “Protect the cross against Jews and Masons,” they asked to take his picture and have his autograph!

  We all sing and pray together and tell stories. Of particular poignancy are the stories of the young Eastern European Jews sitting around the tables. Since the fall of Communism, they are learning of their Jewishness. Their family trees are deeply fractured by the Holocaust; many have no grandparents. Some were born to parents who were hidden with Polish Catholic families when their parents were sent to their death. Another learned just three years ago that he was Jewish. Perhaps some of them are descended from the babies tossed from the death trains. How ironic that Hitler’s criteria for determ
ining who was Jewish—in some instances because of quite remote ancestors—is the same relationship many of these children have to Judaism.

  The next day, on our way to services, I walk behind Rabbi Weiss and see him with his prayer shawl over his jacket. People along the way, not accustomed to seeing Jews, stop and stare. Some take pictures. And I think, “Is it gaudy, is it showy, is it obnoxious for our group to be so obvious in such a place?” That is my first reaction, but then I remember Auschwitz and the hanging prayer shawls taken from the Jews who were annihilated, and now the descendants were alive and walking to the synagogue, and it seems right.

  Our Shabbat services in the hotel are, strangely enough, joyous. We are all happy to be together, to be alive. We feel the history of the tragedy in our depths. We share our common history, common pain. We all have questions and no real answers. As we call out in prayer, rising above and beyond the evil planet of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the planet that bore witness to our people’s destruction, we all turn to the very God that had not answered the prayers of our parents and their parents as the crematoria burned their bodies into ashes.

  Nothing on that planet gives you faith, hope, answers. Nothing there gives you hope for mankind. And yet, as I walked with my fellow travelers that day, as I felt their bodies near me, heard their feet in the mud and stones, walking silently, I knew our walk was prayer. Our walk might defy—bear witness. Our walk might challenge any evils as great, as powerful, as wicked and so, on Friday night we all felt history around us. We were defying Hitler and his henchmen. I thought back to 1988, when I joined my husband on his first visit to the historic chamber of the Senate, where the historian lectured us about the famous figures in American history who had occupied these seats. I had looked at Joe and asked him what he was thinking, and he talked about how proud and honored he was to be part of this rich history. “What about you? What are you thinking?” he asked. “About Hitler,” I replied. “About how he tried to annihilate all the Jews, and here I am on the floor of the Senate, the wife of a senator. I am thinking about throwing my fist up in the air in defiance to Hitler.”