Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss Read online

  I ignored him, walking toward the door of the apartment building. I wanted to go in, enter the old family home, find something that belonged to us.

  The former neighbor warned me not to go into the building.

  He was earnest. Both men insisted I come away from the door. “Don’t make trouble, Deborah.”

  What would I have seen? How would I have known what was ours? I wanted to stand up to “them,” show no fear.

  But I’m a good girl. I behaved myself.

  We ate pierogi in the only restaurant in town. The restaurateur, recently returned from four years in Philadelphia, could say only four words in English.

  “Cashier! Philadelphia! Knife! Fork!”

  With my father acting as translator, the ex-Philadelphia cashier asked what I did for a living. My father, miming my playing a guitar said, “She’s an entertainer.”

  The cashier offered me a job on the spot. Why not return to Brzozów, be an entertainer in his restaurant? I could move into his house. He was recently divorced and had a lot of extra space. The town had so many opportunities, he told me. Come, bring my U.S. dollars to Brzozów, he said. Move back. I thought, now that’s a career move!

  Dad went and bought candles and we drove together on the last leg of our journey before turning back to Krakow and Prague. At the forest, half a mile from town, a small marker sat on the side of the road. Until recently it was the only commemoration of the slaughter.

  The Catholic orphanage lay at the foot of the forest. I saw a new path leading up into the trees. As I stepped out of the car and walked toward the path, Dad began to act very strangely. He darted into the orphanage yard, past a pregnant woman hanging washing, behind several beehives, up a hill, into the undergrowth. He seemed to be running in circles, twigs, leaves, and branches snapping underfoot. I called to him, but he didn’t answer.

  “The path is this way, Dad.”

  “How do you know? I have to find a nun. She’ll show us where it is.”

  “It’s here, I can see it. Dad? Where are you going?”

  “The nun will know. Get a nun, Deborah, she’ll show us where.”

  Soon a kindly nun was leading us up the hill to the site, a dachshund at her heels. As I walked behind my father, I wondered if he needed a nun from the orphanage to escort him to his parents’ grave.

  The memorial lay in a clearing in the forest, blanketed in thousands of dead leaves. It looked like many forests I had seen, like the Berkshires, only with bones. The memorial was a rough concrete square with a blue wrought iron Star of David and marble plaque. A few chrysanthemums stood in bottles on a ledge behind the plaque. The nuns regularly tended the grave and left flowers from their garden. I gave the nun all the Polish money I had in an impotent gesture of thanks. She thanked us and quietly left.

  We stood in an eerie silence and then set about trying to stand the candles upright so that they could be lit. Each time we attempted to stand them up, they fell over, again and again. Is it only Polish candles that will not stand up? It seemed like a bad Polish joke, absurd and monstrously funny at the same time.

  After more than twenty minutes we managed finally to erect and light six lone candles.

  I suggested we say Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.

  “My yalmulke! My prayer book! I forgot my tallis in the car, Deborah!”

  I suggested we recite the Kaddish without a prayer book.

  My father agreed and began to recite the prayer. For a second his voice caught in his throat. Right then, at that very moment, I began quietly to weep. Tears came flowing out as they had never done before. Weeping for innocence and loss, for justice and pain, for my grandparents, Gedaleyeh and Runia, and my uncles, Tuciu and Selig and Ben and Leib and Mendel. For us all.

  It was the first time I ever truly wept in the presence of my father. It felt like an enormous relief. As I wept, my father kicked away the autumn leaves, looking to see if there were any bones still visible. I wept and he kicked. Weeping and kicking, kicking and weeping.

  Through my tears I chanted for strength, for forgiveness, for wisdom. After several minutes, something stirred in me. What was it? I listened.

  I heard something say to me, “It’s enough. Let go. Be free. Enough of mourning. Enjoy your life!”

  Could it be? I felt as though this was the pivotal moment of my whole life. I listened again and squinted into the forest. Where were they? I could feel them near. I felt an incredible strength come over me and, in that moment, made a determination to do my utmost to make sure that the world would never forget what had happened to them. Do something, somehow not to let the world simply forget Runia and Gedaleyeh Filler, their family, their neighbors, and their peers. Somehow they would not die nameless, in impotence, in vain.

  We quietly stood. Before we left the grave, I asked my father if there was anything he would like to say here.

  Without hesitation he said yes. I can’t recall his exact words, but I remember how moved I felt by how he addressed them that day amidst the leaves in the forest.

  “Mum, Dad…I’ve missed you all dese years. I’m sorry what happened to you, how you died. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you somehow. I missed you all dese years. I wish you could have been in New Zealand. You would have had a good life dere. I am happy dere. I would be able to visit your grave dere. I wanted to come back and make sure tings were all right. Now you have a gravestone. I don’t tink I’ll be coming back, though you never know...so, anyway, dat’s it. Goodbye. Rest in peace. I love you.”

  We returned to New York, and a few days later my father departed for New Zealand. I started to think immediately about honoring my commitment. I perform comedy. How could I use humor to honor them? The Holocaust had no humor.

  November 1990

  I began work on a show. At first, performing embarrassingly bad Polish jokes in a Lower East Side shopfront/theatre, friends advised me to dig more deeply, to find my own voice, not to be afraid.

  I told a publicist I knew that I was working on a humorous piece about the Holocaust. He warned me that if it weren’t brilliant, I’d have to leave town. No pressure.

  I began to improvise my darkest fantasies, a slave laborer, an inmate of Auschwitz, a starving child. Was I crazy? It would have been so much easier to parody Tammy Faye Bakker.

  With the greatest of trepidation, I continued. During one rehearsal, a child ghost appeared just as I was improvising entering the gates of Auschwitz. “Deb! I’m so hungry. Did you bring something to eat? We’ve been waiting for you to come back, all of us. Do you have cheesecake?”

  This macabre character later became my imaginary child, Chaikeh, in my off-Broadway show, Punch Me in the Stomach!

  May 1991

  I was a bundle of nerves before my first workshop at La Mama Theatre. A Buddhist told me to go onstage with the energy of Mahalia Jackson across my chest. It worked.

  November 1991

  We had rewritten the piece. Playwright Israel Horvitz called it, “Extraordinary,” in the Village Voice. New York Theatre Workshop offered to produce it. I had an impending tour of Australia and New Zealand.

  February 1992

  My director and co-writer, Alison Summers, recommended giving my parents a copy of the piece to read before they saw it, with a reminder that plays are not literal. Both parents read the entire play and returned it to me in a half-hour.

  My father’s sole comment was that I definitely should not use my first boyfriend Kevin’s real name. After all, he said, Kevin could sue me. My mother agreed with my father. They were appeased when I offered to add an “l” and change Kevin’s name to Kelvin.

  March 1992

  After the opening in Wellington, my father came onto the stage with flowers. We embraced. There was not a dry eye in the house.

  The next night on national television news, the news reader announced, “New Zealand girl pokes fun at the Jewish Holocaust, coming up after the break.” My parents were mortified. They attacked me, telling me that the whole Jewi
sh community of New Zealand was up in arms, all six of them! My parents and I had an important discussion about the ratio of positive to negative coverage to expect from the media. I guessed eighty percent would be positive and twenty percent would not. Agreeing, my parents and sister backed me for the run and the world tour that continued off and on for several years. I’ll always be grateful for their support.

  April 1992

  Closing night after the show in Auckland. We had done several interviews together. My father handled the press like a professional. He was in his element. Celebrities, politicians, the mayor, old neighbors, ex-school friends, our family doctor, members of my parents’ bowling club, Rotary, lodges, and the general public attended the sold-out shows in droves. Many flocked to shake my father’s hand, which was not difficult since my parents came to every show. Champagne was sent to our table several nights after the show by appreciative audience members. In the show my father was a survivor celebrity, and now life was imitating art. He’d been my hero; now he was everybody’s hero.

  As my father helped us dismantle the set, he suddenly looked at me. He told me thank you. “I’m very proud of you.” That was a moment I shall never forget.

  November 2000

  My father died last September. As his hands skittered across the hospital blanket, I knew he was replaying his life. Each morning he awoke more exhausted. He told us he was baking challah in his dreams.

  Words cannot express the extent of my loss. It is too great. Up until his last moment he gave the gift of love. His dying words were a blessing on my sister and on me. The last thing he said to me was, “I bless you with all my heart and with all my soul.”

  My last words to my father as he traveled across to the far shore, were in Yiddish. “Gei Schaja, gei in a Zeisse Schluf. Go into a sweet sleep. Wir Leiben dich. We love you. Wir kimmen. We’re coming. We love you. A vielen dank Tateh. Thank you, Dad.” He went home, absent no more.

  DEB FILLER is a Toronto-based New Zealander. She was a founding member of New Zealand’s fringe theater group, “Debbie and the Dum Dums.” She studied theater in New York and made her off-Broadway debut in the musical-comedy, Sophie. Her sold-out one-woman show, Filler-Up, is performed throughout North America. She also performed Punch Me in the Stomach! and won Critics’ Pick at the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts.

  Chapter 6: Traces Along a Broken Line by Vera Loeffler

  To Mothers.

  To my mother, Sherena Kallus Frenkel

  To my sister, Hedy Samet, and her children,

  Yitzchak and Goldy, who share in this legacy

  To my daughters, Candice and Lisa

  And finally,

  To my husband, Robert, with whom I share everything.

  Through her photographs, Vera Loeffler captures loss, love, and longing. Her ability to hold on to memory is original and beautifully expressed in her work. We have been friends for more than thirty years, and her desire for excellence and perfection are still her mainstay in everything she touches. –MW

  I was born on September 12, 1942, in Bekescaba, Hungary. For as far back as memory takes me, my nuclear family was composed of three females—my mother, my sister, and myself.

  Acquaintance with my father was made solely through photographs, supplemented by the oral history of those who survived the Holocaust.

  My mother was an enterprising woman. She managed to escape from Communist Hungary—virtually alone with two children—to establish a life in “America.”

  My mother—beautiful, ever dignified, ever sorrowful.

  The loss of love and loved ones left an infinite vacuum filled with this sorrow. As children, my sister and I wrestled with the need to protect her and the intolerance we felt for her limitless pain, predictably at hand on the periphery of every happy moment.

  We had not yet realized that her melancholy could be absorbed—if somewhat altered—by us. We eventually integrated her suffering, and it changed us.

  My mother died in November of 1999, just missing the new century.

  I knew her only as “Mother.”

  There was much integral that she left submerged. The woman never surfaced.

  In searching for that woman I have turned to old photographs, becoming a time traveler to places her thoughts had revisited at the end of her life—to a past she quietly invited me to see with her.

  In the end I am left with a tapestry of disjointed images that map her history. The rest is a fiction to illuminate more than it distorts.

  Your speech assumes the waveless dynamic of the dead

  Rolling through a space

  Raging and racing frontal footprints

  Pancho and Maria in perpetuity

  On the last leg of some neuronal midnight run.

  I read “Genetic Mapping Complete”

  To recall where you still live

  Eyes hazel, hair blonde, unopinionated.

  But I inconsolably crave the carnal

  Of breath-heat and surprise

  And the comfort, on waking,

  Of tripping on a boundless love based in nothing

  That I am

  Save for those mappings.

  —Candice Loeffler

  Born in Bekescaba, Hungary, VERA LOEFFLER studied photography at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. She has exhibited her photography in the individual exhibit, “Old Baby Series,” and several group exhibits, including the Photography Invitational and “Romantic Image: Two Cities.” She has won first place in the black and white category in the Washington Post Annual Photography Contest. She is currently a freelance photographer and works as a curator of private collections.

  Chapter 7: Keeping the Family Name Alive by Aviva Kempner

  Aviva Kempner and Helen Ciesla Covensky, mother

  Grandmother Helen Ciesla

  Dedicated to

  my grandparents and aunt we never knew,

  Helen, Leon, and Cesia Ciesla

  and Hannah Pokempner,

  and to the inspiring survival and accomplishments

  of my uncle, David Ciesla Chase,

  and my beloved mother, Helen Ciesla Covensky,

  and her beautiful paintings.

  Filmmaker Aviva Kempner explores her personal history in her groundbreaking film, Partisans of Vilna. Her generosity to everyone, but particularly to artists, from all over the world, is legendary. Her award-winning film, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, is a must see. –MW

  Amid the rubble of the Third Reich, a Lithuanian-born American soldier, shocked by the annihilation of Eastern European Jewry and his mother’s death, was compelled to write feature stories about holidays miraculously being celebrated by the survivors in Berlin—their first free Passover seder in thirteen years, and their first Jewish New Year services since liberation—and the tearfully few family reunions among the displaced Jews. The military journalist’s favorite story was about Polish-born Dudek Ciesla, an orphaned survivor of Auschwitz, and his reunion with his blond, green-eyed sister Hanka, who had survived the war by passing as a Polish-Catholic in a forced labor camp near Stuttgart, Germany. Having lost their parents and only other sister at Auschwitz, their reunion took on poignant meaning.

  The Jewish G.I. fell in love with the sister. For their wedding ceremony, Hanka Ciesla honored the American liberators who transported her by tank to Berlin by wearing a wedding dress fashioned from a nylon U.S. army parachute. The young bride took her deceased mother’s name, Helen, as her own. Ten months later I was born. My picture adorned the front page of an Army newspaper with the dubious title of “Miss 1947,” identifying me as the first American Jewish war baby born in Berlin.

  My mother decided to give me a Hebrew name in honor of my grandmother, who loved singing Zionist songs in the ancient language. My father’s own lore about my naming was that he wanted a bris, a ritual circumcision for Jewish males, in Berlin. But since I was a girl, he opted for putting a Hebrew name on his daughter’s German birth certificate as an ultimate
act of cultural revenge. When I was three and a half years old, we left Germany to settle in the American Midwest. My mother vowed never to return to Germany. My mind blocked out any conscious memories of speaking German words and the face of my beloved nanny, Fraulein Shubert.

  My brother was born in 1951. As we grew up in Detroit, my mother hardly spoke about the war years to us, because, as she declared: “I wanted to protect you from those terrible times.” A mother understandably wants to hide war traumas and horrors from her children.

  The climate in America, even in the Jewish community, was not especially receptive to hearing the survivors’ harrowing tales. Once the war was over, the message was that life was supposed to go back to normal. Even the European survivors adopted that philosophy. They were preoccupied with making a living and bringing up their families in their adopted land. My mother claims she did not even exchange wartime stories with her sibling. Only in their anguish over President Ronald Reagan’s trip to Bitburg, Germany, did my mother tell me that she and my uncle began to reveal their wartime stories to each other.

  But a child has a sixth sense about family losses, especially when there are no grandparents or family from earlier generations around the house. Every Jewish holiday I distinctly recollect my mother’s pain as she mourned for her parents and sister and their holidays together. I was not taught much about the Holocaust at school. During my thirteenth summer, I first discovered the horror of Auschwitz by reading Leon Uris’ novel, Exodus, on a beach in upper Michigan. In one high school English class, we were assigned to read John Hersey’s riveting novel about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, The Wall. Although I was the first student to correctly identify the climax of the book—“The Jews in the ghetto realized they would be facing death at Treblinka”—I did not personally associate the gassing of Polish Jews with my own family’s demise.