A Thrivers Journey

Prologue

September 12, 2004

My temple is dedicating a Holocaust memorial. The rabbi wanted me to give a speech. I told him you would do it instead. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?

A rhetorical question, most people would never, could never understand the conflict my father’s request had caused me.

Public speaking wasn’t the issue. Working for one of the largest companies in the world, I was at ease giving presentations, bullet point by bullet point, until either my time was up or everyone in the room got a glazed over look in their eyes. But to speak on a subject so intensely personal, one that I would have to admit I knew so very little about—well, that was another matter.

He said that you could have between three and five minutes to talk. You take as long as you want. Twenty minutes should do it, right?

What could I even speak about for three minutes? I wondered.

There are many misconceptions about the children of Holocaust survivors. My father’s appeal forced me to directly confront the greatest one of them all. Taking for granted that we possess a perfect knowledge of our parents’ experiences, it’s also assumed we relish every chance we get to discuss them.

But that is not reality. My father’s experiences in 1944 and 1945 left him so profoundly shaken that he rarely mentioned them while I was growing up. And about my bubbe (grandmother) and zayde (grandfather), his mother and father, or anyone else on his side of the family, I knew even less.

What right did I have to be up in front of anyone? It was my father who had been the victim. He was the one who deserved to be described by the word everyone used, survivor. Neither word applied to me.

Still, the request that wasn’t really a request had been made. And there I was, in the middle of Toms River on a bright sunny day, staring at a curved slab of black granite that had quickly gained my focus. It was not solitary. There was another stone about half its size right next to it. The smaller one appeared to be made out of gray granite and was joined to its larger neighbor somewhere near the top of a common base. Taking a few steps to get closer, I saw that the smaller stone was also engraved. Stopping about twenty feet from it, I realized that it bore the surnames of several families. One of the family names on the list was my own. That was the reason I was there. That was the reason Dad had asked me to give the speech in the first place.

I took a few moments to contemplate the stones. When I turned around, I was greeted by the sight of over one hundred people now gathered around me. Outside of the faces of my immediate family, the only other recognizable face was that of Rabbi Hammerman, who quickly moved to stand at my side.

And there I stood—close enough to shake the rabbi’s hand without stretching if I wanted to.

But I didn’t want to.

Don’t get me wrong. It had nothing to do with the rabbi. At the time, Richard Hammerman was the spiritual leader of Toms River, New Jersey’s Congregation Bnai Israel. And while I didn’t know him very well, my father had once told me he was a mensch, which is Yiddish for an extraordinarily good person. It was also high praise from my dad who did not offer compliments all that freely. Most of what was going on that day was Rabbi Hammerman’s doing. This was his temple’s memorial park. He was a driving force in getting them to reserve a few hundred feet of it to commemorate the great horror that had befallen our people. Now that the testament had been built, it was in his congregation’s memorial park that the dedication of Southern New Jersey’s newest Holocaust commemorative was being conducted.

Yet I was not comfortable where I found myself standing. It was a place of honor. On this day it had been reserved for myself and the rabbi. But I felt no particular sense of honor and would have preferred to be part of the crowd I now found myself scanning.

I fiddled with the dog-eared pieces of paper I had stuffed into my pocket and removed so many times—whether due to conscious effort on my part to confirm they were still there or a subconscious hope that they had mysteriously vanished and I wouldn’t have to give my speech. I refused to hold them in front of me for any length of time, not wanting to provide the rabbi with a signal that I was ready to start.

Yet eventually it was time to start, and with my voice strong and clear, I uttered those first carefully scripted words.

But something went wrong. With each successive word, the pitch of my voice increased. And no matter how I struggled for control, it got higher and higher. When I came to the end of my opening sentence, my voice cracked. And by the time I had reached the end of my third, tears had begun flowing freely. Overcome with emotion, I was no longer concerned with how much time I had to speak. I stood wondering if I had the strength to finish. My first time speaking about my family’s tragic legacy became, what I realized later, the first time I had ever cried over it.

When it was over, before anyone else said a word, Dad came up to me and said, Now you make sure you write the whole story down.

Also not a request, this demand would become infinitely more difficult to complete than the speech. The world that Dad had been born into was foreign to me. And here, not more than ten feet from the Toms River Holocaust Memorial, I knew that in order to explore that world I would have to deal with an extraordinary amount of pain that lay trapped in my father’s memories. And there was pain trapped inside me as well. Pain that I had ignored all my life.

In order to undertake the journey Dad was requesting of me, somewhere along the way I was going to have to come to terms with both his suffering and what it meant to me to be a member of the second generation of survivors.

I hugged my father, and we began walking back to where we had parked our cars. Turning for one final glance at the monument, the stinging sensation on my skin from the sunburn I had just gotten seemed like a physical manifestation of the state of my mind.

I thought about the challenge that lay ahead of me. Figuring out how to get Dad to talk about a topic about which he had for so long remained silent was not going to be easy. It could not be done in a few straightforward question-and-answer sessions. How could I simply come out and ask him about his past? Those questions should have been asked so many years ago. Even if Dad was finally able to answer them directly, I was sure that my own guilt arising from not knowing even basic information about his story was sure to complicate matters.

I realized immediately that interviewing Dad and recording his story was going to have to be a process. We needed to start out slow, get comfortable with each other. Even though we were father and son, we needed to gain each other’s trust. Only then could we move onto that difficult subject matter that had caused this gulf to grow in our relationship. It was during the first words of my speech that I realized how large that gulf truly was.

A twinge of pain made me think about my neck again. It was going to a bad burn, one that would probably bother me for a few days. But that thought stayed with me only for a moment. The pain emanating from the voyage I was embarking on was going to hurt for much longer.

1: The Drumbeater

Usually the best place to start a story is at its beginning, although that can be easier than it sounds. Memories, especially Dad’s, didn’t always flow chronologically, or in a single direction. Sometimes they got caught in a continuous loop, returning to the same spot. It was as if there was some hidden meaning waiting to be discovered in a particular recollection. Failing to find it the last time we sat down to talk about his past, I was condemned to return to a particular reminiscence over and over again until I did.

Our first interview session began without much fanfare. Just the two of us in a spare bedroom in my house along with a couple of questions I had hastily scribbled on a piece of paper.

Tell me about your childhood.

What’s the earliest memory of your parents that you have?

What is the name of the oldest ancestor that you can remember?

Over the course of months, we would meet many times, but as it turned out that first meeting was the only one that we ever actually scheduled. The rest of our conversations came about on an ad hoc basis: the two of us would be thrown together for some reason or other—a not-so-uncommon occurrence given that we were family—and then there would be a mutual recognition that it was time for us to break ourselves away from the others in order to sit down and talk again.

Dad opened our first session, like he did every subsequent one, by preempting my questions and asking, So, tell me, what do you want to know?

But no matter how I responded or what questions of my own I asked, no matter how far back we went, even after getting to the present day, during our initial sessions I always found that our conversations drifted back to one specific point in time. It was the beginning of the end. It fascinated me. I am not sure what it did to him.

It was always a thump. Actually, a series of thumps.

April 16, 1944, was a Sunday. Just as they had done on most Sunday mornings for the past thousand years, the Catholic residents of a small Carpathian mountain town named Veretsky—on that day a part of Hungary, but in the present day a component of the Ukraine—welcomed their day of rest. In a little while they would be getting their houses in order, preparing to make their way to one of the town’s three primary churches. Whether it was Rusyn Catholic, Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox, in a few hours all their bells would be ringing, calling out to their faithful in a familiar song that hadn’t changed much for a millennium.

For the region’s relative newcomers, the Jews, entrants into this part of Europe only three hundred years earlier, Sunday was not normally a day of rest. If there had been any work to do, the sound of the bells would have signaled the start of their work week. Weingarten the tailor, Ziegelstein the butcher, and hundreds of other workmen whose names escaped Dad’s memory would have already risen, soon to be on their way down to their shops and going about their business.

But this day, off in the distance, a sequence of slow, heavy beats began to penetrate the early morning calm. The roosters hadn’t begun to crow, and the streets of Veretsky were still peaceful, save for the whinny of a restless horse or the rustle of a discarded piece of paper.

However, on this day, the calm was a false one even though for most of its history, this area of the Carpathians had been an oasis of tranquility. Peaceful days were over for the Jews here, and they wouldn’t be back.

I begin my father’s story at the break of day, in the Jewish section of town. There was no sign that read Here is where all the Jews live. You didn’t need one. Several decent-sized synagogues dotted the area. And perhaps twice that number of shtibls, small ultra-orthodox houses of worship seating no more than two dozen worshipers, were located there as well. If that wasn’t enough to let everyone know that this was where most of the Jews of Veretsky resided, almost all of the town’s Jewish-owned businesses were located there too.

Faint and barely audible, at least at first, distant salvos grew louder as they grew closer. Because the sounds were coming from the west, the residents of Vizhny Veretsky—known as Upper Veretsky, but in reality the westernmost portion of the town—spotted the source of the commotion first. A lone Hungarian marching down Velka Ulice, the town’s main thoroughfare, was beating on a large drum as he made his way down the street.

When my father first told me the story of the drumbeater, he didn’t describe the type of drum the man carried, or even what it sounded like. So I imagined a slow, heavy, almost mournful beat. I wasn’t surprised when later on he recalled it was a bass drum. I knew that the magnitude of what was about to occur could never have been preceded by something as fanciful as the rat-a-tat-tat of a smaller, less significant snare drum.

The drumbeater did not rush, either in his march or in his cadence. From the drawn-out contact of stick to drumhead, to his slow, deliberate stride, there was a desolate finality in every action he took.

Every ninety to one hundred meters the drumbeater stopped, put his arms to his side, and yelled out instructions to anyone within earshot. Shouting in both Hungarian and Ukrainian, he instructed all Jews to pack up everything they owned and assemble at the new high school. Those listening were aware that the messenger was referring to a school built several years earlier by Czech officials during an effort to modernize the town. Failure to comply with the edict, he warned the Jews, would result in death.

He came down Velka Ulice, my father began. "We used to call it the Big Street. It was our main street, the grandest in town. This was the place where everything happened."

However, what occurred on Velka Ulice on April 16, 1944, was much larger than any thoroughfare in Veretsky. My father didn’t know it at the time, but similar pronouncements were also made in all the cities and villages of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, a mountainous region that in better times thought itself one of Czechoslovakia’s easternmost provinces. In 1938, the entire district was ceded to Hungary and, since March 19, 1944, had fallen under German occupation.

Starting on the outskirts of town where the roads from neighboring Volovec and Muncaks converged, walking east toward Nizhny (lower) Veretsky, the drumbeater’s incessant beat echoed off a road that was always well kept. It was dirt at Veretsky’s perimeter, flattened smooth after years of carriage traffic, switching to cobblestones at the more affluent sections of town. Regardless of what it was made of, tree-lined Velka Ulice ran all the way from that neighboring Volovec, a larger village twelve kilometers to the west, straight through to the Polish border. In spots, it was wide enough for two carriages to pass side by side or for a single one to turn around.

It was a decent-sized town with more than five thousand residents, almost every one of whom still used horses to get around.

Every time Dad started telling me about his Veretsky, my mental image of the drumbeater would fade, but only for a few minutes.

The only automobiles we regularly saw were the taxis owned by the Hirsh family, also proprietors of the local bus service. Both regularly ferried people to and from the Volovec rail station several miles away. There was a second, smaller taxi service as well. Owned by the Burach family, the taxis themselves were much larger and more luxurious, often used for special occasions, such as weddings in distant towns.

Three generations of my father’s family—my family—lived alongside Dad on Velka Ulice. As I reconsidered the appearance of the drumbeater, I thought that had that interloper never shown up, this surely would have been my Veretsky as well.

Numerous stores ran the length of the Big Street. Structures of different sizes, living accommodations for most, were usually found on second stories or occasionally in the rear of these establishments where almost all of Veretsky’s residents made their living.

Bursting with color, plant life in Veretsky did not feel any obligation to relegate itself to the alpine fields off in the distance. Now that it was April, its annual seminal invasion of this combined commercial and residential district had begun. This time of year, almost any empty space in town was either covered or soon-to-be covered in a blanket of emerging wildflowers—splotches of yellow, gold, and orange intermingled with flecks of red, purple, and white. Even the moss and lichen overtaking scattered patches of rocks spanned a wide variety of hues.

Every year, this burst of color was tied to the Paschal holidays. With buds forming on strawberry plants, and raspberry bushes springing up around almost every corner as well, there could be no doubt. Spring was in full bloom. The last vestiges of the difficult Carpathian winter had finally been driven back past the town’s perimeter.

With the past winter among the worst anyone could remember, I would have thought that the arrival of these flowers would have been greeted with at least some degree of happiness. In a month, they would be tall enough to pick. In prior years, they would also have soon adorned most homes. But this was 1944, and times had changed. In Veretsky, only the foreign soldiers looking to curry favor with one or more of the local girls were picking flowers anymore.

Beyond the dazzling display of flora, on one side of the street was the gentle downward slope of a hill. It led to the farms, stables, and factories owned by the town’s more prosperous residents.

Jews, Jews, pack your bags! the drumbeater shouted again.

Past multiple shoemakers, a storefront for Bata, the world’s leading shoe exporter, and then past a number of shirt manufacturers, he marched. An inordinate number of garments were being sold here given the town’s population. But Veretsky was a resort town, with most of its economy built on creating these items for the tourist trade.

Closer to the center of town, the drumbeater would have come across several homes whose owners supplemented their incomes by renting out rooms. Visitors from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland hiked and climbed Veretsky’s neighboring mountains in the summer, returning to ski them in winter. But there weren’t any more guests here, at least not welcome ones. Nary a soul had come to climb or ski Pikuj, at 1,400 meters (4,600 feet), one of the region’s tallest and most scenic peaks, or any other mountain, for quite some time.

A little farther, past the post office, one of the five or six locations in town that had a telephone, and then on to the courthouse, the drumbeater continued.

I can’t remember anyone ever going into that courthouse. We didn’t settle disputes that way. You always went to the town council of elders and asked them for a ruling.

Also nearby were the town’s primary football (soccer) fields.

On a normal Sunday afternoon, we would have packed these fields. Jews and Christians alike. All of us competing with and against each other. Fairly. Equally.

But the camaraderie and triumphs athletic competitions had once brought the children of Veretsky were no more. On this day, the fields stood empty, at least of Jews. For several years, things had not been normal. They would never be normal here again.

Go to the new high school now! the drumbeater commanded.

At some point after entering Nizhny Veretsky, the drumbeater would have come upon the house of Jacob Himmel, my grandfather. It was a multistoried building. One of the most prominent on the street, it was testimony to Jacob’s large family and business success. On the ground floor of this house, looking out at the drumbeater were both of my grandparents, my father, my Uncle Eliezer, aunts Bertha and Chaya, and Chaya’s young son, Shmuel.

The upper stories of the structure were quite a different site. Hungarian officers had been bivouacked in this house since they had requisitioned it as living space. I suppose they were smiling. At last, here was some entertainment to divert them from the daily monotony.

A few hundred yards down the hill behind this house lay my grandfather’s soda-water factory, long since appropriated by the Hungarians. Nearby, the family stables: eleven teams of Clydesdales, two horses per team. Twenty-two well-cared-for animals that transported the output of this factory and lived alongside the family’s three carriage horses. It no longer mattered how well they had been treated; they were all Hungarian property now as well.

My father told me that my great-grandfather Shmuel’s house came next.

It was also among the biggest in Veretsky, with ten or twelve small apartments, freestanding buildings that ran along the side and back. At this point, the only Jews left inside the main house were my grandmother Mindel and my cousin Frida. Shmuel had died three years before. In many ways, it was a blessing sparing him from witnessing what was about to unfold in front of the rest of us.

Directly beyond Shmuel’s house was the house of my father’s Uncle Sruel. Sruel had been a butcher. He also had had a very quick temper. His habit of disagreeing with religious authorities had made him something of a local legend. Because of it, my grandfather and his other brothers, all of whom were quite devout, constantly referred to him as the black sheep of the family. His wife, Feiga, supervised the house. Sruel had died in 1941 and in some ways can be considered the first of my family members to be slain in the Holocaust.

My father went on. Uncle Sruel had twelve children.

He paused for a second.

But ten of them didn’t come back.

Didn’t come back.

That statement sent shivers down my spine. It was an interesting choice of words. Though I had yet to hear the stories of all the family members who perished in the Holocaust, I knew exactly what he meant. It was not the fact that, to his knowledge, not a single Jew resides in Veretsky today. Or that none of his family ever returned to live there permanently. From that perspective no one really came back.

But survivors survived. And that’s how they are described regardless of where circumstances took them. Didn’t come back is a reserved phrase, one set aside for the murdered and the missing. It’s antiseptic and easier to say, although I’m not exactly sure for whose benefit.

Those who disobey this order will be shot! the drumbeater reminded the town’s Jews.

Twenty-five or thirty more buildings beyond Uncle Sruel’s house on Velka Ulice was the house of Dad’s Uncle Moishe, yet another one of my grandfather’s brothers. A general store was in front of it, and next to it was the synagogue where Moishe worshipped. Like my grandfather, Moishe held title to several of the nearby homes.

A nearby side street housed the mikveh, a bathhouse owned by the town. Mikvehs were the sole domain of women, or so I thought. A place for ritual purification, after menses or prior to marriage. In Veretsky, where most of the Jews were ultra-orthodox, Dad explained that men used the mikveh for purification as well. Every Friday afternoon prior to the onset of the Sabbath, it was time for adolescent sons and their fathers to partake in a decades-old ritual, immersing themselves in a pool of water heated to a few degrees below scalding, then dunking in pools of cooler water. As a final treatment, twigs were gently whisked across one’s back stimulating circulation.

Orthodox custom dictates tzniut (modesty) between men and women. In Veretsky this meant they couldn’t even be in the mikveh building at the same time.

One day a week was reserved solely for women. And some mornings were exclusively for teenage boys and elderly men. I guess the old men back then were not all that different from old men today. They were always the ones telling the dirtiest jokes.

Continuing on, the drumbeater would have come across the town’s slaughterhouse, which served the needs of Jews and gentiles alike, relegating the slaughtering of pork to a special section within the facility to make the store acceptable to Jews.

Over a bridge and into the town square he marched, banging out his bitter message. What a sharp contrast it must have been to the sweet air and the fresh promise Veretsky’s spring traditionally brought. Who could have realized that this time the season of birth and renewal marked the death of Jewish Veretsky?

Jews, Jews you must assemble!

The town square was bordered on one side by the beit hamidrash, a house of learning that several years earlier had been presented with a Torah scroll by Jacob Himmel. A non-kosher restaurant was right next door. This was the town’s center of activity. On an ordinary Sunday, hundreds would have been milling about. But clearly, this was no ordinary Sunday—though how grotesquely unordinary (or unique) it would be, was still just becoming apparent.

We had been forbidden to use the main thoroughfares, and travel to and from this square was restricted to back alleys and sneaking through other people’s homes. On this day there probably wasn’t a single Jewish soul on the street or in the square.

Turning to one side, on a corner near the bridge, the drumbeater could have seen Rosen’s benzene station. A form of gasoline used by the town’s taxis, benzene was also available to any other motor vehicle should one happen by. Adjacent to the benzene station was a non-kosher butcher, the homes of some non-Jewish families, and then the home of a Jewish widow using her income as a shirt-maker to feed her three daughters. Nearby stood the Kraichma, a bar owned by Hersh Kleinman. On the other side, a small road headed off into the hills. Most of the homes on that street, much smaller than those on Velka Ulice, were, according to my father, also owned by my grandfather.

An immediate right after the bridge would quickly take one to the Polish border. A quick left also led to the border, but only after first passing Latarkel, one of the Carpathians’ highest peaks.

Past the home of Haskel, a man raising a son and four daughters by himself, the drumbeater ventured. Further down, he came upon a group of Czech families, unable or unwilling to move after the Hungarian annexation, as well as the residences of both the Steinbergs and Bookbinders. Then the home of the Singer family.

The Singers rented stores and had an apothecary in the front of their house. Of the five Singer boys, two had already fled to the United States.

My father made sure he pointed out that he was great friends with their son Chaim. He was like a brother to me.

Then he continued. Near the end of the street, right by the Jewish cemetery, my cousin Hersh lived. If you went a little farther, on the left past a small creek, were the Filers, relatives on my mother’s side. Everyone called them the richest family in all of Carpathia.

The Penners and the Kleins were more relatives of my father’s on his mother’s side. They lived in this area as well. Uncle Sruel Penner was his mother’s brother. Simcha Klein had married his mother’s sister. In better times, the Penners had owned a general store, and the Kleins had been bakers.

Where Velka Ulice prepared to exit Veretsky, among the last buildings the drumbeater would have passed was the home of Rabbi Landau and his small shul (synagogue). Next door was my father’s cheder, a religious school that the younger Jewish children attended during the day, before and after their state-sponsored schooling was complete. This particular cheder was only for boys. Mr. Rechter, the father of five girls and one boy, had been in charge of teaching the younger children, while Mr. Zender instructed the older ones. The yeshiva, a full-time Jewish school for older boys, was located across the street. Rabbi Landau, a descendant of the chief rabbi of Prague, and the rosh yeshiva (head of school) of Veretsky, would survive its destruction. Rechter would not. Sadly, I could not find anyone who knows what became of Zender.

The first time I heard about the drumbeater, I thought his appearance would have sparked a visceral reaction from the Jewish people of the town. Was there confusion, quickly followed by shrieks of terror at what lay in store after this surprise announcement? Or perhaps angry shouts, Jews hardening their resolve into defiance.

But as I found out with most of the things Dad would tell me, my expectations were based on a purely American perspective of World War II. A perspective formed by, what was to us, a conflict fought on distant shores. We can never really understand its impact at the local level. Dad said the drumbeater’s arrival was not entirely unexpected or feared.

For close to six years, the Jewish residents of Veretsky had been living under increasingly harsh oppression. First from Ukrainian and later Hungarian overseers. Amidst increased speculation about temporary relocation to work camps in order to support the war effort, the sudden arrival of Nazi soldiers a few weeks earlier had, in fact, created a sense of impending climax. But instead of generating the mass panic I would have expected, the drumbeater’s announcement to assemble at the high school was actually greeted quite warmly.

We packed whatever had not yet been stolen—mainly clothing and warm bedding—into suitcases. Everyone complied with the instructions to assemble. Everyone. The scuttlebutt was that the longed for day of transport to work camps had arrived. Most of our food was gone, and by that time we were all so very hungry. Any worker, even a Jewish one, was valuable. In order for us to continue working, they would have to feed us. At least that’s what we thought.

History has already rendered its verdict on whether the people of Veretsky should have heeded the orders to assemble or not. Meanwhile, inside of me I felt long-dormant emotions beginning to stir. At the time, I didn’t really have words for what I was feeling; my father’s story was only beginning to unfold. There was anger for sure, but to say I was boiling mad or dealing with a silent rage that was threatening to simmer over would be an oversimplification, and upon further reflection not entirely accurate. Sorrow was spreading over me, of that much I was sure, triggered by what I can only describe as a brief glimpse into the true sadness of the forlorn. Despite my father’s statements regarding a guarded optimism, I was headed in another direction. I was a getting a small