When I went to New York City to college in 1965, I met my first
Jews — my first real ones, as I thought of them. The Minneapolis
variety were rare and determinedly undifferent from the rest of us.
In New York, I took trips home on the subway with Jewish classmates
and saw apartments over family grocery stores in Brooklyn, met
skullcapped grandfathers who muttered prayers and frugally cut
their cigarettes in half, heard whole neighborhoods full of Yiddish
(which I found I could learn to understand and speak, since I had
studied German), got myself made fun of by waiters in delis.
I eventually married into one of those families, not having any
idea what I was doing. My new parents-in-law, Stanley and Greta,
had numbers tattooed on their forearms. They had spent more than
six years in Auschwitz, surviving only because they had been
captured at about age 13, and could devote their strongest years to
camp labor. The old, the young, the sick, were slaughtered out of
hand. The teenagers and young adults lived, slaved, and saw it
all.
Not that they ever talked about it. They didn’t. Once I learned
to hear, their lives told the story.
Greta quivered with nerves. Though she kept her kitchen
spotless, every jar had a cross-threaded or jammed lid; boxes were
torn open in killing haste. Open the neat cupboard doors and the
products of bland American companies like Kellogg’s and Pillsbury
screamed violence. Stanley drank, favoring for his morning
pick-me-up an eight-ounce tumbler filled to the trembling brim with
Southern Comfort and plum brandy.
They were divorced, though Stanley was around a lot. Years
before, coming off the boat with no relatives left — a small
constellation of “aunts,” “uncles,” and “cousins” were fellow
survivors, not blood relations — Stanley and Greta had gone to
work at the only trade Stanley understood at all, baking. Greta,
who came from a wealthy family in Poland, took charge of the
businesses while peasant Stanley did the donkey work. They opened
one bakery in Brooklyn, and then another, then another. They moved
to ever-nicer and ever-bigger apartments. They had three daughters
and spoiled them.
Then one day Stanley went to each bakery, one by one, took out
all the cash, about $50,000, and bet it on a horse.
“It was Willie Shoemaker at Aqueduct,” he told me years later.
“It was a sure t’ing.”
Willie Shoemaker came in second. It all crashed — the bakeries,
the grand apartment, the spoiled heedless girls. Greta and Stanley
would never recover from that destruction, because they had never
recovered from the earlier, greater destruction wrought upon
them.
The destroying didn’t stop there. I married the oldest of the
three girls. My wife proved to be a thief (“kleptomaniac”
understated the problem; she stole), a torturer and killer of small
animals (she tormented and killed our kitten, then gigglingly
bragged to me about it), a compulsive adulterer, betrayer, and
provocateur of interpersonal conflict, even violence.
All this, and more, that I encountered with my in-laws, was so
far beyond my naïve Midwestern ken that I simply could not
believe I was seeing it. I had imagined, you see, that the
Holocaust was a kind of mass industrial evil perpetrated by
stiff-backed comic opera villains. I had to realize that it was
something else.
I had once imagined the tattooed numbers on prison camp inmates’
forearms as being stamped by a sort of monstrous typewriter, all of
them alike. No. Stanley’s number sprawled in lazy big figures,
carelessly spaced. Greta’s was tighter and more upright, but still
marked with an individual hand.
They were handwriting. They were signatures, the indelible
autographs of individual evil.
It does not surprise that so many survivors could not forget,
that the internalized destruction I saw in my in-laws’ family was
common among survivor families in the New York area. The miracle is
that so many could put it behind them, and live.
