Saturday
Long ago and far away, I became friends with a woman in a self-help
group in Malibu. She was a lovely, but extremely lonely and
confused woman in early middle age. Her mother, a German Jewish
woman from a small town near Frankfurt, had survived two years as a
slave laborer at a Siemens airplane parts plant in Berlin. Then the
mother had been transferred to slave labor at the labor (as opposed
to the death camp) part of Auschwitz. There, as a teenage girl, she
did heavy labor building barracks for the SS and cleaning them. She
was part of a transport of 112 girls from Berlin to Auschwitz.
By the end of the war, when she was forced on a death march back
to Germany, barefoot in the snow, eight had survived.
The woman’s father, also a German Jew, had been fortunate enough
to have been sent out of the country to work as a clerk at a tin
mine in Bolivia where an uncle was an accountant. When he returned
to Germany after the war, his entire family was dead, murdered by
the Nazis.
The woman in my self-help group in Malibu had grown up in
Queens, New York, and had become an art teacher at Jewish day
schools in Los Angeles.
Shortly after I met her, she became pregnant as the result of a
romance with an unavailable man. As so many modern women do, this
woman worried about how she could support the baby and whether she
should have the baby at all.
“You must have the baby,” I said. “You absolutely must. Hitler
did not get away with exterminating your line of blood. You must
not do it for him by abortion. I will make sure you do not go
hungry.”
So, the woman had the baby, beautiful girl. I (I really must say
my wife and I) have been supporting the baby ever since and the
mother, in middle class circumstances and with private schools.
The child has grown up to be a hard working, lovely, dutiful
child. She has a wide circle of friends, is beloved by her family,
and earned excellent marks in a private Jewish day school.
Recently she applied to colleges and got into several fine ones.
She chose one in New York where she will learn a great deal about
theological studies and also get courses from a super fine college
of liberal arts.
Tomorrow is her graduation day. Her grandmother, the Auschwitz
survivor, is here in town for the event. I took the grandmother,
whom I will call “C” the Mom, and the daughter to lunch today at
the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
It was a perfect, magnificent day. The palm fronds and the blue
sky and the white tablecloths were art.
“What happened at Auschwitz if you didn’t feel well when you
woke up?” I asked.
C laughed. “You made sure you felt well. If you didn’t feel
well, you went to building 85 and then right up the chimney. You
always felt well if you wanted to survive.”
“What if you made a mistake in your work?”
“Up the chimney,” she said.
She went on. “There were two beautiful Jewish girls from
Berlin at Auschwitz. Just beautiful. An SS officer tried to hide
them. But the guards made us count over and over again and then
they searched and found the girls and killed them. They were
beautiful.”
“How did you know the war was over?” I asked.
“They marched us and marched us and then when we got to
Ravensbruck, the guards were all gone and we knew the war was over.
The Russians were going to rape us, but when they saw our tattoos,
they didn’t. A Russian officer who was an orthodox Jew from Siberia
took care of us. He made sure we had food. Then the British got me
back to my village and I had to go over on a ferry to get there.
The ferry operator asked who I was and I told him my name. He said,
‘Oh, so there are still Jews alive.’
“I said, ‘Yes, I am very much alive.’”
The sun was right overhead and C rolled up her sleeves. Her
concentration camp tattoo was on her left arm. “I will always
remember it,” she said. “Always. I use it for the locker
combination at my health club. That’s the difference between
America and Germany. I used it as my password for the gated
community home we had in Florida before my husband died.”
I looked at her. “God bless America,” I said.
“There are no words,” she said and then she started to cry.
But I thought that with all of our problems today, the
recession, the unemployment, the partisanship, the vulgarization of
the media, the racial tensions — this is still America, and I
judge it, as Tony Blair did, by a simple measure. How many want to
get in and how many want to get out.
As we walked to our cars, C said to me, “Thank you for my
granddaughter. I know I would not have her and she would not have
this fine education without you.” Then she cried again.
“Without my wife and me,” I said. “It was and is our
pleasure.”
America, the beautiful.
