However, Mama’s elation at my aunts’ return was short-lived. Her despair returned and intensified as she acknowledged her own family wasn’t coming back. She slept more and ate less. By nature a quiet woman, Mama retreated deeper inside herself. My aunts exchanged worried looks as they cared for her, and I was left free to roam. I was adventurous and enjoyed pushing the boundaries. I wandered the streets of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, following the Russian army as they marched, sometimes in time with a band. I was enchanted by the music and the spectacle. I got lost several times following their parades, until my aunts managed to find me.
The Russians in Tomaszów Mazowiecki were as ill-disciplined off duty as those in Birkenau. They were frequently drunk and convinced of their entitlement to force themselves on women who took their fancy. Aunt Elka was the oldest of the sisters and very pretty. The Russians were always banging on our door.
If that wasn’t bad enough, our Polish neighbors were almost as hostile as the Germans had been. There was no sympathy for the ordeal we had endured.
“Why have you come back? Why aren’t you dead? You should be!” were some of the insults repeatedly hurled in our direction.
Weary of the Russians, the anti-Semitism, the provincial attitudes of Tomaszów Mazowiecki and our cramped living conditions, Aunt Helen decided to move forty miles away to Lodz, Poland’s third-biggest city. She was now in her mid-twenties. Helen had been a widow most of her adult life, and there were more prospects in Lodz, which had a bigger Jewish community.
We escorted Helen to Tomaszów Mazowiecki station, from where the majority of the town’s Jews had been transported to Treblinka. As the train departed for Lodz, she poked her head through a window, smiled, waved and blew me a kiss. Although they understood Helen’s desire to leave, her sisters and Mama were worried because Poland was awash with stories of attacks on Jews returning from the camps. The worst took place in July 1946 in a town called Kielce, a hundred miles northeast of Auschwitz. Polish troops, police and civilians attacked a gathering of Jewish refugees, killing forty-two and injuring forty. It was the worst pogrom after the Second World War. After everything the Jews had suffered, the attack provoked international outrage and completely undermined our sense of security.
I was around seven years old at the time. As a distraction from the harshness of daily life in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Mama introduced me to music and dance. She took me to the cinema to see Shirley Temple in the comedy Bright Eyes. I was enthralled by her rendition of “On the Good Ship Lollipop”. The film was dubbed in Polish, and years later, I was surprised to discover that Shirley Temple wasn’t Polish.
We also went to see The Red Shoes, one of the finest films of the age. It is an adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fable about a girl who could not stop dancing. The dancing and music mesmerized me and I can still picture it vividly in my mind. But the cinema only offered Mama a brief respite from her melancholy thoughts.
Then, one day, at last there was some uplifting news. Mama’s obsessive survey of the survivors’ noticeboard paid off. She found Papa’s name. He was coming home from Dachau. Papa had discovered where we were living from a list that was compiled and shared by a group of teenagers traveling from town to town, trying to find lost relatives.
The day of his return was bittersweet. There was a gentle knock. Mama opened the door and screamed with joy. She threw her arms around Papa, and they held each other. Then he lifted me up and hugged me. All three of us stood in the doorway clutching each other and weeping with happiness. Ita and Elka joined in the embrace.
But then Papa broke away and limped into the sitting room. He opened a newspaper to a page dominated by the photograph of a murder victim lying on the floor of the shop where she worked.
“Look what I found on the train”, Papa sobbed.
I could barely make out what he was saying.
Mama and the sisters took a closer look at the newspaper. The victim was my beloved aunt Helen. She had been shot by a marauding gang of anti-Semitic Poles.
Besides being traumatized, Papa wasn’t in great shape. He had been shot in the leg by an SS officer in Dachau and needed to recuperate.
My parents and aunts began discussing whether it was time to leave the country. We were intimidated by the Russians and the all-pervasive anti-Semitism. But Mama refused. She was afraid that if her family came back and she wasn’t there, she would never find them again.
As for me, Papa’s return meant I could no longer avoid going to school. My days as a vagabond on the street were now over. I was seven and a half and Papa insisted I begin my formal education.
The first day was an utter disappointment. The teacher put me at the back of the class and I had no idea what was going on.
“I don’t understand why those children sit at those little desks doing something with a pencil on a piece of paper”, I told Mama. “It’s a complete waste of time”.
But my parents were resolute and took me back the next day. Once again, I was marooned at the back of the class trying to comprehend what was happening. In the middle of a lesson, all the children were told to go to the chapel. I didn’t have a clue what that meant and was left alone. I decided to head home. As I walked away, I felt something hit my back. I turned around and saw some of my fellow pupils throwing stones at me.
“You dirty Jew”, they screamed. “Why are you alive? You are just a dirty Jew”.
I pleaded with Mama and Papa not to send me back, but they insisted. So I stole some money from my mother’s bag and bought a crucifix on a chain. The next day, I proudly wore the cross around my neck for all to see. The children started laughing at me.
“You aren’t Christian”.
“You don’t belong here”.
“You are a dirty Jew. You killed Christ”.
I cried all the way home and kept asking myself how I could have killed Christ. I didn’t even know him.
I told Mama what had happened.
“I want to be a Christian. I don’t want to be a Jew anymore”.
Mama was furious and smacked me hard.
“How dare you say that! After everything we’ve been through. We’ve made it and survived. You should be proud of being Jewish. Never forget that”.
Although Mama had survived physically, she was struggling psychologically. A hundred and fifty relatives had disappeared. They weren’t coming back. Her depression was so severe, we couldn’t even get her out of bed. She stopped eating altogether and wouldn’t wake up. Papa decided we had no alternative but to leave — to try to save Mama’s mind and possibly even her life.
One day I was told to dress with everything I owned. As Poland’s borders were officially closed, Papa had to pay a smuggler to get us out. Aunt Ita stayed behind with her new boyfriend, Adam, who had just been discharged from the Russian army. But Aunt Elka and her fiancé, Monyak, joined us.
Of all the ironies, we headed into what I thought was enemy territory. Under cover of darkness, we crossed the border into Germany. Our destination? Berlin.
Once we had crossed the border, Mama turned to me and said, “We will no longer be speaking Polish. It’s a very unwelcoming country”.
And so I began to learn Yiddish.
We vowed never to return to Tomaszów Mazowiecki.
Today, nearly eighty years after the war, the town doesn’t have a Jewish community.
Chapter Seventeen. Sleepwalking in Berlin
The night terrors began with a vengeance in our new home overlooking Checkpoint Charlie in the American sector of postwar Berlin. I dreamed that I was being chased. I had to run away and save myself. My nightmares were so intense that they took me over and I started sleepwalking. I got out of bed in our two-bedroom, second-floor apartment, went downstairs and continued to flee along Friedrichstrasse, one of the main streets in the area. It was the front line of the embryonic Cold War, where US and Russian troops faced off against each other in the tense, divided German capital.