My sleepwalking dismayed my parents. Sometimes they heard me get up and could catch me in the street and take me back to bed. When I awoke later, I had no recollection of what I’d done.
I was eight and a half years old at the time. Sleepwalking was not uncommon among child survivors of the Holocaust. After everything I had experienced, it was not surprising that my sleep was disturbed. Mama and Papa did everything they could to alleviate my suffering, as they were worried that my nightly excursions could do me considerable harm. A doctor assured them that sleepwalking could be easily disrupted by putting wet sheets and towels on the floor by my bed. His theory was that when I got up, I’d feel the cold, wake up and go straight back to sleep. But his suggestion didn’t work. Then he recommended placing big bowls of water by the bed to wake me up. That failed as well. I just knocked the bowls over as I fled from the people pursuing me in my dreams, flooding the floor in the process. Thankfully, the area where we lived was safe, and during my nocturnal escapades, I never strayed too far before being rescued.
My parents didn’t always catch me in the act, however. Sometimes they slept through. Once, I was found near the checkpoint in a trancelike state by a friendly American soldier called Jim, whom I had met before when he was on patrol. Jim carried me back upstairs to my parents. They had no idea that I’d vanished.
A few days after we’d settled into the Berlin apartment, together with Aunt Elka and Monyak, Mama allowed me to explore. Although bomb-and shell-damaged buildings bestowed the neighborhood with a somewhat ghostly air, she judged it to be safe. The presence of patrolling American soldiers generated confidence that I would come to no harm in daylight hours. For the first time in my life, I encountered troops who behaved in a civilized manner, and Jim’s kindness made him stand out. The first time he saw me, he offered me an orange and followed it up with a piece of chocolate. Then he gave me chewing gum, which I swallowed immediately. We smiled at each other, and I rushed home with the rest of my treats. Neither of us understood what the other was saying, but whenever we saw one another thereafter, we always waved.
The night terrors, however, curtailed my daytime activities. I was exhausted from sleepwalking and often compensated by snoozing through daylight hours. Although the American GIs weren’t intimidating, my parents felt strongly that we should move to a place with a minimal military presence. Berlin was teeming with soldiers. Besides the Russians, there were also French and British troops guarding their sectors of the city. Mama and Papa thought that the presence of uniforms and guns was contributing to my trauma. My parents didn’t need to take me to a string of consultants to be assessed. My mother’s intuition was unerring. She knew exactly what I required. A tranquil, secure environment.
Ironically, my healing process began in the pretty medieval Bavarian lakeside town where Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, his blueprint for controlling the European continent and exterminating Jews.
Mama, Papa and I moved to the Displaced Persons (DP) camp in Landsberg am Lech, west of Munich in the American zone. Ita and Adam had joined us in Berlin but now both aunts moved to the Leipzig DP camp with their partners. During the war, Landsberg was an annex of the Dachau concentration-camp complex, forty-five minutes away, where Papa had been incarcerated. Landsberg had a dark history of slave labor, starvation, disease and executions. Jewish prisoners were put to work digging massive underground bunkers intended for aircraft production. An estimated 15,000 Jews died, amid terrible conditions. American troops who liberated Landsberg in April 1945 found 5,000 survivors. Physically and emotionally, they were too sick to leave. They had nowhere else to go and so they stayed.
Liberation did not bring instant relief. Conditions inside Landsberg remained deplorable for some time. The survivors’ psychological and physical welfare were neglected, until the administration of the camp was transferred to the relief agency of the fledgling United Nations. By the time we arrived in early 1948, Landsberg DP camp had been transformed into a model community, full of hope, energy and optimism.
Similar camps were established across Germany, Austria and Italy to provide temporary safe havens for 250,000 dispossessed European Jews. Being stateless and homeless were the only entry requirements.
Everything about Landsberg was conducive to healing and recovery, especially for children. We had very pleasant family accommodation in the stout former military barracks. The communal kitchen had a gigantic oven where we prepared meals for the Sabbath, which is such an important element of Jewish life.
For the first time, I went to school and didn’t object. There were only about ten children in my class. We learned the Hebrew alphabet, not Latin script. Our teachers were volunteers from Israel who were psychologically trained to be aware of the traumas we had experienced and knew how to relate to us. I have especially fond memories of one called Rena, who was extremely sensitive to our emotional state. She framed her questions in a way that encouraged us to concentrate on the present and future instead of mourning the past. Rena didn’t want us to forget what had happened. Far from it. But she wanted us to have a new perspective on life.
I considered myself fortunate to have both parents. Every child in my class had a tragic story to tell. Some of my fellow pupils were orphans and were cared for by relatives. Others had lost entire families and were being nurtured before starting new lives in Israel.
I met my best friend, Clara, in Rena’s class. Clara was a year older than me and lived in the DP camp with her father. Clara, her little sister and their parents had spent much of the war hiding with a Polish farmer whom they paid well. But then a neighbor had discovered them and informed the Gestapo. Clara and her father had run into a forest and escaped, but her mother and little sister were caught. Clara clung to the hope that her mama and sister had also been liberated from a camp somewhere and that eventually they would all be reunited. Their plight reminded me of my mama’s never-ending quest to trace her lost relatives. We were all still searching and hoping, all too frequently in vain.
Landsberg’s secure, peaceful atmosphere was designed to facilitate the renaissance of a people who had been crushed physically, emotionally and spiritually. Our Jewish pride was restored. We began the process of metamorphosis from victims to survivors to thrivers, helped by an education system that offered classes from preschool to college level. The camp also contained a ritual bath, kosher kitchen, cinema, theater, radio station and newspaper. A premium was placed on physical well-being and people who a few years earlier were little more than skeletons found themselves participating in sports competitions. The aim of the camp hierarchy was to prepare displaced people for life in what was called Eretz Israel, or the Land of Israel. Because despite everything we had faced, Jewish refugees remained unwelcome in many countries around the world, and if it had not been for Israel, many would have had no place to go. The need for the Jewish people to have their own homeland, where they could live free from persecution and rejection, was now beyond question.
My family’s passion for Zionism was reinvigorated. I remember walking in a parade on May 16, 1948, a few days after the new State of Israel was formally inaugurated. I was nine years old and all the other children were lined up with Israeli flags. At last, the Star of David was no longer a symbol that marked us out for destruction. How times had changed. It was on display in Germany, and of all places in a town that was strongly associated with Hitler’s tyranny.