Being subjected to a constant barrage of gloom was unbearable. I zoned out, put up a defensive screen and nodded in the right places. I heard her, but I didn’t listen. Some of the stories struck a chord and remain with me. But the names didn’t stick. Memories of a whole generation were lost because of my insensitivity. Back then, I had no idea just how precious that time was. I would give anything now to turn back the clock, to hear the stories and names again, so I could at least light a memorial candle for them and keep their memory alive.
Similarly, the festive spirit of most Jewish holidays always disintegrated into painful memories. Before the war, these feasts were large family gatherings; now there were only three of us at the table. While Mama appreciated our survival, her belief in God was shaken to the core. She constantly questioned why her entire family of observant Jews had been slaughtered.
“If there is a God”, she would say, “He is utterly unjust and doesn’t deserve to be worshipped”.
Nevertheless, she maintained Jewish traditions, keeping kosher and lighting candles on the Sabbath. Doing so kept her close to her family, if not to her religion. In preparation for holidays and Fridays, I would accompany Mama to an open market. We would come home with a freshly butchered chicken or a live carp that Mama then hit over the head before making gefilte fish, a traditional Sabbath delicacy. But I could see that the light in her eyes had dimmed.
At the age of forty, Mama was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctors caught it early, and her spirits rose after she apparently recovered and entered remission. She began to read in Polish again and found the energy to socialize once more, spending time with my papa’s sisters. Aunt Ita and Uncle Adam had moved from Israel to Brooklyn with their two children, Pearl and Ben, and we were frequent visitors to Aunt Elka, Uncle Monyak and their son, Marty, in Upper Manhattan.
For a time, Mama’s mood improved even more, which, to my relief, allowed me to concentrate on my own activities. But after graduating from Jefferson High, my plans to get a college degree ran into opposition from both parents.
“Get married. I want to see you safe before I die”, Mama said.
Papa took her side, but I insisted. So I went ahead and registered to study psychology at Brooklyn College. There, I began by studying the individual psyche through the works of Freud, Jung and Carl Rogers, an innovative American psychologist who was a pioneer of client-centered therapy.
I was more fascinated, however, by the field of group psychology. Trigant Burrow, an influential psychoanalyst, who pioneered group therapy, caught my attention. I also pored over the work of German-born Kurt Lewin, recognized today as the founder of modern social psychology. A German soldier wounded in the First World War, and later a professor at the University of Iowa, Lewin proposed that behavior is shaped by the interaction of individual traits and the environment.
I wanted to understand how an entire nation could be brainwashed and led by an individual who was clearly deranged. The Holocaust was never far from my mind.
One psychiatrist whose work I was introduced to at that time was Viktor Frankl, who, like me and my parents, survived the Shoah. Later in life, when I became a therapist, I studied his survival theories in greater depth. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl proposes that one has the choice to behave morally even under the direst circumstances and one can find spiritual meaning by helping others:
“Every day, every hour offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom”.
Those words resonate with me whenever I think of how my parents behaved throughout the war.
Chapter Twenty. Postcards from Mama
After my first semester studying psychology, Brooklyn College offered an inexpensive trip to Israel in the late spring of 1957. I was desperate to visit a land that until then had only existed in discussions and dreams.
Israel was still tense after the 1956 Suez Crisis. Egypt’s hawkish President Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal, on which Europe’s oil imports depended. Israeli armed forces had invaded Egyptian territory, advanced toward the waterway and were reinforced by British and French troops. The invasion was a debacle. Egypt emerged victorious. The British, French and Israeli troops had all been withdrawn by the time my trip was due, but the situation was far from ideal.
“You can’t go”, Mama said. “It isn’t safe. There’s a shortage of food, especially eggs”.
“Well, in that case, save some for me”, I laughed.
I was not to be dissuaded. I wanted to see if my passion for Israel would be confirmed. Another strong motivation was the prospect of seeing Maier, who had a summer job in Jerusalem.
Nevertheless, I was anxious about leaving Mama. I consulted our family doctor, who assured me that she would be fine.
“Your mother is well. Go”, he said. “It’s just a two-week trip, and if you don’t go now, you will never be able to have your own life”.
So I left for my first visit to Israel. As soon as I arrived in Jerusalem, I was greeted by several postcards written in poor English by Mama, which made me chuckle. I assumed that the doctor’s confidence had been justified and that she was healthy.
It was on that trip that I fell in love with Israel. I had heard and studied much about it, but my expectations were far exceeded. The beauty of the Judaean Desert enchanted me and Jerusalem’s history fascinated me. When Maier and I met up at a kibbutz, we acknowledged that we both loved Israel and resolved to return in the future.
But throughout the trip, I could neither shake nor identify a feeling of foreboding. And it transpired that my intuition was correct. When I returned to Brooklyn, I discovered that Mama had died two days into my trip. Someone else had mailed her postcards.
Mama passed away on June 29, 1957. She was forty-five years old. My sense of guilt was overwhelming.
“She died of a broken heart”, Papa told me, accusingly. “She went to sleep with a headache, took some aspirin and never woke up”.
We never discovered the true cause of her death, because no postmortem was conducted. But we believe she suffered a brain aneurysm and fell into an irretrievable coma. Strong emotions, including grief, can contribute to an aneurysm, as can head trauma. Certainly, in physical terms, Mama had never been the same after the beating in Auschwitz. Although she died twelve years after the war ended, she was unquestionably another victim of the Holocaust.
But at the time, I was convinced that I was the cause of her death and that she would have lived if only I hadn’t gone to Israel. I dropped out of Brooklyn College and stopped socializing with my friends. I was overwhelmed by grief and guilt. I kept thinking about how much my smart, beautiful, sensitive mother had sacrificed for me. Her intelligence and courage were the main reasons why I was still alive. I owed everything to her.
Papa blamed me for Mama’s death, which I felt was cruel and unfair. But deep inside, I convinced myself he was speaking the truth. Our individual mourning drove a wedge between us. Papa buried himself in work and I just stayed at home in our small apartment. When Papa came back from the workshop, we circled each other like strangers and barely spoke. I cried myself to sleep every night for weeks.