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Broken Chain
Catholics Uncover the Holocaust's Hidden Legacy and Discover Their Jewish Roots
By Vera Muller-Paisner Pitchstone Publishing
Copyright © 2005 Vera Muller-Paisner
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9728875-5-7
CHAPTER 1
War, Trauma, and Memory
My family immigrated to the United States in 1955. We had come from Antwerp, Belgium, hoping to find a new life in America. I did not know then that both of my parents had reinvented their lives after the Holocaust. They had each lost a spouse, children, and family during the war. Were it not for their suffering and subsequent marriage to each other, I would never have been born.
I grew up, as did so many people in this country, surrounded by secrets. They hovered around me in foreign languages. By the time I was five, I was eavesdropping in twice as many languages as I could speak. Spending the first eight years of my life in Belgium, I spoke French in school and Polish with my parents. Secrets always came cloaked in either German or Yiddish within a quiet ritual that demanded attention, even from a child. My memories are of half-said things, the almost palpable feeling of words implied but never uttered, and I have a kind of fascination, even appreciation, for the beauty and power of language on the cusp, language that has not yet been born.
A short time ago, I learned that my family name, Muller, was indeed authentic. I had assumed that it had been created to protect my father from being killed during the Nazi regime. It remained honored and hyphenated along with my married name. Knowing that it is "real" has made me feel less of an impostor. Another piece of my family's identity has been connected, thereby enlarging the clarity of the whole picture.
My sense of identify was defined both by what I knew and thought I knew about my family history. Stories were multilayered, like a finely handmade carpet. Unlike a carpet, however, the stories were not woven in their entirety. I remember stories about my miraculous birth as a first child to a Holocaust survivor who was forty-four. I was not told about her first marriage and the loss of her first husband. Any questions I had about her past led to agitation and dismissal. Fragments of information were difficult to piece together to form a whole history.
Holes in the story of my family represented secrets created by the trauma of war. In the name of protection, lies were told, half-truths uttered. Some fit better than others, but the family's fabric was weaker in those spots, and more vulnerable. Much energy and maintenance was needed to keep the thread of past lies from unraveling. When the fabric fragmented from sudden exposure to secrets, the hole widened and exposed the emptiness of lies. Family tapestries that hide the fabric of lies about collective traumas keep a person from knowing where they come from and who they are. The threads of family legacy become inauthentic.
Family history unfolded for me as I listened to my mother's stories about growing up in Krakow. It was as if we were both girls whispering to each other about what happened the previous summer. The chronology of her life, from her childhood at home with parents and siblings to her present situation with my father and me, was seamless. In these conversations, she would neither mention her first husband nor the interruption of war.
Reshia, my mother, was born in 1903 in Krakow. She lived in Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter, in a large corner house on 36 Krakowska Street, with her parents, one brother, and seven sisters. The family owned two cheese and butter stores, both in Krakow, one being across the street on Krakowska. It was easy for the children to help behind the counter before and after school. Customers watched the family grow as they bought their cheeses. My mother's responsibility when she finished high school was "keeping the books," and sometimes traveling abroad to find special cheeses for the store. She enjoyed working for her father, experiencing him as a warm and loving man. When speaking about her life at home, I slowly became aware that she barely ever mentioned four of her sisters, sisters who I knew on some level had not survived the war. As a child, I was really only aware of having one uncle and three aunts.
After the war, her brother, my uncle David, became a cantor in the biggest synagogue in Vienna. Two of her sisters immigrated to Israel. One was aunt Sara, who was full of life. The other was Aunt Ida, who was the eldest. She was hardly mentioned except when my mother would say in German that she had "the real thing," her way of saying that she was dying of cancer. My mother's favorite sister was aunt Rusia, who lived in Paris and with whom she had experienced countless escapades. Their boldness together while living at home as children ultimately served as practice runs for the boldness needed to survive the war.
I remembered hearing that aunt Rusia had been bold when Jewish families in her town in Czechoslovakia were ordered to pack their bags and proceed to the train station for deportation. Rusia and her husband Sammy left their daughters Lilly and Vera with a trusted maid at her family's farm. Dressed well, they joined this morbid parade of Jewish families and walked separately toward the tracks, without suitcases, before furtively slipping into the line of onlookers on the street. Neither boarded the train.
One of my favorite stories was about the evening my mother and Rusia, still living at home, went to a dance unescorted, a forbidden act for them. They were able to sneak into their bedrooms just before dawn and slip under the bedcovers in evening gowns just before their father checked on all the children before he left for the store. All went well until the oven was lit. Both sisters were mortified when a putrid smell whiffed past their nostrils. As it had rained heavily upon their return, they did not want to walk back to their rooms in shoes that were squishy and wet. The pumps that had swirled them around the ballroom in Viennese waltzes and the tango had been hidden in the oven and forgotten. The maid had turned the oven on in preparation for breakfast, causing the house to smell of burning leather. Although both my mother and Rusia were punished, my mother giggled every time she told the story. She spoke in a very animated and easy way about those times.
She spoke about four of her eight siblings as if they lived around the corner and she had seen them the day before. Indeed, the four corresponded weekly. I grew up with my mother reading their letters to me during quiet times on Saturdays. When visiting my aunt Rusia in Paris, the same letter reading ritual was performed.
However, when I became curious about the "others," or about the chronology of events, my mother's tone would change, her eyes would glaze, and she would mutter to herself about how a sister was either the most beautiful, the youngest, the favorite, the most talented ... but that she didn't know, couldn't leave, didn't see what was happening. "What a shame," she would say.
When I asked about specifics, she would avert her eyes and either suddenly become busy with something else or annoyed at my not having done some imaginary task. In later years, I contacted a few of the remaining family members scattered throughout Europe and Israel to help fill the holes in my empty narrative. Most claimed a faulty memory, or ignorance.
My mother was hospitalized suddenly at the age of sixty-nine. I received a call from a cousin who thought it important for me to know that her papers had been falsified and that she was at least ten years older than I was aware. After her death a few weeks later, I learned that she had sworn them all to secrecy to save me from the legacy of trauma.
When I was still young enough only to listen, I fell in love with Krakow. Life sounded wonderful. There were happy summer and winter vacations, sports, the theater, opera, and ballet. My mother was vibrant when she spoke of life before the war. Her hazel eyes widened with glee, while her arms made large gestures as if she were trying to envelope the scope of her beloved medieval city. She spoke of Sabbath meals at her parent's table with a dozen weekly invited guests from the synagogue. The quality of life was high for the thriving Jewish community. Her feelings were filled with powerful emotions. Those moments then and now fill me with powerful emotions as well, but for different reasons. These were the only times that she was available emotionally to me; meeting my gaze and sharing her past happy days. I was able to feel closer to her at these times, a mother who was otherwise difficult to approach and to understand.
These "snapshots" of her past were different in every way to those glimpses I received when I overheard my parents speak in German or Yiddish. They were unaware that I was listening, absorbing their words through all of my senses. There was no levity or laughter; voices were kept low, bodies seemed huddled. I could almost sense the dryness of mouth, could see the clenching of hands and teeth. I remember the shame of sensing my parents fear and the fear it evoked in me. This particular behavior was replicated throughout my childhood.
With a childhood that also consisted of laughter-filled vacations and spontaneity, anticipating the mood of the next moment was difficult for me. There were times in my childhood spent only in the company of my father Solomon. A quiet man with interesting hobbies, he played chess with people by mail. There were chessboards in several rooms around our house that were not to be touched. He studied each board and made his changes. I had seen pictures of him dressed in equestrian attire, boots and britches. I could not imagine him on the back of a horse. Even as a child he seemed thin and fragile to me. He explained to me that his health and stamina had been different before the war, but he never went into detail.
There were moments in my childhood when he apologized for my mother's absences, both figuratively and literally. She was totally unavailable at those times and my father came home from work at midday to prepare lunch. I have vague memories of him wrapping slices of chicken with a piece of lettuce and telling me stories while I ate. When we vacationed in Knokke, a summer beach resort in Belgium, I mostly remember spending time with him. He took great care to make unusual and beautiful kites that we would fly on the beach.
On any given day on the beach, children sat in the holes they had dug, displaying handmade papier-mache flowers on a sand shelf they themselves had dug. Other children walked by with their pails, acting as customers. My father was very skilled at creating beautiful flowers for me to sell. I, in turn, was able to purchase other flowers for my collection. The currency exchange was not money. It was a particular little brown shell with a jagged tooth like edge. They were difficult to find and considered very desirable.
I have happy memories of growing up in Europe. I remember neighborhood and school friends. I remember playing in the street in front of our house. It seemed as if everything was close by and easy to walk to. I especially remember my father walking me to school and often coming home for lunch. I was sent to a Yeshiva called Tachkemony. My parents were not religious but wanted me to know "where I came from." It was a far cry from knowing grandparents and being able to feel the rhythm and tradition of a family.
In the winter we would meet aunt Rusia, her husband Sammy, and their two daughters, Lilly and Vera, for ski vacations in Switzerland. My favorite places were Arosa and St. Moritz. I liked Arosa because its sleighs were lined with soft maroon velvet and a toasty warm blanket would be tossed over you as you sat down for the ride. I remember many such rides with my father. I would sit in front and he would sit behind me with his legs on either side of the sled to steer and work the brakes.
St. Moritz was special to me for other reasons. When we took the ski lift, we would pass the clouds and see distant planes at eye level. I also remember looking forward to having "frites" in the outdoor restaurant on top of one of the slopes. Inevitably my mother would put cream on her face and bask in the sun as I ate them. I also enjoyed the walks and seeing horse races on the frozen lake in the winter.
The voyage to America on the Queen Elizabeth was pleasant but was a precursor to the tension that would follow. I had a glass menagerie that was too fragile to be sent by freight, so my mother had allowed me to bring it on the ship. I placed the figures on the stand close to my bed. One day the seas turned rough and Bambi, my favorite, fell, shattering a leg. I remember feeling very upset but not being able to get sympathy from either parent regarding my loss. Although it felt important to me at the time, it was the smallest of losses compared to life that followed.
We docked in New York and were driven to a prearranged apartment on 191st Street off St. Nicholas Avenue in Washington Heights. I was to go to school about eight blocks away at the Yeshiva Rabbi Moses Soloveichik. I was grateful that at least the Hebrew would be familiar to me since I did not speak a word of English.
Gone were the days of my father walking me to school or coming home for lunch. When I came home from school, it was inevitably to an empty apartment. My father would give me a job to do until their return. Every day there was a new box of Good & Plenty candy sitting on the window sill for me. I was responsible for cutting each piece of candy into four or five slivers. I felt honored to be trusted with a knife and did my job dutifully. My father usually arrived before I finished the entire box. He would praise my work and remove the candy. I never asked what happened to it or why I needed to cut more the next day. It was my job, and I felt pride doing it.
My father suddenly disappeared from my life when I was about nine. I remember thinking that my world had ended. We had been at my parents' friend's apartment for Sunday brunch, and I remember my father began to feel ill. I was whisked away to a friend's house. My mother told me that my father had been hospitalized and children were not allowed to call or visit the hospital. I'm not sure how long I thought him ill. I remember arguing with a girlfriend who said that she had heard that my father was dead. I insisted that he was in the hospital. I remember her saying that they didn't keep dead people in the hospital. When I told my mother about the argument and asked where my father was, she reiterated that he was in the hospital and would be home soon. She told me not to listen to others. Eventually, when my father did not return, I begged just to hear his voice, and that's when she told me that he had indeed died. Years later I learned from a cousin that he had died of a heart attack at the friend's house that afternoon.
The communication between my mother and me was filled with unresolved fragments of information. With my father gone, I was aware, even as a child, that I was not receiving the kind of information needed for daily life. My mother had come to conclusions about past experience and was not always aware or ready to share information needed in the moment. Not only could I not ask, I could not be heard. It was only easy to communicate about happy thoughts and positive feelings.
Fears were unacknowledged. I was often fearful of coming home from school by myself since there was an active gang, headed by a punk known as Billy, roaming my neighborhood. I had told my mother about having been threatened several times, but she refused to listen. When I told her that two boys held me down while a third tried to get me to eat an apple that had been poisoned, she told me that it must have been my imagination. Things like that didn't happen here, she would say. Someone was playing tricks on me. When I was run down by a gang member on a bicycle and shoved against a car, the black and blue marks that I showed her met with a simple response: I needed to be more careful and to move out of the way of approaching bicycles. After many of these incidents, some more dangerous than others, I stopped telling her.
One day, in yet another frightening moment, two gang members surprised me in front of my apartment building, grabbed me, and hoisted me upside down from the fire escape. I was dangling above the entrance, from two stories up, wondering whether this was the time that I would actually be killed. Suddenly everyone scattered! I looked behind me and saw my mother in the distance, coming home. I was incredibly grateful when I saw her and began crying. Surely when she saw me she would realize the stories that I had told her were not exaggerations. I started calling out to her. She looked everywhere but couldn't see me. I told her to look up. Finally, she saw me. When our eyes met I started to try to tell her what happened, but she simply wagged a finger and told me to "get down from there, this instant." She then walked into the building. I felt betrayed. I had thought that she would be able to make my world safer. Clearly, I was mistaken and alone.
A few years later when it was time to go to high school, without consulting my mother I decided to take an entrance exam to a Yeshiva in Manhattan. I was accepted on scholarship, breaking the news to my mother by telling her to dress properly as we were going to meet the principal of my new school. She didn't understand how I had managed to get accepted and only questioned me once about the reason for not going to the local high school. I simply told her that it was dangerous and she never asked me again.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Broken Chain by Vera Muller-Paisner. Copyright © 2005 Vera Muller-Paisner. Excerpted by permission of Pitchstone Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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