No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Beginning the Book

The odd thing about this book is I never set out to write it. The audiotapes were intended for the kids and the rest came from my journals. When I hit on the idea of bringing these disparate narratives together, I called Arthur for permission to use the tapes. There was a long silence on the phone, until he said, “To write this book, Sonny, is like telling the lions not to eat the antelope.”

Now I call him once a week to double-check facts and details. Spelling Polish proper nouns is confounding, and my attempts at syllabic representation produce gobbledy-gook. Our conversations trigger his memory and I take notes as we talk. Soon, I begin transcribing all that he says.

Arthurs life is hard now. His neighborhood in Queens has changed and no one will shovel snow from his walk. His car inexplicably became filled with ice, his basement with water. Irene has Parkinson’s disease and requires a great deal of care. He is a little depressed. I ask if he’s reading, and he says yes, a book on the Spanish Inquisition.

He is not angry at the German army because he was a soldier and understands the mentality of serving ones country. He feels most betrayed by his fellow Poles, especially members of the Jewish Police.

As the conversation begins to wane, his voice takes on a tone of concern.

“I don’t want to ask, Sonny. But something is nagging at me a little.”

“It’s all right, Arthur. Ask me anything.”

“What bothers me is this. How will you link the two stories. The war and Kentucky. What joins them?”

“I don’t know, Arthur. I’m worried about that myself.”

“You figure it out, Sonny. I have faith. Maybe something subliminal.”

“The ending,” I say. “Maybe the ending will pull it all together.”

“All endings are the same, Sonny. You die. The scene in the Titanic movie was the closest I’ve ever seen to the camps — one against the other. The good people don’t survive. You have to push a little to get into the lifeboat. There was one scene of two old people watching it all, then they went to their bed and lay down and waited to die. At that point, I could not look. It was my attitude exactly. But I lived. I always lived. That was the problem. I lived.”

I hang up the phone, impressed by the prescience of his concern. At first I thought the notion of home would bind the narratives — my constant desire to return, his utter commitment to never go back. My original plan was for us to visit Poland together, but he refused. I suggested a trip to Israel, and again he refused. Traveling to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., was also dismissed.

I considered making a trip to Poland alone, visiting Kraków, finding cemeteries, standing in the very room where Arthur was born. This seemed as depressing a prospect as reading about the Inquisition and I quickly abandoned the plan. In fact, all my ideas seemed pathetic. I finally decided that the ending would be whatever happened during my life while writing the book.