The Daughter of Auschwitz. My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope

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 The British, French and Israeli troops had all been withdrawn by the time my trip was due, but the situation was far from ideal.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.

A few short months after Mama’s death, Papa made a dramatic announcement.

“I am going to Israel”, he said.

Days later, he bade me farewell, handing me a thousand dollars and the keys to the apartment. My sense of abandonment was complete. I was eighteen years old. Any feeling of optimism completely evaporated.

My two aunts would have taken me in, but they had no room. In the depths of feeling not only hopeless but homeless, I remembered Mama’s faith in my ability to take care of myself. Her early lessons in survival served me well. She had imbued me with inner courage. I’m in good hands, I thought to myself. My own.

I called a close friend who was studying for a PhD in math at UC Berkeley, California, and he invited me to join him on the West Coast. As soon as I arrived in Berkeley, two weeks after Papa left for Israel, I realized I’d made a mistake, although my friend went out of his way to make me feel welcome. He shared a small apartment with three adults and two children, who all slept on mattresses strewn on the floor. I found the arrangement extremely uncomfortable. I enrolled in a few classes in the hope they’d distract me and make me happier. And I took a job in a bagel shop whose profits helped the Hopi tribe of Native Americans, whom we visited once a month. In solidarity with their status as a marginalized minority, I was paid with meals instead of money.

Although I was surrounded by people, I felt very much alone. The nightmares, which I thought had been banished, haunted me once again. I was homesick for a home that no longer existed, and I couldn’t adjust to the California lifestyle. In desperation, I contacted the Berkeley campus rabbi, who was very sympathetic.

“What’s a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn doing here?” he asked. “Go home”.

Before I left, he gave me the telephone number of a psychiatrist in Manhattan named Lillian Kaplan. Our special relationship changed my life.

For the next four years, I had weekly therapy sessions with Dr. Kaplan, who specialized in helping young trauma victims, including those from the Holocaust. In the safe atmosphere of her office, for the first time in my life, I was able to express all my pain, sorrow and fears. I wept as I unburdened myself about the guilt I harbored over Mama’s death and all my painful war memories that I could never share with my mother because I wanted to spare her feelings.

Dr. Kaplan secured for me a place in the Girls’ Club — a residence for homeless Jewish girls attending school, run by the Jewish Child Care Association. The beautiful brownstone building stood in the residential district of Park Slope near the Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Museum. I lived alongside girls from wildly different backgrounds and with a wide range of traumas. They often acted out. Some had been abandoned by their families or expelled from school. Some had spent time in psychiatric institutions. Others were fugitives from abusive homes or, like me, became homeless after one or both parents died. Besides offering shelter, the Club provided emotional support through dancing, music, art and counseling. These activities were tailored in a therapeutic way to help us overcome our individual traumas.

After almost a year away, Papa returned from Israel in the middle of 1958. He was accompanied by his new wife, Sonia — a survivor of a Soviet labor camp in Siberia. Sonia was beautiful, kind and intelligent, and although she didn’t have any children of her own, she was extremely sensitive to my feelings. She was smart enough not to try to replace Mama in my affections, but her moral support and kindness mitigated my sense of loss. With Dr. Kaplan’s help, I accepted Sonia and the guilt over my mother’s death subsided. I recognized my good fortune in having such a wonderful therapist and she inspired me to follow in her footsteps. She had planted the seed for my future vocation.

After graduating from college in 1960, I resolved to move to Israel. To my surprise, after years of not keeping in touch, Maier Friedman, who had been studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, appeared one day at the Club.

“How did you find me?” I asked him.

“I never lost track of you”, he responded.

When I told him about the vaccines I had just received in preparation for my trip, he said simply: “Let’s get married first and we’ll move there together”.

We had known each other since I was eleven, but we had never actually discussed marriage before. Now we both just knew we were meant to build a life together in Israel.

We were married in Brooklyn two months later, on June 11, 1960. It was a traditional Jewish wedding, and while representation on my side was small, Maier had a large, sprawling family. I considered myself fortunate to be embraced by the Friedmans. At last, I was part of a big, loving family and felt accepted, protected and no longer alone. But I missed Mama terribly. She had been gone for three years already, and it made me profoundly sad that she never lived to see me marry.

Maier and I didn’t have time for a honeymoon. We drove straight to San Diego in California, where Maier had a new job lined up. But West Coast living didn’t agree with us. We missed our family and friends, not to mention the vibrancy of New York, and after only six months, we returned.

Maier had a brilliant mind, and he inspired me to strive harder. He began a PhD in biochemical engineering at Columbia University, and I enrolled in a master’s program in English literature at the City College of New York. Both schools were located on the Upper West Side, and we decided to move to nearby Harlem. In 1961, Harlem was considered a dangerous part of Manhattan and we would definitely be a minority there. Our decision stunned our family and friends.

“How are we going to visit you?” Papa protested. “It’s so dangerous in that neighborhood”.

“It’s not too dangerous at all”, I replied. “There are police everywhere”.

We weren’t just motivated by a convenient commute. On our West Coast road trips, we had been affronted when we encountered segregated restrooms, restaurants and water fountains. Coming from the northeast, we had not come across the daily effects of segregation, and our sense of indignation stayed with us when we returned to New York. Maier and I were actively trying to live by our abiding principles. Our membership of Habonim, the Zionist organization, had not just strengthened our belief in the right of Israel to exist; it had also reinforced our commitment to genuine equality across the racial divide.

By the time we were husband and wife, America’s Civil Rights Movement was in full swing as African Americans demanded an end to segregation and discrimination. Jewish activists played a significant part within the movement, not least because Judaism stipulates that we have a moral obligation to uphold the fundamental rights of others. We marched alongside African Americans in Washington as they called for integration. Talking about equality wasn’t sufficient. We decided to live it.

We moved into a nice two-bedroom apartment overlooking the famous Apollo Theater, on 125th Street. We were the only white kosher Jewish couple among nearly 800 African American and Latino tenants in our twenty-one-story building.

At first, our neighbors were hostile and didn’t acknowledge us, even in the tiny elevator. I hoped the ice would break somehow but wasn’t sure about the best way to approach even the people on our very floor. We avoided eye contact and passed each other silently in the hall. Months passed before neighbors began to even nod when they saw us.

It’s a start, I thought to myself.

But Maier and I knew we were getting somewhere when we joined a tenants’ meeting and a few familiar faces smiled at us. I began to attend various smaller meetings in individual apartments, where tenants discussed safety, cleanliness and sanitation. I wanted to contribute, and I saw these meetings as a bridge toward acceptance. And so it proved. At first, I invited myself, but after a while, I was asked to attend. The barriers had come down. Our neighbors saw that we had the same concerns as they did.

Every day, on my way to college, I passed the Apollo and heard the music pulsating through the walls but had neither the money nor the nerve to enter. The Apollo was the beating heart of culture in Harlem. It started out as a whites-only music hall, but by the mid-1930s it had become a showcase for a broad range of African American talent. Over time, it evolved, promoting jazz, big bands, comedy, opera, gospel and soul music. Performers who trod the Apollo’s boards in the early stages of their careers became household names the world over: Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Richard Pryor, Aretha Franklin, the Staple Singers, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, the Jackson 5 and Stevie Wonder, to name but a few. The building, its stars and audiences, gave off such a positive vibe that just walking past, you could tell something extraordinary was taking place inside.

My best discovery in the area was the public library at 135th and Lenox, now called Malcolm X Boulevard. On my first day there, the librarian tried to be civil, but behind her plastic smile, I sensed I wasn’t welcome. To her annoyance, I began to browse. My attention was drawn to glass cases protecting original manuscripts of African American writers. Through gritted teeth, she explained they were part of the Schomburg Collection, an archive of material focused on Black culture.

I spotted an article lying on the desk about an African American called Richard Wright, who had died in Paris from a heart attack a year earlier at the age of fifty-two. The article stated that although Wright had written a number of works, very few people had heard of him. I was intrigued and borrowed Black Boy, a nonfiction work published in 1945—the same year I was liberated from Auschwitz.

Black Boy chronicles Wright’s experiences in America’s Deep South as he endured poverty, illness and racism. I was shocked that an American child could be subjected to such terrible abuse and violence, not only at the hands of society, but his family as well. Soon after, I announced to my professor that I would write my MA thesis on Richard Wright. But I needed my professor’s approval first.

“I am not sure that a white woman not born in America will understand the Afro American experience”, he said. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I ultimately obtained permission after pressing my professor to consult with other committee members at the college.

While Wright’s sexual and violent imagery led to widespread bans on his books, I appreciated his honesty and empathized with his pain. He blamed institutionalized racism in America for the degeneration of his characters. They were intelligent, tortured and violent, which often led to murder. Searching for social justice, Wright joined the Communist Party for a decade but eventually quit, disillusioned by the lack of justice and its sheer hypocrisy. A party that supposedly stood for total equality among the working classes also espoused segregationism, which meant more racism. In an article called “The God That Failed”, Wright expressed his disappointment and disgust with communism. He died in self-imposed exile, in 1960, disenchanted and unaware of his influence on other writers.

I felt a certain kinship with Richard Wright. Even though we had very different backgrounds with different religions and skin colors, we both had endured abusive childhoods and had struggled to find meaning as wounded children in a harsh, racist society. His torment resonated with me.

I became pregnant with my daughter Risa while studying for my master’s. We named her after my mother. I was determined that any child of mine would have an upbringing free of hatred, unlike Wright’s and my own. Some of our neighbors had now become friends, and although money was tight, they gave what they could. Gifts of baby clothes, sheets and diapers made us feel as though we belonged to a community. Risa’s brother Gadi was born thirteen months later. During that Christmas, more gifts piled up outside our door, and although everyone knew we did not celebrate the holiday, they always argued, “Why should the children suffer?”

With two babies, life was hectic and there was little time for schoolwork. So we posted a flyer in the elevator offering free English and math tutoring in exchange for babysitting. After a slow initial response, we had gathered a few teenage girls requiring help with short composition essays whom we could trust with our babies. A twelve-year-old boy who was struggling with math also appealed for help. He couldn’t babysit because he was already taking care of his two young brothers, but Maier sat with him for hours going through numerical puzzles that became increasingly complex and challenging. The mysteries of math were unlocked and the boy made great progress. It still warms my heart that our tutoring deepened our relationship with our neighbors. Economic, educational and social differences melted away once we connected on an emotional level.

By early 1967, both Maier and I had finished our degrees and were ready to move on. Our neighbors threw a fantastic farewell party and we were very sad to leave. Little did we know that we were heading straight into another war.