My mother kept the details of her past as a Holocaust survivor to herself. Then one day she handed me a box of letters that started a new journey of understanding between us.
Unearthing History
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When my mother gave me a box of letters on the eve of cardiac surgery she feared she would not survive, I was bewildered. "My letters from the war," she announced that summer day, in 1991. I was aware that my mother, Sala, was a Holocaust survivor, the youngest of 11 children, and that most of her family had perished during the war. Beyond that, I knew almost nothing -- her early life in Poland and her experiences during the war were a mystery. My mother's silence about her past was so profound my siblings and I knew better than to ask questions. We could only look on with admiration at the person she had become: Mrs. Sidney Kirschner, the war bride of an American soldier she met in 1945, presiding over an apartment in Queens, New York, accompanying us on our school trips to the Statue of Liberty and cooking Thanksgiving turkey.
Inside the red box, which had once held one of my games, I found a collection of more than 350 letters she'd received while a prisoner in Nazi slave labor camps. Many of the letters were signed by her older sister Raizel, whom I knew as Aunt Rose. "I took her place in the camps," my mother explained. "I was only 16, but a tomboy and very daring. My sister was easily frightened, very shy and religious. I didn't know anything about a labor camp -- nobody did! -- but whatever it was, I was sure that I would find it easier than Raizel to adjust. So when she was ordered to report to a camp for six weeks, I told our parents that it was better for me to go. Somebody had to show up. They had no choice. They had to let me go."
Those six weeks in the camps turned into almost five years. My mother was in seven different camps altogether, part of a slave labor force attached mainly to construction projects or factories. Until late in 1943, prisoners were allowed to receive letters and packages. "But then we were supposed to return them," my mother explained. "You could be beaten if you were caught with anything personal." She told about how she risked her life to preserve the letters -- hiding them from guards during lineups, handing them off to friends, even burying them. I asked her why she risked her life for these letters, only to conceal them after the war, this time from her family. "Without them I did not want to live," my mother said simply. "But I wanted you and your brothers to be normal, just regular kids." She feared her history would be too much of a burden for us.
During the war my mother had received mail from some 80 different family members and friends, some who were still at home, others in other camps. Most of them were dead by the end of the war. My father urged her to put away the sadness of the past, so she took her letters out only occasionally. But when she held them, my mother said, "it was as if my family and friends were talking to me. I couldn't call them, I couldn't even visit their graves, but through their letters I could hear them." Their words told of the daily grind of finding food and work and often belied their dire circumstances. "Well, you wanted to know where we are working," Raizel and her sister Blima wrote in May 1943 when my mother was working at a textile factory. "Not with fine materials as you do, Sala. Only with cotton. It's clean and light work. We're working regularly, from 6 to 5 in the evening with one hour lunch in between. Are you also working regularly or in shifts?" They drummed up little nuggets of good news to bolster a young girl's spirits, and sometimes managed to find humor in their situation. "Imagine, now I sleep with dear mother," Raizel wrote tongue in cheek in April 1941 about the straw mattress she had to share. "Are you envious? I think you must be."
Sharing Her Story
my mother waited a long time to reveal her letters. And I waited a long time to propose an idea I'd been pondering. But in 2002, I suggested sharing the letters with the public by donating them to the New York Public Library. My mother's initial concern was whether anyone, other than me, would really care about these papers. But after decades of keeping them tucked away, she ultimately decided that she was ready to give them up.
When the letters were finally shown to the public in an exhibition that debuted last March, my mother went from being the most silent of survivors to a reluctant celebrity. Suddenly strangers were reading about her camp romance with a handsome Czech businessman named Harry, the intimacies confided by her friends. And, she protested, "does everyone have to know that I was born in 1924?"
I decided that although the letters would be seen by thousands of visitors to the library, there was more of my mother's story that needed to be told. So I became her biographer, spending months in research libraries and traveling back and forth to Europe retracing my mother's steps through her seven camps. With her permission, I began writing Sala's Gift. As I filled in historical details that were missing from the letters, I uncovered brutal facts that replaced what had been my mother's hazier version of what happened to her loved ones. She knew little of the massacre in her hometown and neighboring cities that began on August 12, 1942, when tens of thousands of Jews, including her parents and most of her siblings, nieces, nephews, and cousins, were killed in the streets or sent to Auschwitz and gassed. During a nightmarish selection process that went on for days, in brutal summer heat and torrential rains, with machine guns circling the crowd to maintain order, only her sister Blima was chosen among the family for a labor camp. When a Nazi guard turned away for a moment, Blima snatched Raizel away from the group designated for certain death. Neither sister had ever talked to my mother about that day or about the forced march they endured, walking almost 300 miles in the winter of 1945 without shoes or food, arriving half-dead in Bergen-Belsen, Germany. Although they survived, they had been badly weakened by the ordeal. Blima died of a heart condition, in 1955, at age 34. Aunt Rose was not able to bear children. Of the 11 siblings, only my mother would survive and bring a new family into the world.
My mother reviewed the manuscript of Sala's Gift carefully. No surprise. My smart mother turned out to be a wonderful editor and sensitive reader. But she was weighing more than words. When she encountered my description of her own deportation, she struggled to convey how and why her mother allowed a stranger to lead her youngest child to the train. "She didn't want to let me go!" she cried, lost in the memory of being pulled away from her mother. She turned my words around and around until she found the ones she needed to convey her mother's agony.
Telling my mother's story has been a journey of self-discovery for both of us. The letters have taught us about the power of friendship and laughter, and about the persistence of life and love amid the most horrific circumstances. And so each year we commemorate the day she gave me the letters. "I didn't know what would happen," she says. "But I didn't want to take the secrets with me. It was instinct to give them to you, and then a tremendous load was lifted. You did the right thing."
Source:Hindustanis.org
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