999, page 33
Walking up the steep hill to the old town of Poprad, Martha Mangel and her cousins, Eta and Fanny Zimmerspitz, returned to empty, ruined homes, the sole survivors of their families. Martha’s neighbor beckoned to her from the front gate and opened the door.
“I have something for you,” she said.
She took a spade and led Martha into the backyard, where they dug up a flannel, filthy with mud. Martha’s mother had come to the neighbor, just before they took her, and begged, “Keep these for Martha, if she ever returns.”
“And here you are,” the neighbor said, handing Martha the family heirloom. “And here they are.”
Martha’s hands trembled as she unwrapped the old flannel and saw the tarnished silver of her mother’s Shabbat candlesticks. It was all Martha had left. Her daughter, Lydia, still uses them today.
Eta tells a similar story. When she and her sister returned to Poprad, a gentile reconized them and said, “I want to talk to you.” Before the war, their father had loaned him 20,000 koruna. “I don’t want this money,” the man told them. He paid his debt back with the interest.
AFTER BERGEN-BELSEN was liberated, Bertha (#1048) found her sister, Fany, in a neighboring camp through one of the army chaplains. They reunited in a flurry of tears. Bertha says, “it was happy, and it was sad . . . We hadn’t seen each other in three and a half years.” Fany told her sister how the Germans were searching for Jews and had barged into the house where their elder sister, Magda, was staying. Magda hid in a cabinet. The Germans searched the cabinet and found Magda. When they came for Fany, she hid under the bed. The soldiers pushed the mattress down to see if anyone was under it, but Fany kept still and quiet, she wasn’t caught until 1944. Magda went straight to the gas.
At Bergen-Belsen, the Americans had given everyone ID cards and organized a truck for survivors who wanted to travel east toward Prague. Bertha and Fany had no money to travel, but they were able to show their numbers and get on a train. On the platform, Fany saw Mike Lautman, who had lived under false ID papers during the war. She introduced Bertha to Mike, and the trio traveled back to Slovakia together. They arrived in Bratislava, where the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) “put us up in a hotel, not a Hilton hotel, but good enough! It even had a kosher kitchen.”
Through other refugees, the girls learned that one of their brothers had worked as a partisan during the war and was still alive. They sent him a card. A few days later Emil arrived in Bratislava to take over the care of his little sisters. “He was the father, the mother, everything, and we were the little girls.” For a month, Bertha and Fany did nothing but recuperate. Meanwhile, Mike Lautman kept stopping by to make sure they were okay. Bertha smiles. “A few years later, he was my husband.” In their wedding photo, standing behind Bertha, is Elena Zuckermenn (#1735).
When Ruzena Gräber Knieža arrived in Bratislava, she found old friends to stay with temporarily. On the other side of the country, her husband, Emil, heard that she was alive and jumped on the night train to Bratislava. By eight o’clock the next morning he was at the Kornfields’ apartment, where Ruzena was still sleeping. “I was very weak and tired. They took him to the room where I slept. He woke me, and we fell silent. Suddenly, you saw everything before your eyes, all this long time, the years. After a while, the tears came.”
ON THE LAST leg of her monthlong odyssey home, Edith was thirty-five kilometers from Humenné when the train stopped in the town of Michalovce and looked like it might never move again. This was the town where Alice Icovic and Regina Schwartz and her sisters had once lived. Alice was on her way in a wagon. The Schwartz sisters were recovering in Stuttgart, Germany. Edith was alone.
Impatient, Edith paced back and forth on the platform, waiting for the all-aboard whistle. She was so close, yet so far from home, and she wondered if she should just start walking again.
“Aren’t you Emmanuel Friedman’s daughter?”
Edith looked down at a Jewish man—one of the few left—peering up at her face, blinking unbelievingly.
“I am.”
“Your father is here! At the synagogue!”
It was Shabbat? She had not kept Shabbat or had any day of rest in so long, she had forgotten all about it.
“Please, could you go to the synagogue and tell him that I am on the train?” she begged, unwilling to leave the platform in case the train started moving.
The man hurried to the shul, where he burst through the doors and shouted over everyone’s heads, “Emmanuel! Your daughter, Edith, is back from the camps!”
Emmanuel hurried out the door and up the street to the station, where the train was still waiting for the go-ahead and might continue to wait forever.
“Papa!” Edith ran toward her father’s arms. She ran for the embrace that would dispel the nightmare and bring her, the lost child, home.
He couldn’t touch her. Or wouldn’t. The air between them hardened. He did not speak a word. Not one word. This was her homecoming?
“Papa, why are you so odd?”
He looked shy of his own child. “Do you have lice?” he asked.
The guilt of his decision to send Edith and Lea to “work” hung heavily in his heart and he could barely face his surviving daughter. The chasm of war yawned between them.
She could tell he was crying on the inside. Sorrow tangled his voice so that he didn’t know how to speak to his own daughter. She was a stranger to him.
“Don’t worry, Papa. Everything is okay. Come home with me. Let’s find Mama and surprise her.”
“It’s Shabbes. I can’t travel.”
Edith looked at her father incredulously. “Papa, I was in hell, and I know that you can come with me. God does not care about that.” She beckoned him onto the train. He stepped into the passenger car, still without touching her.
When the train rolled forward, father and daughter shifted uneasily with it. Lumbering down the tracks, it swayed too slowly. Even the engine seemed to disregard the urgency of Edith’s quest. The longest part of her journey home was the shortest distance.
She had left as a child and was returning as an adult—a broken adult. Would her mother be as strange as her father? She had no idea what to expect. A naive desire that nothing had changed remained in a secret wheelhouse of hope. But Humenné was empty now. Of the two thousand Jewish families who had once lived there, maybe one hundred remained.
In Prešov, Giora Shpira discovered that he was one of three people in his school class to have survived. His government ID card numbered him fifteen. Out of a community of four thousand only fourteen Jews had returned to Prešov before him.
AMONG THOSE RETURNING to Humenné in the weeks after armistice were Lou Gross and his family. After hiding in the mountains and pretending to be gentiles for almost two years, even six-year-old Lou understood as they walked up Štefánikova Street that it would never again be referred to as Gross Street. There were too few Grosses left. But miracle of miracles, his grandfather, Chaim, was still alive.
The story is one that is still told around the Passover table: Grandfather Chaim was sitting on the stairs outside their house when the Hlinka Guard came to cart him off to Auschwitz. He had wrapped his beautiful, hand-embroidered tallis or prayer shawl, with its ivory, powder blue, and silver threads around his shoulders and planted himself on the stoop outside the family home. “I’m not going anywhere,” he told the guards.
They threatened to shoot him. He shrugged.
—So be it.
After much posturing bluster, the guards left Chaim sitting on the stoop alone because he wasn’t “worth the cost of a bullet.” His grandfather’s tallis belongs to Lou now, and he still wears it on special occasions.
THE FRIEDMANS NO LONGER lived in the same flat. They had moved into the apartment building where Ladislav Grosman’s sister had lived before the bomb wiped most of his family off the face of the earth. In the afternoons, Ladislav would often pause out front, grieving the loss of his parents, his sister, his cousins and aunts and uncles. He was standing there when the train whistle blew and Hanna hurried out the door.
“Mrs. Friedman, where are you running?” he yelled after her.
“I think my Edith is coming home!”
Who could believe it?
Hanna was at the station within minutes of the whistle announcing its arrival. She stumbled past the people standing on the platform, calling out Edith’s name, frantically looking for her daughter’s face.
As Edith exited the train, it did not seem possible that she was finally back in Hummené. Straining her neck, she caught sight of her mother and waved frantically. “Mama! Mama!”
Hanna fainted on the platform.
WHEN SHE CAME TO, Hanna couldn’t stop stroking her daughter’s face. Her hair. Her arm. She kissed Edith’s fingers and her palms. Kissed the tears from her daughter’s face. Thanked God and kissed Edith, again and again.
Arm in arm, they walked back toward Main Street. The hero of a thousand faces was a teenage girl on the verge of turning twenty. She had returned from the wars and bore scars in her mind, her soul, her leg, but she was alive. Too many of her friends and their families were not. The Jewish quarter was full of empty storefronts. Empty gardens. Empty streets. Empty homes.
There was the coffee shop where Margie Becker’s parents used to sell pastries—boarded up and vacant. Margie’s family was gone. There was the Moskovics’ house, where Annou had lived. Never again would Annou come over for bread-making day and eat Edith’s mother’s warm challah. There was Anna Herskovic’s house. Never again would Anna come pick up Lea to go to the movies. Never again would Adela toss her red hair in the breeze or pose for one of Irena’s photographs. Zena Haber would never grow into her height. Hinda Kahan and Klary Atles would never get married or have children or grow old. Helena’s niece, Aviva, would never turn eight. The ghosts of girlhood lingered.
Limping up the road like a soldier back from war, Edith’s reality was disjointed, surreal. Was this really her mother’s arm around her waist? Was this really her mother’s voice chatting in her ear? Outside the gate of their new apartment, Edith saw a wide-eyed Ladislav watching her, “as if he wanted to see what an actual girl looked like.” There were so few girls left, it wasn’t any wonder he was curious.
Looking at the handsome young man standing in the empty street, what did she foresee? Did she think, Here is my future husband? Or was it simpler than that? Was it just a greeting?
“Hi, Grosman. I know you.”
“I know you, too.”
And so they did.
Afterwards
If these women can tell us anything, it’s to look to the
future rather than the Short-term solutions, and look
to our children and grandchildren.
—KARA COONEY, When Women Ruled the World
“HE WAS THE LOVE OF my life.” After three years of knowing each day could be her last, suddenly Edith was free, alive, and in love with Ladislav Grosman. “I felt so much hope. So much hope for the world, for humanity, for our future. I thought, now the messiah will come. Now the world will change for good. Everything will be different now . . . It did not turn out like I thought.”
For one thing, she was terribly ill with tuberculosis. It would take another three years out of her young life to recover in a sanatorium in Switzerland. After surgery left her knee fused and unbendable, the doctor counseled Ladislav that her illness was so serious he should just “let her slip away quietly.” But Edith has never done anything quietly.
When she asked Ladislav if it would bother him that his young wife had a limp, Ladislav assured her, “If your soul would limp, that would bother me.” Her soul sings. She and Ladislav were married in 1949. After she recovered from TB, Edith finished her high school education and went on to study biology. She never became a doctor, but she did work as a researcher. Meanwhile, Ladislav got his Ph.D. in philosophy and began writing books, plays, and a screenplay. They were living in Prague when Ladislav’s film won the 1965 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, for The Shop on Main Street.
Not long after the Oscars, their good friend Rudolf Vrba announced that he was going on a “long vacation. You should go on vacation soon, too,” he warned. It was a risk for both of their families, but as Ladislav told Edith, “If the Nazis couldn’t keep Rudi in Auschwitz, the Soviets certainly aren’t going to be able to keep him in Czechoslovakia.” The Grosmans followed the Vrba family on a permanent vacation to the West and settled in Israel, where Ladislav continued to write. Just before he died, the Nobel Prize committee visited the Grosmans in Haifa, clearly considering Ladislav for the literary prize. But he had a heart attack a few days later and died without receiving the international renown he so deserved.
His literary artistry in The Bride helped me to better understand and capture the small-town drama of the first transport, inspiring and informing the scenes at the beginning of this book.
“My parents’ Prague friends were all typical middle-European Jewish intellectuals,” says George Grosman, Edith and Ladislav’s son, who continues his father’s artistic tradition as a jazz musician and composer. “Linguists, sociologists, writers, doctors. They would visit on weekends or we would go to their places. The contact was frequent. And invariably, over endless cups of sweet Turkish coffee and in the impenetrable haze of cheap cigarette smoke—everyone smoked then—talk turned to the war. It was usually my father who did the talking in our family, and his war experiences—though harrowing—were not as scary as my mother’s. I learned later that during those first decades after the war my dad didn’t like my mom to talk about Auschwitz. Growing up in Prague, in Communist Czechoslovakia, I never heard my mother speak about her Auschwitz experiences directly. And while I didn’t know much detail, I did see the number tattooed on my mom’s arm, and I knew there was this black cloud of unspeakable horror hovering over her, and over us. I’m sure it contributed in large measure to a feeling of existential anxiety that I’ve had all my life. A feeling that things are slightly unhinged, that the world isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems, that there is a danger in the air, even if it remains unspoken. I guess we are all secondhand survivors.”
DR. MANCI SCHWALBOVA (#2675) returned to Slovakia, where she continued to practice medicine after the war. She did not return to her fiancé, though. While in one of the deportation camps, her husband fell in love with a man. Evidently, Manci had also had an affair; hers was with one of the female kapos, a political prisoner. Edith laughs at the thought that Hitler may have hated homosexuals as much as he hated Jews, but “he turned Manci and her fiancé into Jewish homosexuals!”
Another little-known story about Manci that Edith tells is that in 1943, while still in Auschwitz, Manci was offered safe passage to Palestine and the opportunity to leave the camp. She told the administration in Auschwitz that she was needed and would stay. If she had made a different decision, this story would have had a very different ending.
Manci completed her medical studies at Charles University in Prague and became a licensed medical doctor in February 1947. She worked at the Children’s University Hospital in Bratislava and as a professor of pediatrics. Her memoir Vyhasnuté oi (Extinguished Eyes), 1948, was the first published account of the first transport.A second memoir was titled I Lived the Lives of Others. Neither of her books has been translated into English. She died on December 30, 2002, in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Unfortunately, the last names of other female doctors mentioned in the survivors’ testimonies are never stated, so I cannot say more about them or how they helped girls in such brutal circumstances.
Linda Reich Breder (#1173) testified in at least two trials against the SS. The first was in 1969, in Vienna, against SS Franz Wunsch and Otto Graf. The trial ignited tensions among survivors in Israel, because Helena Citron, by then married and living under her Hebrew name, Tsiporah Tehori, flew to Vienna to testify on Wunsch’s behalf.
“I never forgave her for that,” Eta Zimmerspitz Neuman (#1756) says. Edith says it was one of Helena’s deepest fears that she would be accused of being a collaborator and forced to leave Israel. At the trial in Vienna, Linda almost certainly knew that Helena came to testify, but she refrains from mentioning anything about Helena’s presence at the trial in her USC testimony.
Neither Wunsch nor Graf was found guilty. “They were sadists,” Linda says. “Even though I told them, and other witnesses told them. It didn’t mean a thing . . . . They were set free. They didn’t go to jail. What millions they brought out of Auschwitz, they took everything to Vienna—so they had ten lawyers and they went free.”
Twenty years later things would be different when Linda was flown to Germany to testify against another former SS, Gottfried Weise. The prisoners referred to him as Wilhelm Tell, because he liked to place cans on the heads and shoulders of little boys for target practice. After he shot the cans, he always shot the child in the face. Linda had witnessed one of those murders and had also been present when he bayoneted the Hungarian child one of the girls from Canada had thrown water to; Weise was also the SS who shot every tenth girl while they stood at attention.
“It was very weird,” Linda’s daughter, Dasha Grafil, tells me. “There were TV cameras and newspaper reporters and even high school students, who had come to hear my mom’s testimony.” The defendant “looked like a wealthy industrialist—you would never think this was a guy who killed people.”
Linda worried that this trial would be another fiasco like the Wunsch and Graf trial. As had happened in Vienna, the session started with the court grilling Linda for three or four hours. The judge and defense lawyers asked her a myriad of questions, but the fact was she knew more about Auschwitz than anyone else in the courtroom. “I remember everything what [Sic] happened fifty-five years ago, but I hardly can remember what happened yesterday, what I had for lunch.” She had a wry sense of humor.
