My Holocaust Read online

  In a moment alone with Nechama during the reception following Maurice’s talk, the two of them facing each other with their clear plastic wineglasses filled with sparkling cider, as if playing a couple just introduced at a social gathering, Norman casually mentioned—in another context entirely, he forgot what—that of course nobody really knew exactly what Maurice Messer had done during the Holocaust except that he had hidden in the woods all day and stolen chickens at night. No shame in that, of course, under the circumstances. “You just gotta face it, kiddo,” Norman went on, in the grip of something beyond his control, “he never shot in the woods—he shat in the woods!”

  “You mean Grandpa wasn’t really a partisan leader who fought the Nazis?” The child seemed genuinely shocked.

  Norman raised an eyebrow. His daughter was not being ironic. Maybe he had gone too far this time, maybe she really was an innocent, maybe she was just too fragile for this kind of realpolitik. Incredibly, it looked as if she truly had not fathomed until that moment that her grandfather’s story was just an innocuous piece of self-promoting fiction. For a devastating pause, Norman felt as if he might have violated his child in some irreparable, unforgivable way, but when, after a long silence to absorb the new information, she mischievously blurted out, “Okay, Dad, I won’t be the one to tell the Holocaust deniers that it’s all made up,” he breathed again with relief, impressed by how quickly she had caught on, how alert she was to where her interests lay and her loyalties belonged, how sophisticated she was in accepting human weakness as another amusing fact of life.

  “Look,” Norman intoned, “it’s not as if he didn’t really suffer. You think it’s easy being considered a victim all the time, having people feel sorry for you—especially for such a macho type like Grandpa? You’re a big girl now, Nechama, you can understand these things. The Shoah was an extremely emasculating event, as your mother might put it; strangers could come along and really screw you. For men like your Grandpa, this was very hard to take—so that afterward it became psychologically critical for him to find ways to prove that he hadn’t been castrated, that, to put it bluntly, he still had balls—and he turned himself into a resistance fighter. It’s as simple as that. Anyway, who’s going to be hurt by an old man’s little screenplay starring himself as the big hero?” He slowed down emphatically now to make way for the bottom line. “The Holocaust market is not about to collapse due to one old man’s pathetic inflations, trust me. Those loonies who say the whole thing never happened should not take comfort.”

  Should not take comfort, he had said—not take nechama. Anyway, it was from that time on, as he recalled it, that they began their tradition of delicious mockery, all in affectionate fun, whenever Maurice warmed up and delivered his partisan spiel. It had evolved into their own personal father-daughter thing. And it was the memory of this innocent conspiratorial bonding with his child that took possession of him now and overcame him.

  “Nu, Normie,” Maurice was saying, “yes or no? Why you not talking? You remember that hoo-hah mit the schwesters at the convent mit that crazy rabbi, like your mama calls him?”

  Maurice liked to quote his wife whenever possible, to whom he gallantly conceded superior mastery of English idiom and pronunciation, and whom he regarded as a nearly oracular source of common sense. For example, whenever the subject came up of that rabbi who had created an international incident with his protest against the presence of a Catholic convent at Auschwitz, where more than a million Jews had been gassed—the very same convent in which, in a more acceptable location ordained by the pope himself, their granddaughter Nechama was now a nun praying for the salvation of the souls of the Jewish dead—Blanche would open her eyes wide and exclaim, “But, darling, he’s crazy!” In consequence, Maurice never failed, when referring to that event at the old Carmelite convent, to include the epithet “that crazy rabbi”—as if the rabbi’s mental state were a certifiable clinical diagnosis, since Blanche, with her peerless common sense, had declared it to be so. Common sense, in Maurice’s opinion, was an exceedingly desirable quality in a woman, and there was a time when he had advised Norman to put it at the top of his list in choosing a mate. To which Blanche would always remark coyly, “When they tell you a girl has common sense, that’s code language for not so ay-yay-yay, if you know what I mean—in other words, not so pretty.” “Common sense together mit pretty,” Maurice would then chime in with alacrity, “just like mine Blanchie.”

  They discussed everything, he and Blanche, even the subjects they did not discuss. They discussed but did not discuss, for instance, their shared sense of the limitations of their Norman’s capabilities—it was not an understanding that they cared to seal in words. But around the time they sold their ladies’ undergarments company, Messers’ Foundations, from which they had made a more than comfortable living, the Holocaust had become fashionable, more fashionable even than padded brassieres and lycra girdles. At first, the two of them booked up their retirement by becoming leaders in the survivor community and popular lecturers on the oral-testimony circuit. The Holocaust was hot, no question about it. Blanche then urged Maurice to start the new consulting business, Holocaust Connections, Inc., and to take Norman in as an equal partner—“Make Your Cause a Holocaust,” as their smart-aleck Norman packaged it, he was just too much. It would be first and second generation working and playing together, an ideal setup, a perfect outlet for their Norman, the original futzer and putzer, as they lovingly called him, whose jobs until then, they both agreed, had been totally beneath him, totally unsatisfactory and unchallenging. Now Norman could hang around all day long, talking creatively with clients on the telephone, holding forth with all his brilliant opinions, cracking his wicked jokes, writing an article now and then for a Jewish newspaper, traveling and schmoozing in diplomatic channels and the corridors of power with all the other politicians and insiders and players—the best possible use of his considerable gifts and talents. Unspoken was their shared sense that Norman needed their help, that fundamentally he was a weak person, that he could never manage on his own. Never mind that he had gone to Princeton University—Princeton Shminceton!—where he had even taken part in a sit-in in the president’s office for three days and nights, though his mother had not hesitated to march right into the middle of that nonstop orgy to personally hand him his allergy medicine. Never mind that he had a law degree from Rutgers, where they trained poor schlemiels to become a bunch of creepers and crawlers. Never mind that he was an adult, to all appearances a grown man, with a social-worker wife and a beautiful but moody daughter. If the war broke out tomorrow, they knew in their hearts that their Norman would never make it. Without saying it out loud, they recognized that, unlike themselves, Norman would not have survived.

  Survival—that was the bottom line. You couldn’t argue with it. It was the fact on the ground that separated the living from the dead. That was the lesson they had struggled to drum into their Norman: first you survive, then you worry about such niceties as morality and feelings. When someone tells you he’s going to kill you, you pay attention, you take him seriously, you believe him. You wake up earlier the next morning and you kill him. If you survive, you win. If you don’t survive, you lose. If you lose, you’re nothing. What is rule number one for survival? Never trust anyone, suspect everyone, take it as a given that the other guy is out to destroy you and eat him alive before he gets the chance. Why had they survived? Luck, it was luck, they always said. But they didn’t believe it for a minute. It was the accepted thing to say, so as not to insult the memory of the ones who hadn’t survived, the ones who, let’s face it, had failed, the ones who were now piles of gray ash and crushed bone that people stepped on. The real truth, they knew, was that they had survived because they were stronger, better—fitter. Survival was success, but even among the successful, there were categories and degrees. Look at your survivors today, for example, the ones who had staggered out of the camps like the living dead. There were your classic greenhorns, eternal immigrants,
afraid to offend by harping on the Holocaust—why make a federal case of it?—a bunch of nobodies until they had their consciousness raised by the survivor elite, by Blanche and Maurice’s circle, the ones who survived with style, the fearless ones. “Me? I’m never afraid!” Maurice always said; it was his motto. Now, thanks to them, the Holocaust was a household word. They built monuments and museums. They were millionaires, big shots, movers and shakers. They ran the country. Survival of the fittest. Blanche had once read in a magazine that cancer cells were the fittest form of life because they ate everything else up, they spread, they reproduced, they succeeded, they survived, they won. Maybe this wasn’t such a wonderful example; maybe this didn’t reflect so nicely on her and Maurice and the rest—to be compared to cancer. Cancer was bad, but in this world if you survive, you win, and if you win, you’re good.

  They were a formidable team, Blanche and Maurice Messer, a fierce couple, and proud of it. For their fortieth wedding anniversary, Norman and Arlene had given them a plaque engraved with the words “Don’t Mess with the Messers,” which they hung in “Holocaust Central,” their den off the living room, right above the composition that Nechama had written when she was eight years old, in third grade. The topic was “My Hero”; Nechama had chosen Maurice. “Grandpa had a gun in World War II. He killed bad Germans with the gun. He was a Germ killer. He saved the Jewish people. He loved the gun. He kissed the gun goodnight every night. He slept with the gun. After the war they gave Grandpa a ride on a tank. He was holding the gun. Then they took the gun away. Grandpa was sad. He cried because he missed his gun. So he married Grandma.” The teacher gave her only a “Fair” for this effort, but Blanche said, “What does she know? It’s not by accident that she’s a teacher,” and she hung the composition, expensively framed, on the wall. “I’m the gun,” she asserted defiantly. Maurice also didn’t much care for this composition. “What for is she telling the ganze velt this partisan story? It’s private, just for family.” “What are you worrying about, Maurie?” Blanche demanded. “Every survivor is a partisan. Survival is resistance.” “Don’t be so paranoid, Pop,” Norman put in. “It’s safe to come out of the closet now.” Then, swallowing deliberately and pausing pregnantly, he added, “Ziggy and Manny and Feivel and Yankel, and everyone else who was with you in the woods in those days, they’re all dead by now, may they rest in peace—and quiet.”

  Again, it was a question of survival, this time the survival of the Jewish people in an age of assimilation and intermarriage and the mixed-blessing decline of anti-Semitism in America—another Holocaust, frankly, even more dangerous in its way because it was insidious, invisible, underground. There was nothing that Blanche and Maurice would not do to ensure Jewish survival, no effort or sacrifice was too great, and, as they knew very well, there was nothing like the Holocaust to bag a straying Jew—it was the best seller, it was top-of-the-line, it got the customer every time. Why did God give us the Holocaust? For one reason only: to drive home the lesson that once a Jew, always a Jew. You could try to blend in and fade out, you could try to mix and match, but it was all useless, hopeless. There was no place to hide, no way to run. Hitler with his Nuremberg Laws of racial and blood purity, almost as if he’d cut some kind of deal with the anti-intermarriage rabbis, would find you wherever you were and flush you out like a cockroach. Thank you, Mr. Hitler!

  And what could be more effective in sending this message loud and clear than a partisan leader and his wife—herself a survivor of three concentration camps, maybe four, depending on how you counted—telling their story over and over again until they were blue in the face, pounding in nonstop, day and night, the lessons of the Holocaust. Whatever it took to beat in the message, even if it meant pushing themselves into the limelight in crude ways that ran thoroughly counter to their nature, even if it meant giving the misleading impression that they were exploiting the dead, they would do it, not for personal fame and glory, God forbid, but for the cause, because this was their mission, this was why they had been chosen, it was for this purpose that they had survived. They were the first generation, the eyewitnesses. Norman was the connecting link. Nechama was continuity.

  Yes, continuity. She was their designated Kaddish, their living memorial candle, the third generation. And now she was a Christian. This was tragic—tragic! How could it have happened? Who could ever have foreseen such an outcome? It was beyond human imagining. They had thrown everything they had into that girl, she had always been the ideal apprentice and protégée. She was, as Maurice used to say in his speeches, the spitting image of his mother, Shprintza Chaya Messer the guerrilla fighter, murdered by the Nazis during the roundup in Wieliczka while screaming at the top of her lungs, “Fight, Yidalech, fight!”

  To this day, people still talked about Nechama’s bat mitzvah speech—how she had turned to address the ghost of the Vilna girl with whom she had insisted on being twinned with the words, “Rosa, my sister, you were cruelly cut down by the Nazis during the Holocaust. You never had a bat mitzvah. Today I give back to you what was so wrongfully taken away—because today I am you.” Arlene, with her naive American O-say-can-you-see attitudes, had called this gruesome, morbid, a form of child abuse, and had threatened to walk out of the sanctuary, but everyone else felt spiritually uplifted and morally renewed by Nechama’s words, and wept contentedly. And who could forget the Holocaust assemblies that Nechama had organized in high school, at which either Maurice or Blanche gave testimony, and once even Norman, as the ambassador of the second generation, addressed the teenagers with their yellow paper stars for Jews pinned to their Nine-Inch Nails T-shirts, pink triangles for homosexuals, black triangles for Gypsies, and especially who could forget Nechama’s original dance composition, presented each year, entitled “Requiem for the Absent,” with the flowing, twisting scarves and the arms reaching poignantly toward the heavens? She had always been so proud of her family, those Holocaust relics who would have mortified your average adolescent, and had even invited her grandparents and her father to accompany her to Poland for the March of the Living, with thousands of other Jewish girls and boys from all over the world, but she was in a class apart, she was a Holocaust princess. And she wasn’t ashamed of the VIP treatment that she then received because of her family’s position in the Holocaust hierarchy, and she wasn’t embarrassed to walk at a slower pace alongside the old folks for the three-kilometer march from Auschwitz to the actual killing center in Birkenau, with its remains of the gas chambers and crematoria, and ash and powdered bone underfoot; she had turned to them and said, they would never forget it—“I see them, I hear them, I feel them, the dead are walking beside us.” And then there was her essay on her college application in which she had written, “The one thing about me that you may or may not have learned so far from this application is that I am, in the most positive and constructive sense, a Holocaust nut. What this means is that I am totally obsessed by the Holocaust, the murder of six million of my people, and am determined to do everything in my power to make sure that these dead shall not have died in vain.” “Beautiful, beautiful,” Maurice declared, “like the Shtar Shpangled Banner!” She was rejected by Princeton, even though she was legacy, because deep down they were, as Maurice put it, “a bunch of anti-Semitten and shtinkers.” So she went to Brown.

  With such Holocaust credentials, who would ever have predicted that she would turn her back on her people and become, of all things, a nun? Convent and continuity—these were two concepts that definitely did not go together, they did not mix well, they were not a natural couple. The idea of a nun was foreign to Jewish thinking; among Jews every girl got married one way or another, every girl had children, and if one didn’t—well, that just never happened, who ever heard of such a thing? Ever since she was a little girl she had talked so movingly about how she would have at least twelve children to help make up for the millions who had been murdered—heads bashed against stone walls, hurled alive into flaming pits, shot and gassed. She was going to be a baby machine
for Jewish continuity. She was a pretty girl, everyone remarked—a little full maybe, “zaftig,” as Maurice said; “baby fat,” said Blanche. Her favorite food, according to family lore, was marzipan, and even that preference was regarded as a sign of her superiority; it was so European, so Old World—what ordinary American Mars Bar kid knows from marzipan? The boys who were attracted to her were usually considerably older, usually foreigners. One of the family’s favorite stories was about how she had stayed out very late one night, and when she finally came home, at five in the morning, her excuse to her parents was that this Salvadoran guy named Salvador had asked her out, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so she had to explain to him that she could never date a non-Jew because of the Holocaust—it was nothing personal, but it was her duty to replace the six million. And then, of course, she had to tell him the whole history of the Holocaust so that he’d understand where she was coming from—starting with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and so forth until the end of World War II in 1945, which took a long time, which was why she was so late, she hoped they weren’t mad. “So what did Salvador say?” Norman asked, obviously not mad at all, obviously swelling with pride. “Oh, he said, ‘I only asked you out for a cup of coffee. I didn’t ask you to marry me.’ But that’s not the point.”