Submitted by Max J. Friedman
A Holocaust Property Story (of Sorts)
For most of my life — I’m 72 now — I avoided learning very much about my family’s Holocaust story. I had heard bits and pieces — actually more than my older sister and I could stand — from the earliest memories I can recall. I heard about Joseph Mengele selecting my aunt to go to the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Amon Goeth randomly shooting women who might be standing next to my mother from his villa window at Plaszow. I heard about the antisemitism that plagued both my parents from the time they were very young. And I spent 20 minutes when I was 20 years old hearing my father talk about the last time he saw his first wife and two children. He said it was the night before they were put on cattle cars from the small town where they lived in Poland for the journey to the train ramp at Auschwitz/Birkenau.
As you can guess, I had defined my parents — Sam and Frieda — in one way — as irreparably-damaged Holocaust survivors who lost everyone they ever knew and loved in the Holocaust, while spending nearly the entire six years of the war in ghettos, slave labor or concentration camps. They endured starvation, beatings, back-breaking labor and typhus. It was unimaginable and unfathomable. Yet, they met in Sweden, where they were sent to recuperate, after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen. That’s where my sister and I were born. Our family emigrated to the U.S. in 1952, but the traumas and scars, the nightmares and reimagined memories stayed with my parents for the rest of their lives. And as second generation Holocaust survivors, mostly my sister and I survived their survival. Collectively, the scars that remained on their lives and even in smaller, but still apparent ways, on our own would, would bear witness to what hate can do.
So perhaps it’s no wonder that I never asked my parents almost anything more about the details of their lives before the war or even what happened to them during the Holocaust. They did have a life before the war — but I didn’t know it, so I never gave it any thought. It’s the same way I said I didn’t have grandparents, because the truth is, we all do. I just never knew them or about them. It was enough for me to piece together a sad past that leaked out through their screams and terrors, their fights and fantasies. We didn’t want to upset the delicate balance that existed between their PTSD and past with the hard new life they sought to create for themselves and for us.
It wasn’t till 1994, just a few years before my mother died and a year after my father passed away from the Alzheimer’s I’m certain he had developed from the countless beatings around his head suffered at the hands of a Nazi criminal Kapo nicknamed Ossi, that something changed. My wife and sons convinced me to go to the movies to see Schindler’s List. It was there that I first saw and began to understand in graphic detail — even if just reimagined by a genius and sensitive filmmaker — the cast of characters and places my mother had described to me as a young child. Finally, I came to understand my mother’s story. My father’s tale, it turned out, was even more complicated. Yet I also knew that there was no happy ending for her family — since she was not a Schindler Jew. She hadn’t been lying to us all those years, at least not about that part of her past.
Four years later, we visited Halmstad, Sweden, my birthplace, and by pure chance, happened on a concentration camp survivor who knew my mother and father, and even showed us pictures of ourselves as babies. But it wasn’t until 2016 that I decided to find out more, spurred on by questions from my eight-year-old grandson about what it means to be a survivor like the great grandparents he never knew. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t answer his questions. So from that day, I set out on a five-year-long journey to learn more – about who my parents were, what their story was before the war and during the Holocaust, even what they might have been if it weren’t for the catastrophe that permeated their life and our own – the Shoah.
That brings me to October 2018 when my wife and I traveled to Poland (as well as Israel, Germany and later again to Sweden). I had an address — Jozefa 12 in the old Kazimierz Jewish quarter of Krakow – based on documents I uncovered. My mother lived there with her brothers and parents and later with her first husband. Her sister lived around the corner. We decided to visit that address and look for a dance studio near it that my mother claimed she and her first husband operated and that made them rich. It turned out the dance studio was a figment of my mother’s vivid and fractured imagination. It didn’t exist. But Jozefa 12 was real. And as it turned out, Jozefa 12 had become a tourist attraction in Krakow ever since Steven Spielberg used the tenement as a central location for the Krakow Ghetto, yes, in Schindler’s List.
I actually have a picture of myself sitting on the steps outside my mother’s two-room apartment watching scenes shot at that building depicting the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto. It was there and in buildings like that one, that real people lived, loved, married, raised families — and were transformed from families into victims, prisoners, burnt ashes or for a precious few — survivors.
And while before I had assiduously hidden from this past, this time at that place, as a guide took visitors through the “movie location” on their tour of Holocaust-related sites, I laid claim to this property as if it were my own. My mother’s family didn’t own the building. They didn’t own much of anything. But they had lived there for 25 years and as it would turn out, I was the only survivor who could represent them there at that moment. So I spoke up and told the guide and the tourists about mother and her family. I laid claim to my past in a very public way for the first time in my life.
“You know,” I said, “my mother lived in this building with her family and it was from here that she and they were taken to the actual Krakow Ghetto across the river, and from there to Plaszow, then to Auschwitz and finally, to Bergen-Belsen.” Then my voice cracked and tears appeared. I had never told anyone – let alone strangers — about any of that. But it would not be the last time.
On Yom HaShoah in April 2022, Painful Joy, my Holocaust Family Memoir, was published — tracing my parents’ lives from the time they were born through the horrors and losses of the Holocaust. The book remains an attempt to honor their memory and seeks to restore to them a measure of their full humanity. It tries to answer my grandson’s questions about surviving in ways I never thought I could. More than survivors, Sam and Frieda had become heroes, with life stories worth uncovering and then retelling. The second half of the book goes on to describe how their experiences, including their traumas, continued to affect their lives and our own in the U.S.
At Jozefa 12, Spielberg had discovered a building that he could use to relate a terrifying chapter inside an even more horrific series of events. And at Jozefa 12, I had finally found a tangible symbol of a past which I could finally begin to accept and from which I could build a family’s story as well as a new set of memories. And while some things change, some things remain the same. I’m afraid that antisemitism is still just around the corner — at Jozefa 12 and everywhere else.
