|
GEDDY LEE November 14th, 2023 with Daniel Richler |
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapters 7-28
Acknowledgments
Photo Section
About the Authorv Also by Geddy Lee
-Neil Peart
As a comic in all seriousness
-Eugene Levy, as Bobby Bittman
You probably know me as Geddy Lee, but my birthname was
Gershon Eliezer Weinrib, after my maternal grandfather who was
murdered in the Holocaust. As per tradition, my mom, her sister and
her brother all named their first-born male children in his honour;
my two cousins and I, all of us born within a couple of years of one
another, were given that same first name, Gershon.
In the old country my family spoke both Yiddish and Polish, the
former being the language they used at home and whenever they
didn’t want the Poles to understand what they were saying. So my
family all had both Yiddish and Polish names, too. Mom, for
example, was known as both Manya and Malka. On most of the
official documents I’ve found, their Yiddish names were used but
sometimes spelled unrecognizably, as they would have been
pronounced by some bureaucrat in the Polish or German
government - or, after the Second World War, the International
Refugee Organization.
As was the case with my grandfather, whom I've seen referred to
as Gershon, Gierszon, Garshon and Garszon, identification for the
emigres was never a simple matter. My father’s name, for example,
had its own set of complications. His full Yiddish name was Moshe
Meir ben Aharon Ha Levi, yet in an old passport that I recently
discovered, it’s spelled out as Moszek Wajnryb and its anglicized
translation, Morris Weinrib. I’d never even heard the name Moszek
before; my mom and our family usually called him Monyek, Moishe
or simply Morris.
After eleven days at sea, on December 20, 1948, the ship carrying my parents from Germany docked in Halifax, Canada. They
barely spoke any English as they walked down that ramp, so when
they registered with customs and immigration, the official came up
with anglicized approximations of their names, beginning with the
same first letter. Thus Manya became “Mary” and Moishe became
“Morris,” and in turn when their children were born, they gave us
each a Jewish name and its English equivalent: in my case, Gershon
and “Gary.”
My middle name is Eliezer, but from kindergarten through the end
of public school, I answered at roll call to “Gary Lorne Weinrib.”
Confused? I was too! When I turned sixteen and was preparing to
apply for a driver's licence and a Canadian Federation of Musicians
card, I asked my mother for a copy of my birth certificate, which she
duly requested from the government. When it arrived, I opened the
envelope and found myself listed as Gary Lee Weinrib. WTF?
“Mom,” I said, “what’s going on here? It says my middle name is
Lee, not Lorne!”
She looked away, thought about it for a moment and said with a
sheepish laugh, “Oy, takeh. Yah. I tink maybe you vere Lee... Your
cousin, Me was Lorne. I forgot....”
Huh? You forgot? I’m not sure which freaked me out more: my
sudden loss of identity or the fact that my own mother couldn't
remember my effin’ name.
I recently discovered that my cousin Gary Rubinstein was in fact
the actual recipient of the middle name Lorne. The best explanation
I have for the mix-up is that, since Mom would have been speaking
English for only a few years by the time I was born, the anglicized
take on Eliezer was for her just an afterthought. And after she and
her siblings made a group decision to name all their first-born male
children after my grandfather, she misremembered which middle
name they'd agreed on for me.
But wait... There’s more.
My mom usually called me Garshon at home, saving Gary for
when we were out in public. Then one day in my early teens, I was
hanging out in front of our house with my pal Burd when she called
me indoors for supper.
“Hey,” Burd said. “If your name is Gary, how come your mom
calls you Geddy?”
“She doesn't,” I said. “Her accent only makes it sound like that.”
He laughed and said, “Well, I’m gonna start callin’ you Geddy
too!” And that was that.
When I turned pro, the musicians’ union application form asked
for “professional, stage or band name” and I thought, How cool.
Perhaps I should be ashamed of this, but in my desperation to
assimilate into a less ethnic world, I didn’t think “Weinrib” sounded
very rock and roll. Lennon, Plant, Clapton, Moon and Hendrix-now,
those were effin’ rock star names. (In an attempt at self-justification,
I asked myself if Robert Allen Zimmerman had had similar fears
before he became Bob Dylan.) So I combined my nickname and
rediscovered middle name to create a professional moniker for
myself and legitimize my new aspiring identity.
A few years later I took that even further and changed my first
name legally to Geddy. By then, even my siblings were calling me
Geddy or Ged, so it was all good. To people who asked, I’d explain
that it was like in Leave It to Beaver, where the kid's real name was
Theodore but everyone, even his parents, called him “The Beaver.”
At any rate, as you can see, I had two identities right from birth:
“Gershon Eliezer” and “Gary Lorne.”
And now “Geddy Lee” made three...
You may naturally assume that I grew up in a house rich in music,
that my desire to play must have grown out of musical influences all
around me. But music was in little evidence in my childhood home.
The radio was always on in the car, but I don’t recall Dad ever speaking about music, or mentioning any artists he liked, or even
humming along as we drove. I just thought music didn’t register
with him.
It wasn’t until many years after his death, when I was playing a
show in Detroit and reconnected with the family of his only surviving
brother, Sam, living in the suburbs of the Motor City, that my aunt
Charlotte let slip some startling information.
“It's so nice zat you have become a musician,” she said casually.
“After all, so was your father” As my brain reeled, she continued,
“Oh, yes, back in za old country, he played za balalaika, I zink.
Parties, bar mitzvahs, weddings and so on.”
All I could muster was a “Really?” It seemed so out of character
with the man I thought I’d known that I wasn’t ready to believe
what she was saying. Was he really a “player”? If so, music must
have thrilled him in his early life and . . . oh man, what questions I
would have loved to ask him. But foremost in my mind was why my
mother had never mentioned it. Seeing as I was a professional
musician by that time, you’d think it would have been a pretty vital
tidbit to share with me, no? I was more perplexed than angry, and
immediately after getting home from that leg of the tour I asked her
to verify the story and give me an explanation.
Visibly embarrassed, she proceeded to relay this to me... Fora
while after their liberation my parents lived in Germany at the
Displaced Persons camp at Bergen-Belsen, formerly the officers’
quarters of the concentration camp where my mom, her mother and
her sister had been incarcerated for the final months of the Second
World War. (Obviously this is a much bigger story, and one that I will
be telling you.) They then moved into an apartment in a nearby
town, trying to put their lives back together as so many survivors
were, and finally committed to emigrating to Canada. As they were
readying for departure, my dad declared that he was packing his
balalaika, but my mom refused to allow him to “schlep dat feedef’
across the ocean with them. She regarded the instrument as
superfluous, his musical endeavours an indulgence they could ill
afford as they forged a new life in a new land. This, she now told
me, was a decision she’d long regretted. It was a heartfelt and meaningful confession, and for me a revelation as to my own
inherent musical aptitude. I guess I came by it honestly! It’s in my
effin’ genes! Yet, sadly, it also goes a long way to explain my father’s
silence on all things musical and so many other joys of life. Looking
back all those years later, I had to wonder if I’d missed any signs of
his musical soul. Perhaps the decision to buy a piano so my sister,
Susie, could take lessons was his way of planting a musical seed
and, as such, connecting with his buried past. But I will never know.
I was six or so when my parents bought that piano-primarily for
Susie, who was two years older than me. Apparently, they thought
this was what well-raised Canadian schoolchildren did. A piano
teacher was hired, and as Susie did battle with the keyboard, I'd
quietly listen to the lesson from the next room or hiding under the
table. She came to play well enough to participate in a school recital
but didn’t stick with it. After I’d enjoyed some success in music, by
contrast, my mom liked to relate how, once the teacher had left, I
would hop on the piano stool and, by ear, pick out the melodies
Susie had been learning- "prefectly,” as she insisted. Like any big
fish tale, this story was most definitely enhanced over time. I do
recall tinkling the ivories after Susie’s lessons, but I can assure you I
was no Glenn Gould.
In the earliest memory I have of my father, the three-year-old me is
at the picture window of our Shaw Street home in downtown
Toronto, waiting for him to return from work. The winter light of day
is fading into dusk - always a melancholy time for me, even now -
and I can hear the tinny fanfare of The Mickey Mouse Club on
television in the background. I watch him coming down our street
from the streetcar stop at the corner, up the walkway and into the house with a tight smile and a weary Ich bin shoyn aheym‘I’m
home, already!” He brushes by me on his way to the kitchen, goes
straight to a high-up cupboard and takes out a bottle of Canadian
Club rye whiskey. He pours himself a snort, knocks it back, then
smacks his lips and makes a sound I always remember with a smile
of my own, “Ahh...” It was only after he’d had his schnapps that
he felt rid of the day’s grime and could pick me up and give me a
kiss, playfully scratching my face with his five o’clock stubble. (I can
smell the liquor on his breath as I type these words.) Then he puts
me down and goes on to do the same to Susie, and finally hugs and
kisses Our mom.
This handsome man with dark European looks came to Canada in
1948 with the proverbial ten dollars in his pocket and the love of his
life on his arm. Moishe and Manya stepped foot on their new
homeland as Morris and Mary - anglicized personae for an anglicized
world - seeking a fresh start in a dominion unscarred by war and
genocide. Morris already had family here: a sister, Rose (Ruchla),
who had left Poland for Toronto before the war. For someone who
had lost both of his parents, five siblings and countless other family
members, all murdered by the Nazis, reuniting with her was the
urgent and natural thing to do. Soon after their arrival, the
remainder of my mother’s family chose to join her and Morris in their
great Canadian adventure: her sister, Ida; brother, Harold; and their
spouses, but most important, her mother, another Rose and the
heroine of the Rubinstein tribe, as I will show you in time.
My dad was a loving father, but strict. He had an explosive
temper, but it took a lot to trigger it. I pause here, because it seems
unfair to mention any of the few bad moments in my short life with
him; unfair because the fact that he survived the war, the fact that
he made it to the blessed shores of Canada at all, is a miracle.
Suffice it to say that I was pretty accomplished at provoking him,
and as with most parents of his generation, if any of us kids did
something really wrong, well, we'd get an ass-whooping.
We knew that he and Mom cared deeply for each other. They
argued sometimes, but hey, that was life in a Jewish home. What
seems like shouting to gentiles (or “white people,” as we sometimes referred to them) was just a regular conversation around our dinner
table. When the whole family got together for the High Holidays...
my god, it was a shouting match! But the love my parents had for
each other won out over any argument, and they were
demonstrative about it. I remember when I was about eight years
old, Dad must have been feeling amorous. We were watching TV
when he surreptitiously raised his arms above his head to get my
mom’s attention and made a scratching motion with one hand in the
opposite palm. I didn’t know what that meant until the kids at school
told me it was a signal for sex. Wow, really? Ew!
Both our parents worked hard. Motivated to build a new life and
raise a family, they held down factory jobs on Spadina Avenue, the
hub of Toronto's shmatte industry, which, like many greenhorns
when they first landed, they referred to simply as “on Spadina.” Once my mom had Susie, and me two years later, she stopped work
and it was up to my dad to hustle a living and pay the bills. It helped
that they also received reparations from the German government,
but we were a decidedly working-class family without much spare
cash or time for the pursuit of frivolous hobbies like music. With no
money for hotels or fancy holidays, we did like many immigrants still
do in Toronto: on Sundays we picnicked with my family and cousins
on Toronto Island or in High Park. The men would sit on a blanket
playing cards and laughing, and I always could hear my dad's voice
louder than the others’; They drank Red Cap Ale and Carling Black
Label; if you’re a Canadian, you'll remember those stubby little
bottles. (I remember sneaking away once to taste a Black Label, but
to me at that age it was just god-awful.)
At one point Dad was hired by a distant cousin to work in his
“shoddy mill." He rose in the ranks to a position of some authority,
but one day came home ranting that he’d been unfairly treated by
his own cousin and in a rage had quit his job. It didn’t take him long
to bounce back, though. He found a partner and proudly started a
business of his own, Lakeview Felt. I remember going there with him
and wandering around the wide-boarded floors in awe of the
machines and the odors of wool and oil. But that, too, came crashing
down when, at the first sign of struggle, the partner panicked and
made a quick deal behind his back with his former boss. After that
betrayal Dad was unemployed for a lengthy period. I remember him
being around the house and down in the dumps while he looked for
Opportunities. Then he decided he no longer wanted to worry about
partners or factory life at all and started looking for a small retail
business instead. He eventually found a little variety store called
Times Square Discount in the burgeoning town of Newmarket,
Ontario. That was a pretty bold move on his part, since he’d never
worked in retail before, but he ran it well, the locals liked him a lot
and there was even an article in the local newspaper reporting on
him as a boon to the community.
After the war and throughout my childhood, Toronto’s immigrant
population was bent on moving north. My mother used to say the
Jews were the first, and when they went even farther out the Italians would move in and so on, like hand-me-down
neighbourhoods. It was an exodus from Toronto’s crowded, grimy
downtown, where they had little choice but to live and work when
they’d first arrived. The charm of a home with older bones was lost
on them. This was the New World, after all; they wanted a New
World house with a new kitchen, a two-car garage with a backyard
and space between the houses on either side, as different as they
could get from the crowded, battered buildings they'd left behind in
Europe. Our first house had been a rental on Crawford Street, in
what’s now known as Little Portugal, which is where my sister, Susie,
was born; when I came along we moved to another, one block over,
on Shaw Street. By the time I was five they had scraped enough
money together to actually buy a house, and that investment took
them north to 53 Vinci Crescent, a small bungalow in the North
Toronto suburb of Downsview.
Situated on the crescent, we were blessed with a large triangular
slice of property and a rare bower of plum and apple and cherry
trees in the backyard, a blissful Garden of Eden that transcended our
humdrum location. I’d play there with my friends and, towards the
end of summer, pick off the ripest fruit. The blackberries were pretty
sweet, though the plums were never as ready to pluck as my
parents insisted they were. Maybe it was wishful thinking on their part, but most likely they were relishing the fact that, after all they
had survived during the war, here they were now in their own home,
growing their own fruit, which, ripe or not, tasted of ... well,
freedom. And to this day I, too, have a taste for plums that are a
little hard and tart.
Fruit trees aside, what were these suburbs like? In a word, bland. In
two words: mind-numbingly bland. The architecture was
unimaginative and repetitive, practically but not aesthetically built,
with garages jutting out in front of the houses - the inescapable
message being that cars were more important than the people who
lived there. The neighbourhoods were virtually treeless, the
backyards big but mostly empty except for the occasional swing set,
with metal or wooden fences so low you could stick your nose into
your neighbours’ business. Ironically, many years later when my son,
Julian, was the same age and we’d take him to the suburbs to visit
my mom, he never wanted to leave. He’d ask, “How come we can't
live in the suburbs like Bubbe does? It’s so clean and beautiful.”
Yikes! One child's ceiling is another one’s floor, I guess.
To my parents, of course, the burbs must have seemed like
heaven, a safe place where their kids were free to play in the streets
or ride off on their bikes pretty much anywhere, but the reality was
that having survived the war, they had other things on their mind,
like building a new life. Today every minute of a child’s day is
monitored, but in those days there was neither the time nor the
inclination for helicoptering. As children themselves under
bombardment, they’d have routinely been sent on hazardous
missions such as dashing out for loaves of bread; now they’d look up
from their work benches only if they heard we’d gotten into serious
trouble - and they didn’t know the half of what we got up to. I
remember one time we rode our bikes over to my new school, when
we saw some older boys climbing up a drainpipe to retrieve a load of
tennis balls that other kids had lost up there. We climbed up after
them - or at least I did, for when I looked around, I realized my pals had decided against it and split. I scrambled about the rooftop and
collected as many balls as I could while they shimmied back down.
Only then did I fully realize how high up I was, how much scarier it
would be to descend than it had been to climb. I tried to slide down
a drainpipe but slipped and landed flat on my back with the wind
knocked right out of me, gasping up at the vast blue dome of
suburban sky. I eventually limped home with my bike and my swag,
snuck past my mom, who was preparing dinner, and got into the tub
to soak my aching body. I was sore for days. Did anyone notice?
Nope, but hey, that was a kid's life back then.
At Faywood Public School I was something of a loner, a quiet kid
who rarely got into trouble. I did my schoolwork in my _ usual
unnoticeable and less-than-stellar manner, with no particular passion
for any particular subject. My report cards consistently featured
comments to the effect of “If he would only apply himself, he could
do very well,” or “Gary has a tendency to daydream in class.” I
remember thinking, What does "apply himself” even mean? I was a
classic underachiever, neither bad enough to fail nor good enough to
excel. It's a common mistake to assume that when a kid (or an adult
for that matter) is quiet, he must be some sort of deep thinker. In
my case I’m afraid it was simply that I didn’t have much to say. Not
all still waters run deep.
In grade five, I sang in the school choir-that was one thing I can
say I really did enjoy. (It will come as no surprise to you that I was a
soprano.) I attended practices for the Leonard Bernstein musical On
the Town as an alternate, meaning I’d only get to perform if
someone fell ill. The night of the play, I was sort of dopily wandering
around the school looking for where the alternates got to hang out
and must have looked lost. A teacher I had previously seen in the
schoolyard and pegged for someone pretty mean came up to me
and asked what I was up to. I shrugged kinda pathetically. He said,
“Follow me!” and took me up to a little room where the spotlights
were operated. “How would you like to help out?” he said, and for
the two-night run I swung those big scorching Klieg lights to and fro
across the stage. It was total magic up there, way more fun than
singing in the choir. To see the production from that perspective was surreal, and I loved being part of the crew. My first taste of show
business, thanks to a kind man who made me feel useful and
valued. Thank you, Mr. Geggie.
Oh, before I continue, here’s a piece of trivia from my public
school days: there was a boy in my class named Rick Moranis. Yes,
the Rick Moranis of Ghostbusters and Little Shop of Horrors fame.
We weren't close friends or anything but were in the same class
every year from kindergarten right through to grade six. In 1981, by
which time he’d become successful as one of the McKenzie Brothers
in the “Great White North” sketches on SCTV, he asked me to sing
the lead on a song called “Take Off!” for their comedy album, The
Great White North. That would be my first entry into the Top 20 and
the biggest hit single of my career!
Around grade four or five, nerd that I was, I started collecting
stamps. My starter collection was a beat-up old album my father
gave me. For years, I was under the impression that it had been his
own, but I don’t remember him ever showing any interest in
philately, and knowing what I know now about his life in the
aftermath of the war in Europe, I suspect that he either acquired it
on the black market there or, most likely, it had been given to him in
Canada and he passed it on to me. Anyway, there was a kid in my
class I’d go to hobby shops with, whenever I could afford it, to buy
stamps from far-off countries. While Canadian stamps looked dull to
me, featuring nothing but variations on Queen Elizabeth's profile, I
was transported by colourful designs from mysterious and exotic
sources like “Republique du Togo” and “Magyar Posta.” I embraced
stamps as a way of seeing the world from my bedroom (or my desk
during exceptionally boring math classes), and considering my
obsessive, almost addictive nature, I think of them now as a
gateway drug of sorts. Those stamps were, you could say, my first
art collection.
Just before I started grade six in the spring of 1964, Mom and Dad,
with three young kids under the roof now (my brother, Allan, was
born in 1960) and facing a daily hour-long commute, decided to look
for somewhere to live closer to the store. We searched even farther
north, to the very edge of the city, and found a brand-spanking-new
house on Torresdale Avenue in the brand-spanking-new suburb of
Willowdale, which was even more suburban than Downsview; newer
but starker and soulless. Viewed from above, you would have seen a
town planner’s map of some ideal future suburb, the trees mere
saplings, with houses like some Lego construction and little plastic people on the grid-like streets. It was the very edge of town, like in
Pete Seeger’s song “Little Boxes,” where “they all get put in boxes,
and they all come out the same.” All we’d do as teens was dream of
moving downtown where everything was happening, where the
hippies were, where the musicians hung out. The farther you got
from the epicenter of cool, the less cool you felt, and where we
were, you couldn’t be more disconnected from cool.
The mention of “Willow Dale” and “the River Dawn” in “The
Necromancer,” the song Rush would one day write for Caress of
Steel, was a jokey reference to that bland suburbia we were all
trying to get away from - Pleasantville, if you like. And eight years
later, with “Subdivisions,” we were trying to express more seriously
the same dead-end feelings of isolation and almost painful yearning.
Apparently that song rang true for a lot of people - including guys
like the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, who’s said he
believes it has “actually saved lives.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but
it has definitely resonated powerfully with a great many individuals
who, listening to it in their identical housing units on the great
suburban matrix, at least realized they were not so alone.
Willowdale was more a tile in a mosaic than the idealized
Canadian melting pot of cultural influences. I hesitate to use the
word “ghetto,” considering the real ghetto conditions my parents
barely survived in Poland, but our neighbourhood was made up
mainly of Jewish families, across the tracks from the older farm
community beyond the city limits - the main east-west thoroughfare
of Steeles Avenue. Not all of those folks were pleased to see a
burgeoning Jewish community on their patch; antisemitism was still
rife in those days, handed down to a fresh new generation of hate-
mongering teenagers. The farm boys and other locals were on the
lookout for young ethnics like me to terrorize.
I was a particularly easy target: shy to begin with and self-
conscious about my outstanding nose. I’d already been razzed about
it from time to time, but the abuse was worse now, and growing my
hair long, as I started to at around twelve in my earliest emulation of
my rock and roll heroes, further stoked the ire of those goons. The
neighbourhood was too new to have a junior high, so we were bussed to the nearest one, R. J. Lang Elementary and Middle School,
about fifteen minutes’ drive away. On arrival every day, we “Jews
from Bathurst Village” had to briskly walk the gauntlet across the
yard to the main entrance; if you broke into an actual run, you were
asking to be chased. Sometimes the waiting kids would stand there
unnervingly silent, watching our every move; other times they
taunted us, jeering, “Dirty Jews,” pushing and shoving until fights
broke out - even between the girls. Not exactly the way the world
looks at us nice polite Canadians, eh?
I wouldn't rush to call it antisemitism, necessarily; more than
anything it was a territorial war. These jerks trolling the streets and
hallways for Jews to torment beat on anyone who didn’t fit into their
worldview. They really weren't all that discerning. But come to think
of it, as the Chosen Fucking People we did get singled out for special
treatment. Okay, yeah, I’ve changed my mind. It was antisemitism.
One time in the hallway, as I was bending over to retrieve
something from my locker, I was shoved from behind and rammed
right into it with my head and ears stuck inside, and humiliatingly
had to be helped back to my feet. Another time after school, I was
standing with a friend at a bus stop smoking a cigarette (yeah, lots
of us smoked at twelve back then; if you could puff on an Export “A”
without coughing your head off - which I could not - you were a real
man) and when I threw the finished butt away, a couple of farm
boys strode up and pushed me hard, and one menacingly said, “Hey.
I didn't like the way you threw that away.”
“Uh, okay. Sorry. Sorry,” I said, holding my breath until they’d
walked away. I escaped a beating that time, but on it went. More
often than not we'd be greeted when we got home by knuckleheads
waiting on their bikes at the bus stop to harass us, whooping and
hollering, all the way to our doorsteps. We learned to run pretty
damn fast, I can tell you. We never told our parents, partly because
we didn’t want to admit our fear even to ourselves, but we also
knew that our experience couldn't compare to what they had been
through during the war. Even now they had enough to worry about,
and we didn’t want them to see us as the weak and frightened
students we really were. The consequence, however, was that nothing was ever done to protect us. In those days I was a big fan
of DC comics, especially Superman and Green Lantern, and I
remember wishing, If only I had the power to become invisible, then
I could walk amongst these assholes without being so afraid.
Working-class immigrants like our parents were hard-pressed to
simply put food on our plates. We kids knew no different and for the
most part didn’t care, but there were times when it stung. Not
knowing how to skate, for instance, was an instantly alienating
offence for a Canadian boy and certainly didn’t help a little pischer
like me to assimilate. I was bought a pair of skates but was
otherwise left to learn on my own and spent many a freezing cold
Sunday afternoon shaking off frozen fingers and toes as I dragged
myself around the ice on my ankles. Needless to say, I would never
be anyone's first pick for games of shinny - if I made the cut at all.
Baseball, meanwhile, was in my bones - long before music
started to seriously divert my attention. There was no major-league
Toronto team then, but on weekend afternoons I’d watch the New
York Yankees on TV, beamed in from stations in Buffalo, with stars
like Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and Roger Maris, as well
as their rivals, the Detroit Tigers, of whom I was a big fan, and I
remember hopping on the bus and streetcar with my pals for the trip
downtown to watch the Maple Leafs, Toronto's Triple-A International
League team. I must have been just ten or eleven and can't recall
the presence of an adult with us at all, so those memories feel like
my earliest independent moments. Maple Leaf Stadium, at the south
end of Bathurst Street near the lake shore, was a typical minor-
league ballpark of the period, with high bleachers, metal box seats
and wooden benches wrapping around from foul pole to foul pole
and behind the infield. In truth, by the time I was old enough to go,
it had become dingy and rundown and the games were sparsely
attended; it was demolished not long afterwards, in 1968, after the
team had left town to play as an unaffiliated club, grooming players
for various major-league clubs. Nonetheless, photos of the old
ballyard, with banner ads along its walls at the back like READ THE
STAR FIRST FOR SPORTS, EXPORT and STONEY’S BREAD COMPANY, spark nostalgia in me. Those balmy days were among the happiest of my
childhood.
I spent countless hours on our driveway pretending to be a pitcher, throwing a rubber ball as hard as I could against the wall of
our house. I’d say to myself, “I can throw harder ... yeah,” with a
feeling that I always had a faster throw in me - even if I didn't.
When I was eleven, I summoned the nerve to try out for my
neighborhood baseball team, but I didn’t make it and was crushed.
Licking my wounds, I played out the rest of my sports career in the
school playground - much of that time bent over baseball cards, of
which we were fervent collectors. We considered them precious but
flung them around in a game called Close-ies, competing to get
closest to the schoolyard wall, and Lean-sies, where you'd lean one
card against the wall and take turns trying to knock it down with a
well-judged flip of another, creasing the corners in the process. Oh
my god, how it hurts to think that today those cards, in perfect condition, could be worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of
dollars...
My dad was not much of a baseball fan, but I do remember
watching Hockey Night in Canada with him - not too often, for it
would be past my bedtime. I’d sneak out of my room and crawl
under the furniture to watch without him knowing, or at least that’s
what I thought, until he’d calmly say, “Gary, go to bed now.” Busted!
But my favourite memory of him and sports was watching him
watching the wrestling. OMG, he would get so effin’ excited. Seaman
Art Thomas, Sweet Daddy Siki, Haystacks Calhoun, Lord Athol
Layton ... man, he loved the shtick. I don’t think he cared whether
it was real or fake at all. He was so into it that he’d mimick the
wrestlers’ holds - so much so that one time he wrestled himself right
off the couch and bang onto the floor.
Summers were lazy and hazy, my siblings and me hanging out on
the streets with all the other unsupervised kids. On Saturdays from
breakfast to lunch, I’d be rooted to the carpet in front of our faux-
wood-panelled RCA Victor, mesmerized by The Bowery Boys, then
The Three Stooges, and rounding out the morning with an array of
horse operas featuring those singing cowboys Roy Rogers and Gene
Autry, or more “authentic” westerns starring John Wayne or
Randolph Scott. Dang, I loved them all. . . still do! Basically, I was
left alone to watch as much TV as I wanted.
But TV wasn’t only for goofing off. It brought the world into our
living room on Vinci Crescent, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the
assassination of presidents to - on February 9, 1964 - the Beatles on
their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and suddenly there
was my sister kneeling on the floor in front of the television, crying
and reaching for the TV screen as if she might touch the Fab Four
and have one of them all to herself. I remember laughing to myself
and thinking, What is wrong with her? but seeing the impact that
rock and roll had on her made a definite impression on me. Needless
to say, Our parents were singularly unimpressed, but rock and roll
music had entered our home and, as my mom would say, “De rest is
history.”
Little by little this nerdy Jewish kid with immigrant parents was
assimilating, blending in and meeting new friends as best I could,
going to new schools and hearing about new bands on an almost
daily basis. North York may not have been the beating heart of the
Swinging Sixties, but we sure wanted to be a part of it. We were
buying records now. The British Invasion had begun - not just the
Beatles, but the Kinks, the Stones and Donovan, and our young
minds were opening up to fresh ideas about clothes and style. I
grew my hair longer, letting the bangs drop over my forehead to
cover my eyes.
Then, on the night of October 8, 1965, my father died in his sleep, and the music stopped cold.
He’d come down with the flu. He was supposed to stay home with
me, as I had it too, but while Mom was readying for work he heard
his carpool buddies honk the horn outside, grabbed his jacket and
ran out to jump in with them. Mom was furious because she was
then forced to take the bus to the store in Newmarket, and when
she got there gave him an earful and sent him home. I remember
being in bed, semi-delirious with the fever and hearing him return. I
remember him asking me how I was. And I remember him heading
off to his bedroom. That was the last time I saw him alive.
I awoke to screams. Struggling to rub the sleep from my eyes, I
saw Mom in her nightclothes crying hysterically, then running out
into the street yelling for help. Pandemonium. Soon our neighbours
filled the house, the police were called, firemen were stomping
indoors and slipping heavily on the stairs. My sister and I sat side by
side in silence on the edge of our parents’ bed, staring, stunned
beyond comprehension, at Dad’s lifeless body, there where he
ordinarily slept - a chilling sight I shall never, ever forget. In time we
were hustled out of the room and I was put back to bed, still
feverish, while Susie was taken to a neighbour's house for the
duration of the madness. I don’t even know where my little brother was or who was taking care of him, but I imagine it was my
grandmother or Mom’s sister, Aunt Ida.
I fell into a fever dream. Some hours later I was roused from
Sleep by my uncles and told to get dressed. Everything was still
manic. People were arguing.
“He should put on a suit!”
“No, look at him, der kint chot a feveh'”
“But he needs to look nice, it’s his father’s funeral!”
This went on all the way down the steps to the black sedan
waiting at the front door. In the back seat on the way to the
cemetery I was lost in a world of my own. When we arrived at the
grave site I was told to wait in the car. It was dusk and raining. I
looked through the window at the huddle of mourners around my
father’s open grave, women sobbing and comforting one another, a
cohort of men in dark coats, led by the rabbi, all shokelling, swaying
on the spot as they prayed. Then two men, maybe my uncles,
Started arguing again as they opened the car door.
“He should come out and say the Kaddish!”
“No, the child is sick, and it’s raining! It will be forgiven if he
doesn’t say it!”
Someone slammed the door back shut and told the driver to take
me home. I looked back through the black rain as that terrible,
somber crowd faded from view.
Morris Weinrib passed away at the age of forty-five. I was twelve.
Outwardly, he’d survived the horrors of the Holocaust seemingly
unscathed, but his heart was damaged by six years of slave labour in
the camps. I believe he'd suffered not just physically but spiritually
too - by which I really mean that he lost his religiosity - if he had any
in the first place. After the experience of the camps, he only put that
on for my mother’s sake. But you know, here I’m just guessing,
because he never shared such thoughts with me. He never told me
what was in his heart. He never told me about his anger towards the
German people or the Nazis or any of that. He never talked about
the war at all, not that I remember. He was always more reticent
about the war than my mom was, and about pretty much everything
else too.
I do, however, have one concrete reason to believe that he’d only
been pretend-religious ... When I was about ten, I accompanied
him and Mom to Eaton’s and Simpson’s, two big department stores
across from each other at Yonge and Queen in downtown Toronto.
As Mom pulled us towards the women’s wear department, Dad said
he’d go for a coffee and a smoke instead (he smoked Export “A”; I
remember distinctly because I thought their green package with the
Scots lass in her tasselled tam was cool). Bored stiff hanging around
with Mom, I slipped away after him, but when I got to the lower-
level cafeteria, I had to stop short on the stairs. There he was at a
table, on his own, with his coffee and cigarette ... eating bacon and
eggs. My eyes nearly popped out of my head. My own dad eating
traif. Then, as I watched him from afar, a sly grin spread across my
face. Not only did I love the fact that I had busted him, but a
heretical idea was planted in my brain that all these religious rules
were bullshit. It was like getting a hall pass, a Get Out of Jail Free
card, and I knew that one day I was gonna use it!
In the end, how I imagine him is assembled from just a
smattering of observations, my own and those of others: quiet until
spoken to, more physical than verbal, except at parties when he was
the life of the party, always the jokester. Everyone in our resettled
family adored him. I have photos of him at parties in which you can
see he's wasted; his eyes are a little less bright than everyone else's,
so I suspect he enjoyed a drink or two. He’d kid with the other
children as much as with me. He’d think nothing of slinging my
cousin Gary up onto his shoulders and horsing around with him. If
somebody farted or if he farted, he would turn to us and go, “Did
you see it?”
He could be hard-headed - you wouldn't want to get on the
wrong side of him - but he was funny, upbeat, hard-working, proud,
fully filling the shoes of the New World Man. He had joie de vivre. He
was able to push aside whatever demons walked around with him.
Maybe he wanted to live a good and happy life but was simply
mugged by a bad heart - a condition that would be fixed today just
like that.
These are the memories I have of him, the slide show in my
head. Among the last snapshots, clear as day, is one from when I
was eleven or twelve: him standing on the porch of our house on
Torresdale, giving me a serious look. I had my bike with me and was
chit-chatting with a couple of girls. He called me over and said
bluntly, “Don’t talk to girls. You’re too young.” Now, although I did
have a bit of a crush on one who lived down the street, I was just a
little schmeckell I had no idea what I was doing. So I guess he saw
a twinkle in my young eyes and felt compelled to give me some
fatherly advice and a wag of the finger. But soon he was gone, and
that was the full extent of the birds and the bees that I ever got
from him. (My mother never, ever went there, so like most kids of
my generation, that was something I'd have to figure out for myself.)
In the end, while I can still picture his expressions both funny
and stern, I’m sorry to say that I can barely remember a single
conversation we shared. There wasn't a lot of time to have one.
Everything in my life came to a stand-still. My mother’s grief knew
no bounds. She was devastated, and although life did carry on, she
never fully recovered in her heart. (Over the years, every visit she
ever made to his grave site left her as inconsolable as the day he
died.) Our household became a_ discombobulated mass of
neighbours, relatives and religious elders coming and going without cease. In the old country before the war, my mother’s side of the
family had been Orthodox Jews, which required them - and
especially me as the eldest male child - to observe strict rules for
grieving. These stages of mourning affected me profoundly and, I
believe, set the stage for my life to come. For, let me tell you, we
Jews know how to effin’ grieve. We are awesome at it, as if misery
were second nature to us.
Immediately after burial, we sit shiva for about seven days,
usually at the home of the bereaved. We cover up all mirrors as a
reminder that this is not about us but the one who has passed away.
We sit on low chairs or remove the pillows and cushions from the
sofas. (I’ve never been able to determine the exact reason for that; I
assume it’s to ensure we are uncomfortable and reminded that loss
is painful.) For seven days, we’re supposed to not leave the house
except on Shabbat to synagogue. We don’t work, shave or cut our
hair. We don’t bathe other than for essential hygiene, don’t wear
cosmetics, leather shoes or new clothing. No _ festivities are
permitted, nor sexual relations (as if!), nor even any study that gives
you pleasure.
After the shiva there’s a thirty-day period of mourning called
sheloshim, an easing back into semi-normal life, but as the eldest
son it was also my duty to say Kaddish, the prayer for the dead,
three times a day - for eleven months and a day. This I did without
fail. During such a period, you may partake in celebrations only so
long as there is no music, so when I had my bar mitzvah the
following summer, it was devoid of music and dancing. (Thankfully,
you are not forbidden to accept envelopes of money from
relatives!)
As part of a regular Jewish upbringing, most kids in my ‘hood
went to cheder (Hebrew school) either full time or, like me, after
school between four and six a couple of days a week and on Sunday,
but I hated it. I found it pointless in the world I wanted to live in.
Hebrew was a language that struck me as existing only in dusty
books and scrolls, and I found it hypocritical that the teachers didn’t
seem to care if we understood the actual words - that reciting them
phonetically at the bar mitzvah ceremony was good enough. They were brutal in meting out corporal punishment, throwing chalk at
you for the slightest infraction - not an environment, in my humble
opinion, in which to build a trusting and devoted rapport. The
moment my dad passed away and there was no longer any male
authority figure in the house to enforce my attendance, I resolved to
quit.
Needless to say, my mom was disappointed in me, even
crestfallen. My aunts and uncles berated me for my newfound acts
of independence or, as they saw it, defiance: not just quitting
cheder, but growing my hair longer and hanging around with
goyische friends. One day, even as my family and I were visiting my
father’s grave site, they started in on me. I remember one uncle
saying, “You're killing your mother! You rebel, you delinquent.” I was
to obey without argument, and when I wouldn't they ganged up on
me. Not a single adult relative asked me how I was dealing with my
loss. Other than the occasional aunt who might swipe the bangs out
of my face and say, “You poor boy. Be a good son and cut your hair,”
not one so much as asked me, “Are you okay?” I never fully forgave
them, and have never, ever forgotten the way that one prick of an
uncle crossed the line, while I was standing in front of my own
father’s grave. Fact is, to this day I have a long fucking memory for
people who treat me badly.
My mother’s pain and bereavement sucked the air out of every
room in the house. Please don’t get me wrong: I felt deeply for her
being left with the loss of the love of her life and three children to
protect, a mortgage and a business to run. But it took me years to
forgive my uncles and aunts for their indifference to me at that
fragile time; indeed, part of me never has. I know they were
grieving my dad's loss too, trying to be supportive of my mom while
labouring to rebuild their own families and keep alive traditions that
had been pummelled by the horrors of war. They would never
recover entirely from the Holocaust. But I was only twelve and my
life, too, had changed in the blink of an eye, and it felt to me all too
readily accepted that I - and my sister and little brother - were
simply collateral damage, that we would have to learn to look out for
ourselves.
Enter Max Guttman, a kind, generous and pious man in his early
fifties with a thick Hungarian accent, who as it happened was also
grieving his recently deceased parents. He volunteered to pick me
up every morning and afternoon and accompany me to the Beth
Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue, where he taught me how to behave
in shul and how to say all the prayers and sing their mournful
melodies. (A musical influence of a very different kind!) He showed
me consideration and treated me as a young adult learning to cope
with new responsibilities. He also helped me prepare for my own bar
mitzvah in that same year of grieving: “Today I am a man” and all
that.
After a time, I believe that Max started to see himself as a
surrogate father figure. I think he liked me but, like a lot of religious
people, was mainly trying to do what was right for the community
and, specifically, for my mother. But I wasn’t having it. I’d been
growing my hair almost with a vengeance, and one day he took it
upon himself to intercede. On the way home from morning services
he said, “Let me take you to my barber. You don't have to cut it
short. Let’s just clean it up a bit.” Perhaps my mother had asked him
to, I don't know. She'd certainly been bugging me about it as much
as every other adult I knew, including the school principal, Mr.
Church (perfect name, eh?) - a royal pain in the ass, a regular tyrant
who made us stand nose to the wall for an hour or more if he
caught us in the halls with our shirts not tucked into our trousers or
if we dared to grow our hair long enough to touch the back of our
collar. It seems almost quaint now, but Mr. Church, Max, my uncles,
all of them saw hair as the beginning of rebellion and wanted to
crush it, quite literally nip it in the bud before it became a real
problem. So, I sat in the barber’s chair but informed the man as
sternly as I could that I only wanted a trim. He said okay, but then I
caught Max's reflection in the mirror, his hand making a motion to
cut it all off. I freaked, jumped up and stormed away in outrage,
shouting at him that he was a liar and reminding him that he was
not my father. After that outburst, he backed off and our relationship
suffered, which was a shame, because I did feel some kindness and
gratitude towards him for what he was doing for Mom, the time he took to help instruct me and never laying guilt on me as viciously as
my uncles did.
I have to hand it to him, Max was creative. He asked a cantor he
knew to make a recording of the Torah portions I was supposed to
learn for my bar mitzvah. My first gig, I guess! A cantor, in case you
don’t know, is the vocalizing counterpart to a rabbi, the one who
sings the psalms and prayers during the service - a much cooler job
than rabbi if you ask me. So I memorized all the Hebrew words, the
traditional melodies and the vocal nuances off this recording, and on
the day I was called to the Torah I managed to recite the entire
program by heart, sort of pretending to read it. I saw Mom smiling
proudly through her tears in the front row, and my relatives were
now saying, “Oy, such a lovely voice. You should be a cantor.” I
nodded my head and gratefully took their envelopes of bar mitzvah
money while thinking to myself, Yeah, right. But sorry, folks. I'm
done with all of that.
My mother may have been crying tears of joy that day, but there
was no real exploring faith with her or anyone else in my family. It
was all dogmatic and unintellectual. There was nothing to discuss. They simply did as they'd been taught. How dare I even question it?
There was one direction only: doing what Jews were expected to do
and behaving how Jews were expected to behave. Children in the
Old World were to be seen and not heard. Anything more was
disrespectful and a reason to be punished with the stick of shame.
(My mother in particular knew how to wield that stick - with
precision!) Of course, in time I realized that faith for them was a way
of keeping the dead alive, a tribute to them, an assertion that they
had not perished in vain. And in more practical terms, these
Survivors were committed to rebuilding the Jewish population. For
the vast majority of observant Jews, the mantra was and remains
“Get married, have lots of kids and keep them faithful to the
religion.” Thus, it’s not just a matter of the past but the future too.
So, yes, in time, I did come to understand that that’s what drove
them, but I still could not bring myself to feel the same way. Please
understand, I love being a Jew and I’m super-proud of all that “my”
people have accomplished in so many aspects of life - especially in
the face of persistent prejudice, hatred and outright murder - but I
consider myself a devout cultural Jew: I love the history, the humour
and even some of the food! But a belief in God and organized
religion? Not for me. A line from Woody Allen’s Love and Death sums
up my feelings well: “If it turns out that there is a God. . . the worst
you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.”
The fact that all three of Mom’s children would eventually marry
out of the faith was, in her mind, a heartbreaking failure of her own
parenting skills. Even after I’d become an adult, she tried to guilt me
back into synagogue: she'd say that by not being observant I was
committing a sin against God and betraying my family and all those
who'd died in the war. Jews are really, really good at guilt, no?) But
it was to no avail. I had prayed for the last time. Surprisingly, once
the penny dropped that we were not going to change, she did too.
It’s a testament to her innate intelligence and maturity that she'd
learn to accept and even embrace people for who they are. She'd
grow fiercely devoted to her daughters-in-law and adored them
unquestioningly till the day she died. I find that hugely admirable for someone of her age and with her past, and wonder if I would have
had the strength to change as she did.
My sister also struggled mightily after Dad died. She was the
first-born, his little girl, and clearly had enjoyed a deeper relationship
with him than I; she was fourteen when he passed, already in the
throes of adolescence, and his death hit her that much more
viscerally. She tried to escape the household at every opportunity,
lashing out and staying out worryingly late. As the “man of the
house” (as everyone loved to remind me) I had to stand up for
Mom, which led to more fights. I, too, was itching to escape,
particularly after my synagogue duties were over. I was percolating
beneath the surface, starting to reject adults at every turn, and as
soon as my eleven months of mourning were over, I spent less time
at home and sought out a new breed of friends.
In 1966 I started at Fisherville Junior High in North York, just
walking distance from our house. It was also there that Susie started
hanging out with some tough guys - "Greasers,” we called them. At
R. J. Lang throughout my year of woe, I’d continued to be one of
the school’s most popular punching bags, but in the first semester at
this new place, as I was walking home and one of these kids
grabbed me by the lapels, winding up to make my life even more of
a misery, another kid said, “Hey, leave him alone. That’s Susie’s little
brother.” Whew. Big sister to the rescue!
And then, when I made friends with a guy I shared a couple of
classes with, a good-natured guy with a cheeky grin named Steve
Shutt, the harassment petered out altogether. How come? Well,
Shutty was a rising hockey star, even in grade seven. He was
revered, super-cool, and just by association with him my kosher
bacon was saved. If you’re a hockey fan, you know he went on to
become a perennial All Star for the Montreal Canadiens, part of the
devastating offensive line alongside Guy Lafleur and Jacques
Lemaire, scoring a career 424 goals, and in 1993 was elected to the
hockey Hall of Fame. He was a year older than me, so we had only a
few mutual friends, but we dug the same music and would soon
both develop an interest in the bass guitar. He was growing his hair
then too, and in the sixties, man, those with long hair bonded instantly. (He’d grow it out every summer, cutting it all off again
without hesitation as soon as the hockey season began; he knew his
priorities.) I’m not sure if Steve was actually aware of being my
saviour. We never spoke of it. But our friendship did allow me to
walk amongst the bullies with impunity.
By now, I wouldn't be surprised if you were hoping for the juicy
rock and roll bits, i.e., the story of Rush, to begin. I will tell you all
about it, but I’m afraid that first a few more heavies are in order. In
the next chapter I’m going to relate my parents’ experience of the
war, After all, if it wasn’t for what happened to them then, I wouldn't
be here to tell you my tale now and I wouldn't be the person who I
am. A lot of what loomed over me as a boy went into forging my
own personality, my value system - the good things and the bad. But
most important, I feel both duty - bound and honoured to tell you
their story. For their sake. If you find it half as harrowing to read as I
did writing it, you may be tempted to skip right along. If you do, I
won't blame you and I'll see you in chapter four, but I’ve included it
in this book because I feel we're living in an era that seems to have
forgotten what can and will happen when fascism rears its head. I
think we all need reminding of it in the face of those who either
deny the past or never knew about it in the first place.
When we were children my mom would tell us about her
experiences in the war, and when our uncles and aunts were over,
talk would sometimes turn to theirs as well. It made me angry to
hear what they’d seen and suffered at the hands of the Nazis, and
when I went up to bed my rage would boil over into waking dreams.
Lying in my darkened room, I'd wish that Hitler would magically
appear in front of me so I could vanquish him myself with brute force - with my bare hands, punching and strangling him (in a way
that Quentin Tarantino would approve of). For me those stories cast
deep doubt on the existence of a higher power - certainly one with
an ounce of compassion - and on the very point of religion. After my
dad died, I was like, Hey, God, what have you done for me lately? I
was amazed that my mother came out of such a horror show still
believing.
The story that follows is sewn together from bits and pieces my
mother and other family members have shared with my siblings and
me over the years, as well as some independently published
Survivors’ accounts and books I discovered while doing my research.
As is typical of many eyewitness accounts of events that took place
SO many years ago, particularly ones recalling events as traumatic as
these, some details were hard to pin down, and we must bear in
mind - as Christopher R. Browning writes in the introduction to his
superbly well-researched book: Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi
Slave-Labor Camp - that “these were childhood memories refracted
through the horrible experiences that followed." Furthermore, all
the family members who survived the war - including my mother,
who kept on trucking until she was almost ninety-six - have now
passed on.
Thanks to the dedication of various diligent Jewish and other
Holocaust memorial organizations, many interrelated accounts have
been recorded in print and on video for posterity. Astonishingly, as I
have found, some of these accounts are from survivors who not only
came from my mother’s hometown but who suffered the same
grueling experiences as she and her family did in exactly the same
places. This has given me the opportunity to cross-reference the
occasional divergent memories. I strongly believe that the stories I
relate to you now are not only true but capture the essence and
spirit of what my mother and father lived through as teenagers - the
awful and the good.
There is, sadly, a paucity of information about my father’s side of
the family. As I said earlier, he never discussed the war with us,
maybe partly because he knew our mom would and did. As a result,
there is little here from his own lips or, for that matter, from his siblings’. He left this world in 1965, and I've gleaned little about him
from the remainder of his side of the family since. What I do have, I
hope I have right.
So yes, there is a bias towards my mom’s version of events for
the simple reason that she was more willing than he to share their
experiences with us. She would talk in detail about all that she and
her family had endured, how time and time again her mother had
saved her life. My mother spoke as if telling these stories to her kids
was the most natural thing in the world. I can tell you that it wasn’t.
Today such parental behavior might be considered irresponsible,
even unthinkable, yet it seemed somehow okay at the time, and I
don’t regret hearing any of it. In her mind, sharing with her children
this six-year nightmare was not just a way of passing her own
history along to us, but a way that we could help the world “never
forget.” What’s more, bizarre as it sounds, it was probably healthy
for her to talk about this stuff, even to her kids. Who else was she
going to tell, a therapist? That was not an option for people of her
generation. Had I suggested such a thing, her answer would surely
have been “Vot, I should pay money to tell this to a stranger?”
LOVE AND HELL SLAVE #A14254
My mother was born in Warsaw, Poland, in July 1925. Her Canadian
passport says Starachowice, but we believe that to be incorrect; she
and her siblings always insisted they were born and lived in Warsaw
until she was five years old. Moreover, her mother, Ruchla (aka Ruzia
or Rose), was born and raised in Warsaw, in the Wielka Wola district,
and was living with her family and working as a_ successful
dressmaker when she met and married my grandfather Gershon
(Gerzson) Eliezer Rubinstajn.
Born in Wierzbnik in October 1900, Gershon was a butcher by
trade. He and Rose had three children, the eldest being my mom,
Malka (Manya or Mary), followed by her younger sister a year later,
Ida (Yita), and lastly brother Herszek (Herschel). They lived in the
part of the city that in 1943 would be the site of the Warsaw Uprising, but they were long gone by the time that violent liquidation
occurred. Gershon had been having trouble finding work, so after a
consultation with their rabbi (to whom pious Jews usually went for
advice of a serious nature), and despite his wife doing very well as a
clothing designer, they decided in 1930 to move the family 160
kilometers south to Starachowice-Wierzbnik, where the Rubinsteins
lived and worked as a close-knit clan, and he joined his mother and
two of his brothers in their thriving butcher business. They found a
good and stable home there, living at number 6 Kolejowa, a small
house across from the train tracks, and quickly resumed life as a
middle-class, highly observant Eastern European Jewish family. (1
was surprised to hear from my mother that she had learned to speak
Yiddish only upon their arrival there; as residents of the bigger, more
sophisticated city of Warsaw they mostly spoke Polish, even to one
another.) My grandfather, a generous man, soon became a respected
community leader, head of a local shtiebel, who would often bring
needy strangers home for dinner on the Sabbath.
Starachowice was separated into two distinct sections by the
Kamienna, a tributary of the Vistula, Poland's largest and longest
river. It was a small but growing industrial city of mines and steel
works, whose factories produced guns for the Polish army before the
war, whereas Wierzbnik was more like a shtetl made up mostly of
wooden houses, and where 90 percent of the Jewish population
lived. That little river dividing the city has been described as a
symbol of regional antisemitism, separating the Jews from the rest
of the Poles; even before the Nazis arrived, the munitions factory of
Starachowice was already off-limits to Jewish employment. Another
Survivor from their town, my cousin Zecharia Grynbaum (Zachary
Greenbaum), wrote in his own autobiography, “The Jews and
gentiles lived together peaceably enough, but the hatred was always
there, burning underneath.” In fact, my uncle Harold recalled that as
the war got closer the Poles of Starachowice grew less afraid to
show their true colours, standing in front of Jewish shops
discouraging people from doing business with “dirty” Jews.
In 1938 rumblings of a German invasion were starting to spread,
yet my family, along with many others, did not give these whispers much credence. Like most of their fellow townspeople they were
caught woefully unprepared for the fall day on which the German
armed forces bombed and marched their way right into their life and
tore it to pieces.
On the afternoon of Friday, September 1, 1939, my mother and
her first cousin and close friend Miriam, both fourteen years old,
were sent as usual to the Starachowice side of the river to buy some
bread for the Sabbath. They were expected to return home before
dark but were still on the road when the bombs began to drop.
Polish soldiers were shouting and scrambling as they leaped into the
trenches built in anticipation of such an attack - though notoriously
there was little resistance - and my mom and her cousin were forced
to hide in one of those ditches. The fighting went on for more than a
day as they cowered there. At daybreak when the city finally fell
quiet, they crawled out from amongst the many dead or injured
Polish soldiers and started walking back to Wierzbnik.
Along the way they heard stories from people about two young
Jewish girls who’d been killed in the raid. They entered their part of
town to find the streets deserted. As my mother describes it, “We
were like the only two people walking in the whole wide world.”
They went from house to house, seeking their families, finally
Opening one door to find their fathers, Gershon and his brother
Josek (Yankel), saying Kaddish for their missing daughters. Being
Orthodox Jews, women were not allowed to pray in the same room
as men, so when the girls entered the house their fathers grabbed
them and pressed them close beneath their tallitim (prayer shawls)
until the prayer was over, then took them to show their wives and
sisters that the girls were still alive.
Within ten days the occupation began. As one resident, Yitzhak
Edison-Erlichsohn, described: “The entire market was filled with Nazi
soldiers. The following day the persecution and torture of Jews
began; kidnapping them for work, frightful beatings, robbery of
Jewish possessions, and the laughter and ridicule of our neighbours
of a thousand years - the Poles.”
The country was now under the strict control of the German
General Government, led by the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, who in 1942 would be tasked with carrying out the Nazi “Final Solution.”
Under his command the important factories of Starachowice legally
became the Braunschweig Steel Works Corporation, owned and
operated by Reichswerke Hermann Goring.
New rules for the Jews were quickly established and violently
enforced. In an ominous message to the Jewish citizenry of
Wierzbnik, shortly after the Yom Kippur holiday was concluded the
central synagogue of their community was burned to the ground.
Schools were now off-limits to Jews; curfews were imposed, and a
ghetto was being delineated to further limit their movements. Public
degradation of Jews became the norm. The German word for Jew,
“Jude,” was painted on all Jewish shop windows, and it became
mandatory for Jews in public to wear a yellow badge in the shape of
the Star of David, either as armbands or sewn onto their clothing.
Standard operating procedure for the Nazis during an occupation
was to go house to house, removing at gunpoint all adult Jewish
males (or other undesirables) deemed a potential threat to their
command. They would either march them to a secluded location and
murder them en masse or transport them by train to prison, the gas
chambers at Treblinka or some other destination where they would
meet the same terrible end. This was my grandfather Gershon’s
brutal fate.
My mother used to tell us with guilt and regret that before the
Germans arrived her father had an idea to run away to the Soviet
Union, but she was so distraught at any talk of him leaving the
family that he abandoned the idea and stayed on, only to meet his
doom. It’s a pain she had to bear her entire life.
The SS came to their door in the winter of 1940, in the middle of
the night. They ordered Gershon out of bed with a “Get up, dirty
Jew, you're coming with us.” When my grandmother dared ask why,
she was smacked in the face. Gershon, only forty years old, was the
first male of the town to be arrested in this manner. He was marched
off amidst the chaos and the crying and protestations of his family.
My mom ran after them. She caught up and took hold of her father’s
arm, refusing to let go until the soldiers beat her into submission, leaving her unconscious in the snow. Her mother found her there a
few hours later.
Later that day a local policeman who’d been one of Gershon’s
friends informed Rose that those arrested were to be transported by
train to the town of Radom that same evening. My mom and one of
her male cousins slipped out of the house and went to the station,
where they found the men lined up and shackled and waiting for the
train. My mom left her cousin watching from a safe distance to try
and alert her father to her presence. She got much too close and
tripped, falling at his feet. While Gershon quietly pleaded with her to
run away before it was too late, a German soldier came up and
stabbed at her hand with his bayonet, piercing the skin on her
thumb (when we were kids, she used to show us the scar) and
yelling at her to get out of there. As her cousin hustled her away,
she looked back at her father, never to see him again.
As daily conditions worsened, Rose fought to learn of her
husband’s fate, eventually discovering that he was still alive and
sitting in a jail cell at Radom. According to prison records, he had
been arrested on January 14, 1942, charged with the “distribution of
illegal meat” and sentenced to one year and three months.
(Starvation was a real problem in the ghettos. The German-allotted
per-person ration was just 100 grams of bread per day, so the
smuggling in of food was a matter of survival. Being a butcher,
Gershon was able to set up a system with friends outside the ghetto,
giving him access to a few cows in a shed to help provide for the
community. That was his heinous crime.)
Records also show that in March 1942, Rose and an attorney
were able to secure permits to see her husband. My mom's family
were mostly blonde and didn’t share many typically Jewish facial
features (unlike me!), and as such Rose could pass for a Pole and
slip out of the ghetto simply by removing her yellow Star of David.
Despite his having already served five months in jail, Gershon’s
sentence only officially began on May 29, 1942, and was set to end
over a year later, but an addition and stamp on the prison
documents indicate that on August 18, 1942, he was deported, likely
to Treblinka, where he met his death. I've racked my brain trying to understand why the Germans and the Polish police under their
command would have undertaken such a circuitous procedure to
eliminate him when so many others were shot on the spot for, say,
dawdling. The only answer I have is that in the early days of the
Final Solution, my grandfather must have been considered a man of
some stature in Wierzbnik, such that the authorities felt the need for
a “legitimate” paper trail of crime and punishment. As we know from
extensive war records, the Nazis had honed not only a system of
arresting and killing Jews but a routine of keeping files to document
it too. Talk about the banality of evil.
The family had no choice but to try to carry on without their
patriarch. Similar to Jews in cities and towns all across Poland, they
were now living under armed patrol in a small and highly crowded
area of their town, dubbed the Ghetto of Wierzbnik. There were
more than 3,500 local Jews and about a thousand others from
elsewhere, all living in a few dark and narrow laneways. My family
was marginally better off, as their house was on the edge of the
ghetto and they got to remain in their home, albeit jammed in there
with many others. Brutal treatment, sudden shootings and public
hangings had by now become commonplace. As they tried to adjust
to a life of fear, my blonde mom would remove her star and go with
her friend Oscar to purchase scraps of food from unsuspecting shop
owners in the city.
In the early days of the war, an organization was created by the
Germans called the Judenrat, a committee of Jews acting as an
administration agency between the Germans and the Jewish
population of each ghetto. Of course, by the very nature of its
creation, their powers were limited, but the Judenrat of Wierzbnik
interceded as much as it could, either by stealthily arranging bribes
to improve conditions for some or obtaining work cards for others.
For corrupt German officers, providing work permits had become a
booming black-market business. The Judenrat was instrumental in
persuading its overseers that it would benefit the war machine if it
constructed work camps to house the Arbeitsjuden, or “Work Jews,”
close to the steel works, brick works and munitions factory. The
Judenrat gambled that, if successful, this plan would stave off the
transport of Jews to even more deadly places such as Treblinka.
In the fall of 1942, in accordance with the Nazis’ Final Solution
policy, Jewish ghettos across Poland began to be liquidated in a
process the Germans called an Aktion: the SS would gather the Jews
in a central location, and those who were deemed too young, too
small or too old to work would either be executed on the spot or transported to one of the death camps. As news spread and fear
grew, some residents contemplated escape to the forests while
others, like my family, were in denial, taking an attitude of “it won’t
happen here,” mistakenly thinking that due to the importance of
Starachowice’s munitions and steel manufacturing they would
somehow be spared.
In the early dawn of October 27, 1942, an Aktion came to the
Wierzbnik ghetto. People were roused from their houses by the SS
shouting, “Jews out! Out!” and ordered to gather in the rynek, or
market square. They were told to leave their possessions behind, but
some had already hidden valuables in their clothing or prepared
backpacks while others grabbed things that were most easily carried.
Panic ensued as gunshots rang through the night, many from inside
the houses of those either too slow to leave or too slow to walk. In
the terrible chaos of that Aktion, any random movement interpreted
by the soldiers as resistance meant instant death. My cousin Chuna
Grynbaum (Henry Greenbaum) once described how on that morning
his uncle, dressed and praying in their home, was murdered right
there on the spot.
Another survivor, and the head of the Wierzbnik Judenrat, Simcha
Mincberg, describes that nightmarish experience in these words:
“This bloody day, 27.10.1942 was carved into my memory as a dark,
bitter day, a day of cruelty and murder . . . humiliated, tortured Jews
flowed out, their feet buckling under them and their faces stricken,
men, women and children all headed to the place of gathering. A
little while later, the entire town square was filled by nearly 5,000
Jews, locals and refugees alike.
“The place was surrounded by bloodthirsty brutes, led by Becker
(Police Chief) who was brandishing a pistol. Dozens of Jews, men
and women, were killed on that accursed day, and their names are
carved in this Yizkor book . . . Of those who lived, some were
considered capable of working and were ordered to the labour camp
in the forest called ‘Strzelnica.’ The rest, the majority of our people,
were led toward the train station, where they were loaded on the
death cars on their way to annihilation.”
From seven in the morning until past noon they stood in rows of
five waiting to be chosen for the first of a series of “selections” that
day. Those with work cards were chosen first and sent to line up at
the far side of the rynek, and then those who looked strong and old
enough - usually twelve or older - were pulled out to join the
workers’ line. After selection they were marched or forced to run to
the Strzelnica labour camp. All the remaining Jews deemed unfit,
meaning the elderly, the very young and the infirm, were put in a
line on the other side of the square and transported by train to the
gas chambers of Treblinka.
The same policeman who’d known my grandfather risked his life again to intercede on my family’s behalf. He obtained work cards for
them that assigned them to slave labour - even my uncle Herschel,
who was barely of age but tall was given a card and jostled into the
work line. I prefer to believe that this man acted out of friendship
rather than taking a bribe, but regardless, he certainly helped save
my family that day. This would be just the first of many such
excruciating selections that they would have to endure in the camps
over the next three years.
According to Christopher Browning’s book, in Wierzbnik alone the
Germans sent approximately 1,600 Jews - 1,200 men and 400
women - to these slave labour camps and deported nearly 4,000 to
Treblinka. As he explains, the fact that more than 25 percent of
these people were not killed immediately was remarkably atypical for
the SS in this region; the deportation rate during these liquidations
was usually around 90 to 95 percent. It’s hard to know if this was
intentional or an accident of fate. Was it due to their proximity to the
factories and the pressing need for more slave labour? Was it the
number of bribes taken in exchange for work cards? Browning posits
that the Judenrat was able to bribe and manipulate the German
soldiers and management into thinking that it was in their best
interests to keep the Jews alive and exploit them. Whatever the
explanation, in the history of the Holocaust in Poland, the number of
Jews from my mother’s particular area who survived is highly
anomalous.
Three camps were built in the Starachowice area. The workers’
line was divided into two groups. One went to a smaller camp
nearby known as Tartak, which was based on an already existing
sawmill and lumberyard; the other prisoners were sent to the
Strzelnica on the other side of the sprawling munitions factory
producing casings for shells and grenades. My mom, Herschel and
their mother, Rose, along with her aunt Rachu and my mom’s cousin
Miriam and her two sisters, were processed and then moved on to a
third camp, Majowka, which was closer to the steel works, the blast
furnace and the Rogalin brick factory, while my mom’s sister, Yita,
and her uncle Yankel remained at Strzelnica.
Some towns such as Ostrowiec (that included the tiny suburb of
Gozdzielin, where my father’s family lived), had already been
liquidated in October of that year. He was one of 110 young, strong
males spared death and sent to join the workforce in the nearby
Starachowice camps. This is most likely how my father came to meet
my mother...
Upon their arrival, on penalty of death, the prisoners were
ordered to give up all their valuables and other possessions. This
was a wrenching decision, as most of them knew how valuable
bribery would be in the camp. My mom’s uncle Yankel, for instance,
was put in charge of the kitchens due to some well-placed bribes,
although he was still searched and, when money was found on his
person, beaten within an inch of his life. The fact that he was so big
and strong was the only thing that saved him that day, but that
beating left an unforgettable impression on the other inmates.
My mother was assigned to make bricks at Rogalin, not far from
the blast furnace where my dad had been assigned to work, while
her siblings toiled in the munitions factory and my grandmother Rose
delivered food to the Germans, taking parcels of food to the barracks
and officers’ residences.
These teenagers had no choice but to adapt quickly to life as
Slave labourers in disgusting conditions. The camps were hastily built
and woefully lacking in any acceptable hygiene. Soon Majowka, and
especially Strzelnica, became foul places to live, infested with lice
and outbreaks of typhus; on top of the numerous illnesses, a reign
of terror and murder was conducted by the Bergen-Belsen camp’s
Sadistic security chief, Ralf Alois “Willi” Althoff. How sadistic? Well,
my uncle Herschel recalled that at least once a week Althoff would
select a number of Jews just to make them run in a wide circle while
he randomly shot them down like it was a game of target practice.
Over a three-month period in late 1942 he conducted so many mass
killings and raids on the sick that the work force was decimated, and
Jews from other regions had to be brought in to keep up
productivity.
By late summer 1943, Strzelnica was deemed so unsanitary that
it was abandoned. Yankel and my aunt Yita joined the rest of their families at Majowka. Life in these places was like walking a deadly
tightrope. Inmates might be shot at the whim of any soldier or
beaten with a rubber club by a Kapo. After the war, Miriam said of
this treatment, “If they didn’t like you, or even if they didn’t like a
look in your eyes, they just shot you, like you were no more than a
chicken,”
Despite the risks, bribery was an essential method of improving one’s chances for survival in all these camps, and inmates smuggled
in Polish zlotys or whatever else they could hide. The wealthier ones
brought in jewels and money (usually US dollars acquired on the
black market) often sewn into the lining of their clothes, behind
buttons or cached in scooped-out loaves of bread. Compared to
most concentration camps, the ones near Starachowice were in
uniquely close proximity to the inmates’ former homes, and there
are accounts of some who relied upon their few loyal Polish friends
on the outside to help smuggle in whatever hidden valuables they
had left behind.
Sometimes my mother would go to Uncle Yankel, who was very
fond of her, and get extra potatoes from him. But word of that
spread, causing resentment in the barracks. Fearful that her
husband would be shot if the authorities found out, her aunt Rachu
asked her to stop.
Mom and her friends met other adolescents on the work
brigades. She tells a story from her time at Majowka of loading
cargo with some men, when a young Polish boy offered her some
bread. Mistrustful of him, she refused to accept it, but after that he
continued to look out for her. It was at this time that she also
noticed a strong older boy working a crane that carried hot iron back
and forth. He continually caught her eye, and she assumed that such
a strong guy must be a Pole and couldn't possibly be Jewish. (Hey,
wait a minute!) Little did she realize that this strongman was also
keeping a close eye on her, and one day he appeared with the Polish
boy to ask why she wouldn't accept the gift. My mother was shocked to discover that not only was this fellow Jewish, but he was the one
behind the offers of bread. Many years later she admitted to us that
at first she’d been quite intimidated by him. After all, he was five
years older, muscular and rather good-looking. But a romance was
budding, even in this brutal place.
His name, of course, was Moczek (Moishe) Wajnryb, aka my dad.
He’d been born and lived in a small village called Gozdzielin, about
thirty kilometers down the road from Wierzbnik. His father was
Ahron Wajnryb; his mother, Chaja Sura Wajnryb, née Cytrinbaum. By
all accounts, theirs was the only Jewish family in Gozdzielin, and it
suffered a terrible toll in the war: along with both parents, my dad
lost three brothers and two sisters to the Germans. Only his brother
Shloima (Sam or Szlama) survived the camps, while his sister Rose,
as I mentioned earlier, avoided the Holocaust entirely by emigrating
to Canada.
Moishe continued to do what he could to improve my mom's lot
in these cruel surroundings. Hoping to secure her a less arduous job,
he bribed one of the higher-ups with some gold he’d hidden in his shoe. She was subsequently given work spraying down the hot iron
with a hose, and whenever possible he would try to see her at work.
On one of these encounters he revealed to her that he carried her
photo, which had been given to him by her brother, Herschel. He
was Clearly crushing for her in a big way.
During their time at Majowka both my parents were involved in
an escape attempt. A boy Mom knew named Alter told her that
some inmates were going to make a break and asked her to join
them. He came for her on the night, but Rose refused to let her go.
A tug-of-war ensued and my mom fell and twisted her ankle. Unable
to walk, she could only watch as Alter and several others, including
my dad’s brother Shloima, leaped the fence. Dad himself was
Supposed to go with them, but when he saw that she wasn’t with
them he hesitated, and in that moment shooting broke out. He was
able to slip back to his barracks while some of the others, Alter
included, were killed and still others injured badly. Uncle Shloima
was one of the few who made it out and was able to hide
successfully for a good part of the war in a Polish farmhouse. The
wounded, meanwhile, were dragged back to camp and, as a
deterrent, left to bleed to death for the whole camp to see.
Their flirtation continued throughout their incarceration. It’s hard
to believe that under such horrific circumstances anyone could be
thinking romantically, but one has to think of their age and the
resilience of youth, and the need to believe in something other than
imminent death. And in what I guess must pass as survivor humour,
for years Dad would jokingly remind Mom of the time she saved his
life by twisting her ankle.
As summer approached, the Majowka and Tartak camps were
closed. My family and the other surviving prisoners found
themselves moved to a newly built camp on the grounds of the
munitions factory. Tensions had been rising over the spring as other
Survivors from Lublin arrived, bringing with them stories of what
they had seen and heard along the way: confirmation of the
rumours of gas chambers at Majdanek and Treblinka. I can only
guess at the impact this news must have had on them. As it became clearer that their time in Starachowice was soon to end, many tried
to escape but were shot dead as they clambered over the fences.
Then, on the sweltering evening of July 28, 1944, the surviving
Jews, including my mother, her family, my cousins and my father,
were jammed and locked inside cattle cars with just two small
windows to make the 140-mile journey to the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp. The cars were grossly overfilled, especially the
first one, which carried between 120 and 150 men, among them
Uncle Yankel.
They had to endure a torturous thirty-six-hour ride without water,
and as they struggled for air skirmishes erupted. By the time that
first car pulled into the station at Birkenau just before dawn on
Sunday, July 30, as many as thirty had died in that car alone,
including Yankel. After the war my cousin Chuna Grynbaum, who
was also there, said, “They stuck us in there like sardines. That’s
when the commotion started, fighting during the day, everyone
trying to get some fresh air from that little window, everybody
pushing one another and getting angry.” Whether they died from
suffocation and dehydration or at one another’s hands can scarcely
be imagined.
Between 1940 and 1945 the Auschwitz-Birkenau compound
comprised more than forty death camps and sub-camps. It’s hard for
anyone with a rational mind and a fully functional heart to fathom a
mindset that could devise and construct a place dedicated to the
sole purpose of the extermination of human beings, and on such a
mind-boggling scale. Of course, Nazis did not view Jews, Gypsies or
other “deviants” as human beings at all.
The train car carrying my family pulled into Birkenau, past the
main gates of Auschwitz where, in wrought iron high above the
entrance, were the cynically perverted words Arbeit Macht Frei
(“Work will set you free”), As the people were hauled out of these
train cars and down the ramp the chaos immediately escalated to an
even more nightmarish level.
My mother described this moment many times to us. “When we
first arrived, we heard screams and shots, and we couldn’t breathe
from the smoke. The guards were shouting, ‘Go right! Go left!’ My mother and sister went to the right, but I went to the left. My
mother jumped out of the line, even though she could have been
killed on the spot, and dragged me back in with her and Yita and
told us, ‘If we go, we all three go together.”
They would soon be separated into different camps by sex, which
meant my mom and dad would not have access to each other for
long. According to camp records of the new arrivals, 1,298 women
and 409 men were taken to be tattooed that day, each with their
own number on their arm.
My mother was now officially Slave #A14254. From then on, the
Nazis would address prisoners only by their numbers, never by their
names, in order to dehumanize them even further.
After that they were herded over to be washed. There was a
tremendous fear that instead of water coming out of the shower
heads, it would be Zyklon B gas, for the prisoners were by now well
aware of the other kind of “showers.” My grandmother peeked
around back and, seeing people were exiting from the other side of
the shower room, concluded they were safe. Then, after they'd
cleaned themselves, they were taken to have their heads shaved
and were given striped prison uniforms and wooden shoes without
socks.
Considering everything she had endured to this point, it was the
loss of my mother's “beautiful blonde” hair that was a tipping point
for her. It was the injury to her teenage pride that broke her, and
she became hysterical. She screamed through her tears, “I don't
want to be liberated!”
“My dear daughter,” her mother reassured her, “you have a head,
and you're going to have hair, so much hair you will have to go to
the hairdresser once again. You can’t have it today, but it will come.”
My mom used to tell us, “In the camps, your grandmother always
Knew how to talk to me and calm me. She was my saviour.”
They would be quarantined in the “Gypsy Camp” for a time,
before being assigned to barracks elsewhere in this vast complex. As
they walked towards it on that first day, with the smell of death
literally hanging in the air, they would have to endure one more
punishing indignity. Playing on loudspeakers was a jolly German folk song called “Arbeit macht dein Leben sus,” which translates as “work
makes your life sweet.” Every morning, for the duration of their
imprisonment in this extermination camp, this music would
accompany them as they trudged off to do their slave labour.
As far as hygiene was concerned, inmates actually found
conditions in Auschwitz a considerable improvement over the squalor
they’d been living in at the Starachowice camps, yet the quality and
quantity of food was another story entirely. For some, including my
family, the ease of bribery in Majowka and the presence of Uncle
Yankel in the kitchens meant more food had been available to them
and, as a result, most of them were less malnourished than other
new arrivals from Hungary and elsewhere, which lent a slightly
better prospect of survival.
My aunt Yita described the meager rations in Auschwitz. “We
would be woken at six a.m. and have roll call at six thirty. Breakfast
would be only water, then we would be taken to work. For lunch
they would give us a piece of bread so thin you could see through it,
and for dinner some soup made from water and vegetables, like you
would give to a horse.” However, my family also told stories of the
occasional willing Polish kitchen worker who, for a few dollars, would
Smuggle out morsels of food for them.
One of the sweeter moments in Auschwitz was the time my
mother received a pair of shoes, courtesy of my dad. He had bribed
one of the guards to procure a pair, then tried to pass them to a
woman who often walked by the fence between the male and
female camps. He asked her, “Do you know a Manya Rubinstein?”
and when she said she thought she did, he asked her to take them
to her. The woman refused, thinking it too dangerous, but he
persisted, suggesting, “How about only one at a time?” to which she
said okay. She hid the shoe, took it to my mom, and a few weeks
later brought the other one. My mother was amazed. Not only was it
a message that Moishe was still alive, but that he was thinking of
her. But soon they would all be transferred again, and it would be
quite some time before either would know the fate of the other.
The plumes of smoke coming from the ovens were an almost
daily reminder of how thin the line was now between life and death. During their four months in Auschwitz-Birkenau, they lived in
constant fear of the next terrifying selection. These would come
without warning, and every time it was the same awful ritual of
being gathered together and stepping forward one by one to be
divided into two lines: one meant work, the other took them to the
showers - which meant, of course, the end of the road. The
designations of these lines changed daily, so prisoners would never
know if this would be their last day on earth or not. My grandmother
ensured that she and her daughters were always in the same line,
and luck broke their way every single time.
Among the many threats and indignities they suffered at the
hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz, and one that almost killed my mom
and her sister, was the taking of blood. Josef Mengele, known to
history as the Angel of Death, was the SS chief medical officer in
charge of selections. I have seen video testimonials of survivors
describing him as a dark-haired, good-looking man, standing calmly
in the midst of all the tumult of arriving prisoners, wearing white
gloves and personally pointing at which sad souls were to go directly
into the line for the gas chambers.
He also performed medical experiments at Auschwitz and was
obsessed with experimenting on twins. Even though Mom was a
year older than Yita, they looked very much alike. Mom told us,
“Mengele thought we were twins, and I would say no, no, we are
not twins! Still, they took our blood time and time again.”
My aunt confirms this story. “We gave so much blood, every
second day, for over a month or so. After, they would say you could
go now, but when we got up, we would faint to the ground. We
were so very weak, yet we would still have to go to work somehow.”
At one point my mother, beyond caring anymore, defiantly said to
her captors, “Why do you need my blood? I’m a Jew, you know. It's
Jewish blood!”
The response was simply “It matches the soldiers’ blood.”
So much for pure Aryan blood. My aunt also tells of when she
was at the end of her rope, and said to Mengele himself, “I just can’t
do it anymore.”
He turned to her and replied coldly, “What do you need blood for? We need it.” The inference was clear.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was liberated on January 27,
1945, but when the Soviets arrived that day they found the camp
silent and largely abandoned. The thousands of inmates who
remained, hiding in the warehouses, had simply been left to die. But
where had all the others gone?
By late 1944 the Germans could already see that the Soviets
were close, and panic broke out amongst the Nazi brain trust. As
they attempted to hastily destroy evidence of what had been
happening there, Jews and other surviving prisoners were hurriedly
transported by train out of Poland to camps inside Germany.
Auschwitz was not the only camp to be suddenly evacuated; the
Same was happening all across the Reich as the Allies closed in on
them. Jam-packed trains crisscrossed Germany in a desperate
attempt by the crumbling Nazi regime to stave off the inevitable.
And if trains were not available, the wretched were force-marched
westward by foot towards Germany or distant train depots,
sometimes for miles; it is estimated that these marches took the
lives of more than 15,000 sick and emaciated prisoners. My mom
believed that my dad had to endure one of these death marches.
Her brother, Herschel, barely survived one that saw 3,400 people
trudge from the Buchenwald camp to Munich for four long weeks,
and by the time they were liberated in 1945, only 142 were left
alive.
According to my aunt, they had a Kapo in their barracks, a
Czechoslovakian woman who could be strict but also had a soft spot
for mothers struggling to protect their children. She apparently
sensed that unless they were moved, they would not survive
Mengele’s obsession with them. Yita says, “She couldn’t stand to
watch us suffer so badly when we came back from giving blood.” As
it happened, a train arrived to transport them to the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp in Germany, and despite some risk to herself
this Kapo made sure my family did not miss it.
Just as my mother was returning to the barracks from a work
detail, the Kapo said to Yita, “Go outside and stand in the square and wave at your sister so she can come to you.” As Yita tried to do so a German guard grabbed her viciously by the neck, but she
managed to break free and scramble onto the train with my mom. It
is somewhat heartening to know that in that hellhole the occasional
shred of decency was possible. Thankfully, it would not be the last
time they would experience some kindly intervention.
In October 1944, my mother, grandmother and Aunt Yita arrived
at Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony, Germany. Established as a
prisoner-of-war camp the year before, it was hastily converted into
three smaller camps as the war went on and the demand for space
grew: the POW camp (Kriegsgefangenenlager), the Residence camp
(Aufenthaltslager) and the Prisoners’ camp (Haftlingslager). With the
daily arrival of thousands of Jews and others from all over Europe,
all three facilities were quickly overwhelmed.
Auschwitz had been purposefully designed as a systematic and
efficient killing machine; Belsen was anything but. It was a place
where these hapless people were basically left to die. The conditions
were atrocious beyond measure. One Hungarian survivor, Alice Lok
Cahana, also a teen at the time, said of it simply, “Bergen-Belsen
was Hell. It was Hell. . . day and night.”
When my mother first arrived winter was fast approaching. It was
already cold and raining, and they were forced to live in tents until
more barracks were built. After long torrential nights, they would
wake up in pools of water and surrounded by those who had
perished during the night. They had little food, existing mostly on a
kind of watery cabbage soup. (In Canada my mother used to say the
smell of cabbage alone made her ill.) Disease and starvation were
rife. Tens of thousands died under those conditions, and by the end
of the war the Germans no longer even bothered to bury the bodies
piling up all over the camp. Mom told us once, “By that time we
were like zombies. We would live and even sleep amongst the dead,
sometimes for three days before anyone would take them away.
Then they would just pile them up outside. We were numb, like we
had no feelings left.” These were almost unbearable stories for us to
hear as children, but my mom wanted to emphasize what a miracle
it was that she had survived.
She did in fact contract a serious case of typhus while she was in
Belsen and was taken to the so-called hospital, which was nothing
more than another barracks. As was the case in all of the camps,
soldiers would come into these places at night, take the sick out and
shoot them - if you couldn’t work you were of no use. My
grandmother had befriended a German nurse who volunteered to
give her a heads-up as to which nights the soldiers were meant to
come, and together they would push my mother out the window and
take her back to the barracks or hide her in the latrine. The next
morning during roll call my grandmother would hold her up as best
she could, hiding her face so they couldn't tell how sick she was, and
then conceal her under the straw in the barracks until it was dark.
Then she would return her to the hospital, which was of course now
empty of patients. Mom’s illness was so serious that this back-and-
forth went on for more than a month.
Unbeknownst to my mother as she was fighting for her life, Aunt
Yita had been singled out by one of the German “commanders” (as
I've learned, survivors seem to refer to any German of rank as a
commander) to select six people for a special job. Among others Yita
picked her cousins. At first they were upset with her, afraid of what
horrible task they were in for, but they were taken to a room and
told to separate and repair clothing that had belonged to the dead,
to repurpose it for the living. Compared to the strenuous and often
gruesome detail forced on most of the prisoners, it was a strangely
sane and gentle piece of work. They did as they were told and were
even allowed to choose some clothing for themselves, and at the
end of the first day, this commander brought them food, including
warm soup made from rice and milk to share with their families.
Yita remained in that job for weeks, scarcely believing her good
fortune, and eventually discovered that the Kommandant was acting
out of a desire to secretly do some good. When she asked him why
he was helping them he said, “I have a daughter your age, and you
remind me of her.” When he saw Yita crying one day and asked her
what was wrong, and she answered, “My sister is very sick with
typhus, and I’m afraid she won't live,” he actually slipped her some
antibiotics. It’s very likely that this one act of kindness saved my mother's life. In fact, Mom used to tell us about being awoken by a
pinprick, opening her eyes and seeing the nurse standing over her
with a smile on her face. Yita never knew the commander's name;
prisoners were not permitted to address any German personally, only
by rank or “sir.” Shortly after their liberation, this rare man capable of
decency shot himself rather than face justice for what he, willingly or
not, had been a part of.
At long last, on April 15, 1945, the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment and
the 11th Armoured Division of the British Army entered the gates of
Bergen-Belsen to free the approximately 60,000 prisoners still barely
hanging on to their lives. My mom described the scene to us: “I was
working in a woodshed piling wood. We were all starving or sick,
and I noticed out one window that the Germans were standing with
both hands up. I even joked to the others about it. ‘Look!’ I said.
‘Now they’re saluting Hitler with both hands. We worked thirty
minutes beyond our liberation because we didn't realize the British
had arrived. When we were told to come out, and that we were free,
we could not believe it. We were in shock. We had assumed there
was no one left alive to save us, otherwise why had they not come
sooner?”’
Yita's experience was quite different from my mother’s: “When
the British arrived, they lifted me onto the first tank. As I showed
them around the camp, I was so happy, it was the greatest day of
my life!”
My mother continued, “When we came out of the woodshed the
British were so stunned to see us, they couldn't take it. They were
just sitting down and, you know, crying. They couldn’t believe the
horror of it. And yet we were used to it.”
I recently watched some heart-rending video footage of the
scenes my mother is talking about. It brought me to tears, not for
the first time whilst writing this account. The British soldiers were
clearly devastated, many of them weeping and being physically sick
from what they had found. They forced the now-arrested Germans
to move the hundreds of bodies tossed in piles around the camp
from trucks to the mass graves, while the now-liberated prisoners
shouted and cursed at them in a Babel of languages.
“But the soldiers were also making some mistakes,” Mom said.
“They would put the Nazis in the trucks but forget to search them -
some would have a gun hidden and start shooting innocent people.
So even though the war was over, some prisoners died after they
were liberated.
“The British couldn’t do enough for us. They gave us food,
whatever they had, candies or whatever, which my mother forbade
us to eat. She would take it all and every day give us just a little bit,
which was so wise because we weren't used to that kind of food.
Many others got sick from it, and without enough medication to help
them recover, some even died. So up until the very end my mother
kept on saving us.”
Honestly, I cannot for a moment imagine where they found the
strength and courage to carry on. Many survivors, like my own
family, desperately held on to their faith to get them through;
shockingly to me, their belief in God had persisted throughout those
six years of carnage; others relied on their own defiance as a
survival-of-the-fittest mentality; and others, well, they simply tried
not to succumb for as long as they possibly could. My cousin
Zecharia described his liberation this way: “By some miracle I
survived. God makes miracles, but this was not a miracle from God. I
am a religious man, but I don’t Know where God was then.”
Throughout my life, whenever I’ve thought back on my parents’
horror-filled experiences, I've felt immeasurable admiration for their
strength and enormous sadness for what they endured. I also get
why so many children of survivors struggle. It sounds absurd that a
child of a survivor should suffer guilt for something they had
absolutely nothing to do with, but it’s a real thing. I understand that
living in the shadow of so much suffering can cause deeply stressful
if irrational emotions, and that some people are never able to shake
them off. To find happiness in my life I’ve done my best to reconcile
those feelings through therapy, through self-examination, through
acceptance. The healthiest way to deal with them, in my experience,
is to talk about them - so I’m thankful to my mother for having told
us her stories at the dinner table; they were proof that the human
spirit can overcome terrible adversity without ever forgetting those who sacrificed everything to make happiness possible for me and the
ones I love.
As I mentioned earlier, details of my father’s survival after
Auschwitz are very sketchy, but I believe he was transferred or
marched out around the same time my mom was sent to Belsen. For
a long time, I imagined that he’d found himself in the prototype of
the death camps, Dachau, on the outskirts of Munich, and my sister
recently found a piece of paper amongst my mother’s things that not
only bears this out but lists all the camps he had been incarcerated
in until his ultimate liberation on May 5, 1945, an unbelievable seven
in total, making his survival even more miraculous: Starachowice,
Auschwitz, Flossenburg, Landsberg (aka Kaufering, one of eleven
sub-camps that comprised the Dachau concentration camp),
Buchenwald, Leipzig and Mauthausen. He never talked about how he
survived. I have to assume it was down to his physical strength and
his ability to keep working, but his body paid a terrible price, for
after the war he was diagnosed with serious heart damage, which
cost him his life when he was only forty-five.
We do know that sometime after his liberation from Dachau in
May that spring, he ended up in Feldafing Displaced Persons Camp,
twenty miles southwest of Munich in the American Zone, where,
amazingly, he ran into my mom’s brother, Herschel. Every day after
that reunion, they would check the bulletin boards where the names
of survivors across Germany and beyond were posted, in hopes of
finding any scrap of news of their families. This was where my dad
first learned that only he and his brother Shloima had survived. Then
one day, there in black and white, he saw the names Manya, Ida and
Ruchla Rubenstein. Unbelievably, all were alive and living in Bergen-
Belsen. Halle-fucking-lujah!
Initially, they planned to make the nearly six-hundred-kilometer
journey to Belsen together, but Herschel needed to gather his things
from where he was staying in Munich, and by the time he returned
to Feldafing my dad, impatient and desperate to be reunited with my mom, had left without him. They travelled separately by foot and on
Open train cars with numerous other survivors in search of the
remnants of their lives.
Meanwhile, my mother and her family were recovering in the
Displaced Persons Camp at Bergen-Belsen - basically the soldiers’
and officers’ quarters beside the camp. Here they were still required
to line up for food, mostly soup in these early post-liberation days.
During that time a policeman named Leon took a liking to my mom.
He’d pay her special attention and even bring her extra soup, and
when he saw that she was sharing a room with another family, he
arranged for her, Ida and their mom to settle in one of their own.
Clearly, he had intentions. When my mother told him she had a
boyfriend, even if she didn’t know whether or not he’d survived, he
replied, “Well, if he’s no longer alive, then I will be your friend.”
Whenever she stepped out with him, she always brought along a
cousin as a chaperone. One day they went to a party with some
people from the area around Leon’s hometown of Ostrowiec - an
area that included my father’s, Gozdzielin. At that party a person told
Leon he had a letter for someone named Manya Rubinstein and was
instructed to give it to her in person only. After some back-and-forth,
my mom grabbed the letter from him and ran off saying, “I know
her, I'll give it to her!” (In the rampant paranoia of the time, people
didn’t like announcing who they were. Survivors all suffered from
different kinds of post-traumatic stress disorder - and some of them
kept strange habits to the day they died. My mother, for example,
could never abide an unlocked door, even if we were playing right
outside it, because she feared the Germans might come marching in.
She always used to say, “It could happen again!”)
She grabbed the letter and, not knowing whether it contained
good news or bad, ran off to read it in private. Then she screamed
and ran home to share the incredible news but was so hysterical that
my grandmother had to slap her to snap her out of it. Finally she got
the words out: “Herschel and Moishe are alive and coming to us!”
Some days later an opera was being performed on the grounds
of the Displaced Persons Camp. As my mom approached with Yita,
she saw someone in the crowd she thought she recognized. She asked Yita to call his name, which she did, but he didn’t answer.
They continued on until they came to a small stream, which they
had to jump over to get to the opera. She paused and asked her
cousin to wait a moment. “Something was pushing me to go and see
who those people were. I was hoping so much that it was him. So I
got close and called out loud, ‘Moishe?’ and he turned to me. It was
him.”
Though my mom knew Herschel was also alive and on his way,
when four days later she looked out the second-story window of her
barracks, the sheer disbelief of seeing him too in the flesh made her
weak at the knees. She leaned so far out the window that my
grandmother had to grab hold of her to keep her from falling.
On November 21, 1946, my mother and father were married in
the Officers’ Mess Hall at Bergen-Belsen. What had been a roomful
of coldblooded and ruthless persecutors was now a room filled with
love, family and the promise of a new future together.
My Effin' Life