"God gathered the scattered of Israel"

"God gathered the scattered of Israel and freed its prisoners at the right time of year." ~ Tehillim 68:7

Today would have been my father’s 84th birthday.

My father and me

He and my mother parted ways before I turned three… and I never saw him again – until last year.

I did research over the years, hoping to meet him. I found his social security number, his mother’s maiden name, his US army record… eventually, I found out that he had died at the too-young age of 53. My information pretty much stalled out there for several years.

Then a miracle of modern science presented itself. I signed onto Ancestry.com and did the DNA test in hopes of finding out more about my father’s side of the family. I found a few links to family tree builders on my mother’s side, but nothing about my father. Then Ancestry.com offered its annual half-price sale for full access for six months. With a certain amount of trepidation (because it was costly, even at half-price), I asked the Dearly Beloved if I could indulge. Of course, being the Dearly Beloved, he said yes. I signed up, and spent the night in self-recriminating dreams, wondering what was in my mind, spending all that money for perhaps a clue or two... or maybe nothing. And then it became morning…

The photo that started it all

I logged onto the site and found a photo of my father I’d never seen before. I wrote to the woman who had posted the photo.

  

Hi, Jeanne. My name is Ruth Eastman, and I am Norbert Winston's daughter. I was delighted to find a photo of him I'd never seen in your file! Can you give me any other information? Are we related, or was he in some way a family friend? At 62 years of age, finding even a glimmer of my past is fascinating and inspiring. I look forward to hearing from you. Regards, Ruth (Ruti) Eastman

Jeanne – the wife of a half-brother I never knew I had – was quick to answer, and we began a lovely correspondence, sharing pictures, memories, small bits of information about Dave’s and my father, about his and my dear mothers, and about our children.

My brother Dave and my sister-in-law and new best friend Jeanne

A few days later, I awoke to a very special message:

Dear Ruti, I have a link to something you may be quite surprised and happy to see. Several years ago I found a video record of your Dad speaking of his Holocaust survival. It is quite amazing and was particularly interesting to see how much he looked and gestured like my husband Dave. It is under his nickname Kip Winston and the site is United States Holocaust Memorial. I think you will be fascinated. Looking forward to future correspondence. All the best, Jeanne

Jeanne was right. I was and remain fascinated. One Generation After, a Boston-based oral history project conducted by the children of survivors, had interviewed my father. Thanks to Janet Seckel who conducted the interview and the videographer, Wolf Krakowski, I spent an hour and a half with my father, recorded almost exactly a year before he died, listening to him tell his story. 

My father was three years old when the war began, and six when he arrived in the States; so most of his impressions of the war are made up of feelings: terror, panic, confusion. But a few memories are clear.

Norosz and his cousin Yanusz were playing in the yard with a pony. Yanusz was a year or two older than Norosz. Suddenly, bombs were being dropped from planes. The mother of Yanusz, Bronya, called out to the boys in a panic to come inside... Norosz ran toward the house, but Yanusz was slow to respond. A bomb landed on his head and and blew him up... all over little Norosz.

My father’s memories of those years included bad smells and bodies and looks of hatred on the faces of Poles... “There was a lot of death in the ghetto. I don’t remember a day towards the end, walking outside, when I didn’t see bodies. Then all of a sudden, we started hearing of people being taken away...”

It was January of 1941. Little Norosz and his parents were on a train in a cattle car with about 200 other people, destined for Treblinka. My father was now four years old, and the war, too, was young. When the train tipped over in the snow and Jews began to stream out into the woods, the German soldiers apparently were perplexed. Were they expected to deliver live Jews, or would dead Jews be acceptable? No one wanted to bring down the wrath of the Reich with a bad decision. So they faltered for a few moments before they made the choice and began shooting. Those few moments allowed a brave and decisive man – my grandfather, Samuel Fienjstien – to grab his wife Rita by the arm and his small son Norosz by the hair and save their lives. 

“We ran and ran and ran into the woods... it seemed like hours! We marched around for days. I don’t remember how we ate or slept or where, sometimes in barns. We were more afraid of the Poles than of the Germans. The days and hours became weeks... At some point, we found a hunter’s shack... In order to keep people away, my father put out a sign on the shack that said ‘cholera.’ That kept people away. My father was a very clever man,” he smiled proudly. 

My father remembering his father

“One day a man came to the door – Dr. Braun – who said that perhaps he could help us.” Dr. Braun, a Polish Jew, stayed with the family in the cabin for several days, sharing their food. My father remembered a very significant moment during those few days. In an eerie reprise of the experience he had as a small boy at the beginning of the war, he was playing outside near the cabin when a German plane “decided to use me for target practice. Dr. Braun heard the airplane, saw what was going on, ran out and jumped on top of me and got hit, he caught about four of these slugs in him...  they didn’t kill him, but that was the end of our staying in the cabin.” Sam persuaded a farmer to take Dr. Braun to a doctor. They knew this was dangerous, but they knew he would die of his wounds if he didn’t get care. 

There is more to the story of my family’s survival and eventual emigration to the United States. But this and one followup story resonate for me, a few days before we observe Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Day.

Twenty years after he was almost strafed by a German war plane, my father ran into Dr. Braun in a Tel Aviv cafe. They renewed their acquaintance, and my grandfather flew from America just to meet the man who had saved his son’s life.

Dave has often wondered where you were and if you are healthy and happy.  

Thanks in part to you, lovely lady – my sister! – I am indeed very happy; and thank God, we are healthy.

We are all living through this horrible COVID-19 plague, and I don’t know when we will finally meet in person. But I am so grateful to you for filling a big empty space in my personal history. And I am grateful to God for the friendship with you and my brother and your dear family. May our friendship grow for long, healthy, happy years!

Some of my family on the Dearly Beloved's 69th birthday -- Photo credit: Micha Paul

Important postscript: There would only be three people in this photo, if our forebears hadn’t escaped or otherwise survived the Holocaust. Thank you, God, for the amazing gifts You have given us. Sam and Rita, Norbert and Sandra... I know you are all smiling from your places in Heaven. A lot of courage and blessing built a special family. May we continue to make you all proud.

Returning from Choiceless Times

(Courtesy, Yael Shahar)

What if you could go back in time and fix that one terrible error you made in your youth? Or even if you couldn’t fix it, you could at least seek resolution and absolution…

There were moments in Yael Shahar’s book, Returning, that resonated deeply with me, certainly with a me of the past. One such moment was when she “took advantage of the many eighteen-wheelers that plied I-35 on their way south. She would single out a truck, throttle the bike up to its full speed to get into the giant vehicle’s slipstream, and ease off the throttle as they were carried behind the truck.” After reading this passage, I knew I could connect with this very down-to-earth author. We already shared a common history.

But very quickly, Ms. Shahar and her characters took me beyond myself, into an excruciatingly different time in history, and to a wondrously different focus on the meaning of reality.

The trip through Returning is an excursion between times, foreign countries, and extremely foreign concepts. Alex, the main character, was a 17-year-old boy caught in the horror machine of the Holocaust. His primal need to survive caused him to accept a role in the hated and feared Sonderkommando in the Birkenau death camp. Several decades later, he struggles to find a way to atone for his choices. God blesses him with a handful of rare individuals willing to hold his hand and heart through this painful process.

I like all five of the principle characters very much, and find myself thoroughly caught up in their ordeal, hoping desperately that they find the answers they are seeking, and absolution. This is difficult writing at its best, allowing us to feel sympathy for the plight of the historically unlovable and seemingly unforgiveable. Ms. Shahar causes the reader to care about two people broken as much by their desire for survival as by the Nazis and their campaign of wanton evil.

The wisdom of the man who is Alex is by turns painfully poignant and inspiring. In his own voice, he allows us to travel inside the tragedy of the Holocaust that stole his family, friends and identity, as well as his relationship with his Creator:

“Will God torture us forever for being Jews?”

“Is this how we’re to be a light unto the nations, as fuel for the fire?”

“The foundation of my existence has been cut from beneath me, leaving me hanging in emptiness. Where once was a vibrant web of ties to others and to God, I find only singed and blackened threads leading into nothingness.”

These poetic words convey for the reader the abject emptiness of spirit wrought by daily life in the camps, especially for those manipulated into being “partners” in crime against their brethren.

Returning also carries with it the terrifying aspect that reality isn’t as we imagine it. Is the apparent time- and space-travel in this story true? Ms. Shahar certainly renders it believable, even for someone like me. I have never had a “spiritual” or “supernormal” experience. No one has ever reached out to me from the beyond. Unlike some of my dearest friends, my dreams have never been touched by visions of angels or demons or predictions of the World to Come. Returning makes me want to believe that such “touching the beyond” is possible, that there is always time to repair what we’ve damaged.

There is so much life-wisdom in this book:

“…beauty is to be found in working within the constraints imposed on us by life.”

“…when we imbibe ‘willingness’ to die for our sacred principles, then there is some hope we will be driven to find meaning in living for our sacred principles.”

“Sometimes the answer to our prayer is the ability to pray at all. Fortunate is he who can see his personal deliverance when it finally comes.”

And more, from wise Alex, who found a miraculous way to carry his story and life-lessons into the future:

“I thought of those times when one quiet smile lit up that impenetrable night, and gave me, if not joy in life, at least a reason to live. There was more power in one of those smiles than in all the weaponry of despair with which the enemy reduced us to silence. In rising above despair, the courage in that smile raised us all – if only for a moment – to the level of immortality.”

“These are my heroes…. Not those who take up arms against the Germans in a hopeless battle, but those who take up words against silence.”

“How could one remain resolute in despair when even the act of returning a lost hair pin was a form of communion with God? How could one remain distant from life when the act of biting into a piece of fruit was a motion toward holiness? Judaism is not so much a religion as a civilization. It has inherited some great wisdom and outstanding morals that have stood the test of time, honed down through centuries of caring for one another through hardship and exile.”

Returning is not for the faint of heart – but if empathy for the lives of some of our most misunderstood brethren is important to you, it is a very significant work. One leaves this journey with as many questions as answers, perhaps the most haunting a question to the self: What choices would I have made, in the “choiceless time” of the Shoah? And what should be my opinion of my brothers and sisters and the choices they made?  This powerful telling of a terrible tale has the potential to silence earthly judgment – and replace it with compassion.

Returning, by Yael Shahar

with an afterword by Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo

Originally published at the Times of Israel under the title "Returning to the Land of the Living"