Preface

 
After over forty years, why the decision to bring up old, painful memories? After all, they have haunted my nights all along; nightmares brought up vividly some childhood fears, many later encounters, all mixed up and all in confusing patterns and usually, my awakening dispels them. Yet they keep returning.

Some pleasant memories return, too: some are sentimental as they evoke old friendships, loves, unusual and unexpected encounters - a kaleidoscope of memories.

My sons Mark and Eytan heard a number of stories in the course of their growing-up years, yet the events seemed disjointed. Talking to Eytan last summer, he exhorted me to write a real account of my life. He had heard bits and pieces, yet not the whole story. I mulled over that conversation and realized that it would be right to do it now - I have ample time and can still remember fairly well what went on when I grew up, how I matured under highly adverse conditions. After all, my memory may fail as time goes on. I decided to write before memories fade. The time and place of my youth were so different from the place and time of my children’s and grandchildren’s lives.

My grandchildren may catch a glimpse of the life of their grandparents and great-grandparents, a life before cars, television, telephone, refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, air conditioners, frozen foods and disposable diapers. Imagine a world like that? It looks impossible from the vantage point of to-day, yet life had its joys and sorrows, just the same. Life was simpler, people worked harder, physically, expectations were lower.

Besides, how can one put in a nutshell the years that followed, years of such turbulence, of such upheaval, fear and danger and political convulsions, the years from 1939 to the end of the Second World War? It was open hunting season on the Jews in Europe and thorough German hunters achieved great successes - they almost annihilated the Jewish communities of Europe. The ones who remained have a duty to tell the events, as they experienced them, as a sad reminder and as a warning, for "history repeats itself".

The question in my mind and in the minds of those reading these pages would necessarily come up: How does one have the courage to continue living under such circumstances? Why does one not commit suicide? A great number of people took their own lives. Was their despair any greater? Did they display more courage or less?

Among my own circle, three women committed suicide: a former classmate of mine, the young woman upstairs, who jumped to her death from the fifth floor, was picked up, carried in by her father and set on my bed. I could never erase that picture from my mind. That fateful day was December 7, 1941, where half a world away from us, the Japanese attacked the U.S. navy at Pearl Harbor. The third was the wife of a doctor, a former neighbor on Mehlplatz. She was a few years older than myself. Yuda’s family physician and her husband took their lives in the ghetto, in October 1941.

I could see that it seemed simple, bloodless and freeing one of further struggle, yet I never considered that solution. I had that magic thinking, that innate optimism, that in the long run, we’ll come out on top, survive the catastrophe, live to tell the tale. The fact that an entire community went through the same suffering made it easier to endure. Everybody hoped that through some unusual event, the war would end. One hoped for Hitler’s assassination, for a special bomb that would bring to an end German power, deus ex machina, a deliverance, somehow.

However, in retrospect, I realize that had anybody known that the war would stretch to such length, six years, one would not have struggled to keep alive.

Six years are an eternity in wartime, especially when you are among the ones the government is out to exterminate, to wipe off the face of the earth. Luckily for the ones who survived, the war was over in 1945, forty years ago, but the struggle did not end. The new endeavor was to rebuild a life out of the ashes. One had lost home, friends, family, a way of life. People came out full of scars, from wounds that had been inflicted along the way. All were poor, penniless, homeless. Some survivors became aggressive, some became resigned, some ruthless, others restless and others compassionate. Some felt they were wiser but not calloused, still quite vulnerable.

When my father found out, in 1944, that his entire family had been wiped out in Poland - brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces - he said to my Mother and myself: I don’t think I will ever laugh again. He never did.

No two people who survived those awful years could tell the same story. Everybody went through a different course, each one’s experiences were unique, different, all bitter. My husband Yuda lost his parents and did not know whether his only brother, Michael, was alive. Yuda himself went through the ghetto and labor camps, arrived in Israel and fought an entire year in the War of Independence (1948-1949). For him, the war that had started in 1939 ended in 1949.

The same was true for the different Jewish communities all over Europe. The isolation of those years was such, nobody knew what was going on in the next town or village. The utter splintering of the Jewish communities brought along the isolation, intended by the oppressors. All during the war, I never heard of Treblinka or Auschwitz, while in Poland or in Austria they never knew about Bershad or Obadovka or Michailovka, in Transnistria, where the Jews from Bucovina were deported and most of them did not survive.

It may be of interest to my grandsons Michael and Jonathan and their future brothers or sisters and to Eytan’s future family to read an account of grandmother’s and grandfather’s lives and to know more about their family than they ordinarily would. Of course, for my daughter-in-law Ruth, this is a revelation of our past.

My fervent hope for my children and grandchildren and generations to come is never to have to endure anything comparable to the barbarity that occurred in the first half of our century. If anything, the world should have learned from the senselessness of the destruction. My fervent wish is for a peaceful, happy life. Lechaim - to life.

 
Two Questions
 

In the course of conversations, people will often ask a naturalized American citizen, like myself: "What country did you come from?" and upon hearing that I settled here after the Second World War, they will invariably ask: "How did you survive?" I find both queries difficult to answer, since a simple name of a country does not really tell what my background is and the second question defies a simple retort altogether. The closest I came to giving a fair answer as to how I survived, was: "I kept breathing."

Actually, the bulk of the following writing constitutes an answer to these inquiries - therefore this piece of writing deserves to come at the beginning of my reminiscences.

To tell that I was born in Romania is correct, historically, yet my surroundings, my first language, my first registered impressions, the first songs I sang, the first fairy tales told to me, the first jokes I heard and understood - all those were German, based on the life of a province, of a town, of a family that existed within the Austrian culture. Up to the age of six, when I started first grade, I did not understand a single word of Romanian. Growing up, the Romanian education went on side by side with the accustomed life of before - no cutting off of the former, just adding another facet to my life. I became bilingual by necessity, by circumstance.

As history intruded onto the scene, when I was 20, the Soviet Union took over the province where I lived and another layer was about to be added to the former. The war and Nazi occupation brought a sharp interruption of the Russian-Ukrainian scene and the Romanians came back for three years. As the Soviets returned in 1944, I lived under them another year and left Czernovitz for good, in 1945. After an interim of two years in Bucharest, I came to the United States for slightly over two years of studies and then settled for seven years in Israel. For the last thirty years, my home is in the United States, my language English. My native town has been Russian ever since 1944.

Now, considering layer upon layer of languages and cultures and regimes, how can I easily answer a seemingly simple question? As a rule, I say: "I was born in Romania." This often calls forth a remark about liking gratar, mamaliga, red wine, ctuica and gypsy music and dancing the hora. Well, I really do not stem from that background. We liked different foods: we ate wiener schnitzel and drank spritz - a mixture of wine and soda-, we listened to German classics, we enjoyed German literature, we loved the poetry of Schiller, Goethe, Heine; we sang songs by Schubert and Lehar, we danced to Strauss waltzes. "What kind of a fake Romanian are you?" would be a natural reaction. We followed the Austrian tradition because the area had been for generations part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, those were the customs familiar to us. Little by little the Romanian customs started to appeal to the younger generation, yet old traditions are hard to erase, it takes generations for the new ones to set in.

"So what is the area now?" It is part of the Soviet Union now. In fact, Bukovina was located in the North-Eastern corner of Romania and is now the Western part of the Ukraine. Hard to explain to any person who does not exactly follow the vagaries of European history in the 20th century. Instead of trying to clarify this complicated matter orally, I rather take a detailed map of Europe and try, if possible, to clarify and show where all this took place.

The answer to the second question proves even more treacherous to elucidate.

The fact of one’s presence is in itself the answer: I survived, I am here. The hard part is to explain: how? I won’t go into that again because the whole story is the answer to this question. For the first time, I have given a full, detailed reply, a complete account of my own survival as well as that of my parents and of a fraction of the Jewish community of my home town Czernovitz.

Next time, when asked, I will tell the questioner: Read this book.