Last update - 00:00 07/09/2006
Their private Holocaust
By Ronit Roccas
Yoram Mor was 9 years old (his name was Jerzy Mieczyk then) when the Germans invaded Poland. Four years later, at the end of 1943, his family - his father, his mother, he and his sister - found shelter in the home of a Polish family that lived in a village near Warsaw. Mor already knew then that the shelter was given to them not only in return for money, but also thanks to the affair that the woman had conducted with his father. "I knew when my father got out of bed and went to the Polish woman," relates Mor in "Quilt of Time" by Hanna Ezer-Ulitzky , which was published by Gvanim with the help of Yad Vashem and the Amos Fund of the President's House. "This was part of the price we paid for staying there."
However, some time later, the father was murdered by the Germans and the woman who was hiding them demanded they leave. Mor was already 14, his sister Joanna was only 7 and their mother realized there was no way of keeping them together and alive. She decided to send her son to work for a Polish farmer, but first she asked him to take his sister and leave her in the street; perhaps someone would take pity on the orphan, who had a crucifix placed around her neck, and take her in.
The interview with Joanna, now Ilana Nachshoni, appears in the book immediately after the conversation with Mor. "Snow, December, bitter cold," she relates. "They leave a small girl in the street ... No one knew for sure what would happen ... I went back to the house we had left. I remember that. The woman said to me, 'Your mother isn't here any more!' ... Today I know that my mother jumped into the river. I can't free myself of my anger towards her. Why did you jump into the river? You were a nurse. You could have put on a nurse's uniform and gone to a hospital and looked for work. You could have at least tried. In any case you jumped to your death, at least you could have tried ... To leave small children like that?!"
During the course of two years, 2003-2005, Ezer-Ulitzky interviewed 32 men and women who were children during the Holocaust, and in every case survived in monasteries, convents or the homes of Christians without their parents at their side. Mor is the eldest of them; the youngest are David Frishbein (Horoczek), who was born in 1941 in Dubnow, in Poland-Ukraine, and the twins Shosh Ram and Tammy Shoham, who were born that same year in the ghetto in a town near Vilna.
Ezer-Ulitzky is neither a historian nor from a family that went through the Holocaust. She is 72, was born here, has been a widow for a year and a half and lives in Hofit. She has a master's degree in history and the philosophy of education and in the past ran therapeutic workshops in interpersonal relations, dealing with stress situations, among other things. The idea of interviewing survivors who were children at the time was suggested to her by Dr. Nachum Bogner, who five years ago published the book "At the Mercy of Strangers" (Hebrew, Yad Vashem) - a study of children who survived in Polish territory, most of them thanks to a borrowed Polish identity.
The idea was that Ezer-Ulitzky, a contemporary of the survivors, would focus on something that Bogner and others have not dealt with in depth - the histories of these children after they arrived in Israel, the process of their absorption and the ways in which they have chosen to fulfill themselves despite the difficulties, the residues and above all the series of separations that in most cases did not end even after the war.
"I received three names from Dr. Bogner," relates Ezer-Ulitzky, "and it moved on from there. I went to see all of them - from Kiryat Gat to Kiryat Motzkin - and had I wanted to interview more people, there would have been no problem. I stopped this at a stage at which I had at least 10 more people, and I have no doubt that it would have grown. It is important for me to say: Everyone I interviewed is in the book; I didn't make any selection. Everyone who opened himself to me - I felt that he deserved the respect of having his story told. Initially I interviewed the people and I didn't know what I would do with it, I didn't have any organization behind me and I wasn't even sure that there would be a book, but the way was important to me. People opened up to me. There were those who recounted all the details, as they appear in the book, for the first time in their lives. They wanted people to know what had happened to them after the war, what some of them called 'my private Holocaust.'"
Separation after separation
Rivka Yisraeli, then Rena Motyl, was 3 years old when the Germans occupied Poland. Like most of the interviewees, her memory plays tricks on her. She remembers some things well; others have been forgotten and erased, and she has needed long years of life in order to try to reconstruct the years in which she was passed from hand to hand. Like many of the interviewees, even today she experiences the loss of her parents with a force that entirely overwhelms her, and especially the moving from place to place, from person to person, after the war. "Like a package," she says. "They took me, the package, and returned me to the Christians because they, my relatives, went to Mexico."
The survivors' monologues are presented verbatim in the book, with slight editorial changes, and only now and then are they interrupted by comments from the author, who mostly expresses her sympathy with their pain or tries to illuminate things with comments that seem to come from psychotherapy. Of all the interviewees, it is clear that Yisraeli's state is especially difficult. Throughout the interview, she weeps, and it seems that the bitterness, the anger and the disappointment with the adults who were supposed protect her in her childhood are as present today as they were then.
"We were in the ghetto," she relates, "and afterward we weren't together, and I don't know how it happened that my father and mother were not together. Where was my father when they took my mother to Treblinka?" Yisraeli was 5 years old at the time and her brother, Michael, was 10, and their father had given them money and the addresses of Polish friends and sent them on their way. He told her brother: "You are now responsible for your sister." For months the two tried to reach one of the Polish families, chasing trains and hiding.
Finally, Yisraeli relates, "My brother didn't have strength for me. I was injured, full of fleas, hungry and without clothes ... It was difficult for him. From a distance he saw some lake and wanted to drown me ... Luckily for me it was winter and they lake was all frozen. Later on, she is angry: "My father was in hiding ... He had a place to eat, to sleep, and they threw us, two little children, into this terrible world."
There are things that Yisraeli doesn't remember, but she knows that in the end they succeeded in reaching the Polish Matuszewski family - she was hidden in a town and her brother was sent to the countryside. From the distance of years, despite the terrible things she experienced during the war, Yisraeli has much more difficulty with what happened afterward. She knows that her father survived in hiding and was on his way to his children, but something went wrong - no one knows what - and he never came.
At first she was sent to some childless relatives, cut off from her brother, who was sent to Germany, who remains alienated and distant from her to this day. Later the relatives decided to move to Mexico and sent her back to the Polish family. "One loss after another," she says. But her father's brother heard about this and decided to remove her from the Polish family. Again. Yisraeli has not forgiven him to this day.
She remembers that she was injected with an anesthetic and woke up in a hotel room. Despite the terrible uprooting, her uncle did not think of taking her under his wing. He just wanted her not to be with Christians, and took her to an orphanage, still in Poland. From there she came to Israel, to the Mikveh Yisrael boarding school. Later, when everyone went into the army, she had to go to live with her uncle's new family, where she experienced humiliations and difficulties from which she is not free to this day.
"I don't understand how I survived here, in this country, after the war," she tells Ezer-Ulitzky. "I didn't have a home, I didn't have a corner of my own, I slept in one place and another. Virginia Woolf wrote "A Room of One's Own." A corner of my own would have sufficed for me."
Second class
The well-known insensitivity that Holocaust survivors encountered on their arrival in Israel seems especially harsh and infuriating when it happens to children, who were trundled here without parents, without a close, familiar adult at their sides, and were passed from hand to hand - sometimes from relatives who gave them up after a short while to institutions and kibbutzim, which not only acted insensitively but also related to them as "second class," according to some of the interviewees.
Ruti Ben David, who was born in 1936 in Tel Aviv, returned with her family to Lithuania because of economic difficulties, and was trapped there when the war broke out. She herself survived thanks to a Lithuanian family, but she lost her parents. When she came to Israel, after a short period at the home of relatives "who didn't imagine what they were getting," she was transferred to the Ahava institution. At the end of three years there, when she was in eighth grade, she was sent to a youth group at Kibbutz Netzer Sereni.
"If I broke down," she tells Ezer-Ulitzky, "it happened there ... the feeling of being second class was manifested in our clothing that we got from Youth Aliyah, in the possibility of participating in dance, instrumental and sports classes ... The sabras learned subjects that we, the Youth Aliyah children, were weak at, and therefore they sent us to work in the plant nursery while they were studying, and thus the gap between us grew."
There are survivors who are obviously forgiving and have come to terms with the life that was given them. But for many of them, there is still mainly pain, almost as vivid today as it was then, "for mother and father, for the lost childhood, for the pain of separation from adoptive parents, and altogether for a life that could have been built in one way and was built in an entirely different direction," as Ezer-Ulitzky says.