Pauline Steinhorn

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EXCERPT

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

Growing Up with Holocaust Stories

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When I was young, I often tiptoed into my parents’ bedroom to look at the jewelry and trinkets on my mom’s dresser. I was also fascinated by the framed black-and-white photos, many of children. One of my favorites was the one of six smiling girls bundled up in a snowy yard. When I asked who they were, my mother pointed to the tallest one and said, “That’s me. I was ten.” “

 

Where do they live?” I asked, pointing to the other girls.

 

“They’re gone. Murdered by the Nazis,” she said.

 

I didn’t fully understand her answer, but the cloud of pain that crossed my mother’s face convinced me to never ask about them again. I wondered if that was why she cried during the night. I often visited those photos when no one was around, trying to understand who these girls were, what games they played, and why anyone would want to hurt them. That black-and-white snapshot of six smiling girls in their winter coats broke my heart, if a six-year-old heart could be broken.

 

My imagination was my solace in those days and the years that followed, that and the company of my brothers. Allan was born when I was 2½. Around the same time, my grandmother, Bubbe and her son, Teddy, moved in with us. Teddy was two months younger than me and the product of a marriage to an older man with grown children who believed he was finished with diapers. My grandmother, like many Holocaust survivors, desperately wanted to start a new family even though she was almost forty. She thought her husband would warm to the idea. After all, how can anyone resist a baby? Somehow, he did. The only thing Bubbe carried when she moved into our home was her shoeless two-year-old, my Uncle Teddy.

 

Bubbe became a second mother to my brothers and me. At bedtime, she told us happy stories about sailing to Sweden with Mom after the war. During the summers, they swam in a lake. In the winters, they skied cross-country at night, gliding along trails illuminated by lantern light. Since Teddy called her Mom, I sometimes did too.

 

I often came home from school to find Bubbe cooking salmon cakes on the stovetop. Around the holidays, our home was filled with the sweet aroma of her homemade apple cake, Mandelbrot (Jewish biscotti) and brisket. Food was her love language. Her face lit up whenever we asked for seconds.

 

Although my mom’s friends called her Harriet, Dad called her by her Polish name, Hajuta (Hi-yu-ta) or “Hi” for short. My American father’s sole raison d’être was to make my mother happy. Dad said we should never do anything to disappoint her or make her sad. She had experienced enough sadness for a lifetime.

 

My father had a bag of tricks to make her laugh. One rainy afternoon, he lined up Teddy, Allan and me and showed us how to raise our eyebrows up and down in unison. On cue, when Mom came into the room, all brows fluttered. Although she laughed, she admonished us, saying our eyebrows would get stuck high up on our foreheads if we did this again. That never stopped us. When my youngest brother Mark was born, he joined the lineup.

 

My father continued his mischief, often sneaking up behind my mother while she washed dishes, grabbing her around the waist and kissing her neck. She would giggle and whisper, “Not around the children.” That never stopped him.

 

She may have laughed during the day, but most nights, I woke up to hear Mom crying and Dad’s soothing voice, reminding her it was just a bad dream. I discovered the source of my mother’s daily nightmares the day the woman in the dark green suit came. Strangers never visited, especially women wearing suits. Mom sent us downstairs to the playroom. She watched us until we reached the bottom of the steps, then told us to stay there until she called. Then she closed the door. She never closed the door. I climbed back up and sat on the top step. I didn’t understand everything they said, but over the course of weekly visits from the woman in the suit, I learned about Mom’s life in wartime Poland.

 

Mom’s stories became my stories. I dreamt of running through the forest away from the heavy footsteps of German soldiers, and being trapped in a packed cattle car with Mom and Bubbe. In that cattle car, women prayed and moaned while others shouted words of encouragement. When I woke gasping, the train whistles I heard were confusing. Was I on a train headed to a concentration camp, or was that the B&O train lumbering over the tracks near our rowhouse in Northwest Baltimore?

 

In the 5th and 6th grades, I took the trolley to the Enoch Pratt Library with my brothers. While Allan headed to the joke book section and Teddy searched for novels by Ian Fleming, I combed through the card catalogs for anything I could find about the Holocaust. Every week, I’d sit on the floor of the adult stacks and read until it was time to leave. With each book I read, I imagined Mom and her sisters fighting for survival with the other characters. I grew up on Holocaust stories. But unlike the books and DC comics I devoured as a child, not everyone who was good survived.

 

By the time I was in high school, my mother was speaking about her Holocaust experiences at synagogues, churches and schools. When my friends visited, Mom told them Holocaust stories at the kitchen table over milk and cookies. They were mesmerized by the tales of heroic escapes… rescues from near death… and teen girls whose bonds of friendship helped them endure the horrors of slave labor and concentration camps.

 

Talking about the Holocaust and remembering those who died became her raison d’être. She survived to tell her story, she’d say, so that it wouldn’t happen again.

 

In 1945, shortly after she was liberated, Mom wrote an almost daily account of her wartime experiences. She translated it into English, edited and re-edited, but it remained incomplete. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she felt an urgency to finalize it. I did too. A pencil and a pile of loose-leaf paper lay on a table beside her bed. Some pages were blank, others filled, and some held notes on earlier chapters. I typed her chapters and asked questions. In the last months of her life, when there was an alarming rise in Holocaust denial and antisemitism, she expressed regret at not finishing her memoir.

 

In early summer 2019, Mom showed me her final chapters, nearly 60 handwritten pages, along with over 220 typewritten pages. I promised to finish it for her.

 

A few weeks later, she passed away peacefully at home, shortly after our family gathered for her 90th birthday. I didn’t realize it at the time, but her legacy would become mine.

 

Over two years later, after completing an edit of my mother’s journals, I discovered my grandmother’s journals. Here were over 250 typewritten pages, also written in 1945, translated from the original Yiddish. I had no idea this treasure existed, nor did I know her history.

 

Bubbe passed away in 1994. I wished she were still alive so I could ask her questions and tell her how proud I was of her. Whenever I asked Bubbe about the war, all she would say was: “I wouldn’t have survived without your mother.”

 

I was familiar with some of the stories. Others astonished me. The book I imagined became something else entirely. Up until that point, I only knew this world through my mother’s teenage eyes. Now, I had my grandmother’s powerful narrative written from the point of view of a wife, mother, nurse and resistor. The coming-of-age Holocaust story I imagined would now include the story of my new hero, a woman who maintained her humanity, spoke her mind, and saved lives under the worst conditions.

 

Bubbe wasn’t afraid of anyone, perhaps because of all she endured. After my family moved to the suburbs of Washington, DC, Bubbe moved into our rowhouse in a neighborhood that gradually became run-down. All of our friendly neighbors moved away. Some houses became vacant, and the city stopped maintaining the streets as it once did.

 

Mom wanted Bubbe to move, especially after she was approached by a “young thug,” as she called him, in an alley when she walked home from the local grocery store. The “thug” pointed a knife at her and demanded money. Bubbe put two bags of groceries down and said, “I live in that house,” she pointed to the back door. “I just came from the A&P. Do you think I have any money left? Now, put away that knife and leave me alone.” She picked up her groceries and walked through the gate into her home without concern. Knowing this about my grandmother helped me understand her fearlessness in the concentration camps.

 

Writing this book was born from a promise I made to my mom. Through her public speaking, essays, plays, and now this book, she honored her vow to remember those who did not survive, those who showed her kindness and generosity, and those who risked their lives so she could live.

 

That responsibility now falls on me. I am honored to share my family’s story about the dangers of fascism, antisemitism, and genocide. Despite the inhumanity they faced, the most valuable lessons Bronia and Hajuta taught my brothers and me are to embrace life, love family, and stand against prejudice and injustice, just as they did.

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