These days my 88-year-old mother keeps two cards in the drawer of her night table. One, her 1952 student ID card from Columbia University, where she attended English-language classes. The other, her affiliate card from the United Nations, where she worked as a volunteer for UNICEF. They symbolize her transition from a stateless person to an American. My New York childhood was peopled with those who, like her, had survived “the other side.”
There was an invisible steel thread of support extending throughout the city that bound these survivors together. As a result, they treated each other’s children as their own. I remember Bolek, who drove us upstate to Bear Mountain, holding the steering wheel with one hand and tapping out tunes with the other. Oscar, who took us ice-skating in Rockefeller Center and didn’t hesitate to treat us to hot chocolate at the fancy cafe. Esther, the nurse, who embraced us because she couldn’t have her own children. Elsa, with her big laugh, who gamely walked us down all the stairs of the Washington Monument. Masza, Rega and Raya, whose warmth and good humor made them seem like second mothers.
All the grown-ups in my America were orphans; all owed their lives to close escape. Many had survived imprisonment or torture. These refugees plunged into a new life concealing who knew what scars. Yet none wore the Holocaust as her identity; none viewed herself as any kind of hero.
And always there was my mother, Ola Schary, picking me up from piano lessons on Riverside Drive, taking me to stamp shows at the Coliseum, pointing out pictures at the Met and leading me through every pathway in her beloved Central Park.
Born in Warsaw, my mother was 25 when the Nazi attack upon Poland catapulted the world into war. She and her parents were herded into the Warsaw Ghetto. Her mother was deported to Treblinka, and perished there in 1942. At the beginning of the war my mother had married, and it was her husband who helped her escape from the ghetto in March 1943. He was caught and killed shortly afterward. Her father was left behind and did not survive.
One month after my mother escaped, the Nazis began their final liquidation of the ghetto, triggering an uprising among the resistance fighters. In retaliation the Nazis razed the ghetto’s remnants and set them aflame to smoke out the last hideaways. My mother witnessed the conflagration from the kitchen window of a house just outside the ghetto walls, where she was working as a housekeeper using the identity of a deceased Roman Catholic woman.
Of all the stories my mother has told–of malnutrition, of typhus and frozen corpses, of mothers watching their children sicken and then die, of the starving stealing bread from the starved, of dogs named “Man” ordered to bite men called “Dogs”–the fiery landscape of the ghetto burning is the strongest wartime image she has left me with. For while my mother was telling me what she saw through the window that night, I was imagining her as a young woman, holding on for dear life to a stranger’s identity. As she pretended to be another, cut off from every friend and relative she had ever known, she watched the last fragments of her past burn to ashes.
Hers was a tragedy duplicated all too often.
Yet bitterness was not in her nature. She took people for what they were. While I was in college she made a German friend of mine welcome in her home, and she recently nominated a Polish woman whom she believed helped save her as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor accorded by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance organization, to Christians who risked themselves to help Jews.
After the war my mother became a displaced person, living in a refugee camp in Germany. Then a set of fortunate circumstances brought her to New York as a newly married young woman. She and her friends lived in a universe cut in two by a great divide: there was “before the war” and there was “after.” It is unlikely that my gentle mother would have been a resistance fighter in the ghetto uprising even if she hadn’t managed to escape. But although she and her fellow survivors never stopped fighting their own interior battles, they made their love for their children–the so-called second generation–the foundation of their new American lives.
