Storytelling or History Uncovered: Reconstructing Memories of Fractured Families in Two Holocaust Memoirs

Anne Wyatt-Brown

Less than five months after the bombing of the World Trade Center, A New York Times

reporter pointed out that chronicles of disaster, such as the bombing, had changed over time.

Initially, reports are told as if they were “clean, simple narratives uncontaminated by human

foibles and disorder.” Eventually, we learn that these stories “are usually muddled and

complicated, subject to different shadings and interpretations” (Kleinfield, 2002, p. 28). If

descriptions of the World Trade Center bombing deepened and changed within a few months, so

have Holocaust narratives over the more than sixty years since the end of World War II.

Unfortunately, some memoirs have been fabricated, for example Binjamin Wilkomirski’s

Fragments (1995/1996).

One solution to the problem of authenticating these recollections consists of collaborative memoirs although one such, Martin Gray’s For Those I Loved (1971/1974) was also fraudulent.

Three unusual examples of genuine collaborative Holocaust memoirs, however, reveal the complexities of traumatic recollection. They are: Rena Kornreich Gelissen and Heather Dune

Macadam’s Rena’s Promise (1995), Gerda Weissmann Klein and Kurt Klein’s The Hours After

(2000) and historian Lawrence Powell’s prizewinning Troubled Memory (2000). Each differs

from more typical Holocaust memoirs in quite distinct ways. For example, Rena Gelissen told

her story to American-born Heather Macadam. Macadam validated Gelissen’s recollections and

recorded their numerous conversations. Rena’s Promise concentrates on life in the camps, what

Terrence Des Pres called “life in death” (1980, p. 95). Gerda Weissmann began her partnership

1 with German American Kurt Klein just after being liberated (Klein, 1957/1995). This

relationship culminated in their marriage and much later in the publication of their postwar

letters. These describe the difficulties faced by Jewish refugees in the aftermath of the war (Klein

and Klein, 2000). Lawrence Powell’s Troubled Memory (2000) incorporated multiple

perspectives: a memoir dictated by Holocaust survivor Ruth Skorecki to Harry Hull, a neighbor

and seminarian (pp. 430-433); extensive interviews with her family and other survivors; and

archival and secondary material. Most important, however, was Powell’s developing friendship with Skorecki’s daughter, Anne Levy. Her story became the emotional center of his study. The book combines an analysis of both the family’s wartime miseries and Anne Levy’s intervention in a recent crisis in American politics. These three women bore eradicable scars. Yet, they formed late-life friendships that demonstrate their resilient spirits.

Not surprisingly, however, as time has passed many who lived through the experience have died. Those who remain are in their declining years. They may not be capable of writing memoirs or contributing a great deal to such compositions themselves. Two recent works by

Eugene Pogany, In My Brother’s Image (2000), and Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost (2006) can

serve as models of new approaches to remembering when relatives are too old or

too unhappy to search for new evidence. These writers are heirs of Holocaust survivors and

victims. They are not professional historians. Because they were born after World War II, they

have reconstructed the stories of their relatives as best they could. They have used private

communication that historians are unlikely to discover in archives, and their accounts give

insights into the complexity of historical memory. The distinctive ways that these writers tell

their stories affect what historians might learn from them. Pogany’s reconstructed memoir is an

example of therapeutic storytelling. On the other hand, Mendelsohn’s epic journey emphasizes

2 the process by which he gathers shards of information and tests them for accuracy. Pogany

began his research to help heal the wounds in his family, many of which were increased by the

miseries of genocide. His memoir, however, has reached many more people than just his family

After he published it, he made presentations to Jewish groups, many of whose listeners also struggle with family dysfunction as a result of the war (see Eugene Pogany at www.google.com).

Mendelsohn sought to appeal to scholars and lay audiences, as well as his relatives. His methods of presentation shed light on the work of historians and on the methods of genealogists.

Most of Pogany’s and Mendelsohn’s immediate relations survived the Holocaust.

Pogany’s parents were incarcerated in concentration camps but returned to Hungary after they were freed. From there they moved to Sweden and then to New Jersey in 1950. His uncle joined his brother’s family in 1956. The majority of Mendelsohn’s relatives escaped the fate of Eastern

European Jews. A good many of his mother’s family emigrated to the in

November, 1920 (see 2006, p. 74, for the roundabout way Mendelsohn first gives the date). The eldest brother of his maternal grandfather, however, found America to be inhospitable and returned to . He lost his life, along with his wife and four children. For different reasons and using different techniques the two memorists sought to recover the fragments of their relatives’ history, narratives which had been partly obliterated by the chaos of World War II and its aftermath.

The styles of the two accounts are very different, reflecting the varied motivations of the writers. Pogany composes a straightforward narrative of reconstructed conversations and memories, based on intensive interviews with members of his parents’ generation, several trips to Italy and Hungary, and secondary research. Much of the scenes he reconstructs are based on the recollections of those he interviewed. Occasionally, however, he invents conversations and

3 thoughts about which he and the relatives he interviewed could not possibly have known.1 He emphasizes the emotions of the participants, in keeping with his professional training as a psychiatrist. His primary purpose is to heal familial wounds. Mendelsohn’s work might be called postmodern in style, combining the conventions of Greek epic–he is a classicist-- with a sophisticated exploration of historical memory. He uses multiple sources for his information, discarding those recollections that turn out probably to be inaccurate.2 He compares what

various people tell him with the family stories he grew up with and the written record whenever it is appropriate. His maternal grandfather had died long before the grandson started researching the family history in 2001. Mendelsohn used various internet sites to obtain information and entered chat rooms. He received some useful responses, as well as a recommendation to use

Alex Donai, a Ukrainian, as his guide in Bolechow, the family village. Alex turned out to be extremely helpful.

Beginning in 2001 Mendelsohn also visited several continents in the effort to find out what happened to his great-uncle and consulted family members and bystanders, both Jews and

Ukrainians. Some of the interviews were of limited usefulness, but even frustrating ones, such as an early one with Eli Rosenberg in Long Island, gave him information that turned out to be accurate. The eighty-nine-year-old man was not as lucid as he once had been, but he told

Mendelsohn triumphantly that his great-uncle had been toip, that is deaf (Ibid., p. 68). This point

was later confirmed (Ibid., pp. 296, 321, 380). Several of the bystanders in Bolechow, both

during and after the war, eventually were able to answer most of his questions. As a result by the

end of his 512 page book, readers and researcher alike have learned about many aspects of the

fate of his relatives and that of others. The advantage of Mendelsohn’s approach is that we learn

about the nature of historical memory, as well as the problems and joys of historical research. If

4 he had merely presented his findings, we would have no idea how complicated the task was and how great a role luck paid in the process.

Both writers were aware that incomplete family histories had contributed to familial psychological dysfunction. Pogany (b. March 22, 1951), a middle-aged psychiatrist, realized that his Hungarian American father and uncle could not forgive each other for the different ways they had reacted to the trauma of war. He conducted many interviews with his uncle during his last years and then after his uncle’s death he encouraged his elderly father to unburden himself of his painful memories. He also talked to his mother and aunt and traveled to Hungary and Italy in the effort of helping his father come to terms with the rupture of family harmony.

In contrast, Mendelsohn (b. 1960) sought the role of family historian in childhood to satisfy his own curiosity about the fate of his uncle and cousins. As a child he had been surrounded by elderly relatives who had left Eastern Europe primarily for financial reasons.

Whenever the boy entered the room where they sat in Miami Beach, Florida, they wept. He looked, they said, so much like Uncle Shmiel, who had perished in Bolechow, Poland, along with his wife Ester and four daughters (2006, pp. 3-8). One of those elders was Minnie Spieler, a frightening figure to the young boy. Many years later in Australia, Mendelsohn learned that the

“scary” woman had been his Aunt Ester’s sister, and sister-in-law of Uncle Shmiel (Ibid., p.

231). Exact information about the family’s fate was difficult to obtain because for many years

Bolechow was behind the Iron Curtain and inaccessible to Americans. The elders did have letters from Shmiel, however, in which he begged for help in escaping the Nazis. Lacking copies of their responses, Mendelsohn does not know why they were unable to assist Shmiel in his time of need. His guess is that they lacked the money necessary to convince the unwilling State

Department officials to allow them to enter the United States. Fascinated by this one-sided

5 correspondence Mendelsohn visited Ukraine--Bolechow, Poland is now called Bolekhiv and is in

Ukraine--,Australia, Austria, the , and Israel. He traveled with family members and friends in order to piece together the story of his missing relatives’ lives and deaths. At the end when he found the places where they had been slaughtered, he realized that he could not fully comprehend their experiences, although he did mourn their loss. Nonetheless, the act of reconstruction made him feel close to the memory of his grandfather and compensated for his failure in youth to have asked older family members more questions about the fate of the unfortunate uncle and cousins. Pogany’s memoir helped his father come to terms with his losses and to reclaim his Jewish heritage more completely. Mendelsohn’s research healed a much less serious rupture between him and his younger brother Matt. Thus, the enterprise of history writing can have personal meanings that scholars, treating more general and more public concerns, might well overlook without noticing the loss.

In My Brother’s Image, an intergenerational memoir of Pogany’s family, opens in

Hungary before the start of World War One and ends in the family’s trip to Hungary in 1996.

Most Holocaust memoirs do not cover so much time. Exceptions include those written by children of survivors, who often describe how difficult it was to grow up in the household of anguished parents, most of whom were unable to discuss their past until the 1980s and 1990s.

Many such essays appeared in Berger and Berger (2001), including one written by Eugene

Pogany a year after he had published In My Brother’s Image (2000).3 Pogany’s account in this longer memoir, however, differs from the saddest of the tales written by other children of survivors and even diverges from the relatively positive essay he placed in Berger and Berger

(2001, “The Path to Kaddish”). In his book he describes three generations of the family, incorporating a story of humiliation with one of healing, aspects of which are interwoven

6 throughout. For example, in the section which emphasizes the prejudice and financial strains the family members faced, their resilience and resourcefulness are apparent. Still, in the last third of the memoir, the chapters which depict how family members became gradually more reconciled to their past histories, Pogany describes how entangled and time consuming the process of mending has been.

The theme of humiliation dominates the first fourteen chapters in which Pogany reconstructs the Hungarian lives of his grandparents, parents, and uncle between the two world wars. According to Pogany, many of the religious choices his beleaguered family members made initially stemmed from an effort to reject unpleasant memories of shame and helplessness.

For example, to avoid anti-Semitism and find employment, Béla Popper, the grandfather of

Eugene Pogany, like many other Jews of his generation, converted to Catholicism. He even had changed his last name. Pogany, however, suggests that a more personal humiliation contributed to his grandfather’s decision to convert. When Béla introduced his fiancée, Gabriella, to his relatives at a Passover seder, his bourgeois brother-in-law, Károly Schneider, made his disdain for the young woman very plain. As a result in 1914, Béla found it quite easy to leave his relatives’ assimilated Jewish traditions behind and become a Catholic convert.

After the Great War ended, Gabriella and her children were baptized in 1918. Life, however, did not become easy for Jews in general or for their family. Shortly after the war ended Béla was captured by Hungarian communists. When he finally returned home his distress was acute, and he almost collapsed from the strain. As a result, he often sat silently in the family circle, to the distress of his children. Moreover, it was becoming obvious that some Hungarians blamed Jews for the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire. To make matters worse, when

Hungary was stripped of much of its territory, many of its diverse ethnic groups departed as well.

7 As a result, Jews were no longer needed to dilute ethnic tensions. (2000, pp. 110-111). Béla and

Gabriella, however, ignored these signs of trouble. The family felt accepted by the members of

their immediate community and nurtured by their local Catholic church.

Repeated humiliations were common experiences for Eastern European Jews throughout

the early years of the twentieth century. Christianized Jews, however, had many illusions about

their roles in society and could not imagine that Hungarian Christians would turn against them.

The greater their religious convictions, the worse was their sense of being betrayed. Most learned too late that many of their religious compatriots, even the clergy, regarded being Jewish as an ineradicable stain. Instead, because they were baptized Christians, they assumed that the laws regarding Jews did not include them (Ibid., p. 124). They felt unrealistically safe and were

less inclined to take steps to leave Europe while they could.

The subtitle of the book, “Twin Brothers Separated by Faith After the Holocaust,”

describes the unusual dilemma the writer, Eugene Pogany, inherited but wished to resolve. His

father, Miklós and uncle, Gyuri, born in 1912, were identical twins. They were inseparable in

childhood, but the trajectory of their adult lives took them in radically different directions. They

were reared as Catholics although Béla and Gabriella, their parents, did not hide their Jewish

backgrounds. Despite the inauspicious circumstances of the conversion, Catholicism suited

them. The mother felt drawn to its doctrines and liturgy. She went regularly to confession and

to mass. The father rarely did so, preferring to play cards (Pogany, 2000, p 65). The two boys

received a Roman Catholic education in rural Hungary in a town near to their father’s

veterinarian practice. The boarding school provided such a safe haven for the two boys that,

while in school, the writer’s father, Miklós, considered becoming a priest. When he departed the

cocoon of the school for a university, he ultimately decided to study law. Gyuri, his twin

8 brother, moved in the opposite direction. At fourteen he experienced transforming love. He fell for Ági, a young Jewish girl whose family members were friends of his Aunt Laura. All might have been well, but Ági died a few years later of tuberculosis of the bone, an event which devastated Gyuri. At the university the loss propelled Gyuri into the priesthood. His commitment was not a common decision for a baptized Jew. Although he developed a rich spiritual life, Ági’s death apparently partially destroyed his capacity for empathy. The Poganys, however, welcomed Gyuri’s choice of career. They sat proudly in the front pew of the church in

1935 when he was ordained. In the same year Miklós, aged twenty-three, was reunited with his cousin Muci, aged twelve, whom he later married. He had first seen his cousin when in infancy she and her mother returned from America, Muci’s birthplace.

World events then divided the two brothers at a critical time in their lives. In October

1939, after the Germans invaded Poland, Gyuri went to Italy seeking a cure for kidney stones, a consequence of his overly rich Hungarian diet. He spent three weeks in a spa in Fiuggi, a hill town near Rome, and emerged cured. When he regained his strength, Gyuri sought a parish to serve. As Pogany pointed out, Gyuri was theoretically aware how dangerous it would be for him to return to Hungary and realized that even Italy might become inhospitable to a baptized Jew. A

Swiss priest, Emil Kappler, recognizing his temporary roommate’s distress, suggested that the two visit San Giovanni Rotondo. The town is in the Gargano, southeast of Rome and at that time was the location of “a saintly healer” named Padre Pio (Ibid., p. 136). Although Gyuri hesitated to make the trip, his friend persisted. The decision to visit ultimately saved the young priest’s life.

According to the author, Padre Pio exhibited a genuinely beatific behavior. He carried the stigmata. More important, he possessed the rare ability to size people up intuitively. When

9 he talked to Gyuri, he immediately sensed the young man’s depression and spoke of the

Hungarian’s catastrophic loss of the girl he had loved. Moreover, he was impressed by the

young priest’s linguistic expertise. He needed an amanuensis to answer the letters he received

from many countries as well as to hear the confessions of those penitents who did not speak

Italian. Although he did not acknowledge Gyuri’s Jewish origin, he intimated that the young man’s life was in danger. Needless to say Gyuri accepted with alacrity. He resided there for the next seventeen years.

Padre Pio sheltered Gyuri throughout the war. He offered sanctuary but did not discuss the plight of Jews in other parts of Europe. Indeed, the young priest was so isolated that he had no idea how other churchmen, less saintlike, were behaving and how the rest of his Jewish relations and countrymen were faring. Even after the war when news of the concentration camps appeared, Gyuri had little appreciation of his twin brother’s suffering. In contrast, Miklós and his beloved Muci suffered considerably at the hands of Hungarian Christians. In 1943,

Miklós was a member of a battalion of Jewish converts to Christianity, who were made to sweep the streets although they were commissioned in the Hungarian army (Ibid., pp. 144-145). The men resented the pointlessness and humiliation of their lot, even though they were also aware of the fates of those who were not so lucky.4

Six months before that assignment, Miklós and Muci had become engaged.

Unfortunately, the family history repeated itself, demonstrating once again that being rebuffed

can often cause those who have been humiliated to abuse others. Just as Béla’s family had

looked askance at his choice of bride, so Gabriella was not pleased by her Catholic son’s

selection of a Jewish cousin. She wanted Catholic grandchildren. Only Muci was realistic about

the religious situation facing both Jews and converts. Not only was she staunchly Jewish, but

10 she also pointed out that the government would not permit the Catholic church to baptize the

child of converted Jews (Ibid., pp. 151-152, 159). In the middle of these negotiations, Béla died.

Although initially his death and internment were treated with respect, shortly thereafter, his

coffin was summarily moved to the back of the cemetery from his prominent resting place (Ibid.,

pp. 160-163). Needless to say, this humiliating incident shook some of Miklós’s faith in his

fellow Catholics.

Luckily the love Miklós felt for Muci endured as successfully as Béla’s had for his

Gabriella. In the short term, however, the situation in Hungary became ever more perilous.

Gabriella, widowed and depressed, was placed in a ghetto from which she could leave only to

attend mass (Ibid., pp. 181-185). She was bewildered by her plight, unable to understand how

the Hungarian police could release her from a temporary prison for mass but place her in a train

headed for Auschwitz. Upon arrival she was quickly selected for death. According to later

reports of prisoners, she managed to hold on to her crucifix even as she entered the gas chamber

(Ibid., p. 220). Muci also was imprisoned in a ghetto, despite being born an American citizen

who was also married to a converted Catholic. When she consulted the immigration authorities

about her status--she lacked a Hungarian passport-- an official urged her to convert to save her

life. At first she refused to abandon her faith. Indeed she felt shamed by the prospect of begging

a priest to baptize her. Nonetheless, Muci underwent the rite to relieve her mother’s worry about

her daughter’s fate (Ibid., pp. 194-204).

Not only did the experience mortify the young woman, but ultimately it did her no good.

On December 8, 1944, she and her mother were rounded up. Although her mother was allowed

to return to the ghetto with other elderly people, Muci was chosen for concentration camp.

Discovering his bride’s capture, Miklós tore off the white armband that marked him as a

11 converted Jew and ate pieces of the letter signed by the papal nuncio in Budapest, written supposedly to protect baptized Jews from harm (Ibid., p. 211). In short order he was placed in a

cattle car headed for Bergen-Belsen. According to his son, “the final deathblow of Miklós’s life

as a Christian” occurred on the march from the train station to the camp. His fellow Christians

lined the streets, yelling that the pathetic prisoners were “dirty Christ-killers” who deserved to die (Ibid, p. 214). It was a charivari similar in its intent to the ancient ritual of tarring and

feathering. Not surprisingly the betrayal as well as his concentration camp experiences

convinced Miklós that he could not remain a Christian. He gained respect for the behavior of

some of his fellow Jews in the camp but at the same time lost his faith in God and his capacity

for prayer.5

Although recognizing the role that humiliation contributed to the religious choices his

forebears made, Eugene Pogany went to great lengths to reconstruct the feelings and

commitments of all the parties, Catholics and Jews alike. In the author’s note in the beginning of

the book, he expressed the hope that by writing this memoir, other Jewish and Christian relatives

might experience religious reconciliation “although my father and uncle could not” (Ibid., p.

xviii). As a result, it is possible to understand the feelings and motives of all the family members

even though the twin brothers had taken such disparate paths.

In the final section of the book the writer himself becomes the focal point of the story.

As a boy he realized that his parents had endured pain beyond his comprehension. In a later

essay, Pogany (2001) points out that his mother often told what seemed like endless stories of

her past, which he had found painful to hear. In contrast, his father, like Béla the grandfather

after his capture by communists, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. He fell silent and

said nothing specific about his experiences. From his parents’ different behaviors, when the boy

12 grew up he became convinced that he needed to ask questions of his parents, which he would

then record for his children (Ibid., p. 180). He recalls a significant dream, which later on he

realized had taught him at age nine, what his role in life would be. The dream was of a warrior

who objected to “the pretense on the surface of people’s behavior.” The warrior told a wizard

that he preferred to have the “violence out in the open” so that “gentleness and restraint” might

regenerate from the “inside out” allowing “people to live together in peace” (Pogany, 2000, p.

264). Not surprisingly the boy grew up to be a clinical psychologist. He specialized in gentle but

searching questions calculated to help patients uncover the unhappiness that they had attempted

to hide from themselves. No doubt his father was his most obdurate patient as he had spent a

lifetime repressing the pain he had experienced and his anger at his brother’s lack of

understanding of what caused him to leave the Catholic church.

Until 1956, seven years after Miklós had written Gyuri about the birth of his first son and

his decision to become a Jew, Gyuri finally left Italy for New Jersey where Miklós and Muci had

settled. Unfortunately, although Padre Pio had tried to convince Gyuri that his brother’s

suffering had caused him to revert to Judaism, the younger priest was unable to understand fully

his brother’s motives. Instead he declared that Miklós was an apostate. Apparently young Gene,

the memorist, was able to get close to his somewhat stiff-necked uncle. From him he learned a

good deal about the twins’ youth. At times Gene had to suppress his reactions when Gyuri

talked about his father unfairly. Ultimately the aging twin brothers learned to avoid the religious

divide in order to maintain a relationship. What this section of the memoir clarifies is how

difficult an enterprise composing the book entailed. The author had to do considerable

secondary research as well as examine his own motives before he could write about the family’s religious history as fairly as possible. As a result of his effort, the positive aspects of

13 Catholicism that he acknowledges seem credible, in particular his description of the twins’

Catholic upbringing and the influence of Padre Pio on Gyuri.6

As it happens, the memoir ends differently from the essay. In the later work Pogany describes saying Kaddish in 1992 for his grandmother, both in the United States and Hungary, episodes that appear in the memoir as well. The memoir, however, extends the account to 1996 when Pogany and his father revisited Hungary. Honoring Gabriella’s Christian belief, Pogany alone visited the basilica of St Stephen in Budapest. It was the site where the young twin brothers first encountered images of Christ before they were baptized. On his return to the basilica, Eugene stood in front of an oil painting of Christ being taken down from the cross. He tells the image of Jesus that “as Jews, we are redeemed only by memory. It is the only redemption we have known. If Christians can remember your passion, would you remember my grandmother’s.” If the Christ in whom Gabriella believed would remember his devout grandmother, perhaps “those who love you will learn to remember, as well,” he implored (Ibid, p. 311). Once that task was completed, the memoir ends. Pogany is pictured standing with his aged father in the Szarvas cemetery where Béla was buried and Gabriella shared his headstone.

Then, at his father’s request, Pogany said Kaddish over his grandmother’s empty grave. The son believed that this act allowed his father to tell his dead Christian parents finally that he had become a Jew and also “prayerfully mourn their deaths” (Ibid., p. 322).

Thus the memoir ends in a spirit of reconciliation. The account demonstrates that the son’s training as a clinical psychologist and his use of probing but thoughtful questions helped his father to remember and express his sorrow at his past suffering. Instead of repeating the cycle of humiliation by word and deed, the usual outcome of such pain, Pogany managed to convert a story of repeated humiliations into one that celebrates human dignity and survival.

14 The book is also notable for Pogany’s remarkable even-handedness, his willingness to give Padre

Pio and Gyuri credit for their faith rather than merely rejecting their beliefs out of hand.

Mendelsohn also showed restraint in his retelling of the deaths of family members. He felt urged by the memory of his grandfather and the reactions of other friends and relatives to reject Ukrainians as being worse than the Germans and the Poles (2006, p. 100). Instead he realizes that the Ukrainians and the Jews were on opposite sides of the conflict from the beginning. The Russians who first invaded Poland favored the Jews over the Ukrainians. When they withdrew, the Nazis treated the Ukrainians with respect while seeking to eliminate the Jews.

Not surprisingly some Ukrainians regarded Jews as their enemies (Ibid., p. 120). Moreover,

Mendelsohn recognized that not all Ukrainians were so hostile. Some went to great lengths to hide Jews at considerable risk, and many perished in the effort to protect their friends, a generalization that he found to be correct in the case of his lost kinfolk.

What makes The Lost both fascinating and frustrating is the narrative style. Instead of

telling the story in a chronological fashion, Mendelsohn creates a narration of concentric circles,

much like the story-telling techniques of his grandfather (see emigration story, Ibid, pp. 163-

164). Lacking much personal information about his lost relations, the younger man emphasizes

his journey of discovery, one which, like Homer’s narrative style in the The Iliad and The

Odyssey, involves digressions. Mendelsohn also includes two analyses of parts of the Hebrew

scriptures, in particular the Creations stories, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Sodom and

Gomorrah, and the trials of Abraham and his progeny. He discusses those stories at length

finding parallels to the Jewish experience in Bolechow. At an early age Mendelsohn had learned

more about classical literature than the history of the Jews, but his research encouraged a new

interest in early Jewish narratives. Fortunately, he also includes an elaborate family tree in the

15 frontispiece of the book because he discusses generations of maternal history. Unfortunately, he omitted an index so checking events becomes rather challenging.

Mendelsohn’s research began in his teens, when he started writing relatives asking for information about Shmiel and life in Bolechow. The responses were largely unsatisfactory. His elderly relations either knew little or were unwilling to revisit the unhappy past. A few, including his Aunt Miriam as he learned later on, gave him important information. On the other hand, some rejoiced so young a family member was interested in their history. He did see letters that Shmiel had written to his siblings and collected a few pictures of the lost relatives. At that time he lacked critical information, including the correct names of his second cousins. He had much to learn and had to be satisfied eventually with incomplete knowledge, but the journey was healing for him and his family.

The major part of the exploration began in 2001 when Mendelsohn and three of his siblings, Andrew, Matt, and Jennifer, traveled to Bolechow to uncover the family story. They had no map of the town as it was laid out in the 1940s so they could not even find the street where Uncle Shmiel had lived. They had so little specific information that any recollection of the family was especially welcome. For example, when they met Olga, an old Ukrainian woman roughly the same age as Shmiel’s eldest daughter, they learned that she remembered Shmiel was a butcher. Both Jennifer and Mendelsohn started to cry “because it was a moment that brought me closer to others of my dead” (Ibid, p. 123). Despite the absence of knowledge about the family’s fate, Olga was able to enhance the information Mendelsohn had learned from the

Holocaust encyclopedia about the first Aktion.7 She had heard stories about the cruel treatment of the old rabbi, who was placed on top of “a terrible human pyramid” (Ibid., p. 128). Later on, he found out more details about the treatment of the rabbi from people who had been temporarily

16 in the Dom Katolicki, “the Catholic community center house,” October 1941 (Ibid., p. 124).

Australia became his second stop where once again he met important informants. Jack

Greene, who invited Mendelsohn to visit, had found out about Mendelsohn’s quest in a

roundabout fashion. Mendelsohn had sent videos of his interviews in Bolechow to his second cousin, Elkana Jäger, who lived in Israel. Elkana invited survivors of Bolechow to see the videos, and Shlomo Adler, the leader of that group, informed Jack Greene about what he had seen. Greene then telephoned Mendelsohn, who arranged a visit, this time with his brother Matt, the photographer.

What is also of interest is the way some survivors contradict the information given out by other elderly observers. Not all informants were equally reliable. In general the information

Jack Greene recalled was accurate. He filled in some of the human interest material that

Mendelsohn longed to have. Greene told Mendelsohn that Ruchele, the third daughter, was

lovely but that Frydka, the second, was especially attractive. He also remembered that the young

people used to go to the movies at the Dom Katolicki, later the place of torture during the

Aktion. In general his accounts taught the younger man to look for stories of how his relatives

had lived not just about how they had died ( Ibid., p. 150). Nonetheless, Meg Grossbard, another

Bolechower, deliberately refused to give much information to the Mendelsohn brothers.

Ultimately she did tell them something of her wartime experiences, but insisted that it be off the record, lest her stories become Mendelsohn’s property (Ibid., p. 252). But at the end of their visit, Meg recommended that he talk to friends of hers in Stockholm, a trip that he took later on.

Moreover, six months later Mendelsohn learned why she had been so circumspect. Joseph Adler in Haifa told them that Meg’s brother, Lonek Ellenbogen, had been a member of the feared and hated Jewish police. Eventually he had been shot by the Germans (Ibid., pp. 385-387). At the

17 moment in the book in which he describes the Australian trip, however, he merely hints about what he would learn later on. Ordinarily rumors are unusable as evidence. On the other hand,

Mendelsohn’s methods reflect the process he underwent in his journey and teaches readers to test the veracity of recollections.

In Australia, Mendelsohn and his brother Matt learned more about the horrors of the first

German Aktion, the one in which sixteen-year-old Ruchele had perished. She had taken a walk with three friends, all but one of whom were swept up in the Aktion and murdered. A Jewish woman, Mrs. Friedman, had been miraculously rescued from the Dom Katolicki by a Ukrainian friend, and she had told the Grünschlags, Jack and Bob, about the horrible treatment given the old rabbi. His eyes were torn out, and he was forced to dance naked with young girls before he was plunged “in the sewage of the D.K. outhouse” (Ibid., p. 208). Greene recalls that the

Germans had a list of prominent citizens given them by local Ukrainians. This account was confirmed by written testimony given by Rebeka Mondschein on August 20, 1946 in Poland and housed in . Rebeka’s information came from Ducio Schindler who had escaped from the place where most of the Jews had been shot and pushed into a ditch. To add insult to injury, the Judenrat had to clean the hall of the Dom Katolicki and pay the Gestapo “for the ammunition expended” and for “3 kg. of granular coffee” (Ibid., p. 208-210). Jack Greene learned of Ruchele’s fate from his father, who was in the Judenrat. Mendelsohn was happy to think that Jack mourned Ruchele but also reports regretfully that this was the last bit of information he ever obtained about Ruchele Jäger (Ibid., p. 213).

Bad as the first Aktion was, the second, was worse, but just which family members were swept up in it has been debated. In childhood Mendelsohn’s Aunt Miriam, the wife of Shmiel’s younger brother Itzhak who emigrated to Israel, had written him that Ester and two daughters

18 had been caught. Lorka, she thought, had joined the partisans with whom she died. The

Bolechowers in Sydney, however, thought that Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia, the youngest daughter,

had died in the Aktion. Miriam, who probably had talked to survivors with vivid recollections

of the Aktion itself, thought that Shmiel and one daughter had died in 1944 ( Ibid., pp. 217-218).

This is probably true. In 2005 Mendelsohn learned that two schoolteachers had been hiding

Jews. One had to be Frydka, and the other was probably her father ( Ibid., pp. 495, 499). All

that Mendelsohn knew for sure at that point was that two and a half thousand Jews were carted off to Belzec and exterminated in September 1942. No information was uncontested. Jack’s brother Bob Grunschlag–he dropped the umlaut in Australia-- argued that he remembered that it

took place in August, despite the “book that the German historian has written” (Ibid., p. 223).

Mendelsohn thought Bob was wrong about the date, but approved of “his refusal to trust blindly

in the historian’s printed words.” Mendelsohn was aware how easily a historian might

incorrectly copy material from an archive (Ibid., p. 223). He also points out other mistakes in the

printed record, including incorrect birth and death dates ascribed to one Lorka Jeiger (Lorka

Jäger) found in the database of Shoah Victims on the Yad Vashem website (Ibid., p. 224).

Not only does Mendelsohn dispute some of the written record, but he also declares that

we have no way of envisaging the horrors of the Holocaust. He warns against what he calls “the

temptation to ventriloquize, to ‘imagine’ and then ‘describe’ something for which there is simply

no parallel in our experience of life” (Ibid., p. 226). Words and our imagination fail us although

we read descriptions and try to create a picture in our minds of what went on.

Unlike Pogany who was able to extract relatively coherent stories from his uncle, father,

mother, and aunt, Mendelsohn had to piece together fragments of sometimes incorrect

information. The confusions arose because as Mendelsohn points out, “Nobody else was really

19 ‘there,’ either, nobody else had actually seen what happened to them; but they all had stories”

(Ibid., p. 395). For example, in Australia, the name of a Ukrainian, Ciszko Szymanski, emerged for the first time. He turned out to be a central figure in the life and death of Frydka, but in the initial discussion, Meg Grossbard stopped talking and insisted that any recollections of Frydka, her childhood friend, and Ciszko be off the record. Jack Greene, however, insisted that Ciszko had lost his life because of his love for Frydka (Ibid., p. 193). His assertion was later on confirmed by Anna Heller Stern in Israel, who also suggested that Meg Grossbard had refused to talk about Ciszko because he wasn’t Jewish (Ibid., p. 301). As Mendelsohn reports, he did not find out exactly how Ciszko died until two years later in Bolechow (Ibid., p. 302). At some point after the Anna Stern conversation Mendelsohn talked on the phone to Dyzia Lew, a friend of

Shlomo Adler. She reported that Frydka had confided to her that Ciszko and she were in love, which was true, and she had heard further from other sources that Frydka was pregnant but not by Ciszko. The pregnancy, both Dyzia and Shlomo insisted, was a story Dyzia had heard but that she thought was probably inaccurate. Frydka wasn’t pregnant, Shlomo explained later.

Instead his cousin Pepci Diamant had been raped, perhaps by a member of the Ukrainian police, and the story had become attributed to Frydka. Like many narratives this one was probably

“garbled in transmission” (Ibid., pp. 357-359).

Because the Bolechow grapevine still operated well, Mendelsohn received a phone call from Meg Grossbard shortly after he had returned from Israel. Mendelsohn had been told about

Frydka’s supposed pregnancy, she reported. “They are only stories, Meg said. They can’t be proved. Just write the facts.” The author reassured her that he wanted to discover facts but also was fascinated by the accounts. “The stories multiplied,” he told Meg. They “gave birth to other stories,” and even false ones revealed something about those who told them. That revelation, he

20 insisted, “was also part of the facts, the historical record” (Ibid., p. 411). In Denmark where he

went shortly after receiving Meg Grossbard’s phone call, he learned about a young woman in

New York, who wrote a thesis about her grandmother’s stories about the war. She was primarily interested, according to Alena Marchwinski, Mendelsohn’s Danish informant, in “how to tell the

story of her grandmother–how to be the storyteller” (Ibid., p. 413). It was a concern shared by

Mendelsohn who from the beginning of his memoir discussed various conventions and meanings of narratives. He believed that what he had collected “was a story about the problems of proximity and distance.” It is the same problem faced by Pogany. Long after the war he heard his aunt Klari tell stories about his grandmother told to her while she was recovering from her

wartime ordeal. This woman had shared incarceration with Gabriella in the ghetto and in the concentration camp where she had been gassed. Although she came from Gabriella’s town, she was not a close friend or a relative. Most of the people Mendelsohn had interviewed regarded

Shmiel and his family as of peripheral importance, not their first concern (Ibid., p. 433).

Periodically he would summarize what he had learned about his relatives in a terse paragraph or two, material which alone would not have made a fascinating book. Luckily he had also learned about the lives of those who talked to him about the Jägers. As a result he realized that “we’d learned far more about what we hadn’t been looking for than about what we’d set out to find”

(Ibid, pp. 434-436). He solved his problem by including everything that he had learned from

every possible source, but by declaring which sources had the greatest credibility.

It is impossible to overestimate the role that luck played in Mendelsohn’s discoveries.

During a trip to Israel, Mendelsohn traveled with Froma Zeitlin, a mentor of his graduate student days who specialized in Greek tragedy. She was an tireless companion, who regarded travel as a form of research. In Tel Aviv she insisted that Mendelsohn visit the genealogy section of the

21 museum. There the woman helping him look up his family name turned out to be Yona

Wieseltier, a friend of his grandfather’s family (Ibid., pp. 344-348). The most remarkable piece of luck, however, occurred at the end of Mendelsohn’s return to Bolekhiv, as he now thought he should call Bolechow. Froma, Alex, and Mendelsohn had been talking to Vasyl Prokopiv, a ninety-year-old Ukrainian. When the old man said that he did not know the Jägers, Alex and

Mendelsohn were ready to leave. Froma, however, was still curious. When she asked if he knew of any hidden Jews, he spoke of Polish schoolteachers named Szedlakowa, who had hidden

some people and were shot by the Germans. Mendelsohn, realizing that he was speaking of

Shmiel and Frydka, burst into tears, just as he had some years before upon discovering that a

Bolechower knew that his great-uncle had been a butcher. Feeling sympathy for the bereaved

younger man, Prokopiv led them to the house where his relatives had been concealed. The

alcoholic Russian women inhabitants let them come in and see the cellar. This was the kestl

(Yiddish for box) his grandfather had mentioned years before, the place where they were hiding

(Ibid., pp. 476-483). After this discovery he realized that looking for evidence made things

happen. “There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking, and finally

seeing, what was always there” (Ibid., p. 486). Gradually Mendelsohn began to realize he owed this discovery to Froma, a classicist like him, who specialized in looking back (Ibid., pp. 487-

489).

Then after being told by another woman, who lived nearby the house that Mendelsohn

and his friends had visited, that no school teachers lived there, luck took them to another woman

who had lived there during the war and knew the teachers. The house they had visited was

correct, Mrs. Janina Latyk, reassured them, and she added that Ciszko had been instrumental in

having the sisters hide Shmiel and Frydka. This woman was fifteen in 1943 and remembered

22 coming home from school to hear that Hela Szedlakowa had been caught harboring Jews.

Because Mrs. Latyk had been a neighbor of the sisters Szedlakowa and had been living there at the time of the Gestapo raid, she “could tell us a story that accounted for all the bits and pieces that, until that day in July 2005, hadn’t quite been able to gel into a coherent narrative, a story with a beginning and a middle and an end” (Ibid., p. 499). Someone had seen Ciszko bringing food to Shmiel and Frydka and reported him to the Gestapo. Shmiel and Frydka were shot on the property, and Ciszko and Hela were hanged in Stryj, a nearby town. After hearing Mrs.

Latyk’s story, she took them back to the house which they had visited and showed them the spot in the garden where Shmiel and Frydka lay.

After standing in that garden spot, Mendelsohn realized for the first time that Shmiel and

Frydka “had been specific people with specific deaths, and those lives and deaths belonged to them and not me, no matter how gripping the story that may be told about them.” He felt as if he were “standing, finally, in the place where everything begins: the tree in the garden” which he identified with the tree of knowledge, the beginning of “both pleasure, and finally, sorrow.”

Somewhat at a loss at how to memorialize the discovery, he found a large stone, which he placed

“in the crook where the branches of the tree met” (Ibid, pp. 502-503). Like his grandfather whose stories came to an abrupt end after the series of concentric circles gave way to a straight narrative, Mendelsohn ends his narrative with their final departure from Bolekhiv.

In conclusion, these narratives offer different methods of uncovering hidden history.

Each is constrained by the specifics of the family situation, but each writer overcame the many problems they faced. In sum, they have shown two useful ways of reconstructing family stories fractured for many years by time, place, and most important, unhappy emotions.

23 References

Brenner, Reeve Robert. (1997). The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors. Northvale, New

Jersey: Jason Aronson, Inc.

Des Pres, Terrence. (1976), The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1980.

Fisher, Ian. (2008, April 25). Italian Saint Stirs Up a Mix of Faith and Commerce. New York

Times, A6.

Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. (1995). Rena's Promise: A Story of

Sisters in Auschwitz. Boston: Beacon Press.

Gray, Martin, with Max Gallo. (1971). For Those I Loved. Translated by Anthony White. New

York: New American Library, 1974.

Klein, Gerda Weissmann. (1957). All but My Life. Expanded ed. New York: Hill and Wang,

1995.

Klein, Gerda Weissmann, and Kurt Klein. The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in the

War's Aftermath. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2000.

Kleinfield, N. R. (2002, February 3). "Real Heroism, With Human Fear and Confusion." The

New York Times (Washington Edition), p. 28.

Klemperer, Victor. (1995). I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1042-1945.

Translated by Martin Chalmers. New York: Random House, 1999.

Laqueur, Walter. (Ed.) (2001). The Holocaust Encyclopedia. New Haven: Yale University

24 Press.

Pogany, Eugene L. (2000). In My Brother’s Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith after the

Holocaust. New York: Penguin Books.

Pogany, Eugene L. (2001). “Path to Kaddish: Prologue to a Son’s Spiritual Autobiography.” In

Alan L. Berger and Naomi Berger (Eds.). Second Generation Voices: Reflections by

Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, pp. 172-187. Syracuse, New York:

Syracuse University Press.

Powell, Lawrence N. (2000). Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's

Louisiana. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Wilkomirski, Binjamin. (1957). Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Translated by

Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Schocken, 1996.

Notes

1. For example, he invents his grandmother Gabriella’s thoughts and words when she was taken

prisoner and placed in the Jewish ghetto. He also invents her conversations with gendarmes and

her fellow prisoners (Pogany, 2000, pp. 181-190). He says his Aunt Klari met her mother’s

neighbor after the war who had been with her both in the ghetto and knew how she had died

(Ibid., p. 325). Surely she was not privy to Gabriella’s thoughts and her behavior when she was

allowed to go to mass. In the initial author’s note he admits that his attempt to invent thoughts

and words of his ancestors “represent an attempt to enter and participate in the lives of those to

25 whom I am admittedly connected through my own longings and imagination as much as through the historical record, personal reports, and my own life experience” (Ibid., p. xvii).

2. One inaccurate recollection was Malcia Reinharz’s assertion that his cousin Frydka was pregnant at the end of her life (Mendelsohn, 2000, p. 328).

3. Berger and Berger (2001) Second Generation Voices. Pogany’s essay, “The Path to Kaddish,” describes the journey of faith Pogany undertook before he could say Kaddish over the grave of his grandmother who died in Auschwitz. He wrote the essay after In My Brother’s Image, a memoir which he hoped would reach a more general audience than the one for Second

Generation Voices. In the later essay he concentrates on his feelings about how his parents’ revealed or concealed events in their past lives and tells more about his use of meditation to enhance his spirituality. His religious life was improved after he finally was able to say Kaddish for his murdered grandmother. Marlene Bernstein Samuels (1997) describes her relationship with her mother, a Holocaust survivor. Her mother’s “optimism,” she recalls, “compounded any personal depression I might have been experiencing with a sense of guilt over feeling depressed”

(p. 339). Samuels felt as if she had no right to be unhappy given how easy her life was in contrast to her mother’s youth.

4. Victor Klemperer served in a similar battalion in (1995/1999). The son of a rabbi, he converted to Christianity when he married a Protestant.

5. Reeve Robert Brenner, The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors (1997), studied the effect of the Holocaust on the religious attitudes of Jewish survivors of concentration camps. Some gained faith in God and became observant while others lost the beliefs they had before the war

26

began. He did not study people of Jewish origin who started the war as Christians and became

Jews as a consequence of the Holocaust.

6. Padre Pio was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002, but according to a recent book Pope

John XXIII “thought he was a fraud and a womanizer.” This spring his body is on display at

San Giovanni Rotondo (Fisher, 2008, p. A6).

7. I have no idea what encyclopedia Mendelsohn used. I could find nothing about Bolechow,

Poland or Bolekhiv, Ukraine in The Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2001.

27