Jeff Jacoby Is a Columnist for the Boston Globe
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
JEFFJACOBY “I WANT TO DO SOMETHING WITH MY LIFE,” I TOLD MY FATHER. “I WANT TO ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING. WHAT HAVE YOU EVER ACCOMPLISHED?” IT WAS AN AWFUL THING TO SAY, CRUEL AND SMUG AND SNOTTY. MY ONLY DEFENSE IS THAT I WAS 14,AND LIKE EVERY ADOLESCENT, THE ONE THING IN THIS WORLD 1 Mark Jacoby, 1946 COULD SEE WITH CRYSTAL CLARITY WAS MY FATHER’S CLAY FEET. No man is a hero to his valet, the aphorism runs. Perhaps the other way. Later he learned that they had been taken no father is a hero to his adolescent son. But even at 14, I immediately to the gas. should have known better than to ask what my father had Within a day or two, my father’s other brother, Zoltan, ever accomplished. He had made a good marriage to a good was also killed. His sister Franceska lasted a few months woman, with whom he was raising five children in a home longer. Of the seven members of the Jakubovic family who filled with love, laughter, and integrity. Pedestrian achieve- were rounded up by the Germans in the spring of 1944, only ments? In my father’s case, they were nothing short of heroic. one-my father-was still alive in the spring of 1945. By then, he had been through four concentration camps. At the \F-~$“nthe day after Passover in 1944, my father and his end he was in Ebensee, a satellite of the grim Mauthausen 4d)family were rounded up by the Nazis. Along with camp near Salzburg, Austria. He was 19 years old, weighed 65 other Jewish families from their region of eastern Slovakia, pounds, and was dying of typhus and starvation. When the they were transported to a ghetto in the nearby Hungarian Allies arrived at Ebensee, my father was nearly a corpse. He city of Satoraljaujhely. For six weeks they were kept in the would spend the next month in a delirious fever in a field ghetto, which grew increasingly crowded as more and more hospital. Later he would learn that he had also contracted a Jews were brought in. Then it began to empty, as Jews were form of tuberculosis. taken out. His trials didn’t end with the war. He made his way back They left on a Thursday. With only the belongings they to his native village in Slovakia, only to discover that could carry by hand, they were marched to the waiting train. strangers had helped themselves to his family’s small As each boxcar filled, its doors were chained and locked. house. He struggled to support himself-buying this, sell- There were no seats inside, no windows, no water. The only ing that, smuggling something else. Making a living would toilet was a bucket on the floor. have been a daunting prospect for anyone in war-blighted For three days of suffocation, thirst, and stench, the train Eastern Europe in 1945. What must it have been like for a moved. When it stopped, David and Leah Jakubovic and young death camp survivor with no family, no property, their five youngest children-Franceska, Markus, Zoltan, and no home? Yrvin, and Alice-were at Auschwitz. In 1948, the Communists seized control in Czechoslova- The doors opened. There were blinding floodlights, kia. My father, desperate not to be trapped again in a totali- shouting S.S. guards, snarling dogs. The Jews were forced off tarian dictatorship, got out. He managed to procure an the train and onto the platform; men and women were made American student visa and to raise the price of an ocean to line up separately. crossing. He got off the boat in New York on May 14,1948- “Raw!Raus!” they heard. “Out! Out!” and was robbed on his first night in America. It is almost lit- In the noise and confusion, they made their way along erally true to say that my father started out in the New World the platform at the end of which Dr. Mengele waited, per- with only the shirt on his back. forming the “selection.” Some Jews he waved to the right, He went to work as a manual laborer, nailing window some to the left. My father, a strong 18-year-old, was sent to sashes in a carpenter’s shop. After a while he tried his hand at the left. His clothes were removed, his head was shaved, and a sales: mattresses first, then appliances, then furniture. In time number (A-10502) was tattooed on his arm. My father’s mother and father and his youngest brother and sister went Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for the Boston Globe. 42 THEAMERICAN ENTERPRISE LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED he opened a furniture and appliance store of his own. His f:yI,nce I asked my father if anything had been upper- i visa authorized him to stay in America for no more than one \\4 most in his mind when he was in the camps. Was year. He has been here, so far, for 52. there something he always concentrated on, a goal he always kept in mind? 1 , n all my years growing up in my father’s house, when No doubt I was hoping for something lapidary. Some- 1 money was often very short and luxuries were few, I can- thing like the exhortation of Simon Dubnov, the renowned not recall ever hearing him complain about his circum- Jewish historian, whose last words before being murdered in stances. It is as if he decided that, after Auschwitz, no setback the Riga ghetto were, Yiddin, schreibt und farschreibt-“ Jews, or misfortune was worth even a moment’s self-pity. Nor can I write it down, write it all down.” Perhaps my father would tell , ever recall hearing him boast-about anything. Perhaps he me he tried to remember everything so he could one day was never one to blow his own horn. Or perhaps he lost the bear witness to what he had seen. Perhaps he would say he al- urge to brag once he saw the utter degradation to which hu- ways looked for ways to sabotage the Nazi operations. Or man beings can be reduced. that he never stopped dreaming of revenge. Or that every My father makes a point of giving some money to char- morning and night he recited the Sh’ma, the Jewish credo: ity every day. I once asked him, after watching him slip a few “Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” dollars to a panhandler who clearly had no good excuse to This is what my father told me: He was always careful to be scrounging for handouts, why he gave money to some- watch his shoes. He slept at night with his shoes beneath his body so patently undeserving. head, he said, because if you lost your shoes you wouldn’t “It’s not my job to decide if he’s deserving,”he told me. “A survive for long. man came up to me with an empty hand. When somebody It was hardly the answer I had imagined. I had expected asks for help and holds out his hand, you something inspiring, something courageous. don’t turn him away.” Shoes? In the middle of the most evil hell ever That was, for him, a long speech. He is not I NEVER created on earth, my father was thinking an especially eloquent man and to my knowl- RECALL about his shoes? edge he has never spoken before an audience. But I have come to understand that my fa- HIM He still talks with an accent and sometimes ther was right. If shoes were essential to his COMPLAINING, garbles his syntax. But actions speak louder survival-and when you are force-marched than words, and those who know my father OR from Poland to Austria in the open in January, have always known what kind of man he is. BOASTING. they are-then shoes were precisely the thing His store was never a great success. He is he had to think about. The Jakubovic family, not a born salesman and never learned the art awash in blood, was nearly extinct. My father of talking uncertain customers into buying something they had to survive. The Jews had to survive; Somehow,-despite weren’t sure they wanted. Nor was he much good at leaning everything, they had to go on, and if shoes could keep this on customers who had taken delivery of some furniture or an Jew alive, then nothing was more important than shoes. appliance, but couldn’t be bothered to keep up their pay- Some Holocaust survivors emerged from their ordeal ments. Nevertheless, he earned a name for himself, as he embittered and angry. Some came out cynical and untrust- would learn during the “long, hot summer” of 1968. ing. Some survivors, furious with God for not stopping the When race riots erupted in Cleveland that year, my fa- slaughter, turned their backs on faith and became enemies of ther’s furniture store stood at Ground Zero: St. Clair and religion. Some sank into black depression. Some slowly lost 103rd, in the heart of the city’s Glenville neighborhood. For their minds. days, the area was wracked by pillaging and arson, the vio- If my father had done nothing but survive the Holocaust, lence made worse by the mayor’s order for white police ofi- his life would be worthy of note. That he survived as a decent cers to stay out. To deter looters, signs reading “Soul Brother” man and a believing Jew, that he can still laugh and love and appeared in the windows of black-owned establishments, but look on life’s bright side, is nothing less than magnificent.