The Oxymoron Factor 3: Italian Interlude #2

By Frank Stiffel

THE OXYMORON FACTOR 3, Italian Interlude #2, is the 3-rd part of a 4-Part Holocaust memoir. In it, the Author and the Reader enter the tunnel of gloomy darkness, an Underground Railroad from Poland to the West used by the surviving Jews after Hitlers final debacle in his anti-Jewish WANNSEE CRUSADE. Along with Frank you will be inching your way toward the glimmering light at the end of that tunnel. Once out, you will follow Franks search for the Spirit of Redemption, the mystical Girl of the Ring, a vibrant young woman, whom eventually he finds in the flesh.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 27, 2002
• ISBN: 9781462842711

Frank Stiffel

Frank Stiffel, a former inmate of the Nazi Camps Treblinka and Auschwitz, arrives in the USA with his wife Ione and their three-year-old daughter Aurora, after a four-year Italian interlude in his neo-Darwinian struggle for survival of this least fit of the fittest. With all links to the first 30 years of his life severed, he comes to New York with no money, no marketable skills and hardly any knowledge of English. What’s more, there is no one to extend a helping hand. Is life worth fighting for? Look for an answer to this question in “The House of Margie”.

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Copyright © 2001 by Frank Stiffel. COVER ARTIST: Aurora Stiffel Berman.

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Contents

PROLOGUE.

1. AM C H U.

2. The Girl of the Ring.

3. Giovanna of the Chestnut Hills.

4. Just Married.

5. Allegro Ma Non Troppo.

6. Reality and Illusion.

7. Hi, World. I’m Aurora.

8. Bittersweet Color of Umbrella Pines.

9. Arrivederci Roma.

AN AFTERWORD.

I dedicate this Holocaust Love Story

to Ione, Aurora and Nicole.

Note to the Reader: Due to technical difficulties, the Publisher was unable to reproduce proper Foreign Symbols.

The Author apologizes and begs the Reader’s indulgence.

PROLOGUE.

Aurora completed the painting. It was a 50x90-inch acrylic canvas whose left quarter showed a blown up black-and-white photograph of a group of twenty-one men, women and children in loose black bathing suits, the latest cry of the early nineteen-twen-ties’ fashion. There was a caption in dark-blue ink at the bottom of the photo: Brosen (Zoppot), on the Baltic Sea, summer 1925. On the remaining three-quarters of the canvas was the acrylic painting based on the photograph. In it the artist reproduced the same group of twenty-one bathers, eighteen of whom had become mere skeletons with living faces. Each figure was wrapped in a translucent halo. Only two little boys seated in the first row, one six, the other ten years old, and one teenager, third from left in the standing row were normal adults with child’s and young adult’s faces on grown-up bodies. The painting was Aurora’s rendering of the damage inflicted on European Jews during the Second World War by Adolf Hitler’s Germany, an event recorded in History under the name of the Holocaust. She called her masterpiece The Merry Bathers of Brosen, even though the people in the picture weren’t even smiling. The artist dipped her brushes in a glass jar filled with turpentine. She stirred them a little, pulled out one at a time and dried it carefully with a soft rag. Then, she tucked it in an ornate Chinese ceramic vase standing next to her on the floor of her Spartan studio. Seated on her painter’s stool she contemplated the canvas pensively.

Suddenly, strange things began happening. The painted figures acquired life. From twenty-one, they became ten. Nine were very old Jews in Hasidic garb, shiny black satin caftans, round sable-trimmed hats, long beards and earlocks. The tenth, slightly younger, was a slim man with a taut, clean-shaven face, a thin white mustache and silvery hair. He wore a brown Pierre Cardin blazer, beige trousers, suede shoes, white button-up shirt and a brown silk tie with a paisley motif.

Finally, we have a Minyan, said a skinny Figure. The man’s voice was screechy, unpleasant to the ear. It was the sound of one hundred years of life that burdened his stooping shoulders. Now, that we have a Minyan we can recite our final Kaddish. A Minyan was the required quorum of ten Jewish men who had undergone their Brith Milah, the Circumcision, when they were seven days old, and had celebrated their Bar Mitzvah, the Coming of Age rite, after having reached the age of 13. Kaddish was the Mourner’s Prayer.

I’m sorry, said a burly Hasid, the ruddiness of whose cheeks sneaked from under the thicket of a long black beard. We don’t have a Minyan because this man Franco is not a real Jew. He doesn’t DAVEN, pray with the Tefillin and the Tallith, the phylacteries and the prayer shawl on. He doesn’t go to shul. He walks with his head uncovered and, may the Eybeshter forgive him, he eats pork. He’s not fit to be a part of our Minyan.

May I say a few words? Franco addressed the Congregation of the Nine Hasids.

"Go ahead,’ screeched the Centenarian.

"My Father and Mother died in the Nazi Death Camp called Treblinka. They were murdered, because they were Jews. They practiced the ritual Judaism on the three Holy Days. During Pesach, the Passover, our house was strictly kosher for full eight days. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, my parents and their four sons spent two days praying in a shul and on Yom Kippur we all fasted in that same synagogue. It was an expensive project, if I may say so. Do you know that my father had to purchase six tickets for the family? Funny, isn’t it? A Jew in Poland had to pay for the permission to pray to God. For the rest of the year, we were Jewish Poles. My older brothers and I went to Polish schools. At home Polish was spoken. Occasionally though my parents spoke in German to each other, their early years’ mother tongue from the time when they lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Or, they used Yiddish, a language that my three older brothers and I understood a little, but never had learned to speak. Later in life, because of my lack of the knowledge of Yiddish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, in Treblinka and in Auschwitz called me a Jecke and stayed away from me. In spite of that, with the war over, the Breikha, a loose political arm of various Zionist affiliations, made me a leader of groups of Polish Jews who, having survived the Holocaust, desired to leave their hostile fatherland. They used me because I spoke a few European languages. But as soon as they needed me no longer they discarded me like a dirty rag. It made me bitter. I don’t want to die a bitter man. That’s why I would like to become the Tenth Member of your Minyan and recite my Last Kaddish along with you.

The Centenarian pulled a Deck of Cards out of the pocket of his caftan. The scene changed once more. Now, the Ten Figures sat on wooden benches around a massive round oak table. The Old Man laid his Deck of Tarots on the table and shuffled them absentmindedly. He shook his head, and, as he did, his gray earlocks swung, reminiscent of two ancient pendulums marking the passing of time on a three thousand year old Grandfather Clock. He mumbled a blessing, sighed and fixed his washed-out blue eyes on Franco.

My poor child. Although eighty-four years old, you have yet to find the meaning of our life and yours. He reshuffled the Cards and piled them before him. Do you see this Deck? It contains your Past, your Present and your Future. Somewhere among these Cards lies the answer to your Quest.

I can give you the answer! the Hasid with the peachy complexion exclaimed. Your Father’s Father was a Hasid. Your Father was a Jew as a bow of obligation to his ancestors’ tradition rather than to the strict rules of Judaism as prescribed by Talmud. And you, your father’s son are a Jecke. You married an Italian Catholic woman in a civil ceremony, a ritual that is not recognized either by the Catholic or the Jewish Authorities. Your daughter Aurora grew up without a religious upbringing. She married a Jew who was also a Jecke. Although a Rabbi married them, she bore him a daughter whom they called not Sarah, Leah or Rachel, but Nicole. That is your Past, your Present and your Future. I have spoken.

You might as well have not spoken, said Franco. There is no Past, no Present and no Future, because Time doesn’t move. It is you and I who run our course against the motionless backdrop of Time. It is you and I who create our Present that later becomes our Past and eventually leads to a Future that had been defined for us since the beginning of the ages. Peach-cheeked old man, your words are as hollow as is your narrow mind.

It is true, said the Centenarian. Time stands still. That is why the Answer to your Quest is written in the Cards. The Tarots are Time. Immobile as they are, they contain all the Replies. Don’t worry about our Minyan, son. Go with the Lord and search. You will be back when you are good and ready. You will find us here, because we too, just like Time, are standing still. We are the Immortals. That is what’s so good about a work of art. The Prayer can wait. We’ll recite the Kaddish when you are back.

Franco got up. With moist eyes he said good-bye to the Immortals. Then, filled with fear and foreboding, he stepped out of the Painting. He knew about his Past, because it was a part of his Present. And as for the Future, not much of it was left for a man of eighty-four. Still, he would like to learn how to read the Tarots. If he knew, perhaps he could change some of Fate’s final decisions. He was aware that it might take a Miracle to acquire that knowledge, but he had experienced Miracles before. One happened in Treblinka. One of a million Jews brought there to be murdered, he waited for his turn to be gassed or killed with a bullet in the neck. Suddenly, buried in the burning white sand a ring caught his eye. It lay at the tip of his toes, a chunk of gold with a cabochon of a chatoyant tigereye stone with a profile of a beautiful girl etched in it. The Girl spoke to Franco and a ring became THE RING. He heard a soft whisper, ‘Take me and hold me. And you will live to tell.’ He survived Treblinka, Gestapo tortures and Auschwitz. The Girl of the Ring was the greatest Miracle of his life. Is there still time for another Miracle? he asked himself. He glimpsed at the Painting. It showed the Twenty-one Merry Bathers of Brosen. He placed a kiss on Aurora’s forehead, and went in pursuit of an answer regarding the meaning of Life. I love your Mother, Aurora, I love you, and I love your daughter Nicole. I will never stop loving you. This is the present extent of my knowledge of the Future. I guess that I’ll have to begin at the beginning, he said to himself. Then, he disappeared.

It is hard to begin a quest for the meaning of life when you are eighty-four. Such search involves returning to your forties, thirties, twenties, even to your childhood. Yet, it makes sense. While having lived this long, I have seen, heard, felt and absorbed a lot. I have accumulated an encyclopedia of experiences into the pages of which I can reach for substance during my search for meaning.

Until some years back I had a faithful assistant, Mr. Groots, who kept the ledger for me. His was an arbitrary name and he was a virtual Person. But, even though the name was of my creation, he, my Alter Ego, was fashioned by the Lord in Treblinka. At times, he stood next to me, invisible to other people, telling me how to act and what to say. Sometimes, he was I. When Germans, Ukrainians or Poles whipped me, it was Mr. Groots who took the beating. The Gestapo tortured him. It was he who heard the reading of the death sentence the Germans imposed on me. He was my eyes, my ears, my skin, my flesh and my soul. He stayed with me for many long years, until in mutual accord we both had decided that it was time for him to leave and for me to become myself. It didn’t happen until I had become a man of advanced age, a person the Americans refer to as Senior Citizen. Even then, the transition wasn’t simple. At first, like an inexperienced swimmer, I’d say to myself, stop pondering. Dive and the rest will fall into place by itself. Then, with just a couple of old images creeping out from their safe hideouts in the rusting file cabinets of memory, I’d retreat in horror to wait a little longer for the fruit of recollections to ripen. Finally, I understood the mechanics of telling a story. Before giving an answer, you must query. And now, time has come for the Quest to begin.

1. AM C H U.

A stands for Anti-Semitism.

M stands for Murder.

Cstands for Cruelty to Man by Man.

H stands for Hatred Universal.

U stands for: Under Your Eyes, oh God!

Under Your Eyes All That Had Happened. Didn’t You know, God, that AMCHU means THY PEOPLE? Oh, God! How Could You?

. . . Avec leurs chats, avec leurs chiens, Avec pour vivre quels moyens, Les gens s’en vont, les gens d’ici, Par la Grand’ Route, a l’Infini . . .

Verhaeren

I mused, as the crowded train rolled slowly in the direction of Rzeszow. In my mind I ruminated on a volume of information the redheaded fellow in Krakow had given me before we departed. The unofficial name of the Breikha was The Organization. The Underground Railroad smuggling Jews from Poland toward the West was given a Hebrew name: ALIYAH DALET. Aliyah meant Ascension; Return to Palestine. Dalet, the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, had also a numerical value; it meant FOUR. The Project was run by a coordinated effort of all the Zionist political denominations, from the leftist Hashomer to the right-wing Betar. The H.Q. of the Aliyah Dalet was located somewhere in Palestine, in the central offices of the Jewish underground army known as PALMACH. The money needed for the execution of such a tremendous operation came from the Jewish Communities in the United States of America, as well as from Jews living in the countries that remained unscathed by the Fuehrer’s furor. A secret trail had been established that in certain ways resembled the American Underground Railroad in the time preceding the Civil War. The only difference was that this time Jews instead of Negroes were fleeing from their slave drivers. Our present Underground Railroad went from Poland to a series of the Organization’s Points, usually small apartments in strategically important cities in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Austria, Yugoslavia, Germany and France. In my case, all the roads led to Italy.

Intimidating and fraught with expected and unexpected hurdles and dangers, that first people-smuggling trip of mine was indeed an odyssey. Our Polish fellow-passengers watched us with hostility, my loud declaration to the conductor that we were Greeks returning from Auschwitz to Salonika notwithstanding. It didn’t bother me. I was prepared for the animosity of Poles toward Jews, even if they happened to be of Greek descent. But when the managers of the Organization’s Point in Rzeszow, a man and a woman in impressive leather coats, confiscated the wristwatches belonging to six of my Asians, Jews who had survived in the safety of one of many Asian Republics of the Soviet Union, I felt upset. I wasn’t prepared for meeting Jews stealing from Jews, with the war not yet over. The man in charge was husky and tall; the woman was short and slim. Both were abrasive. Both spoke in a strident authoritarian voice. And both wore the long brown leather coats of SS officers and of the Jewish pioneers, the Halutzim, who, during my very young years immigrated to Palestine to begin turning the mosquito and malaria infested marshes of the Promised Land into Pardesim, orange groves, and arable soil, and who at that time bore the name of PALESTINIANS. The man, Zvi, said, Anybody who owns a watch, raise his hand.’ Half a dozen hands went up. ‘The six of you,’ the woman Golda ordered, ‘surrender your watches.’ ‘Why?’ one of the members of my group dared to ask. ‘For your own protection,’ the woman said. ‘Polish underground Home Army guys are still looking for the surviving Jews to kill them. A watch on your wrist is a self-destructive weapon. You, there!’ she pointed to a young woman with exaggeratedly blond hair. ‘Give me your watch!’ ‘She’s my wife!’ a black-haired young man objected. ‘I’m a partisan who fought against the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto. You can’t have my wife’s only remaining family memento.’ ‘I can’t?’ smirked Golda. ‘Just look and see.’ And she ripped the watch from the blond woman’s wrist. ‘You can thank me, girlie,’ she said with sarcasm. ‘Now, Polish hoodlums no longer will have a motive for wasting you.’ That was one of the many pictures of my exodus from Poland that I could never forget. We stayed in Rzeszow for two full days. During that time, the pair in leather coats taught us how to be Greeks. ‘Whenever anybody asks you where you’re from or where you’re going to, just say, ATHENAI. Repeat it aloud. All of you say aloud, ATHENAI, ATHENAI, ATHENAI.’ With that done, we had become Greeks according to the Point managers’ agenda.

On April 12th, 1945, on the morning before leaving Rzeszow, I went to a barbershop to get a haircut. As the Figaro was trying to give my head a decent appearance, a Polish gentleman in his early fifties rushed in waving a newspaper with excitement and screaming, ‘Roosevelt! President Roosevelt is dead!’ The little I knew about President Roosevelt was that my Father lost most of his funds when President Roosevelt cut the value of the dollar by half using a short, simple Decree. I also knew that on December 7th, when we were living in Soviet-occupied Lwow, President Roosevelt declared war on Hitler’s Germany. I had no bone to pick with President Roosevelt with regard to failing to bomb the railroad tracks leading to the gas chambers of Auschwitz II. I blamed the British for it and the Soviet Union. But now that the excited Polish gentleman in the barbershop of Rzeszow announced President Roosevelt’s death, I said to myself, If President Roosevelt’s death means that Hitler’s war might not be over yet it is indeed high time for my Jews and me to evacuate Poland.

Our journey’s trail was tortuous and unpredictable. We traveled through the East Beskids, the Slovakian part of the Carpathian Mountains. Every now and then, we stumbled upon small groups of Jews, who, just like ourselves, tried to avoid eye contact and kept their heads down, and, when they glimpsed us, it was with suspicion. Only the miraculous, the incredibly mysterious word AMCHU was the magic formula that gave everybody a feeling of reassurance and even brought a grin to the tired faces of people who thought that they had seen it all.

We journeyed in open freight trains, on top of timber piled on the short cars of narrow-gauge mountain trains and, most of the time, by foot. We crossed picturesque mountains, thick forests, brooks and white water streams. But unconcerned with location or circumstances men and women in my group of twenty survivors, until a few days ago total strangers, now paired up freely and copulated whenever they felt like it. They did it in full daylight on top of the timber that the narrow-gauge trains transported from the mountains to the plains. The small rooms of Breikha Points heaved with lust at night. Embarrassed at first, soon I began understanding. Many of them were mature people who had lost their wives, their husbands, their children. The only way for them to avoid depression was continuation. Copulating meant multiplying and continuing. It meant starting from scratch. To young people copulating meant pleasure, and perhaps it gave them the feeling of power, a sensation of which they had been deprived during their years of submission to either Nazi or Soviet rulers. I wasn’t mature or knowledgeable enough to ask myself a pertinent question, Why don’t I grab one of these willing females and sleep with her in the midst of other non-sleeping sleepers? Perhaps it was a remnant of my home upbringing. Once upon a time, before the war and during the Soviet occupation, several virgins wanted to sleep with me. I never took advantage of the offer. I considered virginity a state of holiness. Thus, even though not quite comfortable with what people around me were doing I was hardly in a position to criticize their behavior. Not being a teacher, a Talmudic scholar or a judge, who was I to cast the first stone?

Volunteer Red Cross ladies welcomed us with slices of black bread and mugs of ersatz coffee served at long pine tables set on the platforms of railroad stations. One morning, we ran into another set of Red Cross representatives. They were four Orthodox Jews. Their long well cared-for beards and earlocks, shiny satin coats and fur-trimmed hats were witness to the fact that Hitler’s onslaught hadn’t affected them. Yet, they refused to give us bread and ersatz coffee. One explained it concisely. ‘The people you are leading aren’t Greeks. They are Polish Jews. It was they, not Hitler, who killed Hungarian Jews in German death camps. We’ll feed you because you’re a Frenchman, but we’ll never give bread to our brethren’s murderers.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I won’t accept bread from you, if this is the way you feel about other Jews.’ We walked through mountains and woods. We crossed rivers. There were other survivors everywhere, and doubt and suspicion. They kept avoiding us. We kept avoiding them. Had it not been for the magic of AMCHU, the post-War HELLO of the Jews displaced throughout Europe, the stray people would have never found a moment of peace. And all of them kept copulating. Their philosophy of life was different from mine. They yearned for continuation. I believed in an absolute termination. That and my ignorance of Yiddish kept me apart from them. They and the Hashomer managers of all the Points used me, because I was competent and always ready to help. But none of them had ever tried to befriend me, to make me feel warm. DOKTOR FRANEK became my NOM DE GUERRE. As such, IT WASN’T MINE TO REASON WHY. IT ONLY WAS TO DO OR DIE. Whenever a serious problem arose, it was I who was called upon to find a satisfactory solution. But as soon as that was done, the invisible barrier between them and me returned. To them I was the eternal JECKE, a Jewish Gentile, a person from whom it was all right to take, but to whom one never gave. They kept me out of the AMCHU, the Lord People’s pale.

That state of affairs lasted until I met the two BIELSKI brothers and two of their cousins in one of the Points. They were former Jewish partisans in the virgin forests of northeastern Poland. One of the brothers, probably the eldest, a huge broad-shouldered man, had been awarded the Medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union by the generals of the Red Army, whom he had helped by fighting the rear of the German troops from the beginning of the Nazi offensive until the time of its total collapse. That brother Bielski, whose first name I never knew, and I became close. He didn’t speak much about his heroic feats. Some of the fellows who had fought at his side did. According to them, he had built a Jewish settlement in the very heart of the woods. In it, he had lodged old or incapacitated men, women and children. Some spoke of over 200 people; others’ estimate was close to 1,000. They respected that Bielski brother. They described him as a fierce, courageous, indomitable fighter on a white stallion, a hero who, at the head of his Jewish partisan battalion, inflicted heavy damage on the occupiers. But then, in 1945, oblivious of his Soviet decorations, he joined the Everyjew’s pilgrimage toward the Land of the Ancestors. Now, as we traveled together, he, his brother and cousins taught me how to drown our dejection in a sea of alcohol. We drank night after night till my brain was numb. The Bielskis were used to alcohol. I wasn’t. Consequently, one night I was found unconscious in a roadside ditch. A charitable soul brought me to the Point and the morning after I woke up drowning in my vomit. A woman put a small mirror in front of me and said, ‘Look at you, Doktor Franek! Do you like what you see?’ I didn’t. From that time on, I didn’t touch vodka, slivovitz, zuika or the Romanian SPRITZ, bad white wine with seltzer, until several weeks later, when I found myself in Italy. There, in the Land of sun, song and love wine was not a shelter from scary nightmares, depression and dejection. It was an ancient companion of man in quest of happiness. In Rome, I had a glass or two of wine a day, without feeling guilty because of it.

After a long and eventful journey, we arrived in a small town in Transylvania, a Romanian province inhabited mostly by Hungarians. The name of the town was Alba Iulia. The town’s Jewish population had miraculously escaped any serious damage by either the Germans or the rabidly anti-Semitic Romanian Fascist Iron Guard. Local Jews extended a warm welcome to the temporary tenants of the Alba Iulia Point, which before the war was a brothel owned by an Orthodox Jew called Lupescu. Now, under the Soviet occupation or liberation, prostitution became a cottage industry, and Lupescu rented the emptied premises to the JOINT Distribution Committee. Thus, the former bordello was now a POINT that, because of its size and less than an overnight nature, came to be referred to as KIBBUTZ. Seven groups of Amchu wanderers, about 140 people counting my set of pilgrims, presently lived here. The local Jews spoke Hungarian, Romanian and German. That made it easy enough to form a degree of intimacy between them and the D.P.s from the east, most of whom spoke Yiddish, a tongue similar enough to German, so that the speaker of one and the listener of the other were able to communicate. Alba Iulia Kibbutz consisted of three long wooden barracks set in the shape of the letter U. Each barrack was divided into several cubicles, just as any decent brothel should. The complex was large enough to offer a degree of intimacy to men and women who wished to live together. In front of every barrack was a narrow passage made from raw wooden planks. A wooden banister running along it made it look like a porch of sorts. A high stone wall with only one gate, which allowed just one person at a time to enter or exit, protected the compound.

The majority of the inhabitants of the Alba Iulia Kibbutz were members of the Zionist left-wing Hashomer. I was informed so by a woman my age who was summoned by the gatekeeper at the arrival of my group and me. ‘My name is Miriam,’ she introduced herself. Her regular features, smooth skin and a slim figure made me think of her as pretty; but because of the cold steel-blue eyes she seemed aloof. ‘You are Doktor Franek. The approximate time of arrival of your group was conveyed to me by a SHELIYAH, a courier. I was told that you don’t speak Yiddish. It’s just too bad. Most of the people here belong to Hashomer Hatzair. They speak Yiddish among themselves, and they expect everybody to use that tongue. They declared Polish and German to be enemy languages. But don’t worry. I’ll be your interpreter. You’ll need one, even though most of them know Polish as well as you and I.’ She suddenly smiled. That was when I decided that she wasn’t just pretty; she was beautiful. Next to Miriam stood a youth that looked to me not older than seventeen. ‘Vovka,’ Miriam addressed him, ‘please show these new arrivals to their quarters. I’ll take Doktor Franek to his room.’ Vovka reset his eyeglasses, cleared his throat, and said in Polish, ‘Of course, Miriam.’ Then he turned to the members of my group and said in Yiddish, ‘Follow me, Haveyrim.’ HAVEYRIM was Hebrew for Comrades. ‘He is Vovka Gdud,’ Miriam informed me, as we walked toward the left corner of the letter U. ‘He is a distant cousin of mine. He and his father survived the slaughter in the woods of Lithuania. But his father isn’t here. So I look after him. Vovka is a nice boy. He even knows how to play the violin.’ ‘And you?’ I asked. ‘I lost my husband in Lithuania. He was a physician. I’m a nurse. I’ve