Prologue

A turning point in my relationship with my parents came twenty-five years after they died. It happened that my partner, Lindy Green, at the request of Toronto’s Ashkenaz Festival, was about to mount an exhibition at the Al Green Gallery where she was director and curator. The showing, entitled I Am from Here, would consist entirely of paintings by Maciej Frankiewicz, a young Polish artist, a Christian who, Lindy explained, was obsessed with the obliterated Jewish community that had thrived in his town before the war. He painted scenes of the shtetl as he imagined it. He also voluntarily tended its neglected Jewish cemetery.

I asked Lindy the name of the town.

“Starachowice,” she said, and I looked blankly back at her. “It used to be called Wierzbnik.”

“Uh, you won’t believe this, but I think that’s where my parents were from.”

A special preview evening at the gallery was planned for members of Toronto’s Wierzbniker Society, to which, I then remembered, my parents had belonged.

“Then you should be there.”

Rachmil and Luba were Polish Jews who, unlike three million others in Poland, had managed to survive the Holocaust. But they wouldn’t talk about it. My mother, except in rare moments, acted as if it had never happened. My father, a tailor, said little beyond dubious anecdotes depicting himself as a wily POW à la Hogan’s Heroes. My two older brothers were born in Germany after the war, in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp. We five boys — Abie, Charlie, Sam, David, Harvey — knew little else and probing proved futile. We were shut out of our parents’ personal histories, though the secret lives they steadfastly refused to share with us were still vivid in them — evident in their number tattoos, in their sudden outbursts of violence both physical and psychological, and in their insular interactions with fellow concentration camp survivors who shared a common language and history, comrades who were closer to them than my brothers and I would ever be.

The unvoiced trauma of my parents’ history weighed heavily. I had hoped to countervail or at least soften the war’s aftermath by being an obedient son, but the task was Sisyphean and could not be done without the boulder flattening my authentic self. There was no space in their suffering for a child’s independent existence, needs, inclinations, desires. Going against survivor parents was unthinkable. “This is what we survived for?” would be the inevitable response. I felt trapped and riven with guilt.

My siblings seemed more able to bear the burden. They were more compliant, if not content, with my parents’ rigid demands on the shape our lives were to take. They would all become doctors and lawyers, the professionals my parents insisted we be. They would get married, have children, show up for Shabbos dinners every Friday night. Me, I fled.

I disappeared from my blood family for nearly two decades and created a new life for myself. I became part of a communal family of friends whose diverse personal histories were open books. We took to heart the ethos of the sixties’ counterculture — questioning authority, valuing justice, fairness, equity, and brotherhood, not just as dreamers, but as doers. Together we helped free former American prizefighter Rubin “Hurricane” Carter from an extended nightmare of wrongful imprisonment in New Jersey. His triple murder conviction was overthrown and he was released the same year a car crash ended my mother’s and father’s lives.

I charily agreed to attend Lindy’s art show but was beset with second thoughts. I had always hoped to discover more — anything — about my parents’ old country history, yet the prospect terrified me. I recalled the time I’d read aloud from Man’s Search for Meaning, the memoir of psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, a book that had helped sustain Rubin Carter through his years behind bars. Mid-passage, I exploded in tears, surprising myself no less than my audience of perplexed friends, and I couldn’t continue reading. I now feared the detonation and deluge that would inevitably ensue should this Holocaust door be reopened.

Lindy wisely said I would regret not coming and encouraged me to overcome my apprehension. Unforgettable for her was the incident in the middle of one night at her condo. I got up to go to the bathroom and fainted. All my weight landed on my right foot and I was sure I’d broken it. I hobbled quietly back to bed. When Lindy awoke the next morning, I simply said, “You might need to drive me to Emergency.”

“What? And you didn’t wake me?”

Not acknowledging when I experienced pain or discomfort was a behavioural pattern that Lindy had already noticed. She wondered if I reflexively downplayed my own suffering because it did not register on the scale of what my parents must have endured. But this injury went beyond the pale, and my silence spoke volumes of why I needed that Holocaust door reopened. Lindy invited my oldest brother, Abe, to the gallery as well. I decided, what the hell.

At the event, I spoke to Stanley Zukerman, who looked like a middle-aged version of the boy he had been in my grade nine class at Wilson Heights Junior High School. He was now president of the Wierzbniker Society.

“Of course, you’ve read Browning’s new book?” Before a “who?” could pass my lips, Stanley continued, “Christopher Browning. Holocaust history specialist. His book is full of your father’s words.”

“That’s impossible. My father’s been dead since 1985.”

“He was a witness at a war crimes trial. His sworn testimony is on the record.”

A heavy drumbeat penetrated the sudden silence in the room, and everyone appeared to be moving in slow motion. Blood thumped so hard against my temples that my skull was a dam about to burst. Visions of grey matter splattered over the gallery’s white-painted walls, Lindy having to clean up the bloody mess. I struggled to pull myself together.

“The book — “”

“Remembering Survival. About Wierzbnik during the war.”

I was aware my father had gone to Germany in 1970 to testify at a trial. As usual, he offered few details and, as I had already moved out of our family home, my thoughts were elsewhere. One thing he’d said, though, I’ve never forgotten. Sometime after returning to Canada, he’d told me about a man, some sort of former Nazi commandant, who, upon observing my father walk into the courtroom, reacted as if seeing a ghost.

“Herr Schneidermeister, lebst du noch?” (Master Tailor, you’re still alive?)

There’d been a triumphant note in my father’s retelling, which made me discount the story, seeing it as yet another example of his boasting that had little to do with the truth. Now I questioned myself. Why wouldn’t my father have been honestly and justifiably proud? The fact of his survival meant that his life trumped what this man in the prisoner’s dock had tried to do to him. Moreover, in that courtroom, acknowledged as the master tailor he truly was, my father was finally going to be heard.

But not by me. At least, not then.

I scrambled to get a copy of Browning’s book. It would be a revelation and spark further revelations. It would help me puzzle together a story, my story, my family’s story. It would alter my perception of my parents and the influence of their buried trauma on my life and on my brothers’ lives. And it would inspire me to write this book, something my father had promised we would eventually do.

Most unexpectedly, it would bring my parents back to me, and me to them.…