A Tangled Inheritance

My father is an infant Holocaust survivor. A hidden child whose memory of those first three years of life are as near to him as my first steps are to me.

Born in December 1942 in the Jewish ghetto of Radom, Poland, he was kept alive for the first nine months of his life on sleeping pills and breast milk. When, the next year, word of the impending liquidation of the ghetto reached my grandparents, my grandmother Edith left my uncircumcised infant father on the steps of a friend of the family named Marisha, a non-Jewish woman in her early 20s, and hoped for his survival. There were talks about her adopting him, but when the time came, Marisha, nervous, instead took the baby to an orphanage just as my grandparents were carted to concentration camps. While they were shaved, tortured and starved, their son was then adopted by another family in the rural plains of the Polish countryside, calling those new people mamo and tata.

But torture has secrets in its folds: hidden gifts to keep you alive for more torture, or perhaps a whisper of hope. At twenty-two, my grandmother, separated from her family, was taken to Majdonek, Ravensbruk and Auschwitz, beaten and branded with the tattoo of trauma. Her parents and younger brother were killed, but her two sisters—one older, one younger—were unaccounted for. She sewed uniforms for the Nazis, flashing her beautiful blue-eyes and smile to the officers in an effort to survive, to get back to her family.

Still in Auschwitz, my grandmother found her two sisters after a year of separation. They embraced in a momentary reunion of hope in the bowels of the largest death camp of Europe. All three sisters would survive. Each would have two children. Each of those children would have three children, save one who would have two. One to replace themselves, one to replace their parents, and one to make up for the lost millions.

My grandmother was one of the lucky ones. Plucked from the death camps by Count Bernadotte of Sweden, the head of the Swedish Red Cross who created the White Buses Initiative––a secret mission in which he used Red Cross buses to save several hundred women from the death camps––my grandmother was on the first bus north to salvation near the end of the war. Arbitrary selection for life, just as arbitrary for death. She weighed sixty pounds and recovering in what she thought might become her new home country, Sweden.

My grandfather, Henry, after being imprisoned in Majdonek and Brünnlitz, was a member of Schindler’s List, at one point in charge of Amon Goeth’s dogs, made famous by a terrifying Ralph Fiennes in the Steven Spielberg film. As a result, Henry was relatively healthy at the end of the war, so much so that he literally walked home to Radom from Brünnlitz in two days after the liberation, shifting his attention from survival to reunion: finding his family and reclaiming his lost son.

Following the war, my grandfather tried to rebuild a life to which he hoped his son and wife would return. He tracked down my father, found him in the countryside living with a family who had legally adopted him and where he was living the life of a gentile three-year old toddler in rural Poland, in a family who knew little of his past. After several months, a brutal court battle and zlotes and zlotes of blackmail, my grandfather eventually reclaimed him, just as my grandmother was also returning home to Radom. The family was reunited, a blissful narrative of strength and ingenuity, luck, proximity, youth, attractiveness, energy, and time.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Except that it’s not. It never is.

Growing up, I knew my grandparents’ stories of survival, breathed my father’s incomprehensible origins, but beyond the same birthday card I got in the mail from my grandparents every year, and the occasional trips we made to Los Angeles to see them, our paths didn’t cross much. It was the 1980s and 90s; we used the phone and actual letters in the mail. They visited my family in New Orleans once, in addition to attending our bar and bat mitzvahs, but apart from those four precious times, they never came.

Yet the stories were always present, knocking on the door of our relationship like an open invitation to some form of intimacy. And so their survivorship became my way in. I wanted to know more.

“How did you find him?” I asked every year I traveled to Los Angeles to see them, from adolescence to college to adulthood.“How did you get my dad back?” Instead of an answer, there was another version of the same scene; a flash in someone else’s memory I’ll never fully access. The Nazi officer threatening my grandmother’s crying baby. The ghetto doctor euthanizing the remaining babies. The infant left on a stranger’s doorstep like a modern Moses. The death march.

Our relationship—like the stories—became the string that dangles the final tooth before it is tugged from the gum of a child. If I pulled, it would bleed. I didn’t want make it bleed for someone who had already bled too much. I asked my questions carefully and took in what they would give.

What I did know was what I could touch. Her wrist, creped and imprinted with a blueish-black set of arbitrary numbers. What I did know was what I could see. Her eyes, light blue and crystalline like a perfect cloudless sky. Blue eyes, the bluest of blue, which were in part how she survived. Aryan eyes. One notch on the belt of luck. Eyes whose color would convince a Nazi officer to put away his gun instead of shoot.

I don’t remember learning about the Holocaust. It wasn’t in school, or reading Anne Frank. It was if I was born knowing, which is not an uncommon experience among second and thirdgeneration survivors. But beyond the stories of the camps, I wanted to know how my grandparents found each other at the end of the war, how they lived in Germany after the war, and most importantly, how they went about finding my father after he was separated from them before he was one. I wondered if other 2G and 3G survivors, second and third generations out from the Holocaust, had these same questions. Were their grandparents the warm and affectionate kind who huddled close together because they knew what could be lost, or were they distant, with an inability to form intimate relationships, their pathos damaged during the war through no fault of their own.

My father can’t fill in these gaps; key moments of bonding between parent and child. Memory solidifies around the age of three. But now we know that trauma is embedded in our DNA, so that a shadow of a memory will follow you, even if never experienced. This nature of trauma, including survivorship, is imprinted in the DNA of survivors’ children and grandchildren, which is why I can’t remember when I first learned about the Holocaust. I always knew.

But my father was and always has been caught in the middle, wanting both to please and yet also struggling to define his own life. My father, who is a survivor himself, never looked at himself that way until his latter years; instead, he served the role as a child of survivors. He became what psychotherapist Dina Wardi calls, the “memorial candle” child for my grandparents, the child for whom they gave everything to survive. This person who embodied everything they nearly died to escape. This person into whom life—their life—could continue.

My grandparents lived in an old two-bedroom third floor apartment in the San Fernando Valley since at least the 1970s. Every wall was covered with enlarged black and white photographs and paintings of family members, placed in ornate gold museum-quality frames that maybe came from a local store. Old Persian rugs covered even older beige carpet in large rectangular divisions, making the apartment seem like it could be lifted and planted in a different era. All save the television which was on, set always to the stock market, which my grandfather watched religiously. Chicken was cooking in the kitchen, its smell stretching in ribbons of salt and garlic all the way to us in chairs near the couch, wrapping us up in a form of a gift, where my grandmother would speak to us.

“Education, education, education,” she would say.

We were children. We listened to her and we sat near my grandfather, wanting something, trying to find a way in. Deep lines on either side of my grandfather’s lips pointed downward, dividing his chin from his face like a marionette, frowning. Always frowning as he occasionally looked at us and then back up at an old lamp, from which half a dozen reading glasses dangled.

“It’s the one thing they can’t take away,” she would add.

I knew who “they” were, always. I also thought I knew what my grandparents were talking about when they mentioned what they could take away.

But the conversations stopped when my father would arrive to pick us up and my brother, sister, and I would scramble to get our things to leave.

In nearly every visit we made to Los Angeles as children, my parents would drop us off and give us time to spend with our grandparents. Hours later, my father would pick us up and the minute he walked inside, his face dropped and his body tightened, like clay hardening in the sun. That anxiety, the emotional rigor mortis, happened frequently when they were in each other’s presence. My grandfather didn’t stand to greet my father; his face barely turned toward him, and my father’s face did the same, mirroring him in indifference. It wasn’t exactly displeasure, nor was it anger, but rather sadness. The reality of two men unable to connect.

The diaspora of family. Imposed physically or emotionally, or both.

The pressure was overwhelming, on both ends, whether through my father’s choice of spouse, choice of livelihood, they didn’t want to be a part of anything that glorified members of the Nazi party, no matter what they did. They also said that the film Schindler’s List was a fantasy.

“If only it was that good,” they had said.

When my grandfather died years later, something shifted in my father, and the frozen, hardened man who struggled in his father’s presence melted ever so slightly, opening what had been tightly sealed for decades.

At the funeral, my father stood up to eulogize the man who raised him, the man who once told his son that “he made him a doctor,” the man who never outwardly accepted his daughter-in-law (even if he did so privately), the man who never visited him when he became a father himself. But also the man who gave him life. The man who helped save him from the Nazis. The man who acquired a gun after the war to protect him and, choice of residence, and my brother, sister, and I were witness to this gradual unspooling of their relationship, all the while realizing that legacies and inheritances are marbled.

“Let’s go!” my dad would urge again.

We would look up, hug our grandparents, and head to the door, never sure when we would see each other again. This would repeat for decades, until as adults, my brother, sister, and I created our own special relationships with them.

My grandfather died in 2008 at the age of 95. Before the war, he was a competitive ice skater, a fierce athlete. Later, he was a successful businessman in many markets: first a deli owner as a young immigrant; later, he worked in construction. In the 80s, he was approached by author Thomas Kenneally to be included in his book, Schindler’s Arc, but my grandfather didn’t want to be part of it.

We didn’t know that my grandfather was on Schindler’s List until the movie came out in 1993. My father and I went to see it on a school day while I was in sixth grade, and I was immediately plunged into a familiar world. The film reminded me that my family was lucky but damaged, tortured but alive, and gave me a shorthand narrative in my omnipresent introduction to the world. I am both a second and third-generation Holocaust survivor.

My father later told me that “Zeyde hated the man.” He was, of course, speaking of Oskar Schindler. “Once a Nazi, always a Nazi,” he had said to my father. My grandparents told us that against all odds, win him back from an unknown fate in an unknown countryside in another country altogether. And my father started to cry.

“He was a tough man,” said my father in front of dozens of people—some family, some friends, some strangers to him. But toughness, we all know, was the only way to survive in a time like that. Toughness is synonymous with survival. If he wasn’t tough, then he would probably be dead, along with my father. And my aunt, cousins, brother and sister and I wouldn’t be alive. My aunt once told me that he said to her, ‘My job isn’t to love you; it’s to teach you.’ Was this an altogether different expression of love in its own form, or an antiquated generational inability to express love?

“He taught me many things,” my father continued, and I knew he was referring to how to be a father and how not to be a father. “But six months before he died, he called me on the phone and told me he loved me.”

My father’s voice cracked in the sanctuary of the funeral home. Mourner’s Kaddish had not yet been recited. Shiva had not yet begun.

“That was the first time he said those words to me.”

He paused, wiping his eyes, clearing his nose.

“And the last.”

My chest widened and I grabbed hold of my husband’s hand. I looked over to my sister and brother and mother and aunt. My father had told me he loved me weekly for the entirety of my life. I say it daily to my own young children.

A few years later, my grandmother died. But before she passed, also in her mid-90s, I moved to Los Angeles, where they’d lived for my entire life. Finally I was able to see my grandmother frequently, spending time with her on Shabbats, on a random Wednesday after work, on any occasion I could just to chat, to get to know the woman whose myth was a bloodline to mine, so that I could know her beyond what I could see, beyond what I could touch, beyond what I could know. In that time, we created a relationship, a real one. After all, proximity and frequency matter when blood often fails. And in the end, it mattered.

My grandmother died when I was nine months pregnant with my first child, a girl. I named my daughter after her. My daughter inherited those same blue eyes, along with her name, and some of her survival DNA in the weeks between their life cycles. My daughter nearly died from a stroke at six weeks, but escaped healthy, unscathed.

Does survivorship pass from generation to generation, too? Or just the trauma? After all, trauma manifests in whatever form it takes to allow the host to survive. Why not survivorship, too?

I have a dual inheritance that I have struggled to untangle my entire life. One side is the proud legacy that I repeat to everyone I meet, never once sharing the lack of familial unity. People don’t typically share what happens after. It disrupts the ending, the tie that closes the narrative and instills hope. I share the legacy of the Holocaust, of survival; never the legacy of rejection or what inheritance of the miracle candle child might mean.

But what if that second legacy is just as important as the first? What if that tangled tie to end one story is actually the connection to the next? This dual inheritance is one that leads to a distinct, maybe even distorted form of love. Yet, it must be remembered, even tattooed into our hearts: a struggle to express love does not mean it doesn’t exist.

My grandparents transferred to me a pride of survivorship and focus on education as the one thing “they” can’t take away; but they may not have realized that the most important lesson was something else entirely; something that cannot be rejected, abandoned, or taken away.

The love between my grandparents—to know they were loved—fully loved by another person — is something that they also can’t take away. The way my father loves my mother and she loves him, what they lost and sacrificed for each other for half a century is something that they also can’t take away.

What so many families with fissures so deep miss when it seems they can’t be fixed is the search beneath the pain, behind the trauma, the thing that once connected them, is something they can’t take away. I know in my own family that no matter how much we bicker and hurt each other in the day, the moment the sun sets and rises, the slate is washed clean. Even in trauma, even in death, generation after generation—to know you are loved, fully loved by another person—is and always will be something that they can’t take away.

And this, I bequeath to my own young children, is our tangled and beautiful inheritance.

Elizabeth L. Silver is the author of three books, most recently The Majority, a novel (Riverhead). She lives in Los Angeles.