Goodness, the ego!

April 15, 1994

Hello! Greetings from Washington, DC! Supposedly, I’m here to look at George Washington University, but I’m just as happy hanging out in the capitol as on campus. At any rate, I saw many interesting things today.

My friend and I went to Porter’s office. He was at home (in DC), but we talked to his staff. I applied for an internship position in his home office. It was very interesting.

When we approached the Capitol building, there was a small group protesting government trained assassins. It was thought provoking. I never really gave to CIA operations (actually, that’s not true) and whether they still train assassins or not. I began to wonder if those people weren’t a bit too affected by “In the Line of Fire,” but then I realized that they had a pretty good point. Why does our “democratic” government train killers, anyway?

My friend and I also visited the Supreme Court. We were hoping to see the Court in session, but no such luck. That’s how it was with Congress, too. We also stood and gaped at the White House through the bars of the fence. My friend had wanted to go on the tour, but the line was too long and I told her that when I lived there, I’d give her a personal tour of the whole place.

That was pretty much all the government we saw, besides various buildings and embassies. One interesting thing I saw on the GW campus tour, however, was the Uruguayan Embassy. It is located right next door, literally inches away from GW’s biggest Freshman dorm. I thought that was vaguely amusing, and wondered if this had anything to do with our diplomatic relations with Uruguay!

Oh, how little things change!

March 30, 1994

Hmmm… upon looking back over this journal, I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing good ever happens in this crappy world. Almost everything I’ve written about either scared me, made me ashamed, or made me sad. I’m just wondering if any good things ever happen any more…*

*No, little Suzanne, they only get worse. Sigh.

This book, as well as Backlash, formulated who I am to this day. Kozol’s earlier book, Death at an Early Age, was very influential as well.

March 22, 1994

Saturday night, I saw my friend Wendy, who was home from college for spring break. We were talking about Dawn Clark Netsch’s plan to fund education through redistributed wealth. We both thought that it was a great idea whose time should have come long ago. At any rate, Wendy told me about a book she read called Savage Inequalities by Jonathon Kozol. It is about the obvious inequalities between poor students in inner city schools and their suburban counterparts.

New Trier is one of those schools. We are unflinchingly compared to several Chicago schools, one in North Lawndale, DuSable High School, etc. Wendy told me that after reading the book, she was ashamed to be associated with this area. I couldn’t agree more. When I realize all of the things that we have that we take for granted, I feel sick. It’s not just that we have all of this stuff, it’s that we refuse to share it. Resident after resident, official after official, student after student, declared these poor students to be unworthy and undeserving of the same funding we are entitled to. The Chicago students are made to feel like shit by people like them. I don’t want to be associated with people who hold these intolerant attitudes. Unfortunately, I am.

A friend of mine recently voiced these same views of hatred. She even attached racial tones to it. She said that “those” people need to work for their living, and it’s their own fault they live off welfare and in poverty. The problems with her statement are manifold: 1. it is completely ignorant, made without considering any of the facts, but only stereotypes 2. it is commonly believed by a large majority of New Trier.

I am deeply distressed and depressed by the conditions these less fortunate students are forced to “live” under. I cannot possibly imagine living like that. No one should. I think this book will have the same kind of profound effect on me that Backlash did. It will motivate me to fight for change. My moral outrage and sense of decency implores me to.

I hope everyone will eventually read this book. It is not pleasant, but we need to overcome our stereotypical notions of poverty and related issues. We must confront this serious problem; time is running out.

This was supposed to be posted days ago. What the hell is going on with WordPress making everything a draft and confusing me? Twice in the last two weeks…

Yesterday the building’s regularly scheduled exterminator (every third Thursday of the month, lucky for me) came by and dropped poison behind my stove and refrigerator. Apparently, the bait is not that tempting, as a little gray mouse again darted out from under the stove this morning as I stood at the counter cracking eggs. It stopped when it saw me, reversed course, and ran back under the stove. I am fairly certain that in that split second it noticed me, it thought to itself, “Shit. That damn bitch is out there.” For the record, I only made a small yelping noise when it startled me.

About five minutes later, as I approached the stove with my frying pan, a little gray mouse again attempted to emerge from its mouse HQ beneath the stove. It also probably cursed me out for foiling its plans and quickly ran back to wherever it came from. I find that funny. What am I going to do? Take an anodized sauce pot and try to smash it as it runs across the floor? Although the thought crossed my mind, I realized that was more like to result in the heavy pot smashing against the floor and cracking the tile and dinging the pot. Even if I somehow managed to connect, did I really want to remove a bloody, mashed mouse carcass from the floor and then wash off the gristle sticking to the pot?

For the sake of simplicity, if only one mouse appears at any given time, her name is Francesca. I’m sure that is more than one, but it is easier to have a collective name unless I am forced to come up with more, which I really, really hope does not happen.

Anyway, although I want Francesca to eat the poison and go away and die* somewhere else, I am also sort of fond of her. I know that she is a filthy, diseased wild rodent, but she is kind of cute. I’ve always had a soft spot for little furry critter with whiskers. I even once had a pet white mouse for a short time, which I forgot about until Francesca scared the crap out of me yesterday. When I was in London a few weeks ago, one of the free newspapers ran a photo of a teeny brown field mouse climbing on a daffodil. I found it so adorable that I tore it out of the paper and put it in my coat pocket so that I could pull it out whenever I needed a smile. Ironic, isn’t it?

*It seems that rodent poison is actually an anti-coagulant. The beasties die when their blood becomes too thin. Interesting, isn’t it?

On Tuesday, I visited the archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, colloquially known as the “Joint.” (This is not to be confused with The Joint, which was an illegal gambling den behind a cigar store on Kedzie in Chicago. My grandfather frequented The Joint in the early 1960s until my bubbe kicked him out of the house and met with a divorce lawyer.) The Joint was established by American Jews at the outbreak of World War I to help the landshaftsmen overseas during very hard times. I can only imagine what a nightmare it was for them to try and do anything during WWII and how frustrating and heartbreaking it must have been. After the Holocaust, the Joint assisted Jewish refugees in American displaced persons camps across Europe. Since my grandparents and father lived in three of those camps in Austria. I wanted to read the records from that time that reflect my family’s journey.

In 1946, over 125,000 Polish Jews who had been in Russia during the war returned home, including my family. Many were directed to Lower Silesia, an area that Poland seized from Germany, and urged to start over (yes, including my family). On May 15, a cable from a Joint staff person in Warsaw read, “85,000 REPATRIATES ARRIVED IN LOWER SILESIA STOP 15,000 CHILDREN STOP DISASTROUS SITUATIONS STOP REQUEST IMMEDIATE HELP MONEY CLOTHES FOOD.” These people were actually somewhat better off than their peers who went back to their hometowns, only to face angry anti-Semitic mobs. On July 4, a blood libel happened in Kielce, and a mob killed 42 of the 200 Jews who survived the Holocaust. A cable sent from Berlin on July 17 read:

HAVE JUST COME OUT OF POLAND WHERE JEWS LIVE IN APPALLING INDESCRIBABLE MISERY BUT WORST OF THEIR PLIGHT IS THE HORRIBLE TERROR WHICH GRIPS THEM KIELCE WAS ONLY A SYMBOL OF WHAT IS POTENTIAL SITUATION IN EVERY JEWISH TOWN STOP JEWS LEAVING IN GREAT MASSES TO SAVE THEIR LIVES STOP LEARN ARMY LIKELY TO ORDER CLOSING FRONTIERS GERMANY THIS WOULD BE VIRTUAL ORDER OF EXECUTION EYE DON’T CARE WHERE THESE JEWS GO BUT THEY MUST HAVE CHANCE ESCAPE DEATH STOP EYE HAVE CABLED PROSKAUER SILVER ASKING THEM USE INFLUENCE THEIR ORGANIZATIONS WITH STATE WAR DEPARTMENT TO PREVENT CLOSING FRONTIERS STOP PLEAD WITH YOU MOBILIZE ALL FRIEND SIMILARLY TO FAIL TO TAKE ACTION AT ONCE WILL LEAD TO FATAL CONSEQUENCES

Toward the end of July, thousands of people were illegally crossing borders and showing up in German and Austrian DP camps every day. The camps were overwhelmed. Memos from Joint staff in Austria (where my family went) indicate shortages of food, water, clothing, adequate shelter, and heat. Disease was rampant. Camps were in deplorable condition, with more people arriving every day. Still, the Joint aided those who continued to leave. Way stations were set up along the path that the emigrants took, providing them with food.

My family wound up in Haid, a camp hastily opened to alleviate the overflowing conditions of more established camps. A “transient camp,” 2,500 people lived there as of Sept. 20, 1946, three of them related to me. When Haid closed at the end of the year (as it should have because the wooden huts were freezing in winter and residents snuck out at night to chop wood from unoccupied huts intended for new arrivals because there was no fuel, and water was only available for half the residents), my family moved to Steyr, another “transient camp.” They lived in the more suitable barracks for over three years.

I didn’t find many documents from 1947 in the archives, but in 1948, the Joint began publishing a monthly newsletter in English, German, Romanian, and Yiddish. (By then, most of the Polish Jews had gone to Israel or other places, and an influx of Romanian Jews arrived.) The newsletter talked about the Joint’s plans for Purim. It had photos of people celebrating Passover in the Ebelsberg camp and tailors at a workshop in Steyr. The director of the work projects admonished people that “the responsibility for bad salaries rests with the workers. Every time a worker does a bad job of manufacturing something he brings down the salaries of his comrades because ultimately everyone is paid with good manufactured in the Camps.” Monthly health columns advised people how to avoid TB, tooth decay, and… syphilis. Clearly, if people had time to consort with prostitutes, life had settled down to some degree. As a report that year noted, “One of the most amazing aspects of life in the DP camps is the mental outlook of the people. The three years of vegetating in the camps have not broken their spirits. The people are resilient, despite the grimness of their surroundings, their crowded quarters, their lack of privacy, and their general idleness, and their endless waiting for the chance at normal living.”

In October 1948, the rumors about liquidating the camps began. Steyr had less than 800 at that point. People feared being sent to rougher camps if it closed. Eventually it did. In February 1950, my family moved to Ebelsberg. Fortunately, Ebelsberg was also a nice camp. Finally, in late October or early November 1950, my family was one of the last of the Polish Jews to leave the DP camp system.

It’s been kind of tough around the ranch these days. I had the readjustment after my trip to Warsaw. I’ve been miserably sick with a sinus infection since last Wednesday. Last night I discovered unwelcome tenants in my closet. At least twice a week, I’ve wanted to curl up into a ball and rock back and forth while moaning.

However, there are things to look forward to! Yes! I can’t wait for BlogHer to reveal the semifinalists for the Voices of the Year Contest tomorrow. I modestly nominated three of my posts: Neighborliness and It’s Here! in the Opinion/Editorial category, and Yom Hashoah in the Life category. Regardless of my own results, I look forward to finding out which great posts are featured.

In the evening, Husband and I are jetting off to Montreal for the long weekend. I’ve never been there before, and I’m looking forward to exploring this unique city. Also, I can’t wait to dig into the great eats. Will Montreal bagels kick the hole out of New York bagels, as I’ve heard? How is the pastrami at Schwartz’s? Pastries! I am trying not to dwell on my continued minor sinus pain, but I am fearful that the pressure from the flight could really mess me up. Pastries! Climbing up Mont-Royale. Yes!

The Montreal trip is to celebrate something big: Friday is our 10th wedding anniversary. It’s hard to believe that ten years ago, Husband was a blushing groom. (He was blushing as I swore about various things, I’m sure.) I’m incredibly lucky to have him at my side. The next decades are definitely something to be excited about.

There is nothing I can do when I look at this picture but smile so widely that it hurts my cheeks:

I promised myself that I would stop writing sad posts for a while, but it’s hard not to think about my grandfather when I look at my nephew. When I see this beautiful, wonderful child’s smile, I understand why my grandfather did everything he could to survive and how he could continue to go on when he’d lost nearly everything he had held dear.*

My sister named her son after our grandfather. I hope that Marcus inherits his great grandpa’s tenacity and sense of humor. He has big shoes to fill, but I know he will make us all proud by being himself.

*This does not change my lack of desire to have my own offspring, however.

Before I get to my second day in Warsaw, I want to rewind to when Alex and I checked into the hotel on Sat. evening. The desk clerk noted that the reservation was only for one adult (my fault for booking at 2 am and not carefully double checking). I said that I knew this, but spoke to Starwood on the phone and they said it was fine to bring another person. She gave us the fish eye. “Do you want one queen bed or two twin beds?” she asked. I am fairly certain from the expression on her face that she was thinking, “Proszę, nie pochwy lizanie w pokoju.”* We said two twins and she seemed relieved. Anyway, the twin beds have been good because they allow me to toss and turn with impunity. Digression over.

Today we woke up early and dragged ourselves to the sub par gym. I rode a bike for 40 minutes, and Alex put in an hour. Then we cleaned ourselves up and set out in the light rain. After breakfast at a cafe, we went to the Jewish History Museum. My request for an English guide never went through, which wound up being fine. We went to the Genealogical Project of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation first and met with Anna Przybyszewska-Drozd. She was unable to find any new information about my family, but pulled out a directory from 1910 that lists my great grandfather. It said he was a tradesman and lived at Dobra 57. The 1930 directory did not list him at all. This makes sense since I think he died in the mid- to late 1920s. (If the grave I am looking for in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery is really his, he died the day after my grandfather’s 16th birthday, October 27, 1927. What is really weird is that my grandfather died on Oct. 27, 1995.) The family moved sometime between 1910 and 1939, as my grandfather’s last address was Dobra 81. My great uncle, however, was not listed in either guide. Anna thought it might have been because he was Orthodox, but who knows? (One thing I really want to know was how religious my grandfather was, but I don’t think I’ll ever find this out.)

When I went to Dobra St. yesterday, I found an empty lot where 81 used to be. Anna was able to find a picture of his building (and Dobra 57) online. It was amazing to see where he lived. She also showed me a photo of the building my Great Aunt Doba and cousin Beila lived in before they died. She emailed me the photos and also a scan of the directories. She spent an hour with us looking in various databases. It seems that I will never be able to learn my great grandmother’s maiden name or the married names of my great aunts Tema and Estera or anything about their children. However, I am very grateful for her help, especially since we just wandered in with no appointment.

After the research, Alex and I went to the Jewish Institute’s exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto. I already knew much of the horrendous conditions that people lived in, but it also mentioned that some people – smugglers and shop owners – lived fairly well. Still, the pictures, particularly of starving children begging on the street in rags and dead bodies lying on the sidewalk, worn down to flesh covered skeletons, was very upsetting. We also saw an exhibit of Jewish art that I was not particularly taken by. Before we left, I bought a book of photos of the Jews of Warsaw from the 1860s to 1943.

Alex and I ate a non-remarkable lunch, then some chocolate from a newsstand, then yogurt from a grocery store, then a doughnut with rose petal jam at a bakery, then felt sort of sick. We walked over to the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which was more of a museum about Polish partisan fighters in general than Warsaw. It was very well designed, although overwhelming. The out of control school group did not help. The brats had no regard for any of the other patrons, pushing people aside and running around like they were in a playground, not a museum. When a security guard yelled at them, I told Alex that I hoped he told them to stop acting like fucking animals. He gave me a dirty look, too.

Our final destination of the day was a fancy restaurant that Husband’s friend recommended for dinner. We arrived looking like drowned rats after our day of wandering in the rain. I’m sure this pleased them to no end. The food, though, was amazing. I had pork with plums and apples, mashed potatoes, and beets. (OK, so the beets were not amazing.) Alex had roast turkey with fabulous apricot and plum stuffing, currants, mashed potatoes, and beets. The meats were wheeled in on a cart and sliced by our tables, and the sides ladled onto our plates from various pots. It was cool. We also indulged in dessert. We spent a lot of time eavesdropping on the Americans, Brits, and Aussies sitting around us.

Tomorrow, a guide is picking us up at 10:30 to take us to Treblinka. It is supposed to be sunny. I am happy for the small things.

*According to google translate, this means, “Please, no vagina licking in the room.”

This is my great uncle, Yitzchak Srodogora, around 1948. He was married to my grandfather’s sister Doba. Yitzchak and Doba had one daughter, whose name was Beila Basia. Yitzchak, I learned in 2004, survived the Holocaust because he had been conscripted to the Polish Army. He was captured by Russians and spent the war in a gulag. My great aunt and my cousin were sent to the Warsaw ghetto in 1940. In 1943, they were deported to Treblinka and murdered. Beila was 19 or 20, and Doba was 45 or 46.

Yitzchak moved to Israel after the war. He remarried, but his relatives in Israel told me that he never got over the loss of his first wife and their daughter. “He was a very sad man,” his great niece told me. She did not know much else. Whenever he talked about his life before the Holocaust, she covered her ears and refused to listen. She did not want to hear of such tragedies. Great Uncle Yitzchak died in 1983. He was in his 80s.

The man on the left is my grandfather, Motel Rajsman, around 1948. He is with his son and wife in a Displaced Persons camp in Austria. My grandfather survived the Holocaust when he fled Warsaw after the Germans invaded in 1939. He was arrested by the Russians and performed forced labor in a gulag until 1942. He then worked on a collective farm, and in 1944, went to Magnitgorsk, where he met my bubbe at a factory they both worked at. They married in September 1945, and my dad was born in May 1946.

My grandfather moved with his family to the US in 1950. He never talked about the family members killed in the Holocaust. He smiled a lot, and told jokes instead. My grandfather died in 1995, the day after his 84th birthday.

I am handing in my thesis tomorrow during my lunch break. This is very exciting!

I also plan to go to the computer lab and use all of my print credit to make extra copies.

While it is great to be done with the thesis, I am by no means near finished with what I hope will be a book about my grandparents and how their struggles made me the person I am. Part of the research that I continue to do includes reading a book by Vasily Grossman called “Life and Fate.” I mentioned this behemoth two or three posts ago. It follows people through the Battle of Stalingrad, the liquidation of a ghetto in the Ukraine, gulags, and Nazi death camps. When Grossman tried to publish it, it was deemed so dangerous that even the typewritter ribbons used to write it were destroyed by the KGB.

Grossman had been a reporter with the Red Army newspaper, and was one of the first people to arrive at Treblinka. His report (which is part of a book collecting his war writings that I ordered) was one of the first accounts of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. Treblinka (and his mother’s murder when her town was liquidated by the Nazis) changed his perspective about the world. In “Life and Fate,” he wrote:

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.

I find it hard to breathe whenever I read that line.