What Time and Sadness Spared: Mother and Son Confront the Holocaust

By Roma Nutkiewicz Ben-Atar and Doron S. Ben-Atar

Roma Ben-Atar resisted until late in life the urging of her family to share the memories of her Nazi-era experiences. The Holocaust exerted a dark pressure on all of their lives but was never openly discussed. It was only when her granddaughter insisted on hearing the whole truth, with a directness partly generational, that Mrs. Ben-Atar agreed to tell her story.

What Time and Sadness Spared is a journey of both loss and endurance, moving with shocking speed from a carefree adolescence in upper-middle-class Warsaw to the horrors of the Final Solution. The young girl sees her neighborhood transformed into a ghetto populated by skeletal figures both alive and dead. Unbelievably, things only grow worse as this ruin gives way to the death factories of Majdanek and Auschwitz and the death marches of 1945. Life in the camps changes her in less than a day, as if "the person in my body was a stranger I had never met." Her only consolation is to lie on her wooden bunk, no mattress, and speak to the soul of her mother, who, like virtually her entire family, had already been swept away. Roma must summon astonishing powers of adaptation simply to survive, bringing her finally through the wreckage of postwar Europe and to an entirely new life in Israel.

In this unique family collaboration Roma Ben-Atar's son Doron, a historian who brings with him fluency in psychoanalysis, contributes through his commentary an awareness of the difficulties presented by historical narrative and memory. A visitor to the much-changed sites in which his mother grew up and was interned by the Nazis, he also voices the perspective of the survivors' children and their ambivalence over being "protected" from this past. As the generation that endured the camps passes from this world, What Time and Sadness Spared illustrates with particular urgency the historical responsibilities of the survivors' descendants, who must become the new vessels for a story that will not remain alive on its own but demands our courage and curiosity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813934969

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Whose Voice and Whose Memory?

DORON S. BEN-ATAR

This account is the collaborative work of a Holocaust survivor and her historian son. It recalls my mother’s adolescence during World War II. On some basic level we have written a Holocaust memoir—a testimony of the sufferings and tortures inflicted by the Germans on European Jewry that is part of the grand project of inscribing into the pages of history the memory of those who perished. However, no memoir can claim to be merely a transparent record of the past, and survivors’ recollections are no exception. My urge to tell what really happened in as much detail as possible so that the evils of the Final Solution will never be forgotten is tempered by the recognition that for all our best efforts, my mother and I cannot help but recall her experiences through the many individual, social, and cultural filters of her existence then and since.

Perhaps it is best to begin by explaining the manner in which we wrote the book. My mother lives in Israel, and I in the United States. Over the years my sister and I heard bits and pieces of her horror story, but somehow our minds refused to fully absorb the tale. We repeatedly asked her to write down her account, thinking that if she recorded it in writing, the logic of the narrative would bring us closer to understanding what had happened, why, and how it felt. But my mother is not a writer. Cut off from her schooling by the war, she lost her connection with any one specific language. She can speak many tongues—Polish, German, Yiddish, English, Hebrew, and French—but is at home in none. Writing for her is arduous, precisely because her syntax and vocabulary are composed of a mishmash of words and idioms from many languages. Also, she was reluctant to revisit her past in the intense disciplined manner that writing requires; understandably, she did not want to submerge herself in recalling the years of intense pain and loss. She rebuffed our requests, saying that there were enough Holocaust narratives to go around and that the world did not need one more personal account of suffering.

My mother was too busy living in the present to dwell too long on the past. Her second life began where our book ends— in a Berlin displaced persons’ camp in 1946. She moved to the American occupation zone, completed her matriculation exams, and began medical school. Devout Zionist that she was, my mother avoided going to Palestine as long as the British placed captured illegal immigrants in camps on Cyprus, because she could not bear the prospect of being caged behind barbed wire again. Her boat left Marseille for the port of Haifa on May 15, 1948, the day the British mandate of Palestine officially expired. She reunited with her grandmother in Tel Aviv and enlisted to serve in the Israeli army during the War of Independence. A few years later she married a Turkish-born former basketball star, had a daughter and a son, and set out to build a normal life. My sister and I were to be protected from the past. For the most part, my parents did not socialize with other survivors. We grew up as if our family had been part of the Zionist Israeli landscape for generations.

It is not that my mother tried to hide her history. How could she? Every child in Israel knew the meaning of the tattooed blue triangles and numbers on survivors’ arms. The number 47933 accompanied each one of her loving caresses, each serving of food, and each measure of discipline. She named my sister Irith Tova, after her mother (Tova is the Hebrew translation of Guta). I was repeatedly told that I looked like her brother, just a bit more mischievous. And yet my mother made every effort not to burden us with her sadness. Occasionally, when we had to do a school project about the Holocaust, she gave us a shortened, sanitized version, but the fragments we learned were too scary to hold. My mother conveyed simple messages about her past. Her suffering was neither a crutch nor a license for immorality. The Holocaust was not a lesson. It had nothing to do with God. It provided no universal truths. It shed no unique light on history, cultures, and nations. It was her private hell.

Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year we pretended that there was no overbearing ghost in our midst. One day a year, however, on the annual Holocaust Memorial Day, a dark cloud of mourning took over the house. It was the day I dreaded most. My mother had to be left alone. We walked on our tiptoes and whispered. My mother sat by the radio, and later in front of the television, a box of tissues by her side, wiping tears and listening to one horror story after another. I tried to keep out of the house because I could not bear to face her pain and tears. The next morning, however, we resumed our lives as if the previous day had been perfectly normal.

My parents’ determination to spare us the horrors of the Nazi era seemed successful. I grew up a sabra. I followed in my father’s footsteps and played basketball. I was drawn to history but directed my childish passion to the study of the Roman Empire. I loved stories of heroism and conquest. I copied pictures of Roman soldiers from children’s encyclopedias. I learned to recite the list of Roman emperors. I could not bear Jewish history, with its torturous chronicle of persecutions, humiliations, sufferings, and defeats. I avoided Holocaust literature, television programs, and movies. When I was a teenager, I became ashamed of my mother and her experience. I made fun of her Polish accent, her overprotectiveness, and her refusal to throw out leftovers. I cracked Holocaust jokes. I made provocative statements that compared every minor evildoer to Hitler and every small injustice to Auschwitz.

One particular early adolescent exchange haunts me to this very day. It was a joke I heard from a friend. Your mother walks into the kitchen, he said, and upon noticing the scent of a gas leak says, It smells like home. Was I supposed to laugh? If I didn’t, I became one of those ultrasensitive Diaspora Jews Israeli kids referred to as soaps. (And even the term soap is loaded, for it is taken from the false rumor that the Nazis turned the remains of their victims into soap.) I didn’t want to be associated with the frightened dirty Jews who went like lambs to the slaughter. So I laughed and I fit in. Worse still, the next Holocaust joke came out of my own mouth.

The posture of distance and the conscious avoidance never worked. Some nights I lay in bed fantasizing about finding my dead uncle and bringing him home as a surprise. I wondered if my mother had been raped and tortured by the Nazis. I pondered the meaning of my own accidental existence: since she should have died, how could I account for my own birth? I wanted to know more, to understand what had happened, to comprehend how it felt. I was not afraid to ask, but I was afraid to know.

I decided not to tell my children what their grandmother went through until they reached an appropriate age. I was thus caught by surprise when my mother’s past reappeared to haunt them. When my oldest son was about nine years old, he became paralyzed by inexplicable fears. He refused to be alone anywhere at anytime, and if by chance he found himself alone in a room, he screamed in horror. After much prodding he revealed the source of his terror: he feared the Nazis were about to get him. He was terrified of even uttering the word Nazi, opting instead to refer to it as the N word. The Mezuzah nailed to the panel of the front door of our New Haven home, he explained, marked us for the next roundup. And a few years later I learned from my daughter that for years she had had a persistent nightmare: She is running in the forests of Nazi Germany. She needs to protect her little brother from the SS. She hides in the shadows of trees. Then she wakes up in horror as she is about to be caught.

As I matured, my desire to learn intensified. In 1994 my wife, Jo, and I traveled to visit the camps. The trip to Poland was a pilgrimage to the places that had shaped my mother’s past and, dare I say, in no small measure mine. I wanted to trace her transformation from a prosperous twelve-year-old in Warsaw into a homeless lonely refugee in postwar Poland. I fantasized about meeting in the streets of Warsaw members of her family who by miracle had escaped the gas chamber. I wanted my feet to feel the streets she walked. I hoped to enter her old apartment, find the crack a German bomb had created in the ceiling in September 1939, and pull out the jewelry the family had put there for safekeeping. I wanted to find the gold watch her aunt had handed her in Majdanek just as her aunt was grabbed by the hair from a line of naked women by a German soldier and sent to the gas chamber. I took the trip in hopes of understanding what she really went through and why her story has had such a hold on me for my entire life.

Nothing of the sort happened. My mother’s street looked like a typical Communist block—ugly, rundown, and polluted. A dirty, small strip mall stood in place of her former home. The famous ghetto is gone. The Umschlagplatz is evoked by a monument next to a Polish school. I found the old world at the huge run-down Warsaw Jewish cemetery, where the weeds grew two and a half feet high, and where among the commemorative stones simple signs marked large empty lots as mass graves. Of Warsaw’s once glorious Jewish community, only a few hundred Jews remain. We met some at the still-standing Nozyk Synagogue, the one my mother attended as a child. We talked to them for a few minutes and gave them a small handout. The exchange rate made our contribution of less than ten dollars appear generous. Four elderly men stood by the ark and argued for more than ten minutes about how to divide the money. We had a similar experience in the Krakow synagogue. The remnants of the most important center of Jewish life for hundreds of years are pathetically reduced to living off meager handouts from guilt-ridden Jewish tourists. In Poland, at least, Hitler won.

Visiting the death camps yielded similar disappointments. Remembering my mother saying that Majdanek was for her far worse than Auschwitz, I expected the visit to the extermination site in Lublin to provide my long-sought emotional catharsis. Seeing the camp’s gas chamber and crematorium was a vivid experience, but it failed to convey the dimension of the atrocities committed in them. The ditches—where in one day in the summer of 1943 the Germans shot the remaining 18,000 Jews of the Lublin ghetto—looked ordinary. Even the big hill of human ashes under the domed monument at the center of the camp looked like any other pile of dirt. I found Auschwitz equally frustrating. The magnitude of the atrocities is so numbing that after a few minutes the stories become all too familiar.

Auschwitz and Majdanek are excellent museums with all the false authenticity, pretentiousness, and commercialism that define museums regardless of their location or specialty. The Holocaust museums in Poland, like similar institutions in Israel and the United States, are clean, quiet, and orderly, in sharp contrast to the reality they seek to convey. When I walked into a barrack where piles of victims’ shoes were stored, I had to remind myself that this was not just a collection of old shoes, that each pair of shoes represented a victim, and that some of them could have belonged to my dead relatives. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I was ashamed at not feeling anything profound and for cheaply trying to force tears into my eyes. When our tour was about to end and we were called to board the bus that was going to take us back from Birkenau to Auschwitz, I felt a sudden urge to defiantly mark my link to the Jews who were murdered in World War II. I asked my wife and friends to recite Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, with me by the camp’s gate. In plain view of the other tourists, who had already boarded the bus, we stood by the camp’s gate and started to mumble the prayer. None of us, however, remembered more than the first few lines.

I do not wish to minimize the impact of the trip. There were moments of painful empathy. The site of the stones of the ghetto wall in Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery sent shivers down my spine. Given my desire to connect to my mother’s experience, it was important for me to spend a few moments inside a barrack at Birkenau similar to the one she called home for more than eighteen months. And even a few seconds inside the gas chamber in Majdanek conveyed the physical dimension of the Final Solution in a most vivid manner. Alas, the archaeology of the Holocaust is terribly incomplete when the historical narrative of its victims does not accompany it.

I often thought of producing a footnoted scholarly history of my mother’s journey, yet I felt deeply ambivalent about assuming the role of narrator of her story. A few years ago, students in a class on American history I was teaching at Fordham turned the conversation to the Holocaust and asked specific questions. They seemed spellbound by the discussion. I realized that even though I told them nothing personal, there was a commanding, almost demonic, power to my words that came from my intimate personal connection to the subject. I began to perspire profusely. I was intoxicated and guilt ridden at the same time. When the class ended I felt as if I were swimming in a swamp of sweat and humiliation. I worried whether I had violated the authenticity of the survivors’ torturous memories. Did I reap the psychological benefits that befall narrators of Holocaust horrors? Who authorized me to be the voice of the victims? I think that we, the children of survivors, feel we must never yell or call out. Our voices are a whimper; our sadness never poignant enough; our misery in no way worthy of consideration; our nightmares always a cheap imitation. We cannot become the authentic voice of our parents.

Meanwhile, my mother had built a family and home in a country that has never known peace. She moved on, and yet every so often her past, like a beast pouncing on its oblivious prey, unexpectedly resurfaced. One such incident was particularly eerie. In July 1998 my father was dying of cancer. My mother kept busy cleaning the house again and again. It was a typically brutal Israeli summer. The air conditioner was not on. (In our house the air conditioner is an aesthetic piece. We turn it on only for a short time during the most intense heat waves because we don’t waste money.) My mother was flushed from the heat and drenched from the humidity. I asked her to slow down. She replied, I can’t, work liberates me. In this moment of stress she had quoted the infamous slogan on Auschwitz’s gate.

As more survivors began to speak out, my mother repeatedly declined to narrate her past. She refused to go back to Poland. She did not want to face what she would find, and more so what she would not find. She worried that she was no longer strong enough to face her history. She feared that such a visit would destroy the fragile peace she had made with her losses. She did not go back, but in time her resistance to dwelling on her past weakened. Her fourteen-year-old granddaughter cracked the dam of silence. When my niece, Michal, undertook to write a family history for a school project, she refused to be satisfied with the familiar family narrative and forced my mother to delve deeper into her past. Three years later, Michal took a class trip to Poland and called my mother daily to share her experiences. The conversations had a transformative effect. My mother opened up and gave a few talks to youth groups embarking on the March of the Living—Jewish teens’ pilgrimage to the Nazi death camps in defiance of the Final Solution. She found the strength to give video testimonies to Yad Vashem and to Yale University’s Holocaust Memorial Project. And finally, in 2001—2, she relented to her children’s urgings and wrote a journal of her memories in Hebrew.

Several other factors contributed to her change of heart. Having tied her destiny to the Zionist project from her childhood, the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the steady diet of suicide bombings broke her heart. The violence shattered her hope of seeing in her lifetime the fulfillment of the Zionist dream of establishing a normal Jewish existence. Unlike many Israeli leftists, she never lost sight of Palestinian suffering; nevertheless she could not ignore the profound hate that underlay the Intifada’s murderous campaign. The concurrent resurgence of European anti-Semitism suggested that, after a fifty-year hiatus, Western culture has passionately re-embraced its millennium-old murderous hatred of Jews. Perhaps there will never be too many reminders of the consequences of anti-Semitism? The death of my father, and subsequent deterioration of her own health, drove home the message that her time to tell the story was running short, and that if she failed to do so, the memory of those she loved and lost would follow her to the grave. So one day she sat at her computer and began to reminisce. The first pages were devoted not to her beloved parents or brother but to recalling the courtship of Tadek Petshaft—an episode she had never shared before—because she felt that she was the only one who could remember that a boy by that name had existed. And from Tadek the rest of the diary flowed.

Her journal is the genesis and core of this book. I translated the manuscript into English. I probed deeper into events and situations, asked questions, and evoked episodes I remembered hearing about as a child. I set her story in chronological sequence. I checked to make sure that details corresponded with documented historical evidence, knowing that minor errors could undermine the historical standing of the entire narrative. For example, my mother wrote that she was sent to work in the Canada commando by SS officer Heinz Schulz, commander of the crematorium in Auschwitz. I had a hard time finding a record of Schulz’s presence in Auschwitz in the fall of 1943, and in an earlier draft I identified the selector merely as a German officer. I reinserted Schulz’s name only after I found, during my 2004 visit to the Auschwitz archives, a record of SS officers confirming that Heinz Schulz was indeed the crematorium Kommandoführer, On the other hand, dates in Auschwitz, for example, were meaningless. My mother did not know the exact date that she saw Mala Zimetbaum cut her wrists, or when exactly she witnessed the rebellion of the Sonderkommando.

We made a conscious choice to use Nazis and Germans interchangeably. In has become fashionable to make distinctions between the bad Nazis and their evil projects and an amorphous German people who at worst were merely passive spectators of the Final Solution. Our linguistic choice does not imply a position in the ongoing debate about German collective guilt. The narrative recalls the experience of an adolescent Jewish girl, for whom the political affiliation of the thousands of oppressors she came into contact with was irrelevant. In her mind, her tormentors were Germans.

My mother inspected and approved every subtraction, addition, or change to ensure that we remained as faithful to the truth as we could. We tried to be sensitive to the limits of human memory. To be sure, there is the danger that admitting the uncertainties, ambiguities, and treasons of memories in such an account could