“I really want to create a family tree, but doing it on the typewriter is too awkward—can you please help me?” My father, sitting at his battered Smith Corona, sounded very frustrated.
“I don’t have any idea of what a family tree should look like,” I replied doubtfully. But since my hand was steadier and my handwriting smaller than his, I agreed to try.
It was 1964. I was 18; and my older brother, who had just graduated from college, was preparing for a two-month trip to Europe that summer. My father was determined to have a tangible paper document, a real family tree, for my brother to take with him on his trip. As the first person from our small family to visit Europe since my parents fled in November 1938, on the eve of World War II, my brother was kind of an emissary. He was planning to visit the few shards of our family, the relatives who had survived the war and remained in Europe after the Holocaust.
My father hoped that carrying the family tree with him would help my brother understand the relationships between these last members of our family. As he painstakingly dictated the foreign names to me and as the chart took shape, I realized with growing alarm that it was riddled with many branches that ended abruptly in 1941 and 1942. Question marks dangled from the branches, indicating that exact dates of death were unknown.
As part of the so-called second generation, my brother and I had always been aware that my parents lost most of their family members during the war, and we had grown up with a basic knowledge of my parents’ story, their experiences as Holocaust refugees. But transcribing the names suddenly made all these missing relatives seem real to me for the first time. What would our lives have been like, I began to wonder, if even a few of these people had survived and had managed to come to America? How would it have felt to grow up in the warmth of my parents’ once-large families, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins? How would my life have been different if I had had the chance to know them, to grow up with them, if the Holocaust had not stolen them from us?
During my childhood in Chicago, my parents, my brother, and I formed a close-knit unit. I suspect that, given their experience during the war, my parents had not been sure that they would ever have children, so they were thrilled to create a family. They were a reassuring and positive presence, loving, attentive. They had an active social life and a large group of friends, most of whom were also Holocaust refugees. Having escaped the horrific experiences that so many others endured, they seemed not to suffer from the type of “survivors’ guilt” that has often been recognized.
Unlike many children of Holocaust refugees, my brother and I grew up knowing about our parents’ history. My father, Maurice, came from Vienna, Austria; he had two brothers as well as an older half-brother and half-sister. His younger brother, Anselm, was the only one of his siblings to survive the war; Anselm emigrated to the U.S., lived in New York, and died when I was five years old. One of my father’s nephews had survived several years alone in Auschwitz as a teenager; he made his way to Palestine after the war. My father’s niece, Anita, was sent alone from Vienna to London with a Children’s Transport at the age of 14.
My mother, Ina, was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, the youngest of four children. We knew that her father, my maternal grandfather, had been active in the Jewish community in Warsaw before the war; he was abducted and executed along with a group of Jewish leaders in 1939, and buried in a mass grave. My maternal grandmother was murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto along with my mother’s brother Sevek and his wife. Another brother, Stasiek, whose wife and two sons also perished in the Warsaw Ghetto, was conscripted into the Polish army but managed to escape to Palestine during the war. My mother’s sister Felicia’s first husband was killed in an infamous massacre at the beginning of the war, and Felicia and her toddler son spent five years in a displaced person’s camp in Siberia. They emigrated to the U.S. when I was five years old, and settled in New York. Many extended family members also died in the ghetto and in concentration camps.
My brother and I also knew that before the war, our father, Maurice, had been a successful 32-year-old bachelor living in a fashionable section of Vienna. He and my mother met in Warsaw on a blind date in January 1938; they fell in love immediately, and after a brief courtship, decided to marry in April of that year. They planned to begin their married life in Vienna, so my father returned to Vienna in early March to put his affairs in order and prepare his apartment for his soon-to-be new bride.
However, just a few weeks later, my father’s apartment, his real estate management business, and his financial assets were seized at gunpoint by a group of Nazi soldiers who burst into his home. With no place to live and no means of earning a living, Maurice immediately escaped to Warsaw; he and my mother were married there on April 2, 1938. That summer, after an intense and frustrating search for countries that would grant them asylum, my parents left Europe in November 1938, bound for Cuba, the only country that would grant them temporary residency while they waited for visas to the U.S.
Many years later, my mother participated in a memoir writing course for seniors at our local Jewish Community Center. This is her description of the difficult decision to leave Europe in 1938, when she and my father were living temporarily with her parents in Warsaw:
We had continuous discussions with my parents and family. They wanted, of course, for us to stay in Poland. My father offered all the help he could give us in earning a living, if only Maurice listened to “reason” and to his suggestions. But all the discussions did not change the reality of the situation. While Poland was still at peace, there were ominous signs that peace was not going to last. My father, like so many other people, was deluding himself, reassuring everybody by saying that “Things will quiet down and life will return to normal.
I could not understand then and still cannot get over the wonder that my father, smart, intelligent, and experienced man that he was, could have been so utterly naïve. Maurice had a very different picture of the world in that year of 1938. With uncanny, almost prophetic accuracy, he predicted the war and the fate of the Jews in Europe. And I believed him.
Here is her description of parting from her family in Warsaw in November 1938: Finally, the day of our departure arrived. We were to take a train to Gdynia, a Polish port on the Baltic Sea, to board a ship which was to take us to Le Havre, France, on the first lap of our journey to Cuba. All this extra travel was to avoid passing though Nazi Germany, which was, of course, out of the question.
I will never forget the sight of all our family and friends gathered at the railroad station shouting goodbyes and good wishes. I was saying goodbye to everybody with a smile and my eyes were dry. Then I noticed my mother standing at the back of the crowd as if she were waiting for something. Suddenly, I remembered what she had once told me: “According to Jewish tradition, before going away, you reserve your last kiss and embrace for your mother.” I ran to her and threw my arms around her and both of us burst out crying.
And that was the last time I saw my family.
My parents lived in Cuba for several years, awaiting visas. Because my father was Austrian and my mother was Polish, my parents–despite being married–were subject to two different U.S. immigration quotas. My mother received permission to emigrate to the U.S. in 1940, but my father remained in Havana and was not permitted to join her until a year later. During this separation, they wrote to each other every single day.
As the magnitude of our family’s loss in the Holocaust became real to me, it also made me wonder how growing up surrounded by these people might have changed and enriched our lives. Although my mother was a good cook, and we loved her brisket, noodle kugel, and matzo ball soup, Jewish holidays were small affairs in our house during my childhood: usually just us, sometimes with two or three close family friends. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to enjoy a Passover or Rosh Hashana celebration with grandmothers and aunts crowded in the kitchen: the tempting smells of cooking, the happy shouts of cousins chasing each other around, grandfathers and uncles celebrating together, sharing stories and telling jokes in Yiddish. Would we have had sleepovers at our grandparents’ houses? Would our aunts and uncles have been our babysitters?
In recent years, my brother and I began to focus on the importance of exploring and preserving our parents’ heritage and history in a more organized way. The much-scrutinized and photocopied family tree, and the essays that my mother wrote, made us curious to learn more about our parents’ lives.
“Do you think it’s finally time to tackle those boxes that have been moldering in the backs of our closets for years?” I asked my brother tentatively. “I think that those letters and documents in Polish and German are just begging to be examined, and we really need to donate them to the Holocaust Museum. That’s the only place that can translate them and can honor and preserve them.”
“Sure, I think we should definitely donate them,” he replied hesitantly; “But I think that preparing all that stuff for donation is going to require a hell of a lot of work.”
It did, in fact, turn out to be a difficult and emotional task. It took many months, and many hours of effort, sorting through the piles of yellowed and fragile pages, documents, letters, and postcards in Polish and German, trying to decipher their significance. We also found hundreds of photos from our parents’ lives before the war: smiling people of all ages at a picnic, at the beach, enjoying a stroll, playing tennis, skiing. There was no one in our family to ask, no one left to tell us anything about who the people in the photos had been.
To me, the most important find in the boxes was a package of small, plain postcards that my mother in New York exchanged with her mother and brother in Poland, in 1940 and 1941. At that time, my mother was living by herself in a boardinghouse in Brooklyn, and my father was still in Cuba, awaiting permission to enter the U.S. My mother’s entire family—her parents, two brothers, her sister, and their young children, as well as most of their other relatives—were trapped in what had become the Warsaw Ghetto.
The postcard messages from Warsaw were written in tiny, cramped script, and avoided any mention of living conditions or their tragic situation, instead expressing concern for family members whose whereabouts were unknown. The last postcard is addressed by my mother, Ina, to her mother, Justine, and is dated September 9, 1941. Stamped across the front, in bright red ink, are the stark and terrible words, “Returned–Mail Service Suspended.”
It was raining hard that morning in March 2019 when my brother and I made the donation of our parents’ artifacts to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. We had carefully wrapped the carton in plastic to protect its precious contents from the unexpected deluge, and I carried the heavy box to the taxi waiting at the curb. After several difficult and upsetting months of combing through all these intensely personal materials, I felt a sense of closure.
In my dresser drawer, I kept a small black-and-white photo of my mother’s brother Stasiek and wife and two small sons, shown sitting on the sofa of their living room. Something about the smile of the older child, Olesh, who looks to be around three years old in the picture, had always captivated me. In 2003, when my own son was preparing for his bar mitzvah, I remembered that photo and showed it to him. Together we decided to dedicate—or ‘twin’—his bar mitzvah with the memory of this cousin, who did not survive long enough to have a bar mitzvah of his own.
Echoes of the Holocaust have shaped my life in ways that I cannot grasp and will probably never understand, and the memory of all the members of my family who did not survive, whom I never had a chance to know, hovers just beyond the edges of my daily life.
It has taken me almost a lifetime to understand the enormity of all that was lost.
Judith Teich earned a BA in English from Boston University and an MSW from New York University. A mental health services researcher, she is the author/co-author of 40+ research publications. Her personal essays have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Moment Magazine, The Washington Post, and JAMA, among others.
