Lederman family. - A world erased: a grandsons search for his familys Holocaust secrets

A World Erased

A World Erased

A Grandsons Search for His Familys Holocaust Secrets

Noah Lederman

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lederman, Noah, 1981 author.

Title: A world erased : a grandsons search for his familys Holocaust secrets / Noah Lederman.

Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, [2017] | 2017

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008764 (print) | LCCN 2016009490 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442267435 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442267442 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Lederman, Leon, 1999. | Lederman, Hadasa, 2010. | JewsPolandBiography. | Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)PolandBiography. | Grandparent and childBiography. | Lederman, Noah, 1981 | Lederman family.

Classification: LCC DS134.72.L435 L43 2017 (print) | LCC DS134.72.L435 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/180922438dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008764

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For my grandparents,

Leon and Hadasa Lederman

Contents

A World Erased

The Holocaust through Nightmares

T hey murdered my mother, Grandma said, slamming her knuckles down on the dining room table. I stopped scribbling in my notepad and looked up. Her eyes were wet.

How did they... I began but couldnt complete the question. We sat quietly in her Brooklyn apartment. My mouth tasted like cotton. I put down the pen and picked up a spoon. Instead of eating, I just stirred at the soup, which Grandma had ordered from the diner. She hadnt cooked since Poppy died. She always made certain to remind me of bothher inability to cook anymore and Poppys death, six years earlier, near the turn of the millennium.

My mothers hand wouldnt let go of mine. Grandma clenched her hands together and lifted them from the table to show me how their fingers had locked. Her hands shook.

It hurt to swallow.

I needed to run, she continued. But my mothers grip... it was too tight. I dont know how it happened, but I got free. So I ran to the barn. Can you believe it? Again, she struck the glass tabletop. Grandma pressed her lips together in an attempt to restrain the quiver. Then she uttered a few mournful Yiddish words. Can you believe? I left my mother there.

I wanted to tell her that it wasnt her fault or that there was nothing she could have done, but it was hard to speak.

In the barn there was a chicken, she said and then cut herself off.

A chicken? I asked, not following. The only chicken I saw were the bits sunk in the yellow broth, tangled in a web of noodles.

But the mention of the chicken had somehow lifted Grandmas spirits. The permanent frown she wore crinkled with a slight smile. In the barn, she repeated. This is where I find the chicken. The bird seemed like it was attached to fond memories of jumping rope on the streets of Poland, where she had spent her childhood.

I didnt know what to do, so I pick up the chicken. She clutched the imaginary bird the way a child unskilled in running with a football might hold it: out in front, like an offering. Then I hear a Ukraine soldier outside. He say, Look in the garbage. Thats where the Jews hide. Can you believe this? They were worse than the Germans. The Ukraines, they volunteered for this. Oy . No more with the stories. I cant. No more. Grandma grabbed her head with both hands and dragged them across her face so that she could whimper into her palms. The smile was gone.

The refrigerator buzzed.

Lets stop then, Grandma. I stood up from the table, abandoning the notebook of fragmented sentences. I knew that when I left her to go home and create a timeline of her memoriesto rebuild that family that had completely vanished one summer day, to rescue something from the carnageit would be exciting, like watching a coveted image develop in a darkroom. But for Grandma, the pictures that we rekindled now would haunt her through the night.

I looked down on Brighton Beach. The sun glimmered off the ocean fifteen stories below. The beach and the boardwalk swarmed with people. Genocide was probably the last thing on any of their minds. But Grandma and I were continuing with her stories.

Sorry that were doing this, Grandma.

A lot of pain, tatehla .

I wanted to tell her that I understood. Though what could I really know if learning the stories tormented me only slightly, and the overwhelming feeling I experienced was the thrill of resurrecting something from the past? But I guess thats what happens to a grandchild when the stories have always been banned.

I was in pain when the Ukraine soldier, the one who shot my mother, threw us down from... Grandma held her hands above her short, gray hair like a pair of parentheses. Her hands shook, and the loose skin of her triceps was in full wiggle. How you say it... this place above a barn?

A loft? An attic?

Yes, like this. She lowered her arms. Oy, oy, oy . Just moving her hands from her head back to the table had caused more suffering. After I hide and take the bird and a shawl, like a head covering, I run. The Nazis and Ukraine shoot at me. One shouts, Panenka, steib laben! Panenka, steib laben! You know what this means, Noiach?

No. What does it mean?

Panenka, steib laben . Hes saying to me to stand still, girl. So I stop. And I feel blood from my head. I think I am shot. But no. This is from when I fall. The blood does dripping down my face. I turn around and I say to the Ukraine, Jesus help me! Grandmas small eyes opened to twice their size. Her frown was now overwhelmed by an expression of shock.

I smiled at the cruel irony.

Her mother had been killed, men had threatened to murder her, more than ten thousand of her Jewish neighbors had been sent to the gas chambers of Treblinka or lined up above ditches in the woods and machine-gunned to death, and still Hadasa had stood in that forestand sat at her kitchen table seven decades laterin disbelief, worried that she had offended the God who had allowed all of this to happen.

I swear to you, Noiach, I never say these words ever before or ever again. I do not even know where these words come from. Can you believe I say this? Oy . Grandma moaned as if this statement to save her lifethis bit of cleverness, of acting, of instinctwould put her souls future in jeopardy. But then he say to me, the Ukraine, Go, child. Be careful for your chicken. There are Jews. Can you believe it?

I could believe it. And yet I couldnt believe any of this had happened, that humanity could sink to such turpitude. I had watched a documentary the previous evening about a survivor who made it her business to forgive her perpetrators; that I couldnt believe either. Who could be that evil? Who could forgive that sort of wickedness? All I knew was that I wanted to know more about my familys past.