Alicia Appleman-Jurman - Alicia: My Story

ALICIA
A Bantam Book
Bantam hardcover edition / November 1988
Bantam paperback edition / January 1990

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1988 by Alice A. Appleman.

Endpaper map copyright 1988
Anita Karl and Jim Kemp.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-4144.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78864-1

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

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This book is dedicated to the children
of the ghettos who were cruelly murdered
by the Nazis and their collaborators.

May their memory live on forever, and
may children never again suffer such
anguish and despair.

This book is the story of an important and painful part of my life. I wish it were possible to express my thanks to every friend who believed in Alicia, many of whom read and provided constructive comments on the early drafts of my manuscript. I would, however, like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of the following friends: first, my gratitude to Janet Pack, who interviewed me for a newspaper article in 1978, encouraged me to write my story, and suffered with me as I relived the experiences of the war years.

The friendship of Margot Van Geffen, herself a survivor of a Japanese prison camp in Indonesia, and that of the wonderful family of Lou and Eve Sanders gave me the courage to continue during the years I worked on the manuscript in Haarlem, Holland, where my husband was temporarily assigned. I owe much as well to the support of my friends at Beth Shalom in Whittier, California, to the members of the Shoah survivors organization, and to the students of Adat Noar.

I want to acknowledge the contribution of Sara J. Mitchell, whose constructive analysis and comments were invaluable in preparing the manuscript for submission to the publishing industry. I am grateful to my teacher at Fullerton College, James Blaylock, from whom I learned much about writing and for the advice and encouragement given me by Larry Belin. I thank Amy Roland for finding George M. Greenfield and George for agreeing to become my agent and for his efforts, which culminated in the decision by Bantam Books to publish my story.

I was very impressed by the quality of the editing of my manuscript by Bantams Linda Loewenthal, whose comments, painted with a fine brush, have added greatly to the readability of the work, and I thank Nessa Rapoport, who, with Linda, recognized a story that needed to be told and offered her support and encouragement. I wish to express my appreciation to Linda Biagi of Bantam Books for her efforts to place the book in foreign markets, since it is very important to me that my story be heard everywhere.

I am grateful for the support and understanding of my children, Daniel, Ronit, and Zachary, and Ronits husband, Eric. Last but not least, I wish to acknowledge the contribution of my husband, Gabriel, whose native language is English and whose knowledge of grammar and usage was invaluable. Gabriel patiently edited my text without changing either my style or the meanings I wished to express.

I met Alicia in Israel in 1949. She was Ada then, and I was a volunteer, one of many who came to help defend that fledgling state. I was an assimilated, English-speaking American Jew with little knowledge of what had happened in Hitlers Europe other than what I had seen from a line of foxholes stretching from Omaha Beach in France to Paderborn, Germany, as an enlisted man in the United States Third and Ninth armies. Perhaps I was in Israel to appease my conscience, my feeling of guilt that I had not known enough, my illogical feeling that I could have done more to help my fellow Jews in Europe.

One day in early spring Alicia walked into my Hebrew class. There she was, tall, slender, dressed in the British style battle dress that was the uniform of the Israel defense forces, and wearing the big smile that is still her trademarkby anyones standard a beauty. There was some chemistry. We became friends, then fell in love and married. Yes, I married Ada. I didnt know that I had also married Alicia.

In those first years of our marriage I spoke only a few words of Hebrew, a smattering of German from school and combat, and no Yiddish. Ada spoke some English, German, and the Slavic languages: Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian. Whenever we met anyone from what seemed to me to be an endless roster of Adas friends, I would feel isolated in a sea of alien syllables. Yet Ada and I managed to communicate, and as I started to understand what she was saying, I began to realize, slowly, that there was a part of her life that I could never share. There was a bond of mutual experience between Alicia and her friends, Heniek, Beniek, and Tuniaand in those days, in my ignorance, I was jealous.

When Ada (Alicia) would cry and scream in her dreams at night, I would try to comfort her. I was not completely stupid; I simply didnt understand. Like most American Jews, I didnt know. We had been aware that Jews were being persecuted, beaten, put into camps. But a holocaust? furnaces? mass graves? It was only when the Allied forces entered the Nazi death camps that the full truth began to impact the world, and most forcibly the Jewish communities outside Europe. Even then, reading about the Holocaust did not have the same impact as living with someone who had been part of it.