Edward Gastfriend - My fathers testament: memoir of a Jewish teenager, 1938-1945

Cover

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My Father's Testament

Memoir of a Jewish Teenager, 19381945

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Memoir of a Jewish Teenager, 19381945

Edward Gastfriend

Edited with an Afterword by Bjrn Krondorfer

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Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122

Copyright 2000 by Temple University

All rights reserved

Published 2000

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gastfriend, Edward, 1926

My father's testament: memoir of a Jewish teenager, 19381945 /Edward Gastfriend; edited with an afterword by Bjrn Krondorfer.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-56639-734-0 (cloth: alk. paper). ISBN 1-56639-735-9 (paper: alk. paper)

1. Gastfriend, Edward, 1926-. 2. Jews Persecutions Poland Sosnowiec (Katowice). 3. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945) Poland Sosnowiec (Katowice) Personal narratives. 4. Jewish children in the Holocaust Poland Sosnowiec (Katowice) Biography. 5. Sosnowiec (Katowice, Poland) Ethnic relations. I. Krondorfer, Bjrn. II. Title.

The maps were produced by Bjrn Krondorfer and Edward Kobrinski.

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DAVID R. GASTFRIEND, M.D.

ON THESE PAGES is my father's memoir. My father first began to tell of these times when my two sisters and I were small, at first only in gentle, general themes of a German people turned by their leaders into a mean society and into a bad army. By the time we reached grade school, curious about the numbers tattooed on his arm, the story became more personal and complex. We were taught not so much that our people, the Jews, had suffered physical pain, but that the tattoos, the transports, and the camps to which they were subjected were methods of reducing people to cattle weapons against their very souls. The challenge was therefore not just to stay alive but to figure out how not to hate and yearn for revenge. This we were taught even as children. What a strange lesson it was. No wonder the Greek myths seemed easy by comparison.

It was a lifelong lesson, and with the publication of this book, we hope that it may reverberate across the gap of generations. My Father's Testament is my father's testament to his father. That man, for whom I am named, perceived the gravity of the Nazi invasion of Poland and charged his youngest son with an impossible task: to retain the meaning of their life. Thanks to the miracle of my father's survival, this book now echoes that plea into the hearts of his descendants and others.

For our family, this book means his experience is no longer limited to a word-of-mouth collection of numerous episodes. For

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years, these conversations felt disjointed from one another a history that we could sense but never quite grasp. The story took on a tangible form only when my mother, my middle sister, and I accompanied my father back to his native Poland after almost forty years. That journey took us to the home of his birth, to the square from which my grandfather and grandmother were herded into the trains, to the very barracks of Auschwitz-Birkenau in which he counted, one by one, his fellow Jews who would not return at the end of each day. Seeing for ourselves the vast expanse of Birkenau from the top of its guard tower, we could manage only to stammer through a sobbing recitation of the Kaddish , the mourner's prayer.

But as real as the view was, there was an even more revealing experience: to witness firsthand my father's willingness to greet contemporary Poles and to determine, without prejudice, which individuals were open to meeting these visiting Jews and which ones bore their medieval hatreds to this day. In his many such unembittered acts of fairness, he modeled for his family a humane strength that seems to stem from the upbringing described in this book.

Other testimonies, memoirs, and stories of the Holocaust portray Nazism's rise to power, the fundamental evil of genocide, the shock of worldwide neglect, the unspeakable suffering of the martyrs, and the courage of righteous bystanders. In these searing dramas, a fragment is missing. That fragment is this kernel of what humankind actually lost in the Holocaust. We still understand little of the Jewish world that was destroyed. For at its most painful core, the Holocaust might be characterized as civilization's near obliteration of the pious. My Father's Testament is a story of what once existed a microculture of quiet piety, ofttimes gentle, sometimes stern. In modern life we have little capacity left to comprehend such a world. This book brings us close enough to that lost world to feel its loss.