I'm No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor

I'M NO HERO ~

J'mNoHero Journeys ofa Holocaust Survivor

HENRY FRIEDMAN Foreword by Michael Berenbaum

A Samuel 6 Althea Stroum Book UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

SEATTLE

&

LONDON

PRESS

To Sandra, Robert, Deborah, and Jeffrey because you playa very important part in my life

This book is published with the assistance of a grant from the Stroum Book Fund, established through the generosity of Samuel and Althea Stroum

Copyright © 1999 by the University of Washington Press First paperback edition, 2001 Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

1.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Friedman, Henry, 1928I'm no hero: journeys of a Holocaust survivor I Henry Friedman. p. cm. "A Samuel & Althea Stroum book." ISBN 0-295-98116-4 (alk. paper) Friedman, Henry, 1928- .2. Jews-Persecutions-Ukraine-Brody. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Ukraine-Brody Personal narratives. 4. Brody (Ukraine) Biography. 5. Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust-Ukraine-Brody. 6. Jewish children in the Holocaust - Ukraine - Brody Biography. 7. Holocaust survivorsWashington (State)-Seattle Biography. 8. Seattle (Wash.) Biography. I. Title. DS135·U43F754 1999 940·53'18'092-dc21 99-29844 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.§

Contents

Foreword by Michael Berenbaum vii Acknowledgments xiii

SURVIVAL My Boyhood in Brody, Poland 3 Captivity and Liberation 28 My New Hobby 47 The Survivors 57 Confusion for My People 71 Fleeing Poland 75 The Black Market 80 v

VI/CONTENTS

The Call to Palestine 88 Adultery 94

AMERICA Journey to America 105 The Army and Korea 111 The Jewelry Business 118 Sandy 124 The Arnie Apple Company, the World's Fair, and Family Life 131 Israel and Other Travels 137 Family News 143 A Gathering of Survivors 149

India 154 Return to Russia 159 Reunion 164 A Heroine in Seattle 171 Hope 176 Photographs following page 146 Map of Poland 4

Foreword

I

READ SURVIVORS' LITERATURE OFTEN.

I READ

their stories because I feel close to survivors. I read their accounts because survivors make history come alive; they are history incarnate. I read survivors' memoirs because from each of the memoirs I learn something different, something more than I knew before. It was from survivors that I first learned of the Holocaust. Yet it was not from what they said. When I was growing up in the United States in the 195os, survivors seldom spoke of their experiences, at least not to Americans and certainly not to children. Survivors were spoken of; they were spoken about in whispers, in sighs, but they were seldom questioned directly, and most certainly not about their experiences during those dark years. My first images of the Holocaust are vivid to me. I was born after the war, so they came to me not in movie newsreels but in school. As a child in the Yeshiva of Central Queens in New York, a Hebrew-speaking day school, I had teachers with fists but no fingers, teachers with tattoos on their arms. Words were spoken quietly in hushed voices, words that were never to be repeated, words that we did not understand, that we could V II

VIII/FOREWORD

not understand - concentration camps, murder and ghettos, death and children. But the Holocaust remained unspeakable; survivors did not speak. They did not speak, perhaps because they could not speak. They were too close to the Event; the loss was too near to them. Years later, this childhood experience would make clear to me the biblical story of Lot, who, together with his wife, fled his home in Sodom as it was being destroyed. His wife looked back as she was running away, and she was turned into a pillar of salt - the salt of tears. Paralyzed by grief, she could not move on. Lot was left with his daughters, who thought they were the last survivors on earth; they were the last women and he the last man. His daughters plotted as to how to create a future. They gave their father wine to drink, they seduced him, and they gave birth to two great nations. Mter life's destruction, they re-created life. Looking back could come only later; they devoted all their energies to moving on. More important, if we listen carefully to survivors' accounts, they did not speak because they understood that no one was ready to listen. In the countries where they found refuge, people were interested in the future, not the past. In Israel, the place of refuge for most survivors, statebuilding was the primary task. The Holocaust symbolized life in exile, and exile was the logical outcome of statelessness and powerlessness. The future alone beckoned. In the United States, when survivors first spoke of the past they were quickly and often politely informed that "that was then and this is now." Everyone who came from Europe was escaping a past, leaving it behind, whether it was the famine of the Irish, the poverty of the Italians, or the persecution of the Jews. America was forward-looking. We did not look back. Or when they spoke, they were asked an unanswerable question: "Why did you survive when no one else did?" There could be only one truthful response to the question: luck. Every survivor knew someone wiser and stronger, someone more able, someone more worthy who, by accidental circumstance and the ruthless tenacity of the killers, was murdered. The question "Why did you survive?" was often heard as a reproach, as an accusation suggesting betrayal or compromise - sexual or moral. The true answer could come only later, as the character of a survivor's life and accomplishments gave meaning to the lucky accident of survival. Henry Friedman can now answer that question by the quality

FOREWORD

/

IX

of the life he has led, which has transformed survival into witness, an act of witness to the past, an offering to our collective future. He can answer that question by what he has worked to build in Seattle - an institute of Holocaust education and remembrance - and by what he has contributed to the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He can answer it by speaking of his children and their children, of the continuity of Jewish life, and of the re-creation of human community in the aftermath of destruction. Professionally, I have been engaged in two great tasks to give voice to the unspoken words of my youth and to bring the silence of those survivors to the American people and the world. The first project was the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The second is the ongoing work of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which in five years has recorded more than 50,200 testimonies in fifty-seven countries and in thirty-two languages. The Shoah Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg after the filming of Schindler's List, has compiled more than 116,000 hours of testimony. It has been my fate in life to help bring to the American people, in an American idiom, what could not be told to me and to those of my generation by the Holocaust survivors, at least not then. Their experience has now gone beyond the confines of the Jewish community. It is an offering that has transformed American values and shaped American policy in such a way that the president of the United States in 1999-with his country's support- could intervene in Kosovo against "ethnic cleansing." Henry Friedman's I'm No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor is a slim but powerful volume. It traces one man's experiences from his comfortable childhood before the war into a life in hiding, together with his family and alone, through his postwar adventures as he rebuilds his life and re-creates a world. During the Nazi occupation Henry's father, Jacob Friedman, despite dwindling affluence and an ever-narrowing circle of contacts, is able to arrange secret shelter for his family. Because young Henry's Holocaust years are spent primarily in hiding and provide only rare glimpses of the larger shape of "The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem," his universe is small. But through the particular, the larger story emerges. Thus, only in passing do we learn of the ghettoization of the Jews and their struggles within the ghetto. We learn of deportation

x /

FOREWORD

only through the absence of Jews. And Henry does not know of life inside the concentration camps. Henry's family was saved because two women were willing to risk it all. Marie Symchuck confronted her husband, whose courage waned as the killings intensified and the consequence of hiding Jews - a death sentence-became ever more vivid. Mrs. Symchuck was not righteous in a conventional sense; throughout the occupation she carried on an affair in her own bed with the local police chief, a Nazi who wondered aloud as to the Friedmans' whereabouts. Her gossip with the chief, heard through the wall by the eavesdropping Henry, was a source of vital information for the Friedman family - and of fantasies and fascination for the adolescent boy. Marie Bazalchik, who hid Jacob Friedman alone, could not even tell her own family. She was decent; they were rabid antiSemites. These two women endured mortal danger for themselves and their families because, unlike so many of their countrymen, they were appalled at what was being done to the Jews. Lawrence Langer, the distinguished critic of Holocaust literature, or perhaps more accurately, the distinguished scholar of the Holocaust who uses literature as his lens of interpretation, has introduced the concept of choice less choices into our understanding of the victim's plight. A choiceless choice is not between good and bad, or life and death, or even between the lesser of two evils. It is between "one form of abnormal response and another, both imposed by a situation that [is 1not of the victim's own choosing." Friedman's narration of the fate of his infant sister, born in hiding, vividly illustrates this. As you read his words, think of the ordinary categories of right and wrong, the ordinary notions of choice. The circumstances of the Friedmans - and of so many victims of the Holocaust-will become clearer to you. Friedman devotes many pages, even more pages than he devotes to the Holocaust story, to his postwar exploits - financial and sexual. These depictions may offend, but in truth they reveal much about his response to freedom after confinement. Once set free, the youthful Henry places no restraints on his life, neither the laws of the land nor the conventions of common morality. He demonstrates a zest for life, a celebration of life, a passion for life and its pleasures that seeks to compensate for what he has lost and can never recover. We must be grateful for his candor, which is revealed in detail after detail. He is in no mood for reflection

FOREWORD /

XI

during these chapters, yet the speed with which he sets aside the bon vivant's life after he meets and marries Sandy indicates that at some very deep level it had been unsatisfying. We are told of the birth of his children and of his growing financial success. From so diffuse and diverse a range of experiences, we witness the growth of seriousness and depth, the creation of family, the assumption of communal responsibility, a fidelity to remembering the past, and a commitment to the future. These qualities form the substance of a life that is satisfying and giving. They are the substance of a survivor's life. MICHAEL

BERENBAUM

President, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation Former Director of the Research Institute, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Professor of Theology, The University ofJudaism

Acknowledgments

M

y

WIFE SANDRA IS VERY SPECIAL IN MANY

ways. She spent months typing up my thoughts for this book after listening to hours and hours of tapes and unscrambling my handwritten notes. Without her help, this book would never have been written. I would like to thank my youngest son, Jeffrey, who was ten years old when he first urged his brother and sister to buy me a tape recorder and suggested that I record my experiences from World War II. He knew how difficult it was for me to share the darkest years of my life because I was afraid that I would pass my pain on to my children. It was his vision and encouragement that got me started. I would also like to thank my firstborn son, Robert, who kept asking me when I would finish my book. My daughter Deborah deserves my loving gratitude because she transcribed and printed all my tapes so I could read them. Reading through the many pages she printed for me was a valuable experience and brought additional information to my memory. I am grateful to Steve Cutler, Lane Morgan, and Dr. Steve Schneider for their help in editing and improving my manuscript. X III

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At the University of Washington Press, I especially thank Naomi Pascal, associate director and editor in chief, for not giving up on me and for encouraging me to do more work on my story. I am also very grateful to Julidta Tarver, managing editor. Finally, I wish to express my deep appreciation to Sam Stroum, an outstanding community leader and a wonderful human being, for suggesting to me at the outset that I publish my story.

SURVIVAL ~

My Boyhood in Brody, Poland

I

AM

IN

MY DEN WATCHING A VIDEO

PRODUCED

by my daughter. On the television screen are talking heads. A man explains how he ran into the forest and lived there like an animal for two years. A deaf woman contorts her face violently and gestures to describe her captors and her escape. An old couple with white hair talk about their time in hiding, how hungry they had been. All their faces look tired, yet their eyes say they are happy to be alive. Outside, tall evergreens surround my house on Mercer Island, near Seattle. Lake Washington, with its sailboats and beaches, is only a stone's throwaway. How far this is from my birthplace in Brody, Poland. What impossibly different worlds! Soon, I too come up on the screen. Yes, that's me. My face is tanned, and I am wearing a gold neck chain with the golden letter chai ("life"). I begin to talk of that other world. Of my mother. Of my father. Of my aunts and uncles. carrying my father's prayer shawl in his blue bag with its embroidered Star of David to the Great Synagogue in Brody on Saturdays. IRE M E M B E R

PRO U D L Y

3

4 /

-

SU R V I V AL

Polish frontier from 1918 to 1939 Greater German frontier from October 1939

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