Gina Roitman – ‘Sisterhood’

 

For the past few years, I have been leading a memoir workshop via Zoom for 12 daughters of Holocaust survivors in the DC area from my home north of Montreal. We call ourselves The Shvesters^[1] as the relationships forged in writing and reading each other’s stories about growing up second generation (2G) have bound us together into a tight family unit. Through their stories, I have come to see how each connection we make is a small miracle, and in my life, miracles beget more miracles.

One morning in August 2020, I awoke to find an email from one Tammy Lerner of Johannesburg, South Africa that would change my life — and add a new dimension to the story I now tell. 

Reading Tammy’s email, I sat bolt upright in bed, holding my breath. An apparition, a vital part of my history was emerging from a hazy past, a lost ship emerging from the fog.

Tammy had reached out after she received an email from Ettie Zilber of Phoenix, AZ who had read the comment Tammy posted following a webinar given by Irit Felsen, exploring the dual trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors and their children. 

Tammy had mentioned Passau in her comment. This piqued Ettie’s interest who had just published a book about her mother’s Holocaust experience and had been reading about my documentary film, My Mother, the Nazi Midwife and Me. It tells the story of how I was born in a hospital and not in the Pocking-Waldstadt Displaced Persons (DP) camp where we lived because my mother had heard rumors about too many babies dying. Ettie’s mother had done something similar in the Landsberg DP camp. As 2Gs, we have a tendency to compile lists of regrets about the questions we never asked.

Tammy’s email began:  

I believe that you are doing a family history research. My parents are not with us anymore, and as many people of our generation, we are doing research about our roots, and we are so sorry we didn’t ask more. 

My beloved parents, Mania and Yudka Duchowny got married in 1938, in CHRZANOW, Galicia, Poland. They had 4 children. My oldest sister was born in 1940, but she passed away from a child’s disease when she was only four years old. There was no medical assistance. My dear brother was born in Passau in August 1948.

Chrzanow? My mother was from Chrzanow! 

One of her two best friends was named Mania! 

I was born in Passau!

As I was writing back how I thought our mothers may have been best friends, I heard a ping! on my phone:

Hi Gina,

Do you live in Montreal? Was your mother’s name Sula? I looked up your profile- YOU look exactly as Gina, the daughter of Sula, my mother’s friend! You visited us in Israel. If it is You, I even have your wedding Photo. WOW!!!!!

Love, Tammy

My hands were shaking so I could barely type my response. Over the course of the next hours, words and photos flew through the cybersphere to South Africa and Canada, bouncing with pings that made my heart jump each time. Tammy and I were lost birds in search of our flock. It took only an hour for us to connect a myriad of dots.  Here is the story we pieced together.

Our parents were childhood friends. Mania and Yudka, along with another couple, Oskar and Lipke, were the best friends of my mother, Sula, and her first husband, Dovid. They were all members of Hashomer Hatzair,  the socialist-Zionist youth movement. Not long after the Germans invaded Poland, the three couples escaped across the border into Soviet Poland. The Duchownys had a baby girl there but like their friends were not allowed to remain in Soviet-held Poland. Some 250,000 Polish Jews survived World War II as a result of deportation, evacuation, and/or flight to Siberia and Central Asia.^[2]  The Soviets forced Jews and other ‘undesirables’ onto trains, and transported them east along the route of the Trans-Siberian railway. The three couples became separated, dropped off at different locations. During those terrible war years, there was no way to maintain contact. 

Where my mother, Sula Kluger and her husband Dovid Zunenshein, ended up, she never knew or if she knew, she never revealed. Zhrenyeh Azhe, which I translate as Central Asia, is all I ever got. It’s also possible, I never asked. But even on the forms my mother completed for UNRRA^[3], JIAS^[4] and others that I researched at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, when it was asked where she had been between 1941 and 1944, all she could offer was a question mark. It may be she had hopes of emigrating to the U.S. and feared being branded a communist if she revealed she had lived in the Soviet Union. So she never said but for some reason, I decided she was in Uzbekistan. I can’t explain why. 

Wherever they were, my mother said, the winters were freezing cold and the summers unbearably hot with mosquitoes the size of bats. Sula and Dovid had a son, Itzak, but not long after, Dovid contracted malaria and died. Then Itzak, at age three, also died, but of starvation. When her friends finally found Sula at the end of the war, my mother was suffering from severe malnutrition. They saved her from certain death, my mother said.

When I was 18, I travelled to Israel for the summer and for the first time, met my aunt (my father’s sister) and two cousins who both had children close to my age. I also finally met my mother’s best friends – Lipke and Oskar Ortner in Tel Aviv, and Mania and Yudka Duchowny in Haifa.  Their eldest daughter was married and their son, who was around my age, may have been in the army at the time. I don’t recall meeting them. But their youngest, Tamar, aged 16, and I immediately connected. After I left Israel, we even corresponded briefly but then lost touch. 

My mother died in 1976. I was 28. It was decades before I realized how many questions I had failed to ask. Tammy’s email delivered the opportunity to uncover a long-lost piece of my history, the incredible trials of my mother’s life. Suddenly, there was a crack, as Leonard Cohen sings — for the light to get in. 

This is the story Tammy told me. While in Soviet Poland, Mania gave birth to a baby girl, Yanetchka, in March 1940.  Soon after, however, the family was transported to Siberia to slave in labor camps under abysmal and freezing conditions. In 1942, after Germany invaded Russia, the family was moved again, this time to Leninabad in Tajikistan, far in the southeast near the border with China. That August, Mania and Yudke had brought a very ill Yanetchka to Tashkent for medical help but it was too late. The four-year-old died and was buried there. The couple returned to Leninabad and eight months later another daughter, Musha, was born, just weeks before the war’s end. That’s when the Duchownys started to head back to Poland. On their way, they passed labor camps, always asking about other Polish Jews. This is where, Tammy told me, they finally found my mother. 

It was Mania and Yudka who saved my mother from death by starvation. 

They nursed Sula back to health and in 1945, took her with them to their home town — Chrzanow, 20 km NE of Auschwitz. My mother was hoping to find at least one of her sisters, only to learn that all five – and her parents — were dead. My mother often related how the Poles chased the Jews from the town, blaming them for the war. The Duchownys and my mother ended up in the Pocking Displaced Persons camp under American military jurisdiction in Lower Bavaria. 

It was there, in 1947, Sula Kluger met and married Benzion Miedwiecki, and I was born in the nearby birthing hospital in Passau in January, 1948.

Tammy’s brother was born there in August of that year. Her parents had a relative in Paris which is where Tammy was conceived, and another one in Buenos Aires, where they immigrated to before she was born. However, she wrote:

…as soon as anti-Semitism arose when Adolf Eichmann was caught, my parents decided to make Aliyah so us children would grow up in Israel. That was by the end of 1960.  So we did! My brother was very active with Eli Wiesel, finding war criminals and a devoted Zionist, as that was the core and legacy of our parents. 

Back in the late sixties, Tammy and I lost touch. We both married young, she to Moshe Lerner, an Israeli engineer. Some four decades ago, they left Israel for a three-year contract in South Africa and have remained in Johannesburg ever since. Tammy and Moshe have three sons but I have no children. I grew up in a family of just four, without aunts and uncles and cousins except those far away in Argentina and Israel. There was one more valuable gift Tammy offered me — a photo of the three friends taken in 1933. In it, my mother at 20 is smiling warmly, something that no photo of her ever revealed in those she had carried from Poland to Canada.

From the Washington, DC-area to Phoenix, AZ and on to Johannesburg, South Africa, then here to me in St-Colomban, Quebec, lines stretched around the world and gathered in stories that have been interred for decades. Somehow, the longing for common connections brought us together sharing the stories our parents buried deep within us.

After some 52 years, Tammy has reshaped my world by gifting me a story no one else could. Unbeknownst to the other, when we recounted the story, each had told friends we had found a long-lost shvester.

A few days after connecting with Tammy, I awoke with a poem that was eager to be transcribed. I wrote it as if taking dictation:

 

Intersecting Lines

You tell a story that has been told to you. A birthday story about dead babies, about a saved life. Your life. Told in a line that stitched birthdays together. Until the teller is dead. And the line becomes a circle.

You tell a story that has been told to you. A birthday tale of dead babies, of hate as resilient as a latent seed. The tale grows. One day, Jane says: That’s a documentary. You blink in surprise. Open your eyes and eight years slip silently down a line. It forms a circle. 

You tell the world a tale that has been told to you. A surprising story of war’s aftermath, of camps, of displaced persons untethered and careworn, reaching for a cord, a tenuous line to life. Because, after all, life must go on. You tell your story. Others tell theirs. The line gathers in daughters. They form a circle.

The world tells you stories told to them.  Surprising stories about lives saved. The daughters’ tales baste a line through time, beyond oceans, across continents. Then, one day, a line intersects. A tale told by a mother about another saved. Told to you by a mother saved. Who then tells you a birthday story about dead babies. Another circle closes. 

You tell a story that has been told to you. 

---

 

^[1] Sister; shvester in Yiddish and German

^[2]  https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-7975

^[3]  United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

^[4] Jewish Immigrant Aid Services

 

© Gina Roitman 2020

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Author, biographer, and writing coach, Gina Roitman latest work is the literary thriller, Don’t Ask, a biography Midway to China and Beyond, and the auto-fiction collection Tell Me Story, Tell Me the Truth. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including The New Spice Box, Wherever I Find Myself, and Poetica.  She was also the subject of the award-winning documentary, My Mother, the Nazi Midwife and Me.