What If History Suffers Amnesia?

QUEENS, N.Y. —  The woman in Apartment 9L is old, so terribly old. And it is an eerie thing, now that her memory seeps away. What happened 50 years before she remembers, and what happened five minutes ago she forgets. Her mind gives safekeeping only to the tightly packed trains, the marching, the killing, all those people leaving the world as smoke from the chimneys of the Nazi ovens.

Margaret Band’s hair is white, her shoulders slack, her feet swollen in her slippers. “How is it that I’m still living?” she wants to know. At 96, dates elude her, except what she has put down on paper. “Here, look,” she says: Married in Vienna in 1922, deported to the camps in 1942, liberated in 1945.

The memories come floating out in tears. She and her mother were confined in Thierenstadt, but then Mama was taken east by train. She was 75. “I once thought 75 was old,” Margaret Band says. Mama waved goodbye through a dirty window. “But how did she die? This is always on my mind.” In what far-away earth is she buried? Or was she, too, carried off as smoke in the wind?

When Eric Band, Margaret’s husband, was alive, he had ways of keeping her from such thoughts. But Eric is dead now. Heavens, it seems so many of them are dead--or getting close to it. Someone who was 20 when the Nazis came to power now is 83. Of the 300,000 Jews who survived the concentration camps, about half are gone. Hitler killed 6 million. Time is sweeping up the rest.

For three decades, Margaret Band and hundreds like her have lived in the anonymity of a bustling section of Queens known as Flushing, residents of two apartment houses built for elderly survivors of the Holocaust. Here, among their own, they have tried to make their way through the barbed wire of memory.

One building opened in 1964, the other in 1970. Back then, waiting lists were necessary. Survivors liked to be with other survivors. Who else really understood them? Here, no one would have to say, “You can’t even begin to imagine . . . “ People saw themselves in the faces of others, the hurts of Belzec or Auschwitz stamped in sorrowful eyes like postmarks. Once, 333 survivors lived in the buildings. Last year, there were 134, six months ago barely 100.

Margaret Band thinks about this onrush of mortality, as does the man with cancer in Apartment 11H and the woman with a failing heart in 11M and the man tethered to an oxygen tank in 7N: History suffers amnesia. When they die, who will be left who knows what they know, and how much will they tell?

In truth, the telling has never been easy, often for lack of listeners, also because words were too modest a tool. Then too, there was the question of whether to speak of it at all, for some chose to remember and some tried to forget, as if such things could be sorted out and tossed away.

Fifty years later, the memories go on and the explanations still fail. In one apartment after another, amid the heavy, old furniture and the rows of framed photographs, their faces are grim with what happened: the Jews, God’s chosen--hiding out, herded into ghettos, starved, taunted, massacred on the roadsides, dumped in the mud, gas flooding through their lungs, gold teeth pried from dead mouths, the stink of the pyres from endless heaps of flesh.

The 20th century, so alive with promises of democracy and international brotherhood, turned into the most savage time of all. Germany--great, cultured Germany--became a barbarous monster. It had given the world Goethe and Kant and Beethoven. And then it gave it Hitler and crematories and the Holocaust.

Afterward, the world never quite knew what to do with its living witnesses, those reassembled people who had seen genocide distilled from a wellspring of hate. What was to be learned from those who knew of such things?

And what will be forgotten without them?

EUGEN ZUCKERMANN

‘Some Germans--not most, but some--found ways to kill for sport.’

Eugen Zuckermann opens the door to 11H. A tailor by trade, he is a short, round man with pants held up high by suspenders. There remains a boyish glint in his eyes, though his skin shows the looseness of his 70 years. Inside him doses of chemotherapy wage their war against a tumor of the colon. He can tell when the battles will heat up on a desk calendar of hospital appointments.

Half Czech, half Hungarian, he was in Budapest when the Nazis came in March of 1944. By July, 437,000 of Hungary’s 650,000 Jews had been sent to the death mill at Auschwitz. Links! Rechts! the Nazi SS men shouted as dehydrated people spilled from the heat and smell of the freight cars. Newcomers could not possibly know the fatefulness of those words: left to the gas chambers, right to the work details.

Zuckermann’s mother and little brother were sent left, his sister right, though she too would later die. He himself avoided Auschwitz. He was dispatched instead to one labor camp after another, allowed to live so long as he escaped typhus and frostbite and physical collapse and the whims of sadistic guards.

The Nazi killing was much more than a monotony of gassings, he says. He is both scholar and victim. Near his chair are sagging shelves of Holocaust books. His mother and sister watch him from photos high on the wall.

“Some Germans--not most, but some--found ways to kill for sport,” Zuckermann says. He leans closer, the better to describe. At Mauthausen, they fired into the crowded tents, Jewish ducks randomly shot in the Nazi barrel. They turned their dogs on people or beat them into mush or, in a final humiliation, drowned them in latrines. They worked prisoners to death in the stone quarries, whipping them as they carried rocks up the steep inclines.

Thousands were starved into desperation, forced to steal and barter and beg. “I saw corpses with pieces of thigh removed,” he says. “It was either cannibalism or people trying to sell human remains as fresh meat.”

With such memories loose inside him, nightmares violate his sleep across a half-century of time: He is again on a forced march from one camp to another. The speed is too much. People stumble, people quit. The slow are shot in the back of the neck. In these dreams, he is awaiting the bullet.

As he describes all this, he is very matter-of-fact. The story uncoils year by year. “To tell is a duty,” he says. “Listening is a duty also.”

But when he came to the United States in 1948, brought here by an American aunt and uncle, they advised him not to go on so about the war. After all, people here had suffered too. There had been deaths in combat, rationing at home.

The world was tired of tragedy. “You must forget about such terrible things,” is what Eugen Zuckermann was told.

MARY GARBER

‘We were like family here, all with the same backgrounds.’

Forgetting was impossible. Some survivors obsessed, lost the secrets of laughter, thought of joy as a betrayal of the dead. But most others let time reduce their pain to a tolerable size. They wanted to look forward, not back. They adopted their new countries, worked hard, raised families. For them, memory required a juggler’s skill. They had pledged to the 6 million: Never forget! And yet they tried not to let the remembering produce its own poison.

Whatever the obligation to tell the world, most did not like to talk about the war years, even among themselves. In the two buildings, ordinary-looking inside and out, the great comfort was in what could be left unsaid. “I hate lines,” someone might remark after a trip to the bank. This was shorthand for a common memory of the camps, waiting hours in the sun for a cup of thin broth or a small chunk of bread.

“We were like family here, all with the same backgrounds,” says Mary Garber, the woman in 11M. She uses the past tense because the buildings have changed forever. Survivors are a minority now. For the most part, empty units have been filled with Russians and Chinese, the newer refugees of an immigrant-rich community.

Mary Garber is 88, her heartbeat and blood pressure readjusted each day by five pills. There is a hobble to her walk as she rises from her soft chair. Her arthritis is terrible. “There was a togetherness before. We talked with each other, we visited.”

The bond was as much nationality and language as the Holocaust. Most were well-educated German Jews, once people of stature, still an air of formality about them. Before Hitler, they thought themselves as much German as Jewish--and felt superior to the bearded, homespun Jews from the villages of Russia or Poland.

Some Germans even shunned the refined Austrians like Mary Garber, who was from Vienna. When she first moved in, it was hard to get a hello. “I spoke German, a different dialect, but German. It took a while for people to be friendly.”

This formality held back any urge of curiosity. Privacy was to be respected. “Where are you from? Where were you during the war?” people might inquire of neighbors, but they were too polite to press the subject any further.

Over time, and only among the best of companions, secrets did trickle out. In this way, friends might discover that there had once been a baby, a husband, a brother. They might learn that Lisa Allmeier’s sister is lost in the soil of Buchenwald. Or that Mary Garber, who had fled to safety, cannot forget the dream she had on Sept. 1, 1942: Her mother was lying in a bathtub when, suddenly, the water turned green and her eyes locked shut. Mary woke up, crying out, “Mother, talk to me!”

And she is sure that at that instant the Nazis put her mother to death.

SELMA LEVY

‘We had no money, no nothing. But others went to the camps.’

There were reasons not to speak of the Holocaust beyond the formal manners of the German Jews. Some people who had suffered so much were ashamed they had not suffered more. There was a pecking order to the hardships, who and how many in your family had been murdered, which camp you were in and for how long. Treblinka was worse than Dachau, Dachau worse than Thierenstadt.

Selma Levy, in 9F, hurried from Germany in 1937 as the Nazi thugs grew ever bolder, the future ever more frightening. “We had no money, no nothing,” she says. “But others went to the camps. These you should talk to.”

About a third of the survivors had resettled in the United States. For so long, most American Jews did not want to hear of their many hideous memories, all those details about the sick and the scared despised as pariahs and caged in hell. If stories were welcome, they were ones about defiance and resistance.

In time, this would change. The 1967 and 1973 wars in the Middle East again raised the threat of a slaughter of Jews. Surviving the Holocaust gradually came to be seen as a courageous deed in itself, worthy of statues and a presidential commission. Holocaust testimonies filled university archives. In novels, movies, TV shows, the Holocaust became a popular setting. Among American Jews, their refugee cousins were elevated to the status of treasured relics.

Eugen Zuckermann attended his aunt and uncle’s 50th-anniversary party. They eyed him with pride. “Here’s Eugen,” they announced. “He’s a survivor!”

PETER CLARK

‘Can you think of anything more stupid?’

To live in the buildings, applicants had to be 62 or older. An odd myth took root among this aging population. Many believed that the German government had paid for all or part of the construction costs and then subsidized the rents: blood money.

This was not so. New York state supplied most of the funds, working with Selfhelp, a nonprofit social services agency that runs the buildings. Selfhelp did tap into some German capital, but this was from a special pool of reparations--compensation for the seized assets of German Jews whom the Nazis had not only murdered but left without heirs.

The myth was ironic because most survivors thought Germany had paid far too little for its sins. “While people in America had no money, America was rebuilding Germany,” says Peter Clark, 83, the man in 7E. His cheeks flush and tremble with anger. “Can you think of anything more stupid?”

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Rejoicing may have flooded through hearts in most of the world, but there was no gladness here. The news enraged Esther Morgenstern, the Polish woman in 4B. She felt compelled to write down her thoughts on notebook paper: “The Germans, the world’s most famous murderers, should never, ever, be united. Never be free from Russian occupation. An earthquake should wipe them off the face of the Earth.”

Survivors wondered: Does the world now race along at such a speed? Can it really be, Germany again mighty and whole, all the killings forgiven?

Some survivors were still bitter about their own reparation claims. The Nazis had robbed them of their homes, educations, businesses, health.

In 1953, the West German government had agreed to make restitution for suffering. But the process was infuriating. Medical paperwork had to prove a conclusive link between current ailments and Nazi persecution. Mental conditions were especially suspect. After all, said the paper shufflers, who could tell for sure what was caused by the camps and what by something else?

Among survivors, any reparations were impossibly little, absurdly late. And what about the dead, they wanted to know. What were to be the reparations for the millions gone up into graves in the air? As the poet Dan Pagis, himself a survivor, had written: Who would be able to put, “The scream back into the throat/The gold teeth back to the gums/The terror/The smoke back in the chimney and further on and inside back to the hollow of the bones.”

ESTHER MORGENSTERN

‘I try to feel what they felt as they died.’

Is the old saying true: What does not kill you makes you stronger?

Esther Morgenstern would answer no. Her damage cannot be repaired. At 75, she has been a wife and mother, but she calls all this only a shadow of a life, her past always overwhelming her present. Her eyes are pools of sorrow.

“After everything I went through and lost, mourning my parents and brothers and sisters, there is no joy,” she says. “Oh yes, sometimes there is laughing or singing. The sun comes up. But deep, deep, there is only pain.”

She endured the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, Stutthof, other camps. Six of 11 in her family were killed. She wears her grief like a funeral wreath. “How did you survive?” she asks people boldly. “Did your parents die naturally? How lucky if they did; at least you have a grave to visit.”

This openness is well noticed in the building, seen by some as rude, by others as brave. If Esther Morgenstern could, she would shake free everyone’s war stories and tell them her own. “I have episodes, so many episodes.”

She would tell: How foolish they were arriving at Auschwitz, carrying their few belongings in knapsacks, eager to peek at their new home. “Silly, silly people,” they were told by a Jew already at the camp. “You don’t need anything here. In a day or two, you will go through the chimneys like your brothers and sisters and parents.”

She would tell: However numb she already had become to death, her disbelief at seeing that enormous mound at Stutthof, pairs and pairs of little shoes. “Can this be?” she thought. “Can so many children have died here?”

These memories are her psalms. She will never cry enough tears. In the evenings, she shuts her eyes, reliving what she saw, then imagining what she missed, her parents, her brothers, her sisters, the moments of their end.

“I think of the terror they must have gone through, first being collected for the gassing, the smell of it, the crying. I let it penetrate deep in my soul. I try to feel what they felt as they died.”

LISA ALLMEIER

‘So where was God? Where was he? Can you answer me that?’

For an outsider, there is always that recurring phrase: “You can’t even begin to imagine . . . “ Telling and listening are separated by a great wall.

The memories are endlessly painful. People survived because they bribed their way free or hoarded scraps of bread or made themselves useful to their captors. Morality was turned inside out in places where moral behavior was often suicidal. Who cares to be judged later--for good or bad--by people who have never foraged for food or marched barefoot in the snow?

Strength and wits may have played a part in one’s survival, but stronger and smarter people died in multitudes. Nazi whim had prisoners by the throat. That--and luck--held the power of life and death: Who was lucky when the SS made their choices, who was lucky when the lice crept in with the typhus.

And where was God amid all this roulette?

Eugen Zuckermann says: “There I was, a Jew who behaved like a goy, and there was my mother, so religious, and my brother, whose dream was to become a rabbi. Why am I alive and they dead? How is this possible?”

Lisa Allmeier goes to synagogue on the major Jewish holidays, but only out of tradition. “If there was a God, these things could never have happened, right? So where was God? Where was he? Can you answer me that?”

MARY GARBER

‘The world learns nothing. . . . Isn’t that so?’

The world seems to have made some peace with the Holocaust, reviewed it to satisfaction, come to conclusions about its meaning. If survivors were to be seen as brave and the dead as martyrs, the genocide, however horrible, had something positive to offer. Evil had not been victorious. Books and dramas could celebrate the survivors. Didn’t they prove the indomitability of the human spirit?

But was this the vital lesson to learn--or were people, as Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer believes, merely trying to console themselves, erecting fences between the atrocities and more difficult questions? Were all regimes, and not just the Nazis, capable of such crimes? Was the need to dominate, including murder, a natural human impulse, as fulfilling to some as charity and love are to others?

In the two buildings in Queens, there is no boasting of indomitability. Nor is there much optimism about the world soon to be left behind. The Holocaust--this unprecedented binge of killing--did not succeed in reaching its way into the future to make nations take heed, subdue the hatreds, melt the guns.

“The world learns nothing,” says Mary Garber, the woman in 11M. “Things repeat themselves. They come and go and come again. Isn’t that so?”

And yet without memory, what is there? What else can shoulder the wisdom and madness of the past, to value the dead, to wake the living?

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to the reporting of this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

‘You Can’t Even Begin to Imagine . . .’

Margaret Band:

She and her mother were confined in Thierenstadt, but then Mama was taken East by train. Mama waved goodbye through a dirty window. ‘But how did she die? This is always on my mind.’

*

Esther Morgenstern:

‘After everything I went through and lost, mourning my parents and brother and sisters, there is no joy. Oh yes, sometimes there is laughing or singing. The sun comes up. But deep, deep, there is only pain.’

*

Eugen Zuckermann:

‘There I was, a Jew who behaved like a goy, and there was my mother, so religious, and my brother, whose dream was to become a rabbi. Why am I alive and they dead? How is this possible?’