I was talking with my brother, Mark, about my father’s legendary temper. Recalling how Mom would say, “Wait til your father gets home,” to get us (mostly Mark) in line because the threat of Dad’s anger was a powerful weapon. Leah, my daughter, who was listening to the conversation, later said to me, “That’s not the Grandpa I knew. He wasn’t intimidating to me.” I smiled, happy that her experience was different. Happy, too, that Dad, as he got older, mellowed and rarely erupted – he was more at peace with himself, I think.
I knew my father’s anger well. He had quite a temper when we were growing up. His deep voice, muscular frame, bald head and prominent nose gave him an intensity, even when he wasn’t angry. He was the perfect high school dean, which, in fact, he was. He was perfect because while he did have that presence about him that made you think twice about doing something wrong, he was also fair-minded and had a deeply engrained, true moral compass.
Despite his volcanic outbursts, he never, to my knowledge, raised a hand to any of us. I was on the receiving end of his verbal outbursts – usually because of fighting with my brother, Mark, or for using a ‘tone’ with my mother. I think it is fair to say that I could be pretty disrespectful to her and Dad rose readily and angrily to her defense.
One of the things that made living with my dad’s anger more tolerable was his willingness to apologize. Pretty much like clockwork, after the yelling, after I ran to my room crying, there would be a knock on my door. Usually he would say something like, “I shouldn’t have raised my voice like that, I’m sorry. But that doesn’t excuse your behavior….” He would then explain what I had done wrong. He would be calm and sorrowful. The anger gone like a brief, intense summer storm.
I was, I think, ten years old when I realized he was gruff on the outside, and prone to bursts of temper, but a marshmallow inside. It seemed that his anger needed venting, like a pressure cooker. While I don’t remember how I came to that understanding, I do remember the moment of clarity; the time when he screamed and I looked at him and knew that he wouldn’t actually do anything to me.
I had been upstairs in my grandparent’s apartment and I did something awful. I don’t remember what precipitated it, but I yelled at Uncle Terry’s girlfriend (now wife) that I hated her and I ran downstairs to my room. The way I remember it, my parents were in the room when I had my outburst and my father was hot on my trail as I ran down the steps. He boomed, “Linda!!!! How dare you!!! You go apologize this instant!”
It was at this moment that I decided he wasn’t going to hit me, and I didn’t have to do everything he said. I said, calmly, “No, I don’t want to.” I was feeling quite righteous in my own anger. My father was taken aback. Interestingly, he didn’t get angrier, he was silent for a moment. Quietly, he said, “I’m not going to get into an argument with you. But, I want you to think about Uncle Terry.”
That penetrated. I have no memory of why I was so angry at Barbara – I’m sure a good measure of it was jealousy. After all, her time with him cut deeply into my own.
“We love Uncle Terry,” he continued, “and we want him to be happy. You acting that way will not make him happy.”
That took the wind out of my sails. I felt embarrassed. “Okay, I’ll apologize.”
With great difficulty, I climbed the stairs and faced Barbara. “I’m sorry I said that. I shouldn’t have.”
Somehow I understood my Dad and 99% of the time I ended up agreeing with him – despite his temper.
That wouldn’t be the last time my father got angry with me. And, his anger could certainly make me unhappy, uncomfortable, frustrated, resentful, or angry with him. But, I wasn’t afraid.
I don’t know if my brothers ever came to the same realization.
Note: Since I have been traveling over the last several weeks, I have not been able to devote as much time to this blog post as I would like. Please consider it a work in progress. (the whole blog is actually a work in progress!) I want to continue exploring Brody family history and its implications but my life gets in the way. Bear with me as I continue the journey.
After reading the letter from the priest, I felt a need to see if the events described had been recorded; to see if history had taken note of the massacre. I did some research, mostly on the Internet. I also looked at a couple of books, including Jewish Roots in Poland by Miriam Weiner.
I also wanted to find the towns listed in the letter. In addition to looking at maps online, I poured over a world atlas.
I did find most of the towns, though it was challenging. The translation of town names, and my total ignorance of Polish, made finding these locations difficult. Several still exist and can be seen on a current map of Poland (Jaslo, Dukla, Nowy Zmigrod), all in the southeast corner of the country. By the way, Stary in a town’s name means ‘old,’ while Nowy in a town’s name means ‘new.’ Oddly, to me anyway, Zmigrod (without Nowy or Stary attached) appears to be miles away to the west and slightly north of the towns mentioned in the letter.
In looking for mention of the massacre in Halbow, I found another massacre exactly one month earlier, June 7, 1942, in the same area. At first I wondered if it was the same incident, perhaps the month was mistakenly recorded. After further exploration, it appears that there were actually two separate incidents (or “actions” in the language of the war) exactly a month apart. On one level it is hard to believe that there could be two (intellectually I know there were many “actions”), but the scope and horror of the Holocaust is still hard to comprehend, even all these years later.
I did find the July 7th genocide noted in several places and it appears that there is a monument erected to memorialize the lives lost in Halbow.
Monument to the victims of the atrocity in the forest in Halbow.
In the 1990s many children of Holocaust survivors visited Eastern Europe searching for their parent’s hometowns and gravesites of family members. Some of those travelers documented their findings. As a result, I was able to find a picture of the monument (see above). The monument was funded by Zmigrod survivors’ families in America. I was relieved to find that at least there is a monument, but another issue emerged from my research.
The priest’s letter indicates that 1434 people were buried in the mass grave in Halbow. The sources I found on the Internet reported 1250 .(archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/Galicia/2009-07/123905001; www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/nowy.zmigrod1/now065.html; kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/zmigrod/zmigrodholo.htm).
I am disturbed by the discrepancy and wonder what it represents. As mentioned above, in doing the research I found two separate incidents, each with 1250 victims recorded. But it seems odd that the number would be exactly 1250 in both cases. Were they estimates? How were the numbers documented? Could the 1250 represent only the Jewish victims? Or, could the priest’s information be incorrect? It raises so many questions about how history is documented.
Which led me to another question: Does the number matter? My gut reaction was, of course it does – we are talking about 184 souls not ‘officially’ counted.
But, then, I don’t want to obsess about the actual number. The number, whether it is 1250 or 1434, is too many to accept. Either way it is roughly the size of the suburban high school in my community. It is almost half the population of the town I live in. The number is important, but it isn’t the central point – the central point is that humanity was lost in every sense; in the lives cut short and in those who perpetrated the crime. Those who were responsible for the crime discarded their humanity.
We struggle today to identify and agree to facts. Sometimes when the numbers are in dispute people take the opportunity to dismiss the larger issue. Especially for those with an agenda. That these atrocities were committed is a fact that cannot be denied. My family bore the weight of it, in the loss of life, in the loss of faith and the silence that followed.
I wish I had an answer, though, for reconciling discrepancies in records (data) that sometimes lead us to lose the forest for the trees.
The legacy of the letter from the priest is many layered. Of course, there was the profound impact of the loss on Leo Brody, my grandfather, and thus on his immediate family. I had not considered the ripple effects of the atrocity and the silence surrounding it through the generations until now. My family stands in stark contrast to Gary’s family experience – where the impact was more obvious.
As I got to know the Bakst family, when Gary and I started dating in 1979, I was aware that Gary’s parents were Holocaust survivors. Our shared Jewish identity, and the differences in our experiences, was a subject we talked about quite a bit as we got to know each other. My parents were American born and college educated. As I described in prior blog entries, we were culturally and ethnically Jewish, but God was conspicuously absent. No one in my family attended synagogue regularly and when we did it was obligatory, certainly not heartfelt. The Holocaust was discussed, but in a more scholarly way, despite my grandfather’s tragic loss. It was at a remove from our day-to-day experience.
Gary’s parents, while not Orthodox Jews, were far more observant – religion was part of their practice, they kept a Kosher home, didn’t drive on the high holidays and went to synagogue on Shabbat. Gary’s Dad believed in God despite his harrowing experiences – or maybe because of them.
While I would not say that their Holocaust experiences were spoken about often, they were not shrouded in silence either. They attended the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C in 1993, were involved in the organization (Holocaust Survivors and Friends) that was instrumental in establishing the museum and attended the annual meeting of the Iwie Society (a group of lansleit from David’s hometown in Poland). Their status as survivors was an essential part of their identity and of Gary’s (and his siblings).
As I got to know Gary’s family I came to recognize some of the scars from their Holocaust experience. Paula, Gary’s mom, who was about nine when her life in the shtetl of Sarnik was upended, was anxious and fiercely protective of her children. The first time Gary and I went on a date when we were home from college, Gary drove to my house using Paula’s car. This was long before cellphones. When Gary arrived in Canarsie (20 minutes away), he asked to use our phone to call home and let Paula know that he had arrived safely. Years later, when I was pregnant with Leah, my doorbell rang one evening in Albany. I went to the door to find my brother. He had come to deliver a message, “Call your mother-in-law. She hasn’t been able to reach you and she is worried.” Apparently our phone was off the hook and I didn’t realize it. Paula, ever resourceful, long before the Internet, found my brother’s phone number, called him and dispatched him to check on me. Needless to say, I called her immediately.
To say Paula didn’t trust easily would be an understatement. Years before he met and married Shari, Gary’s older brother, Steven, was dating a woman, Jenna, who wasn’t Jewish. I sat at Paula’s kitchen table in Rosedale while she shared her fear that if Steven was to marry Jenna, she might kill him in his sleep. I was at a loss as to how to respond. I asked her why Jenna would do that. She shrugged and said, “Because she is Christian and he is Jewish.” I began to understand the depth of the damage done by her traumatic childhood.
Gary and I were together for four years before we married and had children (at least another 5 years later) before I felt I had earned her trust.
When Steven Spielberg, as a companion to Schlindler’s List, undertook the Shoah Project (the effort to record the testimony of all living survivors before their numbers dwindled), the Bakst family participated. We went to the Pines Hotel in the Catskills and waited in the lobby while Paula and David were interviewed separately. Then all ten of us – Rochelle and Doreen (Gary’s sisters), Steven, Shari, Laura and Jordan (Gary’s brother, wife and two young children) and our family (Gary, me, Leah and Daniel) – went in to be filmed as a coda to their testimony.
Over the years I had heard the stories of their survival. David fought in the Russian army and with the partisans in the woods in Poland. Death was all around him. Paula survived by the guile of her mother and, for several years, with the assistance of a gentile Polish farmer. They told how they met in a displaced persons camp and of Paula’s resettlement in Cuba where she had family and David’s in New York. Ultimately David went to Cuba to propose marriage and a year later, on September 3, 1949, they were married in Havana. David brought Paula back to New York and they settled in Queens and started their family. Paula’s mother, brother and sister survived, her father was murdered as they fled their town. David’s father and sister survived the war, though his father, having navigated the war itself, tragically died from complications from hernia surgery in Germany just before they were to immigrate to America. There is so much more to their story than can be told here in a blog entry.
Despite his travail, David’s experiences reinforced his belief in God. He felt he was spared by God’s hand on several dramatic occasions. Over the years I attended synagogue many times with David and Paula and it was impossible not to be moved by his faith, in particular. He chanted the prayers from his heart. Paula also took comfort in the rituals. They felt part of a community that shared beliefs and customs. It was very different than the synagogue experience, limited as it was, that I had growing up.
The process of integrating our two families and creating our own is still a work in progress.
My last blog post (No Easy Answers) told of my grandfather, Leo, and his time staying with us in Canarsie. Comments from my brothers and mother prompted a deeper examination of his life.
The Brody family story is not unique among American Jews, but it is still important to give voice to it. Grandpa may not have shared his story; at least to the best of my knowledge he didn’t. I believe it merits telling. There are important gaps that I don’t know if I will be able to fill. Many of the people who could offer insight are no longer alive, and some, who are elderly, are particularly subject to the vagaries of memory (as I’ve noted before, memory is a funny thing under the best of circumstances).
This is what I know: Leo Bruder (he changed his name to Brody, perhaps to fit in with other family that had come before) came to this country from Poland. Specifically, he came from Galicia, an area of southeast Poland that changed hands many times throughout history, in the Carpathian Mountains. He came to America with an entrepreneurial spirit. He made the journey alone, not in steerage like most immigrants. He had enough means to buy a ticket that allowed him to arrive in New York City without going through Ellis Island. He was 18 years old and the year was 1921 when he arrived. He left his parents and sister in Europe.
Page 1 of a copy of the translation of the letter Grandpa received
In November of 1945, about six months after World War II ended, Grandpa received a letter (picture above), in response to his inquiry by cable, from a priest from his town about the fate of his parents and sister. The original letter was in Polish. My brother Steven has a copy of the translation of the letter. In order to read it more easily, Steven transcribed it into a Word document that I have posted below.
When I was growing up the letter and the tragedy it describes was not spoken of directly. I knew that Grandpa’s parents and sister had been killed by the Nazis. I also knew that, from that point on, Grandpa didn’t go to synagogue unless there was a specific celebration like a bar mitzvah or wedding. He lost his faith in God. The events described in the letter and Grandpa’s life in Europe were not spoken of otherwise and it was understood that questions weren’t to be asked. Late in his life, after Grandma died, he seemed to be more willing to talk, but the legacy of silence was still strong.
I think it is important to share this letter because it provides documentation of the atrocity. I want to give fair warning, though, that it is graphic and disturbing and I understand if you choose not to read it. I did want it posted, though, as it is an essential part of my family’s history. It made its mark on us in a myriad of ways.
I’m not sure why I didn’t ask more questions about this letter when my father was alive. I knew of its existence from sometime in the late 70s or early 80s. I don’t believe I ever saw it with my own eyes until this past week when Steven scanned it and sent it to me. I have so many questions now. I am hoping that I can find some answers. If I am successful in finding insights that add to our family story, I will share them.
[A note about the letter: Steve and I did our best to transcribe the translation, but as you can see from the picture above, it is not a clear copy. In addition, the original translator was not able to decipher some of the Polish. Fortunately, these difficulties do not impact the meaning of the text.]
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Translation from Polish of a letter dated 11/21/1945
Zmigrod Stary 11/21/1945
Dear Mr Leon,
Your cable was delivered to me only today, though it was received in Zmigrod on November 12th. The post office delivered it to Wohlmuth, who turned it over to me only today. I am answering at once. I am sorry but I cannot write you something good. Your parents and sister were killed by the Germans on July 7th 1942 in Halbow, near –Rempno. On the same day and in the same woods all Jews from our town and the neighborhood with the young rabbi Halboratwa. Your family was killed, family Weinstein and family –estreic from Lysa-Gora.
But before it came to this terrible tragedy, your family suffered a lot. Your mother used to say always why did they not go to USA with their son, why they have to suffer?
To start with all their belongings were taken away from their house and farm. Then they were deported to the town where they lived at Lembik’s house. In the beginning they left with me some of their personal belongings asking to hide them, but before the deportation they took everything with them. They had very bad time there, as they had nothing to eat. I used to send them bread and milk and flour. I saw them a few times and tried to console them and reassure them that nothing will happen to them, that they will be sent to a camp, because nobody could think of such a tragedy. On July 6th I saw them, and they asked me to write you about everything. They gave me your address, but I lost it during the evacuation and the fire of the village. Still in the last day of their life my house-keeper Salka went to see them and to comfort them, but alas it was too late, as they knew already that death is near. The Gestapo patrols were already in the streets. With moans and tears they prepared themselves to the saying of last prayers. On July 7th 8 o’clock in the morning all Jews were gathered on the meadows across the bridge. There they were ordered to surrender all their money and valuables, after this they were by trucks brought to Halbow. There, before dug out trenches, they were ordered to undress and stand up in rows. They were killed by shooting from behind. The children were killed by smashing their heads with rifle butts. Altogether 1,434 persons were killed in this day and buried in the trenches. It is possible that Americans will not believe in such a horrible murder, but it is true.
It is quite impossible to describe what we went through during the war. All villages, Zmigrod Stary, Lysa-Gora, Glojsce, Iwla, Siedliska, Makarowaka, Nienaszow were destroyed and burned down. . Only chimneys and rubble remained. Zmigrod Nowy, Dukla and Jaslo were in ruins. 153 bombs and grenades exploded over my church and in the parsonage and barns. We were hidden for a month in the cellars, later we were removed to some other place. When we after 6 months came back, we found only ruins, without roof and doors, and, what was still worse, nothing to eat.
The house of your parents and of Weinstein are not damaged and at present homeless families live in these houses. The farmland is not tilled. You have to apply to the court to be recognized as heirs after your family. Same apply also to Weinstein, or send me power of attorney legalized at the Polish consul authorizing me to do it on your behalf, as well as giving me right to manage your property, as I presume you do not intend to return. Tell Wallach to do the same.
I have to add that you sister (name illegible) and your mother used to come often to the parsonage. Many times before an imminent danger they used to come to me in order to find shelter and protection. But from death I could not save them. Only Sommer, house painter, son-in-law of Wrobel from Lysa Gora saved his life.
I cannot write more today, though I have many more things to write that would be of interest to you. I am not sure even that this letter will reach you, as the conditions are still not normal (illegible) conditions are better and better, and we hope soon will everything will be in order.
I would ask you do me a favor. I have a brother in USA by the name Maoiej in Carteret, NJ Hudson Street, 18. I do not know if he is alive. He does not write to me. Maybe you would go there and find out what is with him, and would let me know.
I finish this letter with my deepest sympathy on the death of your parents and sister. Let God comfort you.
Best regards,
Priest Juljan Beigert
Zmigrod Stary
District Jaslo, Rz.
Regards to Weinstein, Wallach, also family, and especially Hashek Wallach and Mortek. Please answer this letter immediately
I hereby certify that I am thoroughly familiar with the Polish language; that I have read the attached document in said language; and that the above English translation was made by me and is a true and accurate translation.
Stories I Tell Myself 