“Who are the Fridburgs?”
The question caught me by surprise
while I was drinking my coffee one Sunday in the spring of 2012. I suppose it
should not have shocked me. I knew my son was growing up, maturing, and that
his classes were studying World War II in school, but the question shook me
just the same.
“The Fridburgs?” I innocently
returned, hoping to buy some time. I briefly wondered how my son knew the name;
then I recalled seeing him in my study, reading my yellowing travel memoires. At
the top of one page, I scribbled “Fridburg
– Lodz, Poland.”
The journal pages carried all the
emotional baggage of men and women and children who might die. Grief, terror,
love, hope – these were the intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass
and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried desperate
memories. They carried the common secret of helplessness barely restrained, the
instinct to help or scream or hit or run, and in many respects this was the
heaviest burden of all, for it might never be put down, it required perfect
balance and posture. They carried their anger. They carried the victim’s
greatest dreams, which were the dreams of the future. Men survived, and died,
because their pride motivated them. They lived and died so as not to die from
fear of embarrassment.
“Yeah, the Fridburgs, dad. I saw
that name scribbled in your 1987 trip notebook.”
The memory blasted through me:
The
room appeared on my right and when I turned in, all I could see were stacks of
suitcases. Old leather filled my lungs as I took in the piles of luggage
extending the length of the former Nazi barracks. Names. Hometowns. Ages.
Addresses.
The weight of their stories had
left me in tears. Even at 16 years old, the thought of each suitcase
representing a person, a family, a story, left me in a pile of tears.
And then they laughed.
Who they were or why they were
there was irrelevant. They looked down at me, the blond haired father holding
his 4-year-old son, and the tan, light haired woman pushing a stroller, and
they laughed. They said something, in what I assume was Polish, and pointed at
me, in my pile of tears, and they laughed.
Flooding with memories, I told him,
“Oscar, the Fridburgs were a family from Poland who were captured by the Nazis
in World War II and sent to Auschwitz.” I hoped the basic facts would satisfy
him. After all, I could not tell him everything. At 10 years old, how much
should one know about the horrors?
He said, “Did you know them? Why
did you write their name? Did they die?”
I sat on the steps outside barracks
6 that day in 1987. The gray clouds striped the sky overhead and the wind made
my spine quake. Jodi Rothschild sat next to me and draped her arms around me. I
was unsure if the gesture was one for warmth or comfort, but like a life vest,
I clung to her just the same. Craig
Kushner sat at our side. We carried the baggage from room 6 on the second
floor, we carried the ashes from room 3 on the first floor, we carried the
tangled hair from room 7, and we wept together.
“I later found out the Fridburgs
were a couple from Lodz. They had a great love story, actually.”
“Ew. A love story? In the middle of
a war?”
“Yea, Aaron Fridburg was a strong
young man with a crush on Liza. When the Nazis turned Lodz into a Jewish
ghetto, Aaron had a chance to escape. His Polish friend Tarek offered him a
ride to the border and freedom, but Aaron stayed because there was no room for
Liza in the car.” I looked at my son, and the issue of this being a love story
was no longer present.
“The Nazis came into Lodz to
liquidate the ghetto, and rounded up the Jews to ship to Auschwitz. They took
the Jews to the synagogue. Aaron looked for Liza but he couldn’t find her. When
the Nazis cleared the synagogue and marched the Jews to the Auschwitz train,
Aaron hid under a pile of coal in the basement.”
I continued, “When things quieted
down, Aaron ran straight to Liza’s house. ‘Liza, where are you?’ he wept. He
ran to her family’s store, he ran to the community center, and just when he had
given up hope and wandered back to her house, he noticed movement near the rear
shed. ‘Liza! Liza!’ he called. Liza burst through the doors and they embraced.”
“Why you cry?” the blond man asked
with a grin, now pushing the stroller. Such a question is hard to answer –
particularly with someone who does not speak your native language well. “Why?”
he asked again as he pointed his finger at my tear streaked face, at the drops
on my cheeks.
Jodi cried harder, Craig tensed.
Air escaped my lungs, but no comprehendible sound emerged.
Something, maybe the sound
emanating from my being, made the couple laugh harder.
“Did you not see the hair, the
ashes, the glasses, the toothbrushes…the remains of my people?” I screamed up
at them.
He shrugged and he turned to walk
on in the wake of my incredulous stare.
“But the Fridburgs were still in
the ghetto – so why were they happy?” asked my son curiously.
“They were happy because they had
each other.” I replied.
“And?”
Of course it was hard to
understand. How does one understand how simple togetherness was valuable? How
does one understand that simply being alive was a treasure?
I wished I could tell him that
Aaron and Liza lived happily ever after, but that would have been a lie. So, I
did what I only knew how to – I told him the truth.
Later, Aaron and Liza got an offer
from Tarek, but this time they had to sneak onto the roof of a train to escape
over the border. Tarek gave them stolen train worker overalls and told them
that they had to be at the depot at precisely 9:50 p.m. the next evening, where
he would lead them to a ladder to the roof of a boxcar.
As the train started to pull away,
Aaron and Tarek climbed the ladder quickly and lay on the roof of the boxcar.
They waited anxiously for Liza’s head to appear. “Where’s the girl?” asked
Tarek.
Aaron crawled to the edge and
looked over. He saw Liza clinging to the ladder as the train picked up speed.
She looked at him, wide-eyed, as the wind picked up. She clung to the frozen
metal, and Aaron reached down instinctively for her hand.
“Nooooooooooooooo!” he screamed as
his outstretched hand missed Liza’s by a fraction of a second. Their fingertips
met, then slid apart. Her head bounced once on the side of the track, and her
body, rolled and came to a stop at the bottom of a small embankment.
Motionless.
The man’s indifference to my tears,
to my emotions unhinged something in my heart. I screamed as he began to walk
away. Craig reached out to hold me back, but he was slow. As he screamed “No!”
my fist connected with the side of the man’s jaw, and he fell to the
gravel. He reached up and touched the crimson
that began to run from the corner of his mouth. The woman grabbed his arm and
they scurried away.
I looked down and saw a scarlet
tinged stone. I wrapped it in a tissue, and stuck it in my pocket. It matched
the stone in my heart.
My son sat at the edge of his
kitchen table bench. Hungrily he listened to how years later, I searched the Internet
for Aaron Fridburg, and found him. It just so happened that after war, he had come
to the U.S., first to New York and later to the Chicago area. I emailed him and
we met for coffee.”
“When Aaron told me his story,” I
explained, “I promised him I would help teach others about the dangers of hate.
So, together, Aaron and I spoke to groups of kids, to groups of adults.”
We told them about the memories we carried, we
told them about the grief, terror, love, hope. We told them about the anger,
the desperation, and the dreams. We told them about the peace and the
compassion and the future. These things we carried, like stones in our heart,
and we passed them on to others to feel their weight.
“Is that why you teach?” my son
asked. I stood, rustled his hair with my hand, and smiled.
After years of telling the story to
audiences in and around Chicago, Aaron’s life ended during a telling at an Elmhurst
Storytelling Festival. The unbelievable truth is that the final words of the
telling were, “Please remember this story and tell it
to others because I don't know how long I will be here.” And then death.
But the story did not really die,
because I carry the words, “Fridburg –
Lodz, Poland” in my journals, because I carry the heaviness in my heart,
and because I’ll always be reminded by a bloody stone, sitting in a small
drawer at the side of my bed.
The peace process has been predicated on Reconciliation followed by Resolution. Since 1993, the world assumed that Oslo would spark such reconciliation. The handshake on the lawn between Prime Minister Rabin and Yassir Arafat gave us hope that such reconciliation would one day occur. But again, today that dream has died.
