Tuesday, January 27, 2015

"The Weight of Stone": On the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz...

The story below was published in the 2013 New Scriptor - a collection of writings by Illinois Educators. Many of you have read it, but I thought it appropriate to repost it on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Years ago, I made a promise to 2 survivor friends of mine, now deceased, to continue to teach about the Holocaust and to tell their story. The names are changed here, but I wrote this in their honor. I will never forget...

The Weight of Stone


“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.