Rosh Hashanah at Grandma's Apartment

Here is a link to another video of Grandma that you can view on YouTube. Grandma talks about anti-Semitism after the war and the murder of her brother. Click HERE.

RELATED STORIES

After viewing the chapters below, you can read other stories related to My Grandparents' Holocaust HERE

SAMPLE CHAPTERS

CHAPTER 1—BROOKLYN:  THE LATE 1980s

When I was a child, all I knew about my grandparents’ Holocaust was that Poppy was the only person to survive from his family and Grandma and her cousin Helen were the only two to survive from theirs.

 

On the weekends that my parents left me with Grandma and Poppy, I was constantly investigating, hoping to uncover some locked away secret from their past.  I would dig up the high-powered aviation binoculars from beneath the pungent rush of mothball-scented sweaters and then perch myself on the cement terrace cradled above Brighton Beach.  I honed in on the half-naked beachgoers and the old-timers hording every last boardwalk bench; and when Poppy, who was distracted at the kitchen table calculating the costs of his business, wasn’t looking, I aimed the lenses through the window at him to try and magnify his inscrutable ways.

 

Other times I sat with Grandma in front of the television, watching channel six, building security.

 

“Grandma, is that someone who belongs in the building?”  I would ask.  She squinted at the television’s snowy image—Brooklyn cable.

 

Grandma was nervous.  “Oy,” she yelped as the lobby door opened.  “Oy,” again.  Like any Jewish grandmother, Hadasa Lederman felt comfort in anxiety.

 

“Oh don’t worry Grandma.  I think they used a key.”  We were like two spies who could stake out for hours—she looked for “intruders” as they passed through the lobby; I studied her.

 

Then there was the living room wall-unit.  The mahogany fixture served primarily as a display shelf for holiday cards.  Though during the off-season the enormous wooden piece was home to all of Grandma’s priceless never-to-be-used china and silver platters.  When she was busy in the kitchen wrapping sweet chopped meat into leaves of wet cabbage and Poppy was sifting through the bills, I snuck off to the one drawer in the wall-unit that constantly stole my attention.  It was the smallest compartment and it was solely dedicated to Poppy’s habits.  I gently placed my hand on the copper handle of rose petals, opened it, and reached into the drawer.  Buried beneath a grey electronic garage opener and packets of blue-backed Bicycle playing cards was that coveted, simple red and white box of cigarettes.

 

I removed the pack of Marlboros and slinked out to the terrace.  I inhaled huge puffs from the unlit cigarette, mimicking Poppy.  In between mouthfuls of air, I echoed his thick Yiddish accent.  The one he was convinced he did not have.  At seven years old, I knew I wanted to be in his shoes, or at least know where his footprints originated.

 

“Feh, feh,” Grandma kvetched when she found me with the cigarettes.  “Leon,” Hadasa yelled to her husband.  “Leon.”  Not now, said his flapping hand; he must have had dozens of numbers placed in his mathematical mind.  “See what Noiach does cause of you.  Cut it out with the smoking.”  Turning back to me, “this is no good tatehla.  Oye broch.  Oy gevalt,” she sighed nervously.  “Here.  Come.  We’ll eat instead.”

 

But the only thing I truly hungered for were the stories behind those faint, haphazard vein-colored digits tattooed forever on Poppy and Grandma’s arms.

 

“Not now tatehla,” Poppy said whenever I asked him about the war.  He counted the deck of cards onto the plastic tablecloth, making certain there were fifty-two.  He glanced up at me as the cards snapped like a whip off the top of the deck.  His wrinkled dimples and quick smile let me know it was alright to ask the question, but informed me that I would never get an answer.  “We play.”

 

“Not now tatehla,” Grandma said.  “You want more lokshun?”  Uninterested in my answer, she ladled another giant spoonful of long white noodles into the bowl of yellow broth and parsley bits.  Unlike the old adage, curiosity killed the cat, Grandma subscribed to the saying kill curiosity, boredom, and even excitement with more food.

 

If I ever did manage to whittle out a story, what I received was Grandma’s PG-version of the Holocaust.

 

“There was this girl in my barracks who took my bowl—this is the bowl we ate and drank out of.  Everything—and one night she went to the bathroom in it.  Why?”  she smartly asked.  If she didn’t, she would have had to ignore another one of my endless questions or finally delve deeper into that crypt of Holocaust secrets.  “Because she didn’t know what she was doing.  They treated us so bad.  What did I do?  I had to eat from the bowl.  Otherwise I wouldn’t eat.”  Grandma paused for a moment, walked to the kitchen, and then returned.  “Here tateh sheine.  Eat,” she said, handing me a plate with a large grey lump of gefilte fish, which looked like a child’s organ, and smearing a fuzzy purple blob of horseradish on top.

 

“Grandma, can you tell me…”

 

 “Eat, tatehla.  Eat.” 

 

When my questions remained unanswered, I went into my grandparents’ bedroom and gazed at Grandma’s family portrait, which hung above the light switch like a page torn from an obituary.  Thirty-something people—babies, adults, little brothers—all murdered.  Thirty-something stories that all began and ended the same way.

 

“What do you want I should say?  That’s a cousin, an uncle, mine brother.  Dead, dead, dead.  There were more at the house that day, but they couldn’t fit in the picture.  They’re all dead,” Grandma said.

 

I read the smiles of my exterminated relatives like one reads the untimely dates etched into tombstones.  They were gathered around the Seder table in my great-great grandfather’s home.  It was a family tree chopped down at the base.  Grandma was the last little branch clinging to what was left of the stump.  Sitting at the head of the table were her parents, David and Chana.  Her older brother, Shmuel, was well dressed and off to the right.  Grandma’s pudgy arm popped out from a white-collared black dress.  She was clutching the arm of her youngest brother, Shama, a cute, disheveled child who looked out of breath, probably from playing in the yard with cousins moments earlier.  His collar was unkempt, his hat tilted too far off his tangled hair.  My brother Jake looked like his reincarnate. 

 

Although Grandma appeared happy in the photograph, something in her nervous expression foreshadowed it all. 

 

She was the only one in the picture whose story ended differently.  I was determined to uproot those memories.

 

 

When my father and his sister, my Aunt Anne, were children, Holocaust stories were like three meals a day.  With Holocaust indigestion, they went to bed and awoke an hour later from another nightmare.  The haunting dreams stopped only when Leon and Hadasa buried the stories from their children. 

 

Cousin Helen’s eldest daughter, Alice, who was around my father’s age, made it further through life stomaching Holocaust stories.  For eighteen years, she fed that inquisitive sickness with stories of familial genocide.  One afternoon in the late 1960s, Alice visited a Holocaust exhibit in the Huntington Hartford Museum at Columbus Circle.  She walked through the valleys of enlarged photographs mounted to the walls.  Each still-frame echoed the aura of liberation:  fear, confusion, and nothingness.  There was one photograph, however, that liberated Alice from her desire to unbury her parents’ genocide.  On the wall hung a pile of dead naked bodies, their pallid skin dripped from their bones like soggy parchment.  They were stacked like a bonfire before those that survived, who were just as emaciated.  She turned from the image as her eyes welled up; Alice no longer hungered for her parents’ Holocaust stories.

 

And it went like that.  My grandparents did all that they could to survive the camps and the next generation did all they could to block it out.

 

So my generation grew up protected from the Holocaust.  Poppy and Grandma kept their past as mysterious as the permanence of the green ink tracing down their arms. 

 

Yet, if someone asked me when I was a boy, “tell me something about yourself,” my grandparents’ story, which I knew almost nothing of, was ingrained in my identity.

 

“My grandparents survived the Holocaust,” I managed to squeeze into almost any conversation.

 

If Poppy and Grandma were forever forced to bear those numbers tattooed on their arms, I was determined to tattoo the Holocaust into everyone’s memory.  Innocuous facts in history classes and works of literature gently brushed over my grandparents’ Holocaust—the genocide of my people—but they never quenched my desire to uncover the horrors Hadasa and Leon Lederman kept buried in their minds.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2—SUPER POPPY AND HIS SIDEKICK THE MESHUGGE, LOVING GRANDMA

 Years later, on a visit to the Jewish Museum in New York City, I watched proudly as Captain America, in the premier issue, smashed his fist through Hitler’s face, contorting the murderer’s smug mien like fingers kneading dough.  Useless Nazi bullets ricocheted off of his shield of stars and stripes.  As Hitler fell across the page, he appeared for once defeated.  I could imagine Captain America’s red-gloved fist to be my own.  (The fantasy of every grandchild of Holocaust survivors).

 

Even Superman, the Man of Steel, bent Nazi cannons on the cover of the 44^th issue of Action Comics.  He was hardly fazed by the pebble-sized ammunition aimed at his massive frame.  Mr. faster-than-a-speeding-bullet was Moses, the Jew who rescued his people from the malevolent Pharaoh, in disguise.  Both were cast off by their parents, becoming saviors of their people—one for Earthlings and the other for the slaves in Egypt.  Even Superman’s Kryptonian name Kal El means “all that is good” in Hebrew.  On every wall of the museum, superheroes, from the Human Torch to Sub Mariner, combated Nazis.

 

It was a valiant attempt by American Jewish comic book artists and writers to fight the Nazi regime even though it was with exploding onomatopoeias and plotting battles on grey-stained palettes.  The elected captain of America, Roosevelt, was indifferent to the atrocities.  My family died because superhero cartoons were the only ones trying to save their lives. 

 

And yet many superheroes were murdered in Auschwitz and Majdanek and Treblinka and every other camp and ghetto and street corner in Europe.  The few that survived, the heroes in my family, kept the Holocaust inked only in the tombs of memory, just as a superhero cloaks their secret identity.

 

***

 

“Make a muscle,” I demanded of Poppy when the wrestling match on television was in full swing.  We sat in the guest room indulging in the fantasy world of the World Wrestling Federation.  It was our bond.  We looked on in amazement as these phony supermen body slammed opponents from the top rope.  Poppy sat on the grey couch with one leg tucked under the other.  He wore his casual tan pants and a white cotton v-neck T-shirt, which allowed thin wisps of chest hair to squiggle out.  We both watched as this fictitious charade-in-tights kept our minds at bay.

 

Poppy’s face was handsome, but rough to the touch.  Kisses felt like sandpaper.  His nose was a thick pyramid.  The etches that his dimples once made were now engraved ever so gently into his skin.  Under his light white bristle, regardless of the situation, there was a smile.  More than a smile, it was a smirk; the same long grin that stretches across the face of a lion.  And when that leering mouth tired, there seemed to be a quaint happiness in those young blue eyes that was able to hide the violence of memory.

 

“Poppy’s not weak, tateh sheine,” he would say, making the most powerful balled-up bicep.  I held on to it with both hands, trying to crush my hero’s stone appendage.  He was like Popeye—short, powerful, a smoker with a deep scratchy voice—but with a Yiddish accent.  “Kine hora,” he affectionately announced, complimenting my best effort.

 

“Hey Poppy, did you ever battle any Nazis?”

 

“They couldn’t beat your Poppy.”  That was the length of a good response.           

 

Since I couldn’t beat Poppy either, I attacked him where he was weak, mainly flipping up his combed-over white hair.  Quickly, he reset the white flap to its unnatural position and prepared himself to scold me.  But as soon as we made eye contact, he smiled.

 

“Poppy loves you, sheine yingle.” 

 

When we weren’t sitting around the television room, we were dealing out cards for our twentieth hand of Kalookie or Casino. 

 

“I win again,” I announced.  Poppy shuffled the pile of worn out cards and smiled.  “Let’s play another game of Casino,” I challenged arrogantly.  “Grandma, guess who won again?”

“Ooh, you’re so smart Noiach.  You wanta take a break to eat.”

 

It was a game of algebra and card counting.  I could add fine, but I could never keep track of all the cards splayed in front of me.  Yet, I always won.  Poppy, with the mind of a mathematician and the skill of a card counting extraordinaire, never won.  I thought I was a genius.  Eventually, I learned otherwise.

 

“Okay Noiach, so you make five spots in your head.  Aces, kings, queens, jacks, tens.  You also remember spades.  Then you count them.  One of something.  Two of something.  Up to four,” Poppy explained.  And as I learned to count cards through confusion and accents, I scratched at the slight facial hair that began to bud on my chin as my winning percentage plummeted.  At first I couldn’t comprehend how improving in math and developing strategy could negatively effect my win to loss ratio.  Then again, it took awhile to also understand why I always won that last game.

 

“Noiach.  Take.  Get something nice sheine yingle,” Poppy said as he handed me a combination of bills he sliced off from the wad of cash he kept in his pants pocket.  He worked hard in America and he wanted the best for his family.  “Poppy loves you,” he said, as I hesitated to take the money.

 

“Poppy loves you,” was his favorite line.  It was never weird in the tiny family he created, but unheard of between male relatives on my mom’s side.  Yet our phone conversations were not much longer than “How are you tatehla?” and “You know Poppy loves you.” 

 

“I’m good Poppy.  So how have you…”

 

“Noiach,” Grandma interrupted, having been handed the phone before I could inquire about his life.  “What’s mommy cooking for dinner?”

 

When the entire family gathered at my grandparents' apartment it was comfortable chaos.  There was my father Sam, mother Paula, brother Jake, Grandma Hadasa, Aunt Anne and her two daughters, Elyse and Shari.  But Leon Lederman was the glue.

 

During holidays the Lederman clan sat around the dining room table, surrounded by trays of Grandma’s cooking, and argued.  “Tax deferred annuity is a must.”  “When I’m ready.”  “When she’s ready.”  Interrupted only by the passing of dishes or Jake’s mischief.

 

“Oy,” Grandma shrieked as she delivered the second platter of kreplach for the soup.  “Meshugge,” she yelled.  My brother, who was four years younger than me, spent dinners crawling along the ocean of blue carpet beneath the table, pulling at legs and shoes, avoiding the Jewish feast.  “You’re seven years old now tateh sheine; too old for this meshugas,” Grandma yelled, but Jake retreated beneath the table.  “Sit like a mensch.”  There was no time to see if her words prodded him from below, she was right back to business.

 

Grandma turned the kitchen into a one-woman factory.  Manning the stove in her floral print housedress, the loose skin of her arms draped and wobbled like a rooster’s wattle as she stirred, mixed, and flipped.  Somehow, her carefully permed hair would hold strong against the humidity in the kitchen (and withhold the insistency of her grandsons’ hands, since my brother and I were infatuated with compressing her hair like a spring).  From the low clinks of pots and pans Hadasa produced the most wonderfully orchestrated kvetching.

 

“I do all this cooking and nobody is eating.”  Though nobody could argue with mouths full of food.

 

When the gefilte fish was served, my father would think back to his first pet.

 

“When I was six, I came home and saw a carp swimming in the bathtub.  I was so excited.  I thought it was my new pet.  I quickly changed into my bathing suit,” he smiled and paused, “only to find Grandma scaling it in the kitchen.”

 

If the dinner table wasn’t noisy enough, the non-verbal din created its own fiasco:  laughing, greptzing from seltzer, sneezing.  Grandma coached us through the feast as though it was an eating contest, so there was choking and coughing too.  It was a true family chorus.

 

“Up, up, up,” Grandma instructed the cougher.  She was already in mid-sprint from the kitchen.  The victim (at least that’s how Grandma treated them) held their arms up above their head as though they were being robbed and then whack, whack, whack went Grandma’s hand, paddling the back of the cougher.  If she heard a sneeze she provided so many instructions that it seemed as if sneezing required a manual.  “Gezunt heit.  Quick tatehla pull your ear.  Oye vecht.  Oye broch.  Do it again.”  I winced at bodily functions and awaited the pulls and zetzes.  I even half-expected Grandma’s hand to thump my spine when I asked for a dish, since half of them began with coughing, phlegm-producing sounds—knishes, kishka, kougle, kreplach, kasha, kompot, cake, challah.

 

“Cholent please.”

 

“Quick, pull your ear.”

 

It was this culture that certainly had me explaining myself to the elementary school principal on a few occasions.  I was Pavlov’s dog.  My hand cracked against backs at the sound of a cough and fingers went for ears as faces hinted at a sneeze. 

 

Empty plates on Grandma’s table signaled more food.  She never missed a beat.  It was as though she could hear the scraping of a fork against a bare plate like a dog perking up for that nearly silent high-pitched whistle. 

 

Scrape, scrape, BAM. 

 

There she was with a caldron of kreplach or matzos balls to shovel onto your feeding trough.  Grandma would confuse us with paradoxical language “Are you full?  Eat.”  She even managed to swoop in when something spilled, armed with her shamte.  Drip “oy,” drip “oy.” 

 

But as the family devoured her cooking and continued arguing, she never joined us.  Never.  Auschwitz and Majdanek, it seemed, trained Grandma to never break from her work.

 

Poppy just sat at the head of the table and smiled.

 

His sisters were murdered.  His mother was murdered.  His father murdered.  Cousins.  Aunts.  Uncles.  Grandparents.  Friends.  Neighbors.  Murdered six million times.  But here in front of him, no matter how chaotic we all were and how much innocence was stripped from his youth, he found peace every single holiday around that dining room table.  He would grin that lion smile all through dinner, reaching a hand out every few bites to touch his nearest grandchild (and all the grandchildren wanted to sit near him), and then he would retire to the television in the guest room, when the pandemonium simmered down.

 

But on the last day of 1999, when I was eighteen years old, we buried Poppy with our hands in a maze of Jews.  I felt like I was beleaguered by six million graves.  I would never again be able to hear “Poppy loves you sheine yingle” or say, “make a muscle” or be told “not now” when I wanted to know his story about living through dying.

 

His death became the end of that family.  My brother stopped crawling on the floor.  My cousins stopped talking to my aunt and Grandma for a number of years.  And Grandma lost her will to go on, wishing to join her husband every day, though her concentration-camp-trained body would not allow her this.  Instead she tried her best to wither away at the dining room table where Poppy and I once played cards.  Around her neck she wore a gold plate tattooed with an image of her deceased husband. His white hair wrapped around his head like a halo.  His blue eyes were precious stones that beamed brighter than the gold.  It seemed as though he was always present.

 

Yet I ventured into the next millennium, moving further and further away from Poppy.  Each handful of soil I placed on that grave, each day that passed, felt as though I was burying the Holocaust too.

 

But the curiosity from my youth resided in me like tremors in the ground after an earthquake.  My grandparents’ Holocaust beckoned me to finish digging it up.

 

“Hey dad,” I said from a phone booth in Poland when I was off traveling the world after college from 2003 to 2004.  “I think I found something important…”

 

“I can’t wait to see it,” he said at the end of our conversation. 

 

When I returned home, my aunt called.  “Noah.  Daddy told me what you discovered, maybe you want to take a look at the tapes.”  From the dusty reaches of her closet, she had exhumed hours of testimonial videotapes my grandparents had recorded years ago with Steven Speilberg’s Shoah Foundation—a project to document the stories of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust.

 

I watched the tapes of my grandparents as they revealed a small sampling of secrets.  I felt as though I had uncovered a fake wall in my own bedroom that led to some alternate universe.  After the tapes ended, I stared down at my notepad full of questions.  I realized how little I knew about Poppy and Grandma's Holocaust, and how others, those with no personal stake in my people's tragedy, were bound to let it slip from memory.  In my high school classroom I witnessed this disconnect with my students, descendants of slaves and victims of murderous regimes.

 

“Does anyone know what the Holocaust was?”  We were about to begin Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night.  After a few moments of silence, one student raised his hand.

 

“That Jewish thing, right?”  He was the only one in the entire class that came close.

 

“Have any of you heard of Darfur?”

 

I gazed back into a sea of blank stares.

 

It was then that I made a promise to revive the two stories that my grandparents had allowed to disintegrate like ashes.  With a notepad and an arsenal of questions, I joined Grandma at the kitchen table to try once more to open up the Holocaust vault.

EXCERPTED FROM CHAPTER 6—GOD AND OTWOCK

 

“Hadasa, I want you should have something,” her mother Chana said one evening as she pulled a small cloth from her pocket.  She unwrapped the torn piece of fabric to reveal a small treasure chest.

 

“Mommy, it’s your jewelry.  You keep it.”

 

“No.  This should be yours.  Keep it safe,” Chana said, folding the fabric as though the glimmering gold and silver would lead the Polish blackmailers to their hiding place.  Chana handed Hadasa the cheerless rag.  She pressed it to her heart and then placed the jewelry—elegant rings, a gold watch, an intricate bracelet, and her mother’s marriage band—into her pocket.  Hadasa remembered when she and her mother prepared the cholent for the Sabbath, when the rings would capture the flame’s warming reflection burbling beneath the caldron.

 

On the second day of Sukkoth of 1942, Hadasa and the others hiding in the barn attic davened.  All wrongdoings were atoned for a week earlier during Yom Kippur and in this barn, isolated from the world, they were sinless.

 

Hadasa rummaged through thoughts for the beautiful prayers she once sang in synagogue.  She silently chanted each verse beside the attic’s clandestine congregation.  Hadasa found her grandfather in memory and accompanied him on the Bima; his soothing baritone echoed before the ark of the Torah in a distant, peaceful time.

 

My people are good people.  Please God, make this stop.

 

Suddenly, a gang of Ukrainian soldiers, led to the refuge by Poles, burst in.  If the Nazis were murderous and calculated, the Ukrainians were their sadistic sidekicks.

 

Chana quickly pushed her daughter into the corner.  Hadasa grabbed at a blanket by her feet and pulled it over her shaking body.  Beneath the woolly darkness, she heard screaming.  The Ukrainians shouted and laughed.

 

The cloak was suffocating and Hadasa could not conceive a life without her mother.  She ripped the blanket away only to watch as the Ukrainian soldier pushed her father and then mother from the opening in the barn attic to the ground below.

 

“No,” Hadasa screamed and ran to the square portal from which her parents were thrown.

 

A hand clenched her neck.  She felt the softness of her windpipe collapse.  But then the hand let go and she crashed against and tumbled down the slanted roof.  The pain disappeared for an instant as her body felt separated from the world.  She slammed against the dirt.  Hadasa wanted to run as she watched the others lift their broken bodies from off the ground, but she was unable to move.  The taste of blood mixed with the soil.  Shots were fired.  The others dropped.

 

The Ukrainians surrounded her father.

 

“Hadasa,” Chana screamed as they grasped hands.  Chana pulled at Hadasa, but the ground was like quicksand.  Their eyes met and in that instant, a nightmare eternalized.  One bullet echoed.

 

Chana collapsed.  Hadasa was trapped in her mother’s grasp, which grew taut like a knot.

 

 

 

EXCERPTED FROM CHAPTER 8—KARCZEW: 1942

 

One Nazi sauntered over to a cluster of helpless victims.  Women clung to their children, fathers shifted to block their families from the predatory eyes of this drunken German.  You, his finger said.  The victim rose from the line and walked over to the Nazi who was holding a long black truncheon at his side.  When the Jewish man stopped the German thrashed him with the wooden club until his body dropped to the ground as though he had instantly vanished and all that was left was a pile of clothes. With each hit, those clothes bled and bled and bled until the Nazi ambled back to where he had left his cigarettes and beer.

 

By the afternoon, after the sun spent the day pummeling the eight thousand Jews in the Umschlagplatz, the cattle cars arrived to swallow them up.  Leon watched from his hiding place.  Cries and pleas were muffled as the heavy wooden doors slammed shut on the eight thousand.  The Nazis responded with gunfire and doused those inside with lime.  Truncheons unleashed on those that refused to hand over their baggage.  They were bloodied, stripped of their possessions, and in the end, stuffed into the wagons just the same.

 

“I’m going,” Leon said and ignored whatever appeals his friends offered.  He snuck down to the long chain of wagons and was pushed into one of the cattle cars with nearly one hundred and twenty other Jews.  Inside there was enough space for maybe a few cows, not one hundred and twenty people.

 

When the trains were filled beyond capacity, the remaining four thousand Otwock Jews were marched off into the woods and executed.  Their gold teeth were removed and their bodies were shoved into the pits that they dug beforehand.

 

Otwock was now completely Polish.  Its sole inhabitants wielded axes and hacked down doors to homes once owned by Jews, ravaging through the last belongings of their former neighbors who were hours from the gas chambers.  The Polish children and their mothers played and splashed in the gentle currents of the Swider, while others tongued their ice cream along the riverbank.  The street was littered with broken furniture and dead bodies.

 

By nightfall, the train crawled out of the station. 

 

“Chana.  Esther.  Mama,” Leon shouted in vain.

 

The sappy smell of pine combs curling off the winds from the river and the intoxicating aromas of acacia were masked in the cattle car by diarrhea.  The locomotive was a dark and crowded tomb.  Now and again the train stopped and the doors slid open.  Gunfire exploded.  The doors closed and the train crept forward again.  Sometimes the doors would not open; the bullets entered through the openings above.

 

Leon slinked through the mass of bodies to the bars on the window.  He reached down to his waist and carefully removed a long sliver of wire that he had worn like a belt.  Leon coiled the wire around his left hand and slipped the wire through the barred window overhead.  Wrapping it tightly around his other hand, he dragged the thin cord back and forth against one bar for hours. 

 

The heat, even at night, was unbearable.  Thirst poured through the wagon.  Bodies slumped against one another.  There was no room to fall.  Even the dead stood. 

 

Leon noticed that the wire cutting through his palms was also cutting through the cage; but the train was nearing Treblinka.  The sobs and prayers intensified.  Others buried faith right there in that cattle car.

 

Then the bar gave out. 

 

He looked around the cattle car once more for his family, but the darkness consumed everything. 

 

As quickly as his tired arms allowed, Leon tied the cord back around his waist, hoisted his frail frame up through the hole, and slithered halfway through the opening.  Every vein in his arm pumped violently.  His entire body shook.  Draped from the window of the cattle car, ten feet from the moving ground, Leon felt unequipped to handle the fall.  If the drop did not end his life, the machine gunner atop the roof could.  But entering Treblinka was certain death.  This moment, hanging from the cattle car like a blanket drying, he at least controlled.  Leon inched the rest of his body through and in one motion launched himself from the cattle car, tumbling into the night. 

 

In a Polish field somewhere between Otwock and Treblinka, Leon Lederman watched as the train crept toward the gas chambers with his mother, father, and four sisters inside.

 

Life had taken a new purpose—some way, there would be vengeance.  There was no choice now but to return to Karczew.  He was seventeen years of age.

 

Questions

Since beginning the research for my book, my Grandma, Hadasa Lederman, has been more willing to speak about the Holocaust than she was when I was younger. Not everyone has the same access to survivors these days and I realize how lucky I am to have her in my life.

If any readers have specific questions regarding my Grandma's experience, I would be happy to answer them on this blog or relay the questions to her to learn the answers.

If you would like updates on Hadasa Lederman or if you are interested in reading excerpts from the book and related essays, check back occasionally, join as a follower, or sign up to receive posts (all at the top of the blog page, on the left side of the screen).