Ways and Means

I got some criticism for being "dark" and negative in my German posts, but I'm afraid that that is how I feel or felt. Writing about it "lances the boil" and lets the wound I've been carrying heal.
I don't want to be like my Mom, who in her last years suffered from dementia. She often cried about her lost family and blamed herself for "taking her ass in two hands and running" (said in Yiddish).

Mom never or rarely talked about her escape - I never knew she carried so much guilt and I wondered at her absence of pain. Although, she was frantic in 1942 and had the Red Cross searching for her family. I still have the paperwork. She had been very, very close to her Mother and sister, Toni.

Toni was about 10 years older than Mom (who was the youngest of six) and Toni "mothered" Mom more than her Mother did from what she said.

Toni and Mom went every where together except school and, until her Father died, to shul. For some reason my grandfather favored Mom more than his other girls and took her with him every day to the temple. She learned to read Hebrew before Polish - and I don't think she used much Polish. So Yiddish would have been her daily language.

They lived in a "schetl" in Poland called "Nova Sanch". My Polish neighbors tell me it is a lovely little town - a tourist destination. Google tells me that the couple of hundred Jews who lived there were "liquidated" in 1942.

Mom left school around 14 - she had been bullied a lot and, without her sister at her side, felt isolated and lost. She and Toni then did a 2 or 3 years "internship" with a milliner who "fired" them as soon as they completed their time with her.

Mom's older sister, Helen, had "run away from home" and joined the Yiddish theatre. Mom didn't really know her as she was just a little thing when this happened. Helen died in Germany somewhere - in childbirth. No mention of a husband.

At some point my uncles left Poland and went to Germany. They set up a business together.
Uncle Sidney was trained as a tailor so he was the creative energy of the business. Uncle Alfred was the "salesman" - a good talker and a friendly outgoing personality - Mom's favorite brother.
Uncle Heini was the silent type but he was the bookeeper and the paper manager. They seemed to work well together but ended up breaking up at some point with bitterness and recriminations that lasted their whole lives.

My Uncle Alfred ended up in Chile and developed a big clothing business there which I think my cousin, Albert, still runs.

My Mother, Toni and my Grandmother decided that Poland was not where they wanted to stay.
I think there was no work and lots of hostility and their "men" were in Germany and so no protection.

So off they went.

In Germany they lived with one of the brothers - or maybe all of them - for a while. At some Point Uncle Heini married a non-Jew, Wally and they had Wolfgang. Alfred and Erna married on the cusp of their escape out of Germany. I don't know when Sidney married Helen but I'm betting she was part of the reason they all broke up. She could make a lot of trouble out of nothing and was not well accepted into the family. She came from Russia - wealthy at one point and never let anyone forget it.

Mom and Toni traveled about Berlin as a pair and often went to a beer garden to meet Jewish men. My Dad met my Mom there and talked her into dating him "withour your sister along".
It was a family joke for years, but not to Toni. When Mom married Dad she wouldn't talk to Mom for a year - after all, she was the older sister and was supposed to marry first but Mom was already 27 and Toni would have been 37 so how long could they wait?

Dad helped Mom get "legal" in Germany. I guess he was a kid of the streets and knew all kinds of ways to get things done. Mom talked of going to some house in another district and spending the night there and then, in the morning filling out some paperwork and Viola - she was German.

When Mom and I were getting ready to leave Germany in 1939 - my Grandmother and Toni and Toni's husband, Selig (who always seemed to "just arrive" in the story) decided to go back to Poland and I think they went to Tarnow. Google will tell you the same story - in 1942 all the Jews there were '"liquidated".

Sorry to be so "down", Carol, but that's the story - and we'll never know exactly how my Polish family died.

What I had intended to write about was my Mom's incredible ability to find and acquire things.
I wish I could remember the name the military gave to guys like that but, if you needed something, Mom could find it - even in the darkest rural corner of England.

Next "post" - I promise.