40,000 pairs of shoes from the victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Ask for Whom the Bell Tolls
After my father passed away
in a retirement home in Florida,
I notified his relatives left
in his village in Transylvania.
A cousin wrote back to say
they had the church bells rung
to announce my father’s death,
but for whom did the bells toll?
Hungarian Transylvania was given
to Romania after World War l
and Hungarians suddenly became
a minority on their own soil.
The village of Turterebes, where
Papa was born and raised amidst
rolling hills covered with vineyards,
was rapidly renamed Turulung
and became one of three villages
in a commune in Satu Mare county.
Through heavy taxation, Papa’s
family lost vineyards their father
died for in a steel mill in America,
their land to be shared equally
by all who lived in the commune.
Residents were forced to speak
Romanian until they forgot
Hungarian and native customs.
People claimed there was no one
poorer than a Hungarian in Romania.
Bad diets and worse health care
killed many in the commune,
including Papa’s fifty-year-old son.
When he died, Romanian coins
placed in his palms paid for his
forty-day passage to the afterlife
according to Romanian belief,
and the Hungarian tradition of
mourning portraits was no more.
In my heart, I still hear the bells
tolling for an ethnic minority whose
culture, language, and idyllic life
were wiped out in a single generation.
My Catholic Mother’s Jewish Sister
On a recent birthday visit, my daughter,
Laura, casually remarked: “Grandma told me
her Jewish sister died in a concentration
camp.”
I shook my head. “No, she was an only child,
Catholic for generations,” I insisted. “It’s
not
possible.”
Laura was only ten when she
heard this, and asked no more as she did
not know what a concentration camp was.
Yet Mama, dead now for forty-two years,
said sister. Not
foster sister. Jewish sister.
Why didn’t Mama tell me as well and why
didn’t Laura mention it for over forty years?
The answers must be in my family history.
My grandmother Mary could not marry
Mama’s father who neglected to tell her
he was already married and a father.
Mary had Mama baptized and left her
in a
Catholic orphanage in Budapest.
Escaping to America, Mary promised
to send for her child. A Catholic family
from a village on the Great Hungarian Plain
fostered Mama until her mother sent for her
when she was seventeen, but Mary, very ill,
died before Mama’s ship reached New York
so she never met either one of her parents.
But none of this told me how Mama had
a Jewish sister. The answer lay in a journal
Mama kept in Hungarian. In 1969,
forty-five years after she left Hungary,
Mama returned to visit her foster sister.
After the visit, she allowed two days
to visit the orphanage where she was left
in Budapest.
Nuns searched and found
her mother’s name in their log. Beside “father”
was his name and one word: zsido. Jewish.
Slowly, the older nuns remembered facts
of value.
In 1944, Germans sent 424,000
Hungarian Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz
in the space of eight weeks. Could Mama’s
father and his family have been among them?
The nuns told Mama to visit a synagogue
that kept records of what happened to Jews.
Mama found her father’s name and the fact
that he and his wife had died before the war,
but daughter Judit and her family were loaded
onto a cramped cattle car—intensely hot
hot in the summer, freezing in the winter,
without food or water, only a bucket latrine.
It took two days to reach the “Gate of Death”
at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they gassed
six thousand Jews and Roma every day
and killed over a million in five years.
Laura, who thought I knew, told me Mama
often cried at night during Laura’s sleepovers,
calling out “Judit” as she tossed and turned.
I remembered visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau
years ago and standing in front of a glass wall
displaying forty thousand pairs of worn shoes
thrown into gigantic piles. I felt tears stain
my cheeks, never dreaming some of the shoes
might have belonged to someone related to me.
Jewish friends told me many people who lost
relatives in the Holocaust often did not tell
others as it was too painful to even mention.
I finally found the answer to my question.
For all the relatives that I never met over
time—
both Catholic and Jewish, I offer this
blessing:
“May they all rest easy in sleep eternal.”
Where Did It Come From?
Did you ever wonder
where it came from,
that spark that ignites
ideas into fiery poems?
My immigrant mother,
allowed only six years
of schooling, read all
the time, and visited
a poet’s museum on
her return to Hungary
forty-five years later.
Did she hear his work
read aloud in school,
torching glowing embers?
Was the yearning there
for the rest of her life,
but extinguished by lack
of oxygen in opportunity?
Was the attraction for words
ingrained in genes from
a governess mother
or policeman father,
neither of whom she knew?
After reading my first poem,
she drove me to an auction
and bought me an antique
Underwood, giving me
the kindling to let words,
like flames, leap into the air.
Did my mother recognize
that her passion for words
had set other minds ablaze
and realize that she had passed
her inner fire on to me?
Margaret Duda's book of poetry entitled "I Come from
Immigrants" is published and will be available on Amazon, Kelsay Books,
and from Margaret the beginning of July. It will include 121 pages with
26 photos (some over 100 years old) and 38 narrative poems. She is the
recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination. Margaret has published
numerous short stories, one of which made the distinctive list of Best American
Short Stories, five books and numerous non-fiction articles, and is also
working on a novel set in a steel mill town in the Mon Valley.
Fascinating! A reminder of the churning movements of Europeans. To belong to a flag or country or faith was dangerous. To belong to Oneself is all.
ReplyDeleteThese are witness to such loss and pain that should never be forgotten. And so many from that horrible time find it too painful for speech.
ReplyDelete