Across Europe there were thousands of liberated survivors of the Holocaust - liberated, but not certain where to go. Liberated - free at last - but having had their loved ones, having had theirwives, husbands, fathers mothers, sons and daughters murdered by the Nazis. And not just the Nazis, but many local populations who gleefully joined into the opportunity to do their part in their own "final solution".
Liberation may have been seen by some as a time of rejoicing, but for most other survivors it was also a time of intense grief - grief for their loved ones they would never see again.
Trains - this time not cattle wagons - took them to temporary havens, where the survivors would try to get their lives together; where they would perhaps meet someone they knew, who also survived. Some would wonder for years, even decades, in the forlorn hope that one or some of their family had survived.
It was in such a haven that Raizele Kuszer met Godel Mydlarz, each having "lost" their family. Raizele was now well over thirty years old, and she knew she had to settle down - to try to start a new life. They married in a civil ceremony. Godel moved into where Raizele lived before the war with her parents, bringing with him a sewing machine so that he could continue his pre-war job as a shoe clicker in the boot trade.
Raizele's sister Rutele met another survivor, Icek Cytrynowski, whose wife and young son had also been exterminated. They too married, but had no desire to stay in Poland. It was soon after liberation that another pogrom against the Jews took place in Poland. There were also reports of marauding Soviet troops - not the elite who liberated the prisoners, but the relief troops - who raided trains transporting the survivors, looting and robbing the hapless victims. Ruth and Icek considered Poland a hostile country, and wanted to leave as soon as possible. They migrated to Melbourne, Australia, but not before erecting a small tombstone and makeshift grave for Rutele's and Raizele's father, Fiszel, who died of starvation in the Lodz Ghetto.
Less than three years after the war ended, Godel and Raizele had a son, Henry. This was my entry into Godel's and Raizele's shattered lives. I was born at Ulica Kamienna 7, where Raizele lived before the war - where now there was also Godel, and where only memories remained of the loving family Raizele had less than ten years ago.
I was born into a post-Holocaust world of anguish, grief and mourning. It was all around me - I was part of it. It was inevitable, inescapable and very understandable. As I write this, in my mid 60s, the 1970s which are over forty years ago, don't seem that far back. And yet to me, as a five year old, the war - the Holocaust - which had ended less than eight years before, seemed a lifetime away - another distant life my parents spoke about. "Before the war" was a term I heard again and again, a term which for me separated the world into two distinct periods of time.
As a child I learnt the normal words a child learns, gradually improving my vocabulary. At the same time, though, I learnt words such as "zagazowanie" - gassing, she was gassed, they were gassed; "gaz kamer" - gas chamber; "Jude lump" - one of the insults levelled at Jews by the German oppressors; "hende hoch!" - stick your hands up; "achtung!"... Without ever having experienced it myself, I knew the meaning of starvation. I knew what a delicacy an onion and potato peel found in the gutter could make.
My parents had their friends - the "lager friends" - fellow survivors, often from the same concentration camp. My mother had her good friends. There was Lola, there was Hanka, there were others, and there were my father's friends, often also in the shoe trade. Each had a story to tell - a story of survival and inevitably the loss of family and friends. I recall one of my father's friends as having a gaping hole in the rear of the side of his head - that was where he was shot by the Nazis and left to die...
From an early age, my mother told me about her life - about life before the war, and life during the war. She tearfully told me of her mameshi (mummy, in Yiddish) and one of her sisters being taken by the Nazis to the gas chambers, my mother knowing that they would never see each other again. For many years after the war, well into my childhood, my mother would tearfully say "Mameshi would have been x years old now, if she were alive..." Candles were lit on both mameshi's and tateshi's Yarzeits (anniversaries of their passing).
As a child I accepted all of this tragedy as normal. ...but I also wondered "when will my turn come? When will I have my Holocaust?" I thought it was inevitable that what had befallen my parents would in time befall me. It may have been the beginning of my own struggle...
Should my parents have kept this flood of "negative" information from me as a small child? More to the point is could they have kept it from me? It was only a short time after the war, and all my mother's and my father's friends were survivors - all with some sort of personal trauma; all with grief for the loss of family and friends. The overriding, and often only topic of conversation was the war. I certainly have no issue with my mother telling me of her life, and regret that I never got to find out more about my father's.