Marion

I stand abruptly and flee, bumping into a few chairs as I reach the bathroom just in the nick of time. Thankfully, I’d grabbed my coat and purse, and after a moment of gagging in the ladies’ room, and only regurgitating a bit of bile, I gaze in the mirror. After I wipe my mouth and examine the white and gray hair growth around the part in my hair I shake my head and frown. Am I a coward?

I had just listened to a woman, maybe in her fifties, probably ten years younger than me, describe how she had sometimes touched the numbers that the Nazis had tattooed onto her grandmother’s forearm. Her grandmother, no longer alive, had never wanted the tattoo removed because it was part of her past—but hearing about her survivor resolve was what had forced my quick exit. My heart beat faster en route to the restroom, as I thought about how my own grandmother had perished, along with my grandfather, each in a different concentration camp, thus dying terribly alone. Of course, I don’t resent that woman for having her grandmother while she was growing up. It’s good that her grandmother, like so many relatives of the people seated there with me at the Holocaust descendants group meeting, had escaped, but the enduring evidence that woman had mentioned is what upset me the most: those tattooed numbers. They’d rekindled the memory not only of my grandparents but of someone akin to them: Marion and the small, inked digits on her pale arm. That vision has stayed with me ever since that day, over fifty years ago, with all that these numbers implied. The deleterious wounds they represented, and my own wounds from contemplating the horror this numbered branding had induced.

*

Although, from an early age, I’d always known that they existed, I examined Marion’s tattooed numbers only once, when I was in seventh grade. It was a blustery Sunday in March, and we listened to the rustling branches outside the kitchen windows at our friends’ Boston home. March signaled spring, when snow boots and thick blankets were finally tucked away and the breezy conditions became almost bearable, perhaps adding a combination of anticipation and optimism to the day.

Marion Kluger, a woman in her thirties with long red hair, wore a short-sleeved blouse that day; and as we sat at the kitchen table, I glanced discreetly at the stretch of her skin where her shawl had slipped away, revealing the small, faded numbers tattooed across her forearm. Marion’s brown eyes, as they did so often, looked vacant, expressionless, and distant. Did she notice that I stared at her tattoo? For all my curiosity, having seen her on Sundays for many of my early years, at age twelve I barely knew Marion. She’d never addressed me directly, and rarely spoke at all. So how could I guess whether she’d notice a young girl wondering over the violent evidence still emblazoned on her arm, or whether she would mind?

Earlier that Sunday in the late 1960s, I had planned to stay home, rather than accompany my parents to visit their best friends, the Feinbergs, who usually had Marion with them at their house. For years I’d been going with my parents on those Sunday trips to Boston, twenty-five miles from our home in Brockton. But by seventh grade I wasn’t scared anymore to stay home alone; so I had tentatively decided to hang out and watch reruns. Hogan’s Heroes made WW II episodes funny, as opposed to the conversations I’d hear at the homes of our family’s friends. Yet once I remembered that my mother had baked her special, flourless, chocolate torte to celebrate all the March birthdays in our two families—Mendel Feinberg’s, my mother’s, and my own—I changed my mind. That cake sealed the deal. I suppose I also decided to join them, though perhaps subconsciously, because I knew because I belonged to this tribe of people who considered themselves strong and heroic.

As they did on all Sundays, they recounted the arduous journeys they’d experienced fleeing the Nazis, and the memories of their loved ones lost or murdered in the ovens, including my father’s mother, my grandmother, Emilie. At the Feinbergs’, the oral history I heard made me understand early the impact of the war—the one that this group, including my parents, had survived—and how they comforted one another through reliving their trauma.

“We had to beg for bits of bread,” Annalise Feinberg said on one such occasion. Each time she’d tell a story like this, she described the impoverished conditions in Shanghai, where she, her husband, his mother, and other Jews had been granted asylum. At other times, I heard Mr. and Mrs. Wolfe explain how they’d arrived in Cuba, sick and heartbroken. In my father’s case, whenever he related a few details about his experiences, he still seemed haunted. “The bridge blew up,” he explained. “Only moments before I crossed it. I trembled from the sound of the explosion and witnessed the billowing smoke. I got back on my stolen bicycle and rode quickly past the walkers. We headed for southern France, hoping for safety. People begged for my bike, money, and food but I couldn’t help them.”

I’d never seen Dad ride a bike. But he’d taught me to ride when I was in first grade, running next to me while I pedaled, which was also the only time I saw him run. I propelled the old adult-sized, hand-me-down Raleigh by standing on the pedals pumping my legs harder and harder. Dad, in his buttoned-down shirt tucked into dress pants, ran faster, holding the seat so I wouldn’t topple over. When I stopped, we took deep breaths and smiled, our matching blue eyes reflecting love. I think now that his joyfulness in seeing me master bicycle riding was pure, and that he wasn’t thinking about his bicycle journey in France, pedaling for days on end, even if those other images likely never left him.

On Sundays in Boston at our friends’ home, the adults never tired of relating their near misses, like Dad’s bicycle tale. But they didn’t sulk; instead, they bolstered each other, speaking loudly in German, which I understood, even if at times I wished I didn’t. On Monday, they’d go back to being quiet, new Americans, having waited years and sacrificed much to be granted U.S. citizenship.

Even so, there were people like Marion, who’d had it worse. Her situation nearly silenced them, or at least caused the adults to speak in hushed tones. Marion had suffered greatly, surviving the most un-survivable camps. “She was treated abhorrently,” my mother murmured. “Unthinkable.”

“One of the unfortunates,” Annalise agreed, as people’s heads drooped, sighs echoing.

Marion sat quietly on the periphery, immune to their whispers, her shawl wrapped around her tightly. Bound snugly around me, too, was something like a thick, imaginary cloth, conjured up by the Sunday talks. My pretend, uncomfortable veil made me respect the suffering I was witness to. To not forget. Named for my grandmother, I never stopped grieving the unfairness of her death in Auschwitz. Yet I often tried to ditch the veil as best I could and think instead about my friends’ American families, about how they discussed the Vietnam War and the new shopping mall in Brockton, bringing me back to the present. But then, without warning, that veil would drop over me again, and I’d veer back to Holocaust stories and Marion’s plight. What would I do if I’d been treated that way—and what did “that way” mean, anyway? What did “abhorrently” mean, given all the terrible crimes I had heard about, like shooting, starvation and gassing?

These questions haunted me, even at the strangest times, like at celebrations or time with friends. Yet on that Sunday, when we banged the car doors shut and left our home for the Feinbergs, I glanced out the window at the mostly leafless, yet reawakening trees lining the highway. Mom took the wheel, racing our boxy, sky-blue Rambler to Boston’s Brighton neighborhood. “Slow down,” my dad always warned, and I’d cringe, irritated by my parents, and with myself for being nearly thirteen, and so far from a license of my own, and trapped in the back seat. My mother barely acknowledged my father’s warning comments, and slowed down only to appreciate the magnificent cityscape, with its Prudential Tower, the pride of Boston.

Exiting the car that Sunday, we were welcomed by the forsythia gracing the Feinberg front yard and daffodil stems poking through the crusty soil. Soon their bugles would trumpet spring. Mendel’s parents, Annalise and Martin, owned a house on a postage stamp lot with a garage and garden in the back. Martin, who drove a Boston taxi at night, had fixed up the house, constructing a photography studio in the basement. In contrast, we lived in a small, rented apartment, and my father, pensive and serious, worked as an accountant in a garment factory, and was helpless with tools. Nevertheless, I felt grateful that our vehicle wasn’t a checkered cab like Martin’s.

We climbed the concrete stairs to the front porch, and I noticed again that their doorframe lacked a mezuzah to mark it as Jewish home. Once, when I’d asked about it, my mother had said simply, “They don’t want people to know they’re Jewish.”

“Why?”

“Boston is a big city,” was her inadequate response.

A mezuzah, I would come to understand later, would make them stand out. Mendel, for one, had gotten off easy. Known as Mark in his public school, he didn’t have to attend Hebrew school three times a week like I did.

I came to understand that the Feinbergs had also dispensed with tradition out of concern for Marion, who on most days got dropped off by her husband, Isaac, whom my mother referred to as the handsome young engineer. In her late thirties, Marion, I’d heard, couldn’t be left alone because, on a few different occasions, she’d carelessly almost lit her hair on fire. Isaac’s uncle had known Annalise in Germany; and, when they’d reconnected in the United States, Annalise had reached out to help with Marion, although everyone still pretended that Marion arrived daily as a courtesy visit.

On that Sunday when we arrived, Annalise greeted us at the front door with her horse tooth smile and robust, infectious laugh, and I couldn’t maintain my sour expression. Before we knew it, all of us were standing in the living room, laughing simply to celebrate our arrival. Annalise kept the long velvety drapes drawn and stale air lingered in the living room. We were surrounded by two sofas and multiple chairs covered with handmade Afghan blankets, and I couldn’t help but remember earlier days here. When Mendel and I were younger, around six or seven years old, we’d play cowboys and Indians in this darkened space. He wore a Stetson style hat, bandana, toy holster, and gun, and egged me to chase him, sit on him, and try to skin him alive. Sometimes I punched too hard, though I stopped when Mendel cried. Then he’d cuddle into his mother’s lap, sucking his thumb in his fat mouth, while I sat in the dark alone.

“Kurt, go ahead,” Martin said once we were all in the kitchen. “Have a beer.” He coaxed my father to relax, and the German beer sparked the usual conversations of boycotting German products, while making exceptions and praising their robustness, sturdiness and superiority. German Jews perceived themselves in high regard, especially those from Berlin, like my father, though these self-perceptions hadn’t mattered to Hitler, nor did upscale addresses or professional degrees. I sat there, finding those conversations confusing and hurtful; and on that day, I longed, more than anything, just for lunch.

Eventually, to my relief, Annalise boiled the beef frankfurters, tied together end to end, that she’d bought from the German butcher. We ate them on hearty dark German rye with pungent mustard. All the while, though, Marion sat at the kitchen table staring straight ahead, as if searching for a glimmer of light at the end of a tunnel. I don’t remember her ever taking a bite of food, and I only recall my peek at her numbers and her shiver before she’d repositioned her shawl.

*

Decades after that quiet Sunday, when I’d seen more deeply into her life, I still don’t know everything that happened to Marion in those camps. But let’s imagine that, in 1941 in Berlin, a giant, black-booted Gestapo man ripped twelve-year-old Marion from her family. Her father would certainly have thrown himself in front of her, and the other Gestapo men would have kicked him in response. Amongst the screaming terror, those men would have rounded up Marion’s parents and grandparents, and all the other adults who lived in their apartment. Then these adults would have been deported in cattle cars to labor and death camps. Something else had happened to Marion, though. Perhaps she’d gotten placed in an official automobile. Perhaps her mother had screamed, “Be brave, we’ll be together soon!” and Marion peered back at her parents, trying to be the brave girl they wanted her to be, not realizing that this would be the last time she’d see them. I imagine that at that moment, and for a long time thereafter, she believed her parents would find her.

Marion knew that, before that day, her parents had tried feverishly to leave Germany. Letters and documents had piled up; and at night, Marion heard her mother’s mournful moans each time the latest plan failed. The next day, new letters would have to be posted to distant relatives in Europe and the Americas, as they attempted to save themselves —or at least Marion, their only child. Marion must have feared a possible separation, grateful that a distant relative had not yet sent for her. Maybe she imagined that her family and friends could hide until the madness ended. At school, after all, she’d been popular, pretty, and smart. Every day her mother braided her burgundy hair perfectly. But then, in that Nazi vehicle, all she would know was the officer sitting next to her remarking that they’d found a beauty, for a Jewess.

*

After lunch, Mendel and I hung out in his room, where a suitcase lay open on the bed in their guest room. “Is Marion staying with you?” I asked.

“I guess so,” Mendel answered.

“Why isn’t she living with Isaac anymore?”

To this, Mendel shrugged, replying that his mother had said that Marion was having trouble again.

At nearly thirteen, I still towered over Mendel by a foot. His pudginess was unmatched to my lean stature. Moreover, my long brown hair, parted-in-the-middle, was in style, compared to his curly dark mop; and I’d inherited my father’s icy blue eyes, with which I tried to stare Mendel down. Yet Mendel with his big-lipped dopey grin and soft honey eyes appeared clueless to the superiority I attempted.

“How many chin-ups can you do?” I’d taunted before demonstrating thirty in a row on the chin-up bar hanging in his doorframe. Unimpressed, he fiddled with junk thrown around his room. Noticing the black and white television on his dresser, I was envious that he could watch shows like Bewitched, Batman, and Green Acres privately in his room, and not like I had to do, on the old Sylvania in our living room, next to where my father studied in the evenings, wishing for quiet.

“It’s a mess in here. You should clean up.”

“What?” Mendel asked, sorting his baseball cards.

Mendel and I sat on the brown drab comforter on his bed. He placed his back against the pillows, and I rested mine against the bed’s footboard, our legs and feet meeting in the middle.

“Let’s play cards,” I suggested.

Mendel got off the bed and lumbered to find a complete deck.

“Forget it, ” I hissed, pressing on. “Why do you wear a striped shirt every day?”

“Shut up,” Mendel teased back, reaching over to tickle my foot.

“Stop, or I’ll kick you!” Though what I’d really wanted to murmur was, Don’t stop.

“Wanna hear about my girlfriend?” he asked, showing me her small school picture that she’d signed, To Mark, Love Donna.

“Why do you hide behind the name Mark?” I countered, ignoring his sweetheart’s note.

“You afraid the Nazis are gonna get you?”

But Mendel ignored my jab, his perpetual beam deepening as he ogled Donna, who wasn’t his first girlfriend. Mendel was the kind of boy who knew how to work the lower echelon of popularity. He stayed away from tough boys and mean girls, nimbly dodging unwanted attention and making his move on shy, homely girls, making them feel special.

As for me, I’d recently had a boyfriend—for a week. Clearly, I didn’t understand as well as Mendel how to leverage these young connections. In my case, Norman and I were paired together by our friends at Hebrew school because we both had alpine height, and the extent of our romance was sitting together at lunch, while Norman watched his friends, and I tried to engage him in conversation. By Friday, though, I’d grown tired of the effort and set him free. Instead of Norman, I longed for a mature boy, like the popular older brothers of some of my friends. Having no experience, I wasn’t sure exactly how I wanted this boyfriend to be, but I figured he should be someone who could make me feel popular.

*

By the time the war ended in 1945, Marion, at fifteen, was likely reduced to skin and bones. Maybe she’d endured hard labor in a concentration camp by day and sexual favors by night. Perhaps that had been the only way to survive. She would have longed, of course, for her parents and for anyone she’d known or loved in her previous life—or even for any recognizable semblance of her former self. Had she, for instance, been allowed to keep her hair? Or had the Nazis shaved her head?

Perhaps, once liberation came, a second cousin in New York, with help from the Red Cross, had been able to connect with Marion and sponsor her. On that voyage to her new home, she would have stood alone against the ship’s railing as it sailed by the Statue of Liberty. Would she have wondered what liberty meant for her, as she reflected that her parents were only a memory? Could she still, even after they were gone, remain brave for them? Or did she feel that she’d failed them, by submitting to the Nazis’ demands? Of course, she’d had no choice, not even about living; and I can imagine how her death hadn’t come as she’d sometimes prayed it would. While regaining strength after her long war ordeal and ocean crossing, maybe Marion worked in her cousin’s Brooklyn housewares store until her relatives introduced her to Isaac, the young man who would become her husband, during the summer before he was to begin attending Harvard. He would have been eighteen years old to her twenty-six, but he was smitten by her foreignness, and became determined to make her smile and rid her of her demons. They’d married and moved to Boston in the 1960s, where Isaac’s engineering career would flourish, though Marion would sink into despair.

*

On that Sunday, I noticed that Mendel spoke to Marion as if nothing was wrong with her. Never had I observed any fear in him when he watched her hollow, dark eyes; her grimaced lips, or her unruly hair that was delicately shampooed weekly by Annalise. Marion had told Annalise that she felt her head splintering when the Nazis had shaved her head.

Late at night, though, my own fears began to materialize, as I imagined Nazis fondling Marion’s hair before her near-scalping. My usually organized mind went nonlinear as I experienced brutality mixed with arousal. What had the men done to Marion? In my dream, Marion’s tortured body gave way to my fantasies about a desirable, as yet nonexistent, boy, and I sensed his hands touching me. I awoke in shame-filled sweat.

*

I regret what happened next on that Sunday in March, but it feels only right to reveal the cruelty I inflicted on Marion, on what was otherwise planned as a celebratory day.

After that brief discussion about Mendel’s girlfriend, we wandered back into the kitchen, where a familial warmth greeted us. Dishes imprinted with floral petals graced the table and a robust coffee aroma complemented the sugary treats, including our joint birthday cake. My father sang Happy Birthday in his perfect tenor voice, outshining all the other singers. Talk of the war lifted and, after cake, Mendel and the adults descended to the basement to inspect Martin’s new camera, darkroom, and latest photographs. I stayed seated for a few minutes on the vinyl padded chair next to Marion and, as I pulled my chair closer, she started to tug at her hair.

“Your husband is so handsome,” I whispered to Marion, “Why don’t you go home to him? Why are you scared?”

What I really wanted to ask, though, was about what the Nazis had done to her in the camps. And I wanted to see again the numbers on her arm. Sniffing a slight cigarette odor on her clothes, I continued watching her, noticing how, as Marion yanked her hair, her lips trembled. I grabbed her hands so she wouldn’t hurt herself, but also to see if I could glance at her tattoo again. I tried to pull her shawl off her shoulders, but her eyes became the size of silver dollars, and her mouth opened into a perfect circle. Her facial muscles contorted, in what seemed like slow motion, until a blood curdling scream erupted like a factory whistle blast. I dropped her hands and ran to the bathroom as the procession raced upstairs.

Soon I heard cries of “What’s the matter? Calm down! Get a blanket.” While they tried to help her, I waited in the bathroom, then carved a semi-startled expression and tiptoed into the kitchen. I noticed that the wind had calmed. The branches outside the windows no longer swayed. Marion sat on her chair, shaking, as Annalise draped her arm over her shoulder. Tears ran down Marion’s cheeks, but the screaming had ended. “What happened?” Annalise asked Marion in a soothing tone. Tucking my hands into my pockets, I hunched my shoulders, praying she wouldn’t tell on me. She didn’t look at me, remaining silent. I wondered if she even knew who had upset her? Did she understand what I’d wanted from her?

Shortly after Marion’s outburst, my parents and I departed. It was late afternoon, and the sky was turning silvery, and the air had cooled. Stubbornly winter still lingered. Partway home, Mom broke the silence. “What set her off?”

“A dreadful time, shreklech,” Dad said.

Feigning sleep, I contemplated the two worlds I navigated, silently begging God for forgiveness about what I’d done to Marion, and vowing never to see her again. No more Sunday visits to the Feinbergs. From then on, I’d stay home on Sundays, and I suspected my parents wouldn’t even care. Also, no more dreams about a so-called desirable boy. No more war-related tattooed numbers. I would lift my veil and focus instead on the numbers that Walter Cronkite reported each night: the daily death toll of American soldiers in the Vietnam War.

*

After that day, I never saw Marion again. Now, five decades later, I’ve never stopped struggling with the Holocaust and what it did to my family. I suppose I went to this Holocaust meeting thinking it would be good either to connect with fellow second- or third-generation descendants, or confess that I had not listened enough to my parents’ stories, and had nastily upset Marion.

Now as I stand outside the building in the damp Seattle evening, walking slowly to my vehicle, I don’t mind the darkness. At least it isn’t raining, a reprieve from peering through swishing wipers.

What I’d really wanted from this meeting, I suppose, was to be absolved by a group of strangers of the guilt I’ve carried for years—a guilt that was not truly mine, but that I’ve never found a means of escaping. Of course, I should have known that was impossible. Only I could forgive myself. But as the years progressed, I never have.

Driving home now, I crave some forgiveness, despite never having known the shape of it. As though, even sitting in that dimly lit meeting room, I was bound to squirm endlessly under my Holocaust veil, afraid that tears would come too easily if I related anything about my Holocaust background. What I’ve carried for too long, and the frustration of what I’d truly never know. What was never mine.

Okay, I snap finally, approaching my driveway. It’s time now to summon my own sense of survival. Once you are mature enough to know that you are the child of victims and survivors, it is forever part of your makeup. But as I discovered over the years, I could also use this knowledge to muster strength and accept responsibility. I would continue to fight my demons. I feel that I owe this to my ancestors who suffered, especially as I neared the approximate age they were when they were murdered. How can I outlive them now? How can I prove, with my body, with my life, that they did not die in vain?

As I shut my car door, walking into the house, I feel, even now, that familiar tug: Do I owe Marion an apology? Should I continue to lament that I never knew my grandparents? Can I let go of the suffering they had to endure? But today, finally, I find some release in terms of Marion. I no longer desire to find her, or explain my younger self, perhaps because I never could completely understand her. Whatever my motivations that Sunday so many years ago, it’s over. It’s been over for a long time. All that remains is knowing that I lied to survive, and perhaps I no longer need to—not to explain my memories or escape them. Even if I’m a coward, silent at tonight’s meeting, none of this matters, because the fact is, I do endure—and, in enduring, I remember them all: Marion, my grandparents, all of them.