CHRISTMAS IN THE CAMPS

I wanted to write something about Christmas for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy this year that I hadn’t written before.  I’ve been writing columns for the paper for 7 years now, and a number of these columns have been about Christmas.  I’ve written, for example, about our first Christmas in Chicago after we came from the DP camps in Germany, and I’ve written about what it was like buying Christmas trees with my parents in the neighborhoods around Humboldt Park when I was a kid, and I’ve written about what Christmas celebrations were like in our family in the 1950s.

Thumbing through those old columns, it suddenly occurred to me that there is one thing I had never written about.  

I had never written about what Christmas was like for my parents in the German camps during World War II.  My parents often spoke to my sister Donna and me about what Christmas was like when they were children living with their parents in Poland, but my parents never told us anything about what their Christmases were like when they were prisoners in the German concentration and slave labor camps.

When I first realized this, it surprised me because my parents weren’t silent about their experiences in the camps.  My father couldn’t stop talking about the terrible things that happened to him during his almost 5 years in Buchenwald.  He told me about friends who were starved, beaten to death, castrated, and crucified by the German guards.  He told me about seeing women having their breasts cut off by German soldiers.  Although mother was less open about her experiences, she shared stories about seeing women raped and babies murdered in the slave labor camps.    

My mom and dad told me these terrible stories, so why didn’t they tell me about what Christmas was like in the camps?

The answer is pretty obvious, and I felt it as soon as I asked myself the question.

Researching this question, I found that Christmases in the camps – not surprisingly – were hell doubled down over and over.  

The German guards seldom allowed for any kind of celebration of Christmas by the prisoners.  Mostly, the guards wanted the prisoners and slave laborers to do what they did every day, work in the freezing cold until they could not work anymore.  There are also stories of the guards doing perverse and disturbing things to the prisoners during the Christmas season.  In one photograph from Buchenwald, a pile of bodies appears near a series of Christmas wreaths.  In another camp, prisoners were ordered to carry soil, and those who did not carry enough were shot.  Some of those who were shot were piled under a Christmas tree.  In another camp, prisoners were called out into the freezing cold to sing Christmas carols, and they sang there until they froze to death.

Despite this violent abuse by the guards, some prisoners in the camps struggled to make the day feel like Christmas.  They exchanged small gifts, things like pieces of bread or Christmas greetings that they printed on pieces of paper they found in the dirt.  Other prisoners gathered together in the barracks late on Christmas Eve to sing a hushed Christmas carol or share some cherished Christmas memories or say a silent prayer.  The lucky prisoners and slave laborers did this without the guards finding out.  The unlucky ones were beaten or killed.  

Reading through these accounts of what Christmas was like in the slave labor and concentration camps, I immediately came to understand why my parents never shared such memories with my sister Donna and me.  My parents were protecting us from the world they experienced and survived.  They didn’t want us to live with the grief and suffering and pain they knew so well and would never be able to shake free from. 

My parents’ silence was the best Christmas present they could give us.

— 

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish paper in America.

   

He drank for the next 30 years.  He didn’t drink on weekdays.  Weekdays were for working and making the money that the family needed to live in America.  He was absolutely sober those days.  He wouldn’t touch a drop.  

Weekends, however, were different. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why he drank, but now I do.  My dad drank because he was trying to push back the memory of all the terrible things he had seen in the war.  He hoped that the drinking would cut him off from his memories and from the outside world.  He wanted to isolate himself in that piece of himself that hadn't seen men castrated, women bayoneted in the breast, babies thrown in the air and shot.  He never found that peaceful place.  

So he drank.  Fridays when he came home from the factory where he worked, he would go to the kitchen and take out a bottle of vodka and fill a glass and sit down at the table and drink.  If anyone was in the kitchen with him, he would smile at them and say “to your health.”  He would finish that glass and then take another and another.  He would drink until he passed out.  Saturday, he would begin with beer in the morning and switch to vodka in the afternoon.  Sundays, after church, he’d go to the bar on the corner for his Sunday drink, a free glass of booze that would lead to another and another.  

The peace that he sought never came.  No matter how much he drank, the memories of the war still haunted him.  Sometimes, when he would pass out from the drinking, we could hear him in his sleep weeping or screaming from those memories.  

When he was 56 he realized that the drinking wasn’t helping him, and he sought out a psychiatrist.  He gave him Librium, a medication that’s supposed to relieve anxiety.  It didn't help my dad.  He went back to drinking, and the drinking got so bad that the psychiatrist talked about the possibility that my dad would have to be committed to an asylum of some kind.  

What finally saved him from drinking was my mom telling him she would leave him if he continued to drink.  He couldn't stand that thought.  Her leaving would have been his end, his suicide.  

She was his church

   

The Day I Was Born in a Refugee Camp after the War

She said she knew my birth would be hard, that she had given birth before, to my sister, and that then the dirt had flushed out of her body like a rabid dog that had finally snapped its chain. She said as well that there had been storms the day before I was born and that the creeks near the refugee camp were running high and that some of the barracks near the river were evacuated.

Except for the nurse, my mother was alone that day I was born. My father had seen my sister Danusha being born two years earlier, and he wept and said to my mother that he couldn’t go through that again. So she told him he should just leave, take the money they had and go buy himself some vodka, find a barn he could crawl up into and drown himself in the drink, until he couldn’t hear her screams or see the mess that was coming.

It didn’t matter that she was alone.  No one could really help her with the darkness and the screaming when I started to come. There was just me and the tearing in her stomach and her bones breaking apart like life had decided to squeeze her until she was nothing but blood exploding through her useless skin.

And feeling it, feeling that river of shit and the squeezing and the bones breaking, my mother remembered the road that brought her there to that Displaced Persons camp in Germany and that darkness.

She remembered the Germans who killed her mother and raped her sister and kicked her sister’s baby to death, and the years in the slave labor camp when the guards would promise her a potato if she would suck them, or a piece of meat if she would fuck them, and she remembered being thankful for the food.

She remembered too the time right after the war when the other women in the refugee camp struggled to hold on to their babies because they knew that giving birth to them would kill them because their wombs were still in the war, still weak and tortured and beaten, still kicked and stabbed and wounded, still bleeding and crying and hoping, still falling and slipping and starving, still kneeling and begging and weeping, still everything that had happened since the day the Germans put her and the girls from her village on the train to bring them to this Germany where every birth was a struggle in the mud for a breath.

And she screamed then and knew that screaming was useless, and so she screamed again and kept screaming until the flood came and my bones poured from her flesh like tomatoes exploding in the hands of a God who didn’t care about what she remembered or feared or wept over.

She knew that all God wanted was to hold another life in His hand, and that nothing she could beg for could change the way He turned the baby, regarded it, and let it live or not.

—

From Echoes of Tattered Tongues, a book about parents and the war.  Available on Amazon.

   

 Talking to My Mother

I remember one of the last conversations my mom and I had about the war. I had come to visit her in Arizona where she and I made retired.  

She was 83 years old and dying of all the things she was dying from, and we were sitting in her living room in the evening, and she was telling me about the war, her life in the slave labor camps. 

This time, she was telling me about what it was like just before liberation. 

She was telling me what the German soldiers were doing to the girls in the camps. One terrible thing after another. 

And I looked up from the notes I was taking and saw that she was about to tell me something so terrible that it would just about be the worst thing I’ve ever heard, the last flash and stroke of lightning, and I said, “Mom, I don’t want to hear it.” 

And she said, “I’m going to tell you. You want to know what it was like, and I’m going to tell you.” 

And I said, “Please don’t tell me.” 

And she said, “I’m going to tell you,” and I said, “If you do, I’ll leave and not come back. I’ll stand up and leave and you won’t see me again.” 

And she said, “Okay, you’re 58 years old and still a baby, so I won’t tell you.”