The Month Of Redemption

The Jewish month of Nissan, in the spring, brings the holiday of Passover, commemorating the biblical redemption from Egyptian slavery. It is a month of joy.

“There are no hesbedim [eulogies] during Nissan,” my cousin Fayge said, when she called to tell me her mother, Tilly, had died. Fayge speaks in a very clipped voice, each sentence is a compressed world.

“So the funeral will be very quick, at four o’clock in front of the Belz shul,” she said.  Belz is a large superpower Hasidic dynasty named for the small Western Ukraine town where the group originated. Tilly’s late husband had been a Belz Hasid.  Since she is on my mother’s side of the family I am guessing that her family was affiliated with the Viznitz Chassidim. Viznitz is the Yiddish name for another Ukrainian town. But Hassidic allegiance usually (always?) follows the husband’s affiliation. Tilly and her husband Fishel were married in a European DP camp after the Holocaust. I don’t know how long they knew one another before the wedding, but in photographs they were a handsome couple with radiant smiles. Most likely her wedding dress had been worn by other DP camp brides.

A small crowd of family and friends gathered on the Brooklyn sidewalk in front of the Belz shul. Her coffin remained in the hearse; a bearded man whom I did not know contagiously sobbed a few Yiddish words; then she was off to the airport, for burial in Israel.

Tilly was a small, beautiful, fine-featured woman, of indeterminate age.

“Maybe she was 86,” her daughter, Toby, said. “We never knew for sure.”

‘A’ train to the ‘D’, I repeated the mantra, to guide me on this unfamiliar route.  I dread riding subways, the possible wrong turns seem staggering. But the trains are always easier to maneuver than I imagine. ‘D train to the Ft. Hamilton Station’.

An elegant black turban rests uneasily on my unruly hair. In deference to Hasidic tradition I cover my hair for the funeral. Everything I’m wearing is black. Jews do not have the tradition of wearing black to funerals, but black is a Hassidic standard.

Hassidic families tend to be large. At one of the frequent weddings, an older cousin pulled me aside and said in a kind voice, glancing at my long-sleeved, high-necked, peach and turquoise silk gown, “by us you wear black.”

An acquaintance appeared on the subway platform, rushing in another direction. We nodded. Her flowing blonde curly hair was like sunshine. She wore bright spring-herald clothes. I wanted to remove the turban and let my long hair flow. I wanted to be wearing something light and airy. I didn’t want to be going to a funeral for a respected and awesome relative.

Pain had infiltrated Tilly’s body during her last hours in the hospital. Semi-conscious, she moaned and moved fitfully on the bed, Toby told me.

“Give her more morphine” Toby had said to the doctor.

He relayed his concern about Tilly’s low blood pressure.

“Give her more morphine,” Toby snapped. “She’s not driving anywhere.”

Semi-comatose, alert only to her pain, Tilly could not get out of bed.

“And if that doesn’t work, up the dose,” Toby said. She knew that at this juncture her mother’s suffering was pointless. She wasn’t going to survive.

Tilly, her sister Malka and their father were the only survivors of a large family from an area that had been Romania and then became Hungary. Some borders in that part of Europe were fluid, responding to the stimuli of wars and conquest. The younger children of the family had died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz accompanied by their mother.

As the end of the war encroached, the Nazis, desperate to kill off as many Jews as possible, began mass shootings at open pits. Emaiciated concentration camp inmates and people flushed out of ghettos lined up, dug a large hole in the ground, were shot, and fell into the pit. Then those waiting on the side witnessing their brief future lined up in front of the pits, etc. Alternatives were minimal.  Tilly and Malka were among these people. Randomly, some were not killed.

Shot at but alive, lying motionless in the hellish hole, they waited. After a long lull, when silence indicated that the Nazis might have departed, the barely living dug through the flesh grave, clawing past the dead and dying for gasps of air filled with the smell of death and despair. These undead, some not wounded at all, survived by breaking into houses and threatening murder if not given food.

When the advancing Soviet troops, our allies at that time, found them, the Soviet doctors wanted to amputate Malka’s  arm and gangrenous shoulder, where Nazi bullets had lodged. Tilly refused to allow the amputation. “No,” she commanded. “You will not cut off my sister’s arm.”  Her voice contained all the pain, wrath and suffering from when she had had no choice but to remain silent. Perhaps, with her ferocious beautiful dark eyes burning into their backs, the doctors were extra–meticulous during the surgery; the arm was saved. Malka could never lift that limb beyond shoulder level. Although not much of her was left under the metal plate the Soviet doctors inserted where the shoulder had been, the hand worked, the elbow worked.

Tilly and her tall handsome Belz Hasid landed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where they raised a Hasidic family, which grew to include approximately 45 grandchildren and great grandchildren, all following the tradition which the couple had transported to America.

In Israel, Malka, married a handsome survivor who had never recovered the faith he had lost in Europe. They also  had children but not as many asTilly and also not as many grandchildren.

Malka traveled traveled once a week from her home in Ramle to her father’s home in Netanya – three buses – to clean his house, including the floors – on her hands and knees. After surviving the camps her father remarried also. His wife was a traumatized, terrified, mournful  survivor. Her smile, rarely seen, never reached her eyes. They had one child, a freckled dark-haired girl who seemed to think that life was alright.  When the house was spotless, Malka would take three buses back to her home and get ready to go to her job.

How wondrous are God’s ways. She had a father, a husband, children, a home. And cleaning her father’s house would have been much more difficult with only one hand.