Art of a Jewish Woman: The True Story of How a Penniless Holocaust Escapee Became an Influential Modern Art Connoisseur (Formerly Titled Felice's Worlds) by Henry Massie

Author:Henry Massie
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Jewish history, World Literature, Modernism, Poalnd, Palestine, Europe, abstract expressionism, Jewish, Felice Massie, World, memoir, Szcuczyn, Holocaust, art collector, Art, History, St. Louis, World War II, Jews, Eastern Europe, modern art, Biography, Literature & Fiction
Publisher: booksBnimble
Published: 2013-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

Moshe Ozerovicz Comes to St. Louis

After Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, Moshe was one of 12 million displaced, uprooted, and homeless people in Europe. The Allies established the International Refugee Organization, which created many displaced persons camps to help nourish back to health and restart the lives of the war’s survivors. A Chicago newspaper report from a displaced persons center near Munich, Germany set in motion the next chapter in Felice’s life.

An intern working with Edward saw the story because he happened to be from Chicago and his parents sent him the hometown newspaper. He caught sight of the word cardiologist in an article filed by a Washington, DC reporter interviewing refugees in a camp near Munich. In the article, the reporter described a slight, dignified, middle-aged man named Moshe Ozerovicz who had two daughters in Palestine and one daughter in America, in St. Louis, Missouri. The reporter wrote that Mr. Ozerovicz, who was working as a translator at the center, told him that he was deported from Szczuczyn by the Russians in 1940 into Russia. With the end of the war, he had traveled from Siberia through Russia and across Poland before making contact with the refugee organization, which brought him to Munich.

The article concluded, “Mr. Ozerovicz needs news of his family and would like to be reunited with his daughter in America. He doesn’t know where St. Louis is and he doesn’t know his daughter’s address or married name in America. All he knows is that she is married to a heart specialist. All of his personal papers have been lost.” The resident physician reading the article was a student of Edward’s, and he knew that Dr. Massie had a wife from Poland. He gave the article to Edward, who brought it home.

Several weeks later, in the Spring of 1946, Moshe flew into Lambert St. Louis Airport on a Red Cross charter flight. We stood at a chain link fence on the tarmac outside the terminal building in bright sun that felt exactly the right temperature. The fence was very low, because I could almost see over it, or maybe I was on my father’s shoulders. People started coming down the steps from the plane, and suddenly my mother darted through a gate and ran to her father, and they put their arms around each other.

Then my childhood memory fades because of the language barrier. My grandfather knew no English; my father and I had no way to communicate with him, nor my grandfather with us. My mother’s life was still mostly impenetrable. I was an outsider to the intimacy and quiet conversations my mother and grandfather shared. They were not literally trying to keep a family secret from me, because if I had known what questions to ask, the adults probably would have told me a lot—at least enough to help me understand her past. On the other hand, my mother was still trying to spare me from the Holocaust, so whatever she might have said if I had known what questions to ask would have been selective and sanitized.

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