Looking for Strangers: The True Story of My Hidden Wartime Childhood by Dori Katz

Author:Dori Katz [Katz, Dori]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

CLOSE CALLS, 1942

“Don’t ask how I managed after your father’s arrest,” said Golda. “We went to my brother Fischel, and we stayed there for a while. I was afraid to go back to the apartment, and yet I thought, What if I am not there, and Moishe sends a message? You started acting up; you wouldn’t eat, got cranky, were often crying, and I lost patience with you. Somehow, life went on.” Somehow, indeed! My mother’s resourcefulness in those times amazes me, but she was very vague when I pressed her for details on how she survived, telling me, “You did what you had to do” or “Don’t ask.”

Although she was very worried about my father, she was also angry with him for trying to rescue his brother Mannes when she had begged him not to go, had told him that it was too dangerous. She would often tell me after the war that she felt he cared more about his family than his wife and daughter, and that if he had listened to her, maybe he wouldn’t have been caught. I don’t know if I believed her, but as a child, I often felt that my father had abandoned me—a feeling I tried to counteract with her stories of how much he had loved me, how I had been the most important thing in his life. Then why did he leave? It wasn’t perhaps until I read his German file in Brussels, forty years after the war, that I really understood that he bore no responsibility for what had happened, that he had been caught because he was a loving man who would not let his brother down.

As the weeks went by after my father disappeared, my mother couldn’t stop thinking about what was happening in Antwerp. She thought she still had old friends there and wanted to be comforted by them and by whoever remained of Moishe’s family. She knew that Benjamin and little Dvoirah had been deported, but she wondered how the others were faring. Finally, she couldn’t stand not knowing, so she decided we would go to Antwerp to see everyone, that is, whoever was left. Mostly, I think she wanted them to see me—that I was all right, and that she was taking care of me. She had heard nothing from my father since that first letter, although she went to the Jewish agency every day for news. She had sent him packages: his boots, his tallith, a muffler, some gloves, socks, chocolate, and coffee. And a picture of me that she had had taken by a professional photographer, in part to show him that I was doing well. (I still have that photograph, where I look surprisingly like a normal, happy three-year-old until you notice that for all the formal, plush settings of the studio, my shoes are scuffed and dirty, and my dress looks mended.) I know now that he never got any of the things that were sent to him. Who did

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