Let's Talk Human Rights

By Joel R. Pruce

Every year on Passover, Jews celebrate the exodus from Egypt, the journey from slavery to freedom. This month, the world also marks the liberation of Nazi concentration camps that accompanied the end of World War II, seventy-five years ago. The essay below was originally prepared for remarks I delivered in November 2019 at UD’s Kristallnacht commemoration and I felt it appropriate to share again, this time on the HRC blog, since the man featured in the story, my grandfather, my Zayde, emerged from his personal horror on April 11, 1945. 

While Jewish holidays cover and capture many themes, a constant concept is time--pausing from daily life to reflect, practice, and spend time with family and in community. Connected to notions of time is the imperative to carry history into the present to provide essential perspective. In this spirit, I offer a story about my family and our engagement with our past. 

- JRP

Chaim’s tattoo was a faded six-digit number on the inside of his left forearm - 184569. He told his three children, including my mother, that the tattoo contained the phone number of an old girlfriend. Chaim was my grandfather, my Zayde, a quiet, warm, and strong man, who never spoke about the war. My grandmother, my Bubby, who survives him to this day, shudders when we bring it up. She’ll talk about the good times -- the years in this country since they immigrated -- but not the bad. Our family stories about the Holocaust were vague: like a fable with enough storyline to be compelling but not enough detail to be satisfying. Because Zayde preferred not to talk about it, to protect his family from the harm he suffered and to protect himself from reliving his trauma, I grasped tightly to the broad strokes of his triumph and assumed the particulars of how it all happened were lost to history. 

This is in spite of the fact that history lived on all around us: Holocaust survivors sat in the pews next to us in shul, sharing wine and herring with us during kiddush, many of whom we knew bore the same marks on their arms as my Zayde did. These marks were visible on the men donning t’fillin, the leather straps men wear at morning prayers, faded as they were among the sagging bicep skin.

At my Jewish day school, Holocaust education was a mainstay of our curriculum. Elie Weisel and Anne Frank, Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht. During commemoration events, we sang somber songs with yellow candles glowing, illuminating dark rooms and ritualizing memorials to the mass murder of six million people like me. We sang, “Ani ma’ameen b’emunah sh’lemah b’viat hamashiach” or “I believe with complete faith in the coming of the messiah.” World-historic catastrophe would produce future salvation. Jewish existence in the US in the late-20th century was mediated wholly through the experience of the Holocaust--it told us who we were and reminded us that, but for the grace of god, were we here at all. 

For my family, it was our story but telling the story always felt disappointing. We knew the final tally but lacked the box score or the play-by-play. We just didn’t know. Sentences trailed off into shrugs and ended with a question mark, rather than a period. What we did know and at the core of our narrative was that my Zayde overcame the worst things humanity could hurl at him and did it while protecting his family. He was more than a survivor. He was a hero. But maybe that’s just my reading--meaning I construct and impose on a story whose specifics are blurry.

Chaim Feder was born in 1918 in Pilica, Poland, a small town, and later moved by horse and wagon to a larger municipality a few miles away, to Sosnoweic. He was one of six children, three of whom would survive though their parents would not. Much of this story was recounted by one of Chaim’s surviving siblings, his sister Chana, my great-aunt. When the Germans invaded in 1939, Sosnoweic was locked down and transformed into a ghetto. In 1942, the Nazis began to liquidate the ghettos.  The Jews of Sosnoweic were brought to the “sportz platz” or stadium. Chaim’s and Chana’s parents got dressed up: mother Rivka in a wig and a dress her daughter had made and father Mayer in a jacket and tie. 

I am infatuated with the image of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother showing up to their own murder in formal wear. They knew what was happening to them and what was about to happen and dressed for the occasion. At least that’s how I choose to understand it. I wonder what I would wear to my execution. My Zayde, later in the US, grew to be a man of style. A brown leather coat that was his, with soft black cotton lining and wide notch lapels, hangs in my closet now. When I first came across the coat, it was too big for me in the shoulders and the chest. In my mother’s house hangs photos of Bubby and Zayde pushing a baby stroller through Newark, New Jersey on the weekend, in a dress and a suit. Smiling. 

Rivka and Mayer stood overnight at the sports arena in the rain, after they had been separated from their children. Chaim escaped, as he did often, and returned with bread, which he threw through the window of the arena. From the sports platz, their parents were moved to a school and then to the train station. Chana last saw them through the window of the train as it departed for Auschwitz. Her mother was crying. 

In 1942, Chaim was removed from the ghetto and placed into the broader camp system but there the trail ran cold. We never learned what happened between then and the end of the war. 

We knew he had been to awful places like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. We knew he met and married my Bubby on August 24, 1948 in the Hasenhacke displaced persons camp after the war, where he had a leather shop that allowed him to earn and save. Zayde was an attractive mate for my Bubby, because he had money and she had nothing. Post-war families were often relationships of convenience, not of love. So accustomed to survival, I wonder if their higher-order functions, like loving and being loved, were working properly. Chaim’s sister had been married back in Poland and became pregnant with my family’s first post-war birth, whose name would be Mayer, my mother’s first cousin, named for Chana’s father. 

Unlike his sister, Zayde decided not to emigrate to Israel after the war and chose the United States instead. He felt as though he had already fought enough and knew life in Israel would require more fighting. My Zayde and Bubby arrived at Ellis Island on August 31, 1949 and settled in Newark, New Jersey. Bubby raised three children. Zayde worked in a window factory. He was a skilled craftsman. Good with his hands. He enjoyed watching boxing and professional wrestling. He made enough money for the family to afford a week at the shore over the summer, Bradley Beach in particular, that my mother remembers fondly. They owned their first piece of property over forty years later and my Zayde died within a few years of closing on the house in Leisure Village, a retirement community in Lakewood, New Jersey, of a brain aneurysm, in 1994 at the age of 76. 

My mom wonders if he would’ve opened up, had he lived longer. Some of the quieter survivors do. When my Zayde died, suddenly, our family was left with a real hole. Not only because the quiet, warm, strong man was gone but because our connection to his past and our ability to know ourselves through his experience was extinguished. My whole existence hangs on every decision my Zayde made in the years between 1942 and 1948: every break he caught, every guard he eluded, every hiding place he sought, every intervention that allowed him to see another dawn. I get to be whoever I am because he defied every odd. I carry that weight and that gift with me everywhere I go, like a piece of jewelry hanging on my chest that I clutch at for meaning.

Over the years, my mom amassed a micro-library of documentation that in bits and pieces answers the key research question: How are we alive today? She made many trips to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. She read books and conducted internet research. And four years ago, along with her sister Rita and her cousin Mayer, my mom traveled to Europe. Together with a group of multi-generational survivors, they toured concentration camps, visited my Zayde’s home village, and even stopped at the final camp from which he was liberated. In the past ten years, we’ve assembled details that have allowed us to map out my Zayde’s journey.

After his deportation from Sosnoweic, Chaim spent two years in Blechhammer, a labor sub-camp of Auschwitz between 1943 and 1945. His paperwork, which the Nazis so dutifully kept, listed his profession as schlosser or locksmith. In January 1945, prisoners were marched out of Blechhammer into the winter with a loaf of bread in-hand. 5,000 people left. 200 survived. One half of one percent of those survivors was my Zayde--or two one-thousandths of the original population of marching prisoners. After a brief stay in Gross-Rosen, Chaim was transferred to a sub-camp of Buchenwald called Langenstein-Zweiberg. 

The Nazis opened Langenstein-Zweiberg only in 1944 in an effort to hide munitions and aircraft factories in the side of the hills, in tunnels that Zayde was enslaved to dig. Life expectancy in this camp was six weeks. 25-30 prisoners died daily. As the Allies closed in by the spring of that year, the Nazis ushered most of the 6000 prisoners out of the camp on a death march. But Zayde remained, maybe in the infirmary or the barracks. Who knows? And how? Liberation occurred on April 11, 1945 - two days and thirty-five years before I would be born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Some of what we know about the conditions of the camp are from the accounts of soldiers of the 83rd infantry division of the US army, who landed at Normandy and fought through until the Nazi surrender. When the soldiers entered Langenstein, the prisoners presented them with an American flag made of burlap, in gratitude. That flag is in the collection at the Holocaust Museum in, DC.  

My first trip to the Museum was in the late-90s, as staff on a Jewish cross-country teen tour. Walking through the halls done up as cattle cars, black-and-white photographs of skeletons following me around the room. Among all the glances, I looked for him, scanning the walls for his likeness. Would I recognize him? All the eyes and all the collar bones made me dizzy. Physically dizzy. I don’t think it was a panic attack but a surge of trembling anxiety warmed over me. I couldn’t think straight. The room spun briefly. I held in tears because I was too young to know how to be emotional in public. I recaptured my breath and kept walking, past a five-foot-high pile of children’s shoes and a table full of recovered spectacles.

At liberation, Zayde weighed 30 kilos or about 66 pounds. Most of the prisoners still alive on that day died very soon thereafter, even under the medical care of the US army, as a result of the abuse they had suffered and the impact of diseases like dysentery, which were rampant. Following liberation, Chaim was taken in by a family in Goslar, a nearby town. In 1947, his name was on a letter to the people of Goslar, thanking them for their hospitality. 

We’ve learned that Zayde was one of only a few Jews among the 6000 prisoners in Langenstein-Zweiberg, an anomaly. The camp held men of 22 nationalities and was primarily for political prisoners. Pink triangle patches were also found on-site, identifying some of the prisoners as gay. How did Zayde find himself here of all places at the end of the war? Isn’t that a mystery?! 

My family doesn’t have heirlooms, aside from a set of silverware and the brown leather coat, which seems to fit me better these days. Our family line was interrupted eighty years ago as was any physical attachment to our past. Our cognitive attachment was fractured too, without a timeline to help us comprehend what we’d been through, what he’d been through. Fragmented memories are the only artifacts we have. They’re more complete now than they were a decade ago and I’m grateful for that, for they permit me toeholds to private understanding. 

These days, some memories fill me with paranoid curiosity. With the rise of belligerent white nationalism and violent anti-semitism in this country, I wonder, What would I do if my family was threatened? How long until the cattle cars come for me? Would I make it? Do I have that in me, whatever he had in him? If Kristallnacht marks the outbreak of Nazi violence against Jews, where are we today on that timeline? What a luxury it must be to live through this age without fear.

In most memories, though, my Zayde is smiling with big, bright eyes: scooping me up to carry me in his strong arms; standing at the beach with the sun on his body; at a meal, sitting at the head of the table, laughing, with a drink in his hand. What joy he must have known in the tactile sensation of holding a child, the warmth of summer, and the richness of family. 

I got drunk on the night of my dissertation defense. We were celebrating. Before leaving the house, we drank a bottle of French champagne an old friend gifted us for our wedding engagement. We walked down the street to Fruition, the finest restaurant in Denver, Colorado. We ate halibut cheeks, among other things. I cried. And when I say, “I cried,” I mean I dripped ugly tears on the pale pink tablecloth and wiped them from my face with white linen. 

In this moment of accomplishment and elation, I could only think about where my own family had been in such a short time. My zayde survived statistically certain death and here I am, in America, with a doctoral degree, drinking champagne and eating halibut cheeks. What did I do to deserve this?, I kept saying, sobbing.

My Zayde was given a name by his parents and reduced to a number by the Nazis, and so it is only fitting for me to reanimate his name with my own son’s birth four years ago. Chaim: the Hebrew word for “life.” We could never give an American boy the name, Chaim, of course. Americans don’t do the guttural “ch.” But we affixed Chaim to the front of my son’s name, as well as giving him a wiley American name--Wyatt--the name of a man who traversed a new frontier. 

When my son was six months old, he was diagnosed with a neurological condition that generates seizures in his brain. I said to myself, that since he has Zayde’s name, he has Zayde’s fortitude and his will to live and transcend whatever is placed before him. Today Wyatt is thriving, branded as he is with Zayde’s spirit.

That is Chaim’s tattoo after all: an indelible and unmistakable reminder of human and Jewish perseverance. Faded, battered, but full of life. 

Joel R. Pruce served as post-doctoral fellow in human rights studies and joined the faculty as an assistant professor in Fall 2014. He also leads the HRC's Moral Courage Project. Prior to arriving at UD, Dr. Pruce held the position of Lecturer in International Human Rights at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies - University of Denver. Originally from New Jersey, Joel is settling in to life in Ohio along with his wife, Heather Atkinson, and their dog, Teddy Bear.