Behind me, I heard the same man asking,
"Where is God now?" And I heard a voice within me answer him:
"Where is He? Here He is--He is hanging here on the gallows."
Elie Wiesel
Growing
up with a secondary survivor.
My father,
Bernard Wieder, 18, arrived in America in 1923 with big plans to bring his
entire family here from the same small Hungarian town, Maramoros Sighet, where
Elie Wiesel was born. He worked in Miami
Beach as a busboy and then as a waiter in 1923 at the Nemo hotel in the winters
and gambled at the dog track and horse tracks. He bought some striped pants and
promoted himself to headwater. Miami Beach had only two policemen then and
one of them was let go in the summer. "Nothing
for the other one to do." he said wistfully. Miami Beach extended no
further north than 5th Street. He met my
mother, who was vacationing with her mother, in the 1930s at the Miami Beach
Kennel Club on 1st Street. Her family did not like him, because he was
not formally educated. He was
self-educated, though, saying that he would read the New York Times, not the
Forward when he first arrived to America "to learn English." He moved easily between Miami Beach and New
York, where he had various jobs, eventually becoming a successful hotel owner in
Sharon Springs, Lake Mahopac, as well as in Miami Beach.
But I do not want to get ahead of
myself.
The US Congress passed the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924, announcing "Jews Keep Out" a
year after my father arrived at Ellis Island.
Dad had 6 brothers and sisters, conscientiously sending insulin to his
diabetic father, until September 1939, when the war erupted with Hitler's
panzers crushing Poland. As it
happened, Dad had married my mother in November 1938, planning to take her to
Hungary to meet his parents. Of course,
that never happened. All his family
perished except two younger sisters who managed to survive Auschwitz. They arrived in New York in 1946, and built
lives for themselves, living in Brooklyn until they died in the 1990s.
How that happened is a story of
courage.
In 1948, my father had returned to Miami Beach to live and became active here, participating in the construction of the louche Shore Club Hotel in 1950. I was an 8-year-old, swimming in the pool when the police raided the cabanas housing bookies in green eyeshades, who had always given me candies. Banks of black telephones lined the tables. "Here kid, take this chocolate," they said, semi-annoyed that I was distracting them from their calls. They knew I was the owner's son. Dad was partnered with another much wealthier man, whose also 8-year-old daughter was my swimming playmate. Her name was Priscilla. We lived two blocks away, in an post-war modern two-story apartment house, and during the hurricane of 1950 a two-by-four board crashed through the window almost killing my sister, aged 3 or me. I screamed, "Mommy! Mommy!," running in terror to her room. Mom was an optimistic stoic, extremely comforting.
My father
was involved until the early 70’s in many Miami Beach iconic hotels, including
the Martinique, which he sold in 1974.
My father had completely transitioned in post-war America to the hotel
business, after working in Long Island City at the Sperry plant making Norden
bombsights during the war and also working as a dress salesman for my mother's
brother, a successful 7th avenue dress manufacturer and hotel owner who was
connected to people, some of whom were characters of Damon Runyonesque
proportions, later appearing before the Kefauver committee investigating the
rackets in New York City. One
individual, particularly influential, was instrumental in helping my father
achieve his goals of getting his sisters to America. He personally knew congressmen and that was
what Dad needed for his mission of mercy.
Mr. Al Cobb (name changed) had taken the 5th amendment a
hundred times when called to testify before the Kefauver committee. If you wanted to move a dress out of your
stitching factory, you had to use his trucking company, its tentacles spread
all over the garment district.
It was through this connection that
Dad was able to circumnavigate the American anti-Semitic immigration barriers
to allow his sisters and 21 others from his home town entry into the United
States, including posing as a Colonel in the US Army to get to Europe just
after the liberation, and find his sisters.
How he accomplished that is a story rife with intrigue. Dad had managed
to obtain a “commission” as a US Army colonel, involving a trip to Washington,
DC and a visit to a congressman who shall go unnamed and the details of which
involved an exchange of, shall we say, consideration. Dad was introduced to some people at the War
Department, received a brief orientation, a few uniforms festooned with eagles,
and was told that if he was discovered, “we do not know you.” With his
commission in hand, and MATS transit orders (military air transport command) he
returned to New York, and headed to Roosevelt field to depart for Europe. He boarded a C-47, later known as a DC-3,
flying to Gander, Newfoundland, Shannon, Ireland and on to Paris. At the time, no commercial air traffic was available
from New York to France, where he was headed.
Arriving in Paris, he set up his headquarters at the Hotel California,
on the Rue de Berri, across from the New York Herald tribune and near the
Etoile. It was from there that he needed
to requisition an ambulance, a jeep and a driver to get to Hamburg and
Bergen-Belsen. How he did all this
required huge confidence and an abundance of testosterone. He knew that he did not want his sisters in a
DP camp, where conditions were devastatingly filthy, and with many of the
prisoners in near-death condition. Even George Patton had remarked that the
Jews there were like filthy animals, the stench overwhelming. Patton, despite his military genius, was in
line with the fashionable Antisemitism of the time and the racist mien of
America. Dad knew that his two sisters
could not survive much longer.
On route to
Bergen-Belsen, he made the mistake of dropping into an officer’s mess (Colonels
and up) and was almost discovered, because he was not properly attired. “I’m sorry, sir but I cannot admit you here
in these clothes,” informed an MP. He
was in fatigues and dress uniforms were de
riguer. He promptly exited, fearing discovery. From then on, as he told us later, he stuck en
route to enlisted men’s mess.
Undeterred,
however, he was going to get his sisters to America; they would not have to
wait for a year or two for a visa. Not
his two sisters, 60 and 70 pounds each. Not the emaciated remnants of the young
and beautiful sisters he had remembered, and in his mind, abandoned. Not the sisters who suffered because he did
not act earlier. Not the sisters who were still now, under British occupation
living in squalor and the walking dead. They
told him about the gassing of their siblings and their mother. My grandfather died before that of diabetic
shock, in 1940. “He was lucky,” Dad
later told me.
Dad was
about 5’10, with black hair and green eyes.
Many people, especially women, said he was the spitting image of Spencer
Tracy, and photographs reveal some of that, only Dad might have been a bit
better looking. He had an easy time with
women. While in Paris, he arranged for the Hungarian
women in town who were there either through his efforts or some other means, to
come to his hotel room for baths. He had
hot water, a precious commodity. Through
a common cousin and Auschwitz survivor, Olga Lengyel, (author of "Five
Chimneys,") He met my future wife’s family in Paris and they housed my
fragile aunts and his niece at their apartment while they were waiting for
visas to come to America. Those visas were, I think, also provided through “the
7th Avenue connection.” Twenty years later, when I travelled to Europe
for the first time as a student, he told me to look up his old friend, a Paris
physician, who later became my father-in-law.
My mother-in-law, still lucid at 100 years of age told me how charming
and probably promiscuous my father was during those times.
My first
memory of him was as a three year old, with my mother calling me to the phone
for, in those days, was a "transatlantic call." He had been gone 18
months, leaving my mother to tend to me alone.
So my
father was a survivor also, even though he spent the war in America. After the war, after he returned home, he thought about Auschwitz every day, he spoke
about it every day, read about it continually and until the day he died,
carried that torment and guilt with him of being unable to save his family. He cogitated in a darkened room, chain smoked,
had his meals sent in, and at times, could not speak to anyone. As I grew up, I did not nearly understand the
depth of his despair. He developed a
schizophrenic relationship with religion. He popped Phenobarbitals. He wept for
years. He spoke of a bloodthirsty God that he rejected because God was either
"powerless or evil." He never
overcame his depression and he visited it upon my sister, my mother and me. He needed us to be nearby, he was warm and
financially generous to us, but emotionally he was not there. In the end we
gravitated toward our mother who tried to protect us from his emotional storms.
I did not
have the skills then to talk to him, to convince him it was not his fault. That only one in a thousand people would have
had the courage to do what he did. I
think often how different it would be if I could just talk to him one time now
and tell him it was not his fault, not my fault that his guilt should abate,
that he could let it go. But it was not
to be. It is too late.
As a child
and now as a grown man with my own grandchildren, I still cannot reconcile my Holocaust-torn
relationship with my father, the damage it caused to our relationship and the
scars from it that I carry to this very day, 70 years after Auschwitz.
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