I’m reading Seamstresses of Auschwitz. It’s about women who stayed alive in Auschwitz by sewing garments for Nazi wives. This is a factual account; I can’t bring myself to read Holocaust fiction. I hold the accounts written by survivors to be sacred. The only exception was a fiction story a classmate wrote for a writing class I took. It was an incredible story and the classmate is an incredible writer. As we talked about the story in class, another classmate asked if Elie Wiesel’s Night was fiction. It’s his account of his time in Auschwitz.
Reading about the Holocaust makes me want to know more about where my family came from. According to citizenship papers, which I found in the basement of the Erie County Courthouse, my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandparents were from East Prussia. More digging and I learned they were from Dittersdorf, East Prussia. I’ve never been able to find Dittersdorf on a map. The name translates to small village. Although the family story was they were Lutherans and came from Germany and spoke Hoch Duetsch, the reality is far different. They spoke Yiddish. And who spoke Yiddish in East Prussia in 1888? Not German Lutherans. My grandmother and her siblings were taught to respect all religions but never do anything to make people think they were Jewish. My grandmother was horrified when she found out I ate a bagel in public. Years later, when I had a Jewish psychologist and explained I was brought up Catholic, he asked me who taught me to be Jewish. I certainly didn’t learn it from my mother. Must have picked up Jewish from my grandmother. She cleaned the house on Friday. No other day of the week would do. Cleaning could only be done on Friday. A Jewish custom is to clean on Friday so the house would be clean for Shabbat. We always had candles on the table for holiday dinners. Two candles and the candles were always lit. I now have the candlesticks my grandmother used for holidays. Jim’s family, who came from a region of Poland more or less near where my family came from, almost never had candles. When they did have candles, they weren’t lit. A Jewish custom is to have two candles on the table for Shabbat and other Jewish holidays.
My grandmother is one of six children. In birth order, Sydney, Benjamin, Esther, Harold, Alfreda, Naomi. My grandmother once said their names made them sound as if they were Jewish. My grandmother told me about how her grandmother had a huge wedding certificate hanging on the wall because that’s the way they did it in the old country. A Jewish marriage ceremony contains a ketuba, a marriage contract. Many are incredibly beautiful and are hung on the wall. My grandmother was English only so she had no idea if the marriage certificate was in German or Hebrew. My grandmother said it was okay for her mother to speak German because she was born in Germany. The family story was her mother was two when she arrived in New York. No, she was 10 months old when she arrived. Either way, where would she have learned to speak? Certainly not in Germany. Her siblings, all born in the United States, spoke German – or what my grandmother was told was German. They were speaking Yiddish. This was so the kids – my grandmother’s generation – wouldn’t know what the grown ups were talking about.
Oddly, when my grandmother’s maternal grandparents came to Buffalo, NY, they didn’t settle in the vast German neighborhood on the East Side. They settled in the Central Park neighborhood in North Buffalo. So many mysteries. So few clues. So many questions to which there aren’t any answers.
Who am I? A Jewish remnant of a family so terrified they hid their Jewishness from their children? A Jew who got it all wrong about the family history? I don’t know the answer.
Deb's Art 