Who will be able to heal our hurt?
Our brothers across the ocean Cannot feel our bitter pain. They cannot feel our bitter anguish As death lurks over us every moment. The war will end some day. The world will realize the unheard-of horror. Our Jewish heart is filled with pain: Who will be able to heal our hurt? Rivers of tears will flow When they will findn some day The biggest grave in the world.
-Song sung by ghetto dwellers in Poland during the Holocaust
By Barbara A. Micek Co-Editor
Some of Miriam Grossman's hardest nights turn back to the holocaust.
"I have . . . how 'u say it . . . " Miriam paused as she groped for the right worlds in her gentle Polish-American accent.
"Not a day goes by that I do not remember. Even the medicine I take does not help me forget."
In happier times
There weren't always bad memories.
Miriam (Golomb) was a teenager when she moved with her family from Konin, Poland, to the industrial city of Lodz in the late 1920's. "I have good memories of home. We were a Chasidic family of nine children.
"We lived in the middle story of a three-story building. There was a bakery there where we used to buy bulki (bread rolls). In the back was a man who sold herrings, and next to us was our gentile neighbor, the attorney Mr. Wodznishi . . ." Miriam's eyes danced with the happy memories. "As a girl I loved to see the sky, which I did by sitting on the windowsill and leaning my head backwards to watch the stars."
But lurking close behind prowls the dark shadows of Auschwitz.
For the victims, the remembrance of the Holocaust concentration camps killed some of those who even survived it.
The Lodz Ghetto
The Holocaust was the result of Germany's Nazi party leader, Adolf Hitler, to exterminate anyone he perceived as human roadblocks to Germany's ethnic cleansing, including social democrates, gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, and espcially the Jews.
Hitler electrified the world on September 1, 1939, when he sent his infantry smashing into Poland. Communist elements were poised to take over the nation. Nazi thugs were heard singing in the streets, "When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then all will be fine."
As the war dragged on, the slaying became more merciless. In occupied Poland, as well as Germany and even Holland, the now infamous camps were built, designed to kill people on a gruesome assembly line basis.
Most of the death camp victims came from the ghettos of eastern Europe. German soldiers created a ghetto in Lodz in the dirtiest part of the city. Imprisoning all Jews behind barbed wire, and gving rations which barely sustained life.
Cut off from the outside world, the ghetto prisoners waited for the war to end, taking care of the sick with few medical supplies, while Nazi soldiers took people at whim out of ration lines on the pretext of work.
Two of Miriam's brothers and a sister, along with their families, were taken from the ghetto without notice.
Another brother, who was in the Polish Army and lived in a different city with his wife and baby, came home to find only rubble and was also taken away. Another sister, her huband and baby lived outside Lodz. "We don't know what happened to them either," said Miriam softly.
"We were left in our small room only with father, mother, the youngest brother and sister and myself, sleeping on mattresses on the floor with a makeshift stove where we burned the wooden beds to keep from freezing.
"The water was brought from blocks away to the second floor. During this time in the ghetto, father and mother died from sickness and malnutrition. Now, ironically, we consider this lucky because they were not gassesed."
Waiting for the cremtoria
Miriam was in her twenties when she and remaining relatives were cleared out of the lodz Ghetto, "probably at the end of 1944 or the beginning of 1945. I am not sure of the date," she reflected. "It is like a film with three exposures on it, so many impressions imposed on other impressions.
"We were taken away in cattle wagons supposedly to work, but really to Auschwitz," Miriam continued. "There they separated men and women and children according to their plans- unknown to us-and we were put in stalls under the order of the Kapos (criminals who served the Nazis as labor overseers). Without going into details about the conditions in which we were held, they weren't even suitable for animals.
"We were in a stupor waiting for what would happen next, unaware that we had to wait for our turn to the crematoria."
Auschwitz was quoted by a former prisoner as a "fantastically well-organized spick-and-span hell. Anyone who died in the barracks was taken away first thing in the morning. Anyone who fell ill disappeared too. Those who were gassed did not scream. They just were no longer there. If you could forget the gas chambers, you could manage to live."
After the prisoners took a shower, their heads weree completely shaved. Even family members were unable to identify one another, "I didn't even recognize my sister for a while. We looked so different without any hair," said Miriam.
One dish-five people
Sleeping conditions were so tight prisoners had to sleep one on top of the other.
"We couldn't stretch our legs, and when we were awake, they brought us food into the stall. We were five in a row. The first one would get one dish of soup. We were so hungry-this one dish for
Photo and layout by Barbara A. Micek
Miriam in her cozy apartment, looking through the German-English dictionary she purchased for one dollar when she came to the United States from Austria.
"I am living a normal life and yet I am not. I am living a double life, because I cannot stop living, and we should not stop remebering."
Miriam Grossman, Holocaust Survivor
five people-that the hands would shake and the soup would be shaken out and the last one would not get any.
"It was a terrible sight. We cried, and when we cried, the authorities smarted us and broke the arm of my sister-in-law.
"Once I saw a girl who wanted to escape run into the wire, but they were electrified and she fell down. That's all I saw . . ."
Few prisoners survived more than three months. Very quickly the living began to envy the dead.
Angel of Death
Shortly before liberation, an order was issued that the Germans needed a certain number of prisoners to replace the German women in factories. It was then Miriam came face to face with Mengele.
Dr. Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death", was the chief doctor at Auschwitz. A Nazi doctor or SS officer (black-shirted security guard) determined which Jews should live to perform slave labor and which should die.
"We were gathered in Auschwitz for the selection, exposed naked," Miriam's eyes stay fixed ahead in fresh apprehension. "There was a table and soldiers sitting around it.
"Mengele appeared, in breeches . . .holding a whip.
"We stood in a line, moving forward slowly, and they were looking at us. Mengele made a motion to the left or to the right.
"At that time I was with the remnant of my family: Yetka, my youngest sister, my cousins and one of my sisters-in-law.
"Only I was to survive.
"They were all taken to one side and I was taken to the other. Of course we didn't know what for. My sister and the others were taken away in a covered motor truck. They were naked-standing, bodies pressed together as they were taken away. The picture will never fad from my mind."
No number
Miriam's group was taken to showers, given a garment and marched to a railroad station. On the way a Kapo secretly told Miriam she was going to live and be taken to work, but told her not to disclose she was from a small city. Intelligent people were needed to work in a paricular factory and the Nazis did not have a high esteem for people from a small city. She was also advised to lie about her age and to remember in her mind "forever" the false birth date and place.
"I told them I was born in Lodz, not Konin, and I made myself serveral years younger than I was. It all happenbed in a kind of trance."
Miriam was assigned to a German aircraft parts factory, working 12 hours a day.
"That's why I don't have a number (on my arm). I was destined to the chambers like my family, but when it came to the end, they needed women to work in the factories."
She was assigned to watch parts on an assembly line through a special glass, "like a watchmaker. They said if I missed one part that is dissorted, I would be sent to the chimney."
After working in the factory for a few months, she became sick with a gall bladder infection.
"I was so ill that one day we were standing for roll call and I just dropped to the ground. They picked me up like a piece of rag and threw me in a corner, just to die because there was no medical attention."
Miriam never knew how long she laid near death, drifting in and out of consciousness, but what she does remember clearly is crying and laghter.
"I couldn't lift myself up. I was lying on the floor on straw. I came to and heard the words, 'The war is over' and I rolled myself over to see what is happening. I saw Russian soldiers, liberators, embracing girls and there was crying and laughter, and the soldiers brought food for the girls. (But) I passed out."
Upon awakening, Miriam found herself on a horse-buggy on her way to the hospital, where she received her first medical attention.
An American liberating soldier, after entering a barbedwire- enclosed camp, said of a trenchlike grave piled with naked bodies: "(The dead) were so thin and dried out they might have been monkeys or plaster of paris and you had to keep saying to yourself, these were human beings, and when you said it your mind was not believing it because nothing like this had ever happened before and it just couldn't happen."
Austria to New York
Miriam was placed in a DP (displaced persons) camp in the American zone of Austria for three years. Her nursing experience in the ghetto helped her find work in the camp's ambulance station.
There she met Ignac Grossman, a Czech who had survived because he was a machinist and the Nazis needed his talent. A rabbi married them in the camp in 1947.
In 1949, the DP camp had to be dismantled. The couple had nothing to go back to, so they registered for either Australia or the U.S.
With the quota to the U.S. open first, they were given $5 each and borded a ship for America. When they arrived in New York their first stop was the refugee organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). They suggested there might be a job close to Ignac's profession in Omaha.
"We did not know where Omaha was, but we said we will go to the end of the earth so long as we can build a new life."
Before their move, Miriam purchased a German-English dictionary in an old store in New York for one dollar, and taught herself to speak English.
The couple arrived in Omaha during the winter, and stayed in an unheated hotel room with no means of warming their baby's bottle.
"We didn't even have a bed to sleep on. We were sleeping only on the floor, on a ruined mattress."
Later they moved in with a kind woman from the Jewish Center who took them into her home until they found an apartment. "Finally they got a bed for us and a couch that was all holes and some old dishes, but Ignac injured his back and he couldn't even lift the mattress to the bed. I had to carry it. I was sick too, and he couldn't move. It was horrible.
"Little by little we got on our feet, until I was very sick and had to undergo an operation. Ignac was earning 75 cents ab hour. It was the bottom, impossible to live on, but we didn't have anything else. (But) our landlady was very kind to us. She showed us feeling and compassion-this is what counted."
The Grossman family lived on bare means for three years, until someone helped them buy a home of their own. The couple lived in the same three-story house for 35 years.
"I consider myself a lucky woman because there was not a day going by without my husband saying, 'I love you,' not a day in forty and more years."
Only a photgraph
In time Miriam learned her three sisters, three of her brothers and nearly all of her aunts, uncles, cousins and other relatives had died in the Shoah. Two brothers survived but died several years ago. Her husband passed away in 1990, after which she moved to Livingston Apartments in Omaha.
Miriam's husband never knew when or where his parents died. He saw them last when they were taken away.
"All he had was a photograph of them which he kissed every night before going to sleep." Miriam has no photographs of her parents.
The couple's son, Alex, a manager of Electronic Support Services at Boys Town National Institute, lives in Omaha with his wife and their two children.
On several occasions Miriam has addressed assemblies about the Holocaust, and received a certificate award earlier from an Omaha P.T.A. group in recognition for her contribution to education.
Like so many others who kept the faith, Miriam blames humans, not God: "It made me aware of the cruelty which is in people. I feel justice should be done to those criminals who have been cagth, and I am upset when it is not done. But I do not have revenge in me. Revenge would change me to being one of them."
A heap of bones
Miriam often sings to herself the comforting Polish songs of her homeland, although she is grateful for her friends here who supplement her lost family.
"Each time I go to the synagogue, I see in front of my eyes a heap of bones, and I say the Kaddish (a mourner's prayer). Many of my close relatives are among the bones.
"I am living a normal life and yet I am not. I am living a double life, beause I cannot stop living, and we should not stop remembering."
In conclusion
Miriam folded her hands on her lap in self-assurance, her mannerisms untouched by worldliness and modernity.
As she spoke it was evident only those who lived it could truly understand.
"This is the most abbreviated story of my life," she said softly, "since I cannot even touch upon bleeding wounds which I and so many others endured."
Conclusion of Part One
Next Week: One of the "Hidden Children" tells her story of hiding and survival.
