You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish Read Online Free Page B

matter because we could talk about anything, like when people of all ages fall in love and feel as if they’ve known the beloved forever. I would imagine running my hands up your weathered chest and it wouldn’t even disgust me, though having those thoughts made me feel ashamed. You were an old man! I was a mother! What did sexual tension have to do with it?
    You drove past my house several times a week just to see if my car was in the driveway, like a preteen pedaling his bike past his crush’s house. And I made sure my makeup looked right before pressing your doorbell.
    All this came before I saw that picture of you, which you accurately predicted would turn me on.
    “You’re gonna see me altogether different in the picture,” you said. “You’re gonna fall in love wit’ the picture instead of me.”
    “I’m already in love with you,” I flirted back.
    It was taken when you were twenty-six, shortly after the war ended, probably by someone from the Red Cross. It looks like apassport photo, but the handsomest one I’ve ever seen. You had a strong jaw and sad, soulful eyes. Your combed-back hair was already receding, but it had a little wave to it. I didn’t even know you’d been considered “dark blond” until I read it on your Dachau intake form, but then it was too late to ask you about it. Your mouth, wide and perfectly symmetrical in the photo, would someday smile again.
    The attraction and fantasies sank as you aged, but they’d occasionally bob to the surface. Once when I was driving you to see a doctor, I felt as tingly as when a hunky high school boy had filled my passenger’s seat years before. Another time, during one of our many talks about death, you said you were ready to die. I said I’d miss you.
    “Maybe you’ll come see me on the other side,” you said. “We’ll be born again.”
    “We could be married this time.”
    “We dream of things like these,” you said with a smile.
T HE R OARING T WENTIES
    Back in your day, everyone hit the kids. Hell, back in my days as a kid, everyone did, too. But your household sounded like a super whackfest.
    Your older brother, Mendel, would whack you and you’d pass that whack on to Bill. Your father whacked all three of you.
    “It was a tradition—you know what I mean—when my father slapped me. Why did he slap me? Because his father hit him. Deserve, not deserve, he hit me.”
    You fought often with your sister Helen, who was the next youngest to you. I don’t know if you ever hit her, but I doubt it, because hitting females wasn’t part of the pattern.
    “One time the father comes across to hit me. And the mother steps in front and says, ‘Don’t hit him, hit me instead.’ And he never raise a hand to her, so I was okay.”
    Of course, that didn’t mean your mother couldn’t lay one on you. She went to hit you once but got blocked by your knobby elbow. She collided with bones instead of flesh, hurting her hand.
    “Then I didn’t come home for a whole two days. I was at my aunt’s. I was afraid to come home to a beating from the father.”
    I asked what you did to make your mother so angry.
    “Maybe I did something wrong,” you said. “Who the hell knows?”
    “Maybe?” I said. “I’m sure you did a lot wrong. You must have been a troublemaker.”
    “That’s the way you talk to me?” you said, sounding a little hurt. “You’re supposed to be my baby.”
    But despite all that whacking, you came from a good family. At least, that’s what a lady who lives in Brooklyn, New York, told me. Her father was a poultry man who knew your father, a cattle man.
    “They were nice people,” she told me.
    Then she needed to get off the phone.
    “It’s too much,” she said. “My husband is sick. I can’t talk of these sad memories anymore.”
    She was the last one to see Helen.
J ANUARY 9, 2011
    While the slow drivers continue to fuck with me at the final stop sign, I worry. You’re not alone, are you? They’ve done a lot of