Crossing Boundaries: A Family Story

Meeting Henia

Shortly before I was married, Shirley, my husband’s mother, mailed me her mother Henia’s Holocaust oral history tape, together with a photograph taken in 1979. Henia, interviewed in 1996, had been one of 52,000 survivors and witnesses interviewed by oral historians in the 1990s for Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation Institute.¹ Shirley wanted me to have the tape for several reasons. As a historian and Holocaust Museum volunteer, I was interested in Henia’s story, and this was also a way for me, as the fiancée of Shirley’s son Jake, to “meet” her mother, who had passed away in 2000. Neither Shirley nor her elder brother had ever watched the tape. I thought maybe Jake would watch the tape alone or with me, but he did not want to watch it, either. I kept both the tape and the photograph for a while without looking at them.

Since then I have watched the tape twice. Jake and I have been married five years. We have two daughters, Rebecca Chana and Madeline Jules; Rebecca is fiery and passionate, while Madeline is placid and peaceful. The first time I watched Henia’s tape, I hoped to learn more about the family I was marrying into; the second time I wrote it all down, wanting my children to one day learn a history that will be theirs, too.

For the entirety of the interview, held in her home in Bal Harbour, Florida, Henia sat facing the camera. She wore a chunky gold necklace with a pendant bearing the two-letter Hebrew word ḥai, “life.” As she spoke, I also saw her grandson, the man I married: a willow-tree face, his thin freckled arms.

Henia told of her upbringing and Hitler’s invasion of her town in 1939 She was born in 1924 in the small town of Klimontów, Poland. Her parents, Moshe, a cantor, and Miriam, religious Jews, had seven children, whom they taught Hebrew in their two-bedroom home. “I was the best-looking girl,” Henia recalled without humor. “I had the most gorgeous voice.” Her sense of time in the interview was muddled, skipping from childhood to adulthood, from her youth in Poland to her few years in Canada to her life in Miami. (Shirley later told me it was always this way with her mother.) She remembered finding a neighbor hanging in his shower stall when Hitler invaded. She remembered a particular Friday: Her family was about to light Shabbat candles when they heard banging on their door. And she remembered bread. Once an SS officer asked her to sing a carol in German—but Henia did not know German. “I sang it in Polish and I got two breads.” She took the thin loaves back to her barracks and divided them among twelve girls. “A piece of bread was like medicine,” she said. “The piece of bread was between life and death.”

After a while Henia’s memories made her cry. She spoke of an SS officer wrapping the entrails of a dead chicken around her shoulders. She remembered her father’s dreams of going to Palestine, and she remembered the last time he closed his eyes before she was sent to Sandomierz Ghetto. From there she was sent to Pionki, a forced labor camp in a munitions factory, and then to Auschwitz, a large concentration camp that operated a gas chamber, and to Elsnig, a subsidiary camp of Buchenwald.² The oral historian, Dale Hannan, kept probing: How did you feel? Although I never knew Henia, I wanted to reach into the tape and shake this historian to protect Henia from having to answer. “How did I feel?” Henia asked. “I was the lucky one. You got shower or you got gas.”

Henia related that her mother and four siblings were sent to the gas chambers while she was ordered to stand in another line. “Who had time to say good-bye?” she asked. Instead, Henia was ordered to whistle. “If you give a good whistle, your lungs are strong,” she said. “I was chosen to...