The Shadow of Death: The Holocaust in Lithuania

33. The New Life

33. The New Life My uncle never met us. As Jean and I sat on the pier waiting for him we were surrounded by other passengers being met by their relatives and friends. Long hours passed. I began to feel anxious that Uncle Jack had not arrived. We waited into the evening. All the other DPs had leftby then. I wentto the Red Cross worker in charge and told her we were still waiting for my uncle. She took my name and my uncle's name and came back in five minutes with a message that Uncle Jack was unable to meet us but had sent some train tickets for us to travel to Bear Lake, Pennsylvania , where I was to work on his mink farm. Jean started yelling at me, "How do we find a train? How do we find our way to Pennsylvania?" Neither one of us spoke English and we had only some pocket money. As I tried to calm her she suddenly remembered that she had an old aunt living somewhere in New York. With the help ofthe Red Cross worker, my wife found the telephone number and called her. After talking about fifteen minutes the aunt invited us to stay with her for a week. She gave us her address and told us to take a taxi; she would pay for it. We went out to catch a taxi; it was about 7:30 PM. We saw not one taxi but hundreds oftaxis-and buses, trucks, people running around as ifthey were insane. We managed to stop a taxi, and I tried to tell the driver-half in German, half in Yiddish, with my wife talking in Polish-where to take us as I showed him the paper with the address on it. We finally reached the aunt's house somewhere in Brooklyn. She was very nice. There were a lot ofquestions about my wife's family-where and how they had died. 174 The Shadow of Death During that week, we tried to get accustomed to the noise and the life of the city. We walked through the streets in Brooklyn trying to figure out what was happening. People seemed to swarm like flies. They didn't walk, they ran. Where was everyone running to? After that, I went to work for Uncle Jack on the mink farm in Pennsylvania. But things didn't work out as I had expected. My mother's brothers did not have the kind offamily feelings that I had grown up with in their father's house, with my aunts and uncles and cousins. In America it was each person for himself. In order to make a living I had to go back to New York, where Jean and I worked in the garment district until I was fired as a pawn in a union dispute. We decided that New York was too big, and we applied to the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish relieforganization, for resettlement. At that time, the only opening was in Madison, Wisconsin. The countryside in Wisconsin was not so different from that in Lithuania. The cities were smaller and more familiar . My wife and I had three children before we parted and went our separate ways. I became a scrap metal dealer, a junkman, traveling the back roads to farms, small towns, and factories-a Yiddish peddler who came back from the dead. But that's a story for another time. 11111111111111111111111111 9 780813 190082 ...