Lou Remembered in Local Paper

Our local paper, the Lawrence Journal-World, ran a story in remembrance of Lou today. Check it out here. I was very moved by so many comments from readers who deeply valued Lou’s teaching, activism and presence in our community.

For the Love of Lou Frydman: July 1, 1930 – January 24, 2012

All last night I thought about Lou, waking between my dreams to wonder if he was still alive, feeling that sense of Lou-ness surrounding me. His voice is vivid to me (especially his laughter), and no wonder since I have dozens of hours of interviews with him and many years of hearing his stories of surviving and making a new life after all his family members, except for his brother, were killed in the holocaust that put him through six concentration camps and three death marches. I know Lou from the vantage point of being his friend, but also his biographer (for this book).

 

All last night, I also thought of Jarek’s wife, Maura, who died on this precise day one year ago. Maura was so full of spirit and sass, laughter and outrageously entertaining stories that it’s still astonishing to comprehend that she simply stopped being alive a year ago today.

I awondered if Lou would die on this anniversary, especially after I saw him Sunday, lying so still on the hospital bed in the living room, only opening one eye in understanding when I kissed him goodbye. It turns out he did: at 3:30 this morning, peacefully at home with Jane by his side.

There are those who might say Lou lived a long life, with a notable second act supreme after surviving Budzyn, one of the most brutal concentration camps; the selection process at Auschwitz; and many near-death, nothing-left-to-lose experiences. But none of those rationales mean anything to me or those of us who love him: Lou is dead, and when someone you love dies, it is always too soon, and it always breaks your heart into a million pieces.

Driving to and from Topeka where I had dental work (a good diversion actually because the physical pain distracts from the broken heart), sometimes crying so hard that I kept taking wrong turns, I thought about Lou and his family. Although there was no way he wanted to die, at least he died the way he chose: at home, in the peace that befits such a gentle man, and with Jane beside him after many family members from Lawrence to Paris, San Antonio to Northampton, called and visited, told him how much he was and still is loved.

But what speaks to me most is how he lived. He found the strength to go on after his father was shot, mother was gassed, and extended family members were

killed. He survived starvation, illness, oceans of loss, greedy foster families, having to learn multiple languages on a dime, and moreover, the world in which he grew up being utterly destroyed beyond recognition. He and Jane, who was able to flee Europe with her parents before being sent to the camps, made a life here that rippled out into two more generations.

What Lou gave me — the gift of hearing his story, threaded with laughter that took the edge off the unimaginable horrors of it, and the gift of trusting me to convey his story to others — is one of the greatest gifts of my life.

(cross-posted at www.CarynMirriamGoldberg.wordpress.com)

Needle in Bone to be Published!

I’m very happy to announce that Potomac Books, a wonderful press that specializes in history and political science, will be publishing Needle in the Bone: How a Holocaust Survivor and Polish Resistance Fighter Beat the Odds and Found Each Other. Big thanks to my agent, Neil Salkind, who believed so much in this book, and of course, to the guys — Lou and Jarek — who shared their lives for this book.

Lou, Jarek and Jane celebrated the news with us a few days ago back where it all started: at the round table in Jane and Lou’s sun room for a meal. We met there five years ago over blintzes and with our beloved Maura too when I first asked everyone what they thought of a book. Of course, I had no idea how I would find the time to do all the interviewing, much less the historical research, at the time, but I knew I had to do this. Time is a funny thing, expanding and contracting in ways we can’t imagine, and so here we are on the other side of that beginning, and now we’re eating again, toasting Maura’s memory, talking about the weather, Lou’s cancer, what we’ve been doing lately, and as always, the Holocaust and war. Between the turkey soup, cheese and crackers, Irish Creme and vodka, and some good scones, we celebrated the publication to come.

I’ll be back in touch on publishing dates as soon as I know. In the meantime, look for more blog posts about the book, and the story behind the stories.

Remembering the Veterans and Those They Liberated

Lou’s daughter-in-law Laurie reminded me on facebook today about how veterans — such as Jarek and so many others — are also to be honored for those they saved today. Check out this article from a few years back in our local paper about Lou, and this one about Lou and an American soldier in WWII, which was published in 2003.  Here’s an article about Jarek’s war-time experience. Such articles as well as our annual pause to remember veterans illuminate not just what it means to survive, but what it means to help others survive.

Picture from Richard Gwin of the Lawrence Journal-World — Jarek in uniform.

The Book is Done (Mostly, Kind Of, Pretty Much)

After an open arm’s length of Holocaust books, a pile that would tower over my cat of Holocaust movies, dozens of hours of interviews, and over 700 pages of transcripts from those interviews — not to mention four years of work — the Holocaust book is done……mostly, kind of, pretty much. I add those qualifiers because when writing any book, there’s never a solid completely-done place to arrive until after the book is in print, and even then, there’s usually little tweaks in the second printing and so on. Yet there is a turning point when I can say to myself, this puppy is done, and this is where I’ve arrived.

I started this book without any idea of how I would get it researched, let alone written, given my full-time gig, other obligations and everyday life raising three teens at the time. Like all books, it turned out to be much more work than I imagined, especially as I immersed myself in research on the Polish Resistance, the mechanics behind the Holocaust, German and Polish history and culture, tales of survival and liberation, and moments of horror and overwhelming loss. There were many times when I began to doubt that I could pull together all the research with all the oral histories I’d been recording into a coherent book, yet something told me to keep putting one paragraph in front of the other, one more piece of research into the pile. Last night as I corrected the formatting on endnote #204, the last one, I realized that despite the impossibility of it all, my instinct served me well.

My hope for this book is that those who read it will see not just the history of what two men — Jarek Piekalkiewicz, a Polish Resistance fighter and Lou Frydman, a Holocaust survivor — went through, but in their stories how we might better understand how to live with the enduring traumas of our history, especially those we carry within us. So while the book is done, where it may go from here is just beginning.

Pictures (from top): Some of the books and other company for the journey, and the subjects of this book: Lou and Jane Frydman, Jarek and Maura Piekalkiewicz.

Another Good Holocaust Movie: Steal a Pencil

Last night, I saw a very good Holocaust movie about an usual situation best summed up in this statement made by a Dutch Jew named Jack Pollak: “I’’m a very special Holocaust survivor. I was in the camps with my wife and my girlfriend; and believe me, it wasn’t easy.” Turns out that Jack and his wife, Manja, who were in an unhappy marriage and planned to divorce as soon as the war was over, ended up first in a model Nazi camp, Westerbork, along with a woman named Ina Saep, who Jack and Manja knew from Amsterdam. While the stay in Westerbork was nice enough, given that it was a camp that even had its own sports teams and served as an illusion for the rest of the world about how concentration camps weren’t so bad, Jack and Ina were smitten and struggling with their situation. So they wrote letters back and forth.

A little love triangle was obviously not the worst of their troubles. Soon Jack and Manja, and shortly afterwards Ina, were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, all of them following the same trail that brought Anne Frank to her death at Bergen-Belsen from Typhoid. Only all three of these people lived, Jack and Ina exchanging deeply moving and particularly articulate love letters throughout their fourteen months at Bergen-Belsen. As each of them suffer from typhoid, other diseases and persistent lice, hunger and other threats to any sense of comfort, they find solace in the letters they exchange, and as time goes on, they use their letters to pour all the encouragement they can muster into the other, helping the other find the will to live.

In April of 1944, Jack is put on a train heading east, and Ina is put on a train heading west. Over the next two months, Jack succumbs to such illness that he actually falls into a coma and when he awakens, he’s down to 70 pounds. It takes the war-crossed lovers two months to find each other.

What makes this movie so moving is the juxtaposition of Jack and Ina today — traveling back to Holland or to speak at the U.N. or just hanging out with the four generations of their family in the U.S — with the unfolding of their story, historical footage and most of all, the power of Jack’s words in his long-ago letters to Ina. You can hear clips of some of his words here. The Village Voice says of this movie, “At once tender and tough-minded, Steal a Pencil for Me offers a useful corrective to the sentimental prevailing notion that the Shoah only happened to saints.” I felt the same way — these were real people with real foibles, and yet at the same time, I went to sleep after seeing this film with images of the two of them, Jack now 93 and still lit up in love with Ina, who is still quite taken with Jack too. There’s a grace in these two that comes not just from survival, but from each still being astonished that their impossible dream of surviving the war, marrying and making a life together, against all reason and odds, came true.

Yoga, Suffering & the Holocaust: An Interview With Joshua Greene

Several months ago, I had the pleasure to interview Joshua Greene who is an expert in the Holocaust, Yoga philosophy and Hinduism, and filmmaking. His eclectic publications include Gita Wisdom (on the Bagavad Gita), Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison, and Witness: Voices of the Holocaust, and his films include Justice at Dachau. Here’s some of our interview from May of 2010, which I incorporated parts of into Needle in the Bone:

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg: How are we to respond to the Holocaust, to take it in and really understand it?

Joshua Greene: There’s an entire universe of responses. Your question predisposes that we’re obligated to establish a relationship, and some would would say we need to move forward, so there are people who will avoid the issue altogether for one reason or another. I don’t know if it’s possible to say that one response is right and another is wrong. From a purely practical point of view, there are legal safeguards that have been implemented because of the war — legal rights, laws of extradition laws, rights of women and children, ways to establish safeguards not there before Nuremberg. You can look at that and say we’ve made progress. From another equally valid perspective, the genocides continue so what good has our progress done us? That’s a rather cynical perspective. We crawl our way toward civilization, and every inch in an inch closer.

CMG: Many believe the Holocaust is different from all other genocides because of the cold calculation of the Nazis and how they mechanized killing like never before. What do you make of this?

JG: The difference of the Holocaust isn’t of much consequence, and some people do see a specificity and difference with the Shoah. I would rather call it the Shoah than the Holocaust, which is a word preempted, out of sensitivity to those who survived that period and those who didn’t survive, and to the second and third generations. It behooves us to acknowledge their reaction, even if it may not be our own, and they have every right to say the Holocaust is different. Comparing who suffered more is a rather cold and useless exercise.

CMG: You mentioned last night that there are things we can learn from studying the Holocaust. Could you elaborate on that now?

JG: Are there things we can learn? Yes, but we should do it with our feet on the ground. It’s very easy for people to go along, even intelligent men and women under the wrong circumstances will completely revert to some less civilized mindset. We can learn a lot of things. The tendency has been, at least in the popular media, to imposed redemptive messages, probably because we’re obsessed with closure, finding some way to get on with our lives if we can at least say we’ve got the state of Israel now, we’re so much better off than we were (and I mean without the Hollywood version, the Shindler’s List and Jakob’s Liar versions — even Spielberg, who should have known better because he’s a storyteller).

CMG: Back to my first question, how do we stand in relation with the Holocaust in a way that has integrity and doesn’t just fall into the Hollywood version of it all?

JS: How to stand in relation with this? Don’t manipulate the Holocaust into some message about the indomitable human spirit. A group in Long Island was going to make a film about survivors living in Long Island, and they wanted to call them heroes. So the six million who died, they weren’t noble? They didn’t have human spirit? We view having survived as having a heroism that isn’t there. Survivors talk about being dehumanized. We don’t want to look at something so dark because we’re afraid we can’t handle it, so we pigeonhole it, have our two-week unit on Anne Frank, and then move onto [to a unit in school curriculum on] environmentalism. It’s tragic that such complex subjects are forced into easily digested capsules. Someone who refuses to know is saying ‘I can’t live with confusion and doubt, I can’t deal with not knowing. The idea of confusion and doubt terrifies me.’ It’s impossible to understand the enormity of it but we have to understand what we’re capable of understanding. It doesn’t work to say that “We’ll be part of humanity, we’ll be part of a progressive human culture, but this little pocket of history has to stay outside our realm of interest.”

CMG: How do you reconcile your studies of the Holocaust with your studies of Yoga?

JG: You don’t reconcile it, and you shouldn’t try, yet the Holocaust does show us when we fall from our nature, we can fall very far….There’s as much risk in over-simplying history as there is oversimplifying theology. Both lead to fanaticism. These people mean well. Well, they think they’re on a mission. I have no doubt that Nazi propogandists believed their own rhetoric, that these races are not truly human. If you look at the dominant philosophy of the Nazi era, it was very heavily Darwinism [based on] biochemical, real physicality…and what it means to be a human being. If you define human life in very biochemical terms, this set of biochemicals is better than that set because it functions more efficiency and is more pure, then obviously we have to eliminate the inferior biochemicals. There was no room in that period for any transcendent vision of the self, no place for a nefish – a soul — would have meant having to acknowledge the divinity of life.

CMG: How does yogic philosophy fit into what you believe about the divinity of life?

JG: I find it very engaging and fascinating to look at the Holocaust through the yoga lens, the transcendent process of yoga, which alters our perspective on policy-making. Are we — from the perspective of the law — are we moral, ethical creatures responsible for our our behavior or subconscious creatures, vulnerable to unbringing and self-conscious. Laws are formed accordingly. How you define humanity affects policy. It also affects our relationship with the environment. There comes a point where you can’t rule by coercion. That pain in this life is inevitable, suffering is optional. How much you suffer is a quesiton of the itnernal story they tell themselves. If someone is shot in battle, thinking, ‘I’m still alive, I will be sent home, I’ll probably get decorated, they’ll welcome me as a hero, I’ll go to a military hospital, and maybe there’ll be a cute nurse…’ then when the paramedics come with morphine, the soldier says, ‘I’m good. Give it to someone who needs it more than me,’ and then there’s the opposite story [which is a story of suffering as much as possible, which increases the suffering]. Yoga changes the internal story we tell ourselves.

The Facts of the Matter

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be going through the manuscript sentence by sentence, checking little facts of history against my research and against comments Lou and Jarek have given me to make sure I’m as accurate as possible. If I think of the thousands of spinning facts filling this book — from the number of people killed overall in World War II (over 60 million) to the name of the firm Jarek’s father worked for in Poland (Brown Bovery) — my mind will turn to mass of anxiety. But if I just go page by page, looking things up, reading the little corrections the men have given me, and keeping myself adequately caffeinated and hooked up to ongoing rock music (today, Springsteen radio!), I can make it through the multitudes.

At the same time, I know how important getting these details right is, especially since one of the premises behind this book is questioning some of the larger myths about the Holocaust, such as the Jews being portrayed as helpless lambs or the Poles as angry anti-Semites. While I’ve always been a big picture kind of gal, I’m nesting down into the details of the details right now with a even more oy-vey task ahead after this: double-checking all the footnotes.

The Transformative Power of Our Stories

How we see the stories of our lives, as my work researching and writing Needle in the Bone keeps showing me, have everything to do with what capacity we have to make good with the materials life gives us. I recently was interviewed by Katharine Hansen’s excellent blog, A Storied Career, on the transformative power of our stories, making a living through the language arts, and how Transformative Language Arts has helped people create careers doing work they love and helping their communities find and share stories. Check the interview out, and read other interviews, articles and amazing insights on this site.

Kathy Hansen’s Blog to explore traditional and postmodern forms/uses of storytelling.

So What Does Goodness Have to Do With All This?

My good friend, writer Diane Silver, is exploring goodness. Through her blog, In Search of Goodness, she’s writing everyday — starting June 1 — on various ways to know, question and investigate what’s good and what’s not. She interviewed me recently, and because I discussed this book as well as some thoughts I have on goodness and its opposite in relation to the Holocaust, I share the link here. Her interview with me is particularly timely because throughout the writing of this book I’ve been questioning this very topic as well as how limited notions of goodness can certainly support acts of pure evil, even and especially when those with such limited notions — such as how we can improve society by creating the most opportunity for those of a certain religion, certain ethnicity, certain class, certain genetic make-up — don’t look at the logical extremes of their notions.

Throughout Needle in the Bone, I ask myself how to reconcile my ideas of goodness with the off-the-charts violence and terror of the Holocaust. Being an Anne-Frank-kind-of-gal (yes, I do believe that all people are good at heart), you can imagine that it’s tricky to find such reconciliation, maybe even impossible. Yet anyone alive has to be concerned with the essential question: how do I live? And behind that question lurks our notions, believes, experiences with, socialization toward what’s good and what’s bad. What do you think?

Pictures: Sumac, a good thing; Diane Silver, a good person.