Linking Opposite Sides of History

When I was a teenager, the two most important adult role models who were not my parents were a former WWII soldier in the German army named Kurt and a concentration camp survivor named Saul.

I met Kurt when I was a child, and he was older than my parents, closer to my grandparents’ age. Most of what I knew about WWII I got from action movies and comic books. In these stories, the chisel-faced German soldiers were always yelling, “Achtung!” and “Schnell!” and ended up defeated by the Allied soldiers who, despite their inferior numbers and firepower, always managed to hatch a clever, last-moment maneuver to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The comic-book Germans were the bad guys because they wore different uniforms than the good guys. I knew nothing about wartime atrocities.

Kurt was smart, cultured, clownish, and loved to laugh. He also loved to drink, which was probably one of the reasons my parents got along so well with him and his wife.

One of the reasons I liked Kurt when I was a child was because he never treated me like a child. He greeted me with hearty handshakes, he asked me for my opinions, and genuinely seemed to be interested in what I had to say. He didn’t dismiss me in the way that so many other adults dismissed children.

I would sit playing near the adults, listening to their banter. Kurt would occasionally turn to me and translate one of the comments to explain it in terms that a child could understand. “Two sheets to the wind – well, that just means she had too much to drink,” he would explain. Or, “I need that like I need a poke in the eye with a sharp stick – that just means it is something to avoid.” I was grateful that he thought enough to include me in the conversations.

Kurt had spent the years after the war in the hospitality industry in the United States. By time he retired, he had risen to become the food and beverages manager at one of New York City’s most famous hotels. He often kept my parents and me transfixed with extravagant stories about celebrities, athletes, and politicians, always glamorous and funny and boozy. He was like some long lost foreign cousin of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack.

Kurt was a colorful character, and he seemed to really enjoy the colorful characteristics of others. His catch phrase for punctuating a punchline was, “Oh for goodness sake!” He would blurt it out with his slight accent, after a comedian’s strategic pause, smiling, eyes wide, as if to implore, Can you believe it!? That catch phrase always drew out some extra laughs, and he knew just how to use it.

That was Kurt. Then there was Saul, the concentration camp survivor. I met Saul when I was a teenager. He a Polish Jew who emigrated to Canada after the war. He owned and ran a small deli in the neighborhood where I grew up. When I was 17, a friend put in a good word for me, and Saul hired me to work with him. Stocking shelves, grinding coffee, slicing bread and cold cuts, making sandwiches, mopping floors, collapsing cardboard boxes for trash day, my job consisted of whatever Saul needed me to do.

He was in his 60s by then. Although I never heard him complain, I knew his joints were arthritic and I suspected they gave him a lot of agony. He maintained a stoic attitude. But now and again I’d notice a brief grimace from the pain in his knees as he climbed the stairs, or I would spy him in the back room rubbing his knuckles and wrists as he ran hot water over them.

His most frequent maxim was, “Every thing has a place and every place has a thing.” Each time he said this, he made it sound wise and important. He knew he told this to me on many occasions, but each time he said it as if it were the first time, and I just hadn’t yet realized how important it was.

Saul was all about economy of effort. Why do something elaborately when it could be done simply? He liked to drink tea several times a day. He would drop a tea bag in a cup, pour in some milk and sugar, and then fill the cup with boiling water from the electric kettle. The bag would remain in the cup until he finished drinking the tea. Then he would dump it in the garbage, rinse the cup, and turn it upside down to dry on the counter. No spoon, no saucer, no tea pot, just the bare essentials. A couple of hours later he would repeat the whole process. Economy of action.

Saul had a faded blue row of numbers tattooed to his arm that I knew was his prison ID from the war. I don’t recall how many digits there were, but I remember thinking, that’s a very long number. I wondered, if the numbers were sequential, many people must have been tattooed that way. Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions. And those were the ones who were important enough to be tattooed. How many others didn’t even make it that far in the process?

Sometimes business was slow, especially when the storefront was thick with snow and ice. After Saul and I finished all the cleaning and mopping and cardboard-box origami, and it then was still too early to close up for the night, we would sit and drink tea and talk. That’s when I was able to draw out a few stories about the war. Not many, but a few.

I sensed he didn’t like to talk about it. For him, the war had ended a long time ago and it had been a dark, painful time in the early 1940s. He preferred to focus on the brighter present and the still brighter future. He would oblige me if I asked about the war, but his stories, like everything else, were succinct and economical.

He never told me about what life was like in the concentration camp itself. He confessed that he managed to escape, and he remained on the run as a fugitive in the Polish countryside for weeks. During that time, he discovered a farm with a barn that had barrels of wine. He told me there was a type of cheese that grew on the surface of the wine in the barrels. He was so desperately famished and malnourished when he discovered them that he gorged on that barrel cheese and became more drunk and more sick to his stomach than any time before or since then.

It wasn’t until I got to know Saul and began to hear his stories about the war that I linked the irony of becoming close with both him and Kurt, two individuals on opposite sides of history. There were several other links that emerged from interactions with these men, including my sense that they were both optimists.

In future posts I will explore some of these links and discuss how they helped to form some of the beliefs that shaped the direction of my life.