For All That is Hidden
Katherine Benfante
The door was locked. My fist knocked through the air several times, but never made contact with the peeling paint of the wood door. I backed down the steps to circle around the neighboring blocks for a third time, hoping I would then feel ready. I navigated the winding streets again until my feet stopped in front of the brown brick house with arched front windows. Bricks stolen by German bombs had been replaced by maroon ones, but the address remained the same; the brass plaque matched the street map I was carrying.
This time I concentrated only on the physical: the limestone steps with a gentle shallow of age worn into each tread, the trills from a flock of starlings covering the meager patch of grass along the sidewalk, the acrid scent of unfiltered cigarettes from passersby. This time my fist made the decision which my heart could not, and three knocks brought my head back to the doorway.
It was only a few seconds before the door creaked open on hinges that may not have been oiled since the forties. Wrinkled hands brushed wisps of gray from a face I could’ve spotted in a crowd. She spoke before I could.
“It must have been a difficult decision to come in here,” she said. I separated my lips, but she spoke again. “I watched you from my favorite chair, just there, set back from the window a bit.” She waved off to her right with balletic grace while keeping her eyes on mine. “I would have called the police by now if it was anybody else, but I can see her face in yours.”
I nodded. My shoulders dropped an inch as I exhaled a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “In yours, too.” Then I held out my hand and introduced myself.
~ ~ ~
“Don’t forget your roots,” my grandmother always told me. She drilled into me at a young age that my heritage made me unique. I was who I was and lived where I lived for a reason, she insisted. She always finished with, “Being Jewish is a gift from God.”
We were inseparable as children, David. My sister was my best friend.
Growing up in Brooklyn, fellow Jews were as common as hand-rolled bagels. We didn’t live in a close-knit, Orthodox community, but I never felt like I was a minority. This was one of the few places in the country where I didn’t feel unusual or special. Being Jewish was simply who I was. The Jewish side of my family emigrated from Poland, but I wasn’t half Polish, I was half Jewish.
Our family was my whole world, David. There was nothing we wouldn’t do for each other. We had to, back then. No one else would.
But that wasn’t quite true. They didn’t emigrate from Poland. They emigrated from Germany in ‘45. They were ripped from their Polish homes long before that.
My grandfather and grandmother lived through the Holocaust, as did my great-grandfather, but few others in their family were as lucky. You’d think I’d grow up hearing stories of what those dark years were like, but I didn’t. I learned what my grandmother’s tattoo of numbers on her arm meant when I was seven – but from my mother. Whenever my brother or I tried asking my grandmother about her war years, her eyes would lose focus and harden for a moment, then she’d ask us how school was going or if we wanted a rugelach cookie she’d just baked. The only words I ever heard her speak about the Holocaust are on the taped testimony now in a vault at Yad Vashem in Israel.
She didn’t want to come to America, David. Not everyone wanted a new start. Some couldn’t leave it behind.
One day I’ll make it to Israel. But first I had to make this trip, back to where grandmother’s story started. “You may not like what you find,” my mother warned me the day I told her I’d bought my ticket to Warsaw. “Your grandparents built a wonderful life here. Leave the past in the past, where they wanted to keep it.”
~ ~ ~
My great-aunt’s house wasn’t filled with dusty and dowdy furnishings, as I had expected, but was remarkably spare and modern. I didn’t mean to rudely stare at it all after sitting down in the firm side chair I was offered. I saw little decoration – or warmth – in the living room, but plenty of houseplants were growing vigorously in all of the empty corners. A few photographs were framed, but nothing looked to be over ten years old.
“My granddaughter’s style, you see. She finally made me get rid of all the old things last summer, said it was time to live in modern times and a clean room, but she let me keep my rocker.” She ran her hands up and down the worn oak armrests as she spoke the words; I had a feeling she was reliving all the moments she’d lived through in that chair as she did so.
“I didn’t know you had a granddaughter. I-, am I-, I’m sorry for coming unannounced.”
“Oh, David, there will be no apologies from family for a visit. Family is always welcome. And yes, Ruth is my granddaughter, so she’s … your cousin, and maybe a few years younger than you.” She paused to study my face, as she had at the front door, then stood up and said, “My manners! Would you like a coffee?”
For a moment I was sure it was my grandmother who had said those words, the question I’d heard every Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn. I couldn’t speak, but I nodded.
She must have known I’d come in the first time she saw me circle the streets, because she was ready with a tray of coffee cups, a coffee pot from the fifties, and a plate of rugelach that must be a family recipe.
“Our mother used to make these for us. She adds-“
“Orange peel,” I interrupted.
My great-aunt smiled. “Yes. They are wonderful, aren’t they? There are few things I have from those times, but a recipe is from here.” She tapped her head, dropping a few crumbs into her hair.
“I’m glad you have a good memory, then – just like grandma did.”
She jerked slightly at my use of the past tense, and the expression of pain on her face was raw and deep. I felt sorry for my sudden way of saying she had passed, even more so when I realized I had far more time with this woman’s sister than she did.
~ ~ ~
Only once had I asked my mother why my grandmother and her sister never saw each other after my grandmother left for the United States. She didn’t look up from the dishes, saying only the war complicated a lot of people’s lives. Her tone was clipped, final. But then she slipped. “Some families just don’t speak to each other again.”
She’s still over there and I’m here now. I didn’t need to live with constant reminders of that other time. I moved on.
Yet grandma told me once in her own way, in a rare candid moment, how she could never forget. How she could only have married another survivor; no other kind of man could live with her memories. They were like a third person she carried along in their marriage. It was a history of hell they shared – though at least they understood each other’s demons.
My sister was always the good one, the quiet one. I pushed my luck, David. For an apple, just one blessed apple – they made one apple cost our lives.
Grandma rarely spoke of her extended family, but every time she made some reference to them she would always tack on the fact that she was the only one in America. The unspoken sentence was that of guilt, but even I could read it on her face, every time.
We might’ve stayed hidden. We would’ve, if I hadn’t wanted that apple. It was my fault they found us. David, I never told her it was me. I’d already broken our family; I couldn’t break her heart, too. I’d already broken mine.
~ ~ ~
After we finished our coffee, my great-aunt and I moved to a narrow grey couch to talk further. She brought out a shoebox filled with photographs from the 1950s and 60s. I saw her life played out in fuzzy black and white, mirroring my grandmother’s, but there was no mistaking the depressed Eastern Bloc setting.
I had to ask the one question that gnawed at me. “Why didn’t you follow Grandma to the US? Why come back to this?”
“I didn’t want to go to America. This was my home.” She put down the photo and reached out to hold my right hand between hers. “People grieve in different ways, David. She left her grief behind. I had to face mine. I could never forget, so why not look at it every day? Some say remembering is honoring. Well, I’m honoring what the Jewish people did and who we were - who we still are. No one will take me away again.”
My great-aunt was still pressing my hand, and her grip was as tight as her resolve. As frail as she seemed to me at first, I now saw a tenacity glowing in her eyes. I sometimes saw that in Grandma, too.
“Your sister couldn’t forget, either. But she never talked about those years. I think burying her memories was the only way she could function, though I knew they were always there.”
“You can’t ever escape horrors like that,” she said, nodding.
She knew better than anyone, of course. She probably even guessed why I was really visiting her. Yet I hesitated as I weighed my burden. I was there to deliver the apology that grandma wouldn’t. Couldn’t. I had promised that her deathbed whispers to me wouldn’t go unheard. So I placed my left hand on top of her grasp and took a deep breath.
“Before Grandma died, she wanted to say she was sorry about getting you all captured. She said it was her fault. I think she felt so much guilt all her life. That’s why she never talked about any of it – the war, the camp, nothing. She couldn’t open that box, because once she did she’d face her guilt.”
My great-aunt was silent. She pulled her hands into her lap and stared at them so long I wondered if I should leave – if that box was too painful to open after all. But finally she closed her eyes and sighed. “I knew it was her. They came because the grocer snitched on her. Did she think I couldn’t figure that out? But did she tell you who the apple was for? Our mother.”
I shook my head. Grandma was cryptic in her stories through the end. She had led me to believe the apple had been for her, selfishly taken.
“Our mother barely ate when we were hiding. She gave us all the food she could. It was her instinct to feed her children, the ‘best hope for the future,’ she always promised. And our father … well, he had enough padding to last him longer than mama. No matter what papa said, she wouldn’t eat much, and became so thin. We were all starving, but only she looked like she was.” She shook slightly and curled her shoulders into an aged stoop. “And mama was sick, too, by that time. She needed the apple. Well, she needed more than the apple. My sister knew it; we all knew it.”
This was the truth my grandmother always hid from us. It was perhaps a truth too painful to remember, let alone speak aloud. Yet it was the truth I wish she had revealed to me; it made her almost a hero in my eyes. I remembered her last moments when she spoke her confession to me, before she had fallen silent and left so much unsaid. Silence now took over this room, and I was unsure whether my great-aunt would continue. Her hands were starting to shake, and she was clamping her jaw so firmly it was pursing her lips.
I thought it was anger I was seeing, and I asked the one question Grandma never had the chance the ask. “Do you blame her?”
To my surprise, she smiled. “Yes. She is to blame for us being caught, but it would’ve happened no matter what. She was simply unlucky. What my sister did was brave, braver than I could have ever been. I watched our mother get weaker and give everything she had for us, but only my sister tried to help her. She had courage I have never forgiven myself for lacking.” She took my hands again in hers and looked at me with the defiance she showed me before. “She stood up to evil and tried to fight back, in her way. We were so powerless then – do you know what it is like to be hiding like a rodent against giants? But she was brave against them, our little David against the menacing Goliath, and we had to pay the price. But we were already marked the day we were born, David – don’t ever forget that.”
“She would always say being Jewish is –“
“A gift from God. Our mother used to tell us that when we were hiding. One day, she promised, we would believe it. We would be free and tell our own children. It was something I doubted as we spent endless silent days in that attic.” My great-aunt paused and smiled even wider. “My sister faced evil with courage I still haven’t found within myself. How is there anything to forgive? She did what was right. Maybe that’s why I am still here - to be a fence against evil and make sure it doesn’t return.”
My throat and chest pinched tightly. I wished my grandma would’ve been able to hear her sister’s words.
My great-aunt pulled a very yellowed photo from the bottom of the box and handed it to me. “This was us, as children, before the war. I found very few photos from that time, but this one was hidden away. She was beautiful, my sister.” She ran a forefinger over the shape of a five-year-old posed in front of arched front windows. “I think about her every time I eat an apple.” And she wiped away the only tear I saw drop from her eyes.
Katherine Benfante
The door was locked. My fist knocked through the air several times, but never made contact with the peeling paint of the wood door. I backed down the steps to circle around the neighboring blocks for a third time, hoping I would then feel ready. I navigated the winding streets again until my feet stopped in front of the brown brick house with arched front windows. Bricks stolen by German bombs had been replaced by maroon ones, but the address remained the same; the brass plaque matched the street map I was carrying.
This time I concentrated only on the physical: the limestone steps with a gentle shallow of age worn into each tread, the trills from a flock of starlings covering the meager patch of grass along the sidewalk, the acrid scent of unfiltered cigarettes from passersby. This time my fist made the decision which my heart could not, and three knocks brought my head back to the doorway.
It was only a few seconds before the door creaked open on hinges that may not have been oiled since the forties. Wrinkled hands brushed wisps of gray from a face I could’ve spotted in a crowd. She spoke before I could.
“It must have been a difficult decision to come in here,” she said. I separated my lips, but she spoke again. “I watched you from my favorite chair, just there, set back from the window a bit.” She waved off to her right with balletic grace while keeping her eyes on mine. “I would have called the police by now if it was anybody else, but I can see her face in yours.”
I nodded. My shoulders dropped an inch as I exhaled a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “In yours, too.” Then I held out my hand and introduced myself.
~ ~ ~
“Don’t forget your roots,” my grandmother always told me. She drilled into me at a young age that my heritage made me unique. I was who I was and lived where I lived for a reason, she insisted. She always finished with, “Being Jewish is a gift from God.”
We were inseparable as children, David. My sister was my best friend.
Growing up in Brooklyn, fellow Jews were as common as hand-rolled bagels. We didn’t live in a close-knit, Orthodox community, but I never felt like I was a minority. This was one of the few places in the country where I didn’t feel unusual or special. Being Jewish was simply who I was. The Jewish side of my family emigrated from Poland, but I wasn’t half Polish, I was half Jewish.
Our family was my whole world, David. There was nothing we wouldn’t do for each other. We had to, back then. No one else would.
But that wasn’t quite true. They didn’t emigrate from Poland. They emigrated from Germany in ‘45. They were ripped from their Polish homes long before that.
My grandfather and grandmother lived through the Holocaust, as did my great-grandfather, but few others in their family were as lucky. You’d think I’d grow up hearing stories of what those dark years were like, but I didn’t. I learned what my grandmother’s tattoo of numbers on her arm meant when I was seven – but from my mother. Whenever my brother or I tried asking my grandmother about her war years, her eyes would lose focus and harden for a moment, then she’d ask us how school was going or if we wanted a rugelach cookie she’d just baked. The only words I ever heard her speak about the Holocaust are on the taped testimony now in a vault at Yad Vashem in Israel.
She didn’t want to come to America, David. Not everyone wanted a new start. Some couldn’t leave it behind.
One day I’ll make it to Israel. But first I had to make this trip, back to where grandmother’s story started. “You may not like what you find,” my mother warned me the day I told her I’d bought my ticket to Warsaw. “Your grandparents built a wonderful life here. Leave the past in the past, where they wanted to keep it.”
~ ~ ~
My great-aunt’s house wasn’t filled with dusty and dowdy furnishings, as I had expected, but was remarkably spare and modern. I didn’t mean to rudely stare at it all after sitting down in the firm side chair I was offered. I saw little decoration – or warmth – in the living room, but plenty of houseplants were growing vigorously in all of the empty corners. A few photographs were framed, but nothing looked to be over ten years old.
“My granddaughter’s style, you see. She finally made me get rid of all the old things last summer, said it was time to live in modern times and a clean room, but she let me keep my rocker.” She ran her hands up and down the worn oak armrests as she spoke the words; I had a feeling she was reliving all the moments she’d lived through in that chair as she did so.
“I didn’t know you had a granddaughter. I-, am I-, I’m sorry for coming unannounced.”
“Oh, David, there will be no apologies from family for a visit. Family is always welcome. And yes, Ruth is my granddaughter, so she’s … your cousin, and maybe a few years younger than you.” She paused to study my face, as she had at the front door, then stood up and said, “My manners! Would you like a coffee?”
For a moment I was sure it was my grandmother who had said those words, the question I’d heard every Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn. I couldn’t speak, but I nodded.
She must have known I’d come in the first time she saw me circle the streets, because she was ready with a tray of coffee cups, a coffee pot from the fifties, and a plate of rugelach that must be a family recipe.
“Our mother used to make these for us. She adds-“
“Orange peel,” I interrupted.
My great-aunt smiled. “Yes. They are wonderful, aren’t they? There are few things I have from those times, but a recipe is from here.” She tapped her head, dropping a few crumbs into her hair.
“I’m glad you have a good memory, then – just like grandma did.”
She jerked slightly at my use of the past tense, and the expression of pain on her face was raw and deep. I felt sorry for my sudden way of saying she had passed, even more so when I realized I had far more time with this woman’s sister than she did.
~ ~ ~
Only once had I asked my mother why my grandmother and her sister never saw each other after my grandmother left for the United States. She didn’t look up from the dishes, saying only the war complicated a lot of people’s lives. Her tone was clipped, final. But then she slipped. “Some families just don’t speak to each other again.”
She’s still over there and I’m here now. I didn’t need to live with constant reminders of that other time. I moved on.
Yet grandma told me once in her own way, in a rare candid moment, how she could never forget. How she could only have married another survivor; no other kind of man could live with her memories. They were like a third person she carried along in their marriage. It was a history of hell they shared – though at least they understood each other’s demons.
My sister was always the good one, the quiet one. I pushed my luck, David. For an apple, just one blessed apple – they made one apple cost our lives.
Grandma rarely spoke of her extended family, but every time she made some reference to them she would always tack on the fact that she was the only one in America. The unspoken sentence was that of guilt, but even I could read it on her face, every time.
We might’ve stayed hidden. We would’ve, if I hadn’t wanted that apple. It was my fault they found us. David, I never told her it was me. I’d already broken our family; I couldn’t break her heart, too. I’d already broken mine.
~ ~ ~
After we finished our coffee, my great-aunt and I moved to a narrow grey couch to talk further. She brought out a shoebox filled with photographs from the 1950s and 60s. I saw her life played out in fuzzy black and white, mirroring my grandmother’s, but there was no mistaking the depressed Eastern Bloc setting.
I had to ask the one question that gnawed at me. “Why didn’t you follow Grandma to the US? Why come back to this?”
“I didn’t want to go to America. This was my home.” She put down the photo and reached out to hold my right hand between hers. “People grieve in different ways, David. She left her grief behind. I had to face mine. I could never forget, so why not look at it every day? Some say remembering is honoring. Well, I’m honoring what the Jewish people did and who we were - who we still are. No one will take me away again.”
My great-aunt was still pressing my hand, and her grip was as tight as her resolve. As frail as she seemed to me at first, I now saw a tenacity glowing in her eyes. I sometimes saw that in Grandma, too.
“Your sister couldn’t forget, either. But she never talked about those years. I think burying her memories was the only way she could function, though I knew they were always there.”
“You can’t ever escape horrors like that,” she said, nodding.
She knew better than anyone, of course. She probably even guessed why I was really visiting her. Yet I hesitated as I weighed my burden. I was there to deliver the apology that grandma wouldn’t. Couldn’t. I had promised that her deathbed whispers to me wouldn’t go unheard. So I placed my left hand on top of her grasp and took a deep breath.
“Before Grandma died, she wanted to say she was sorry about getting you all captured. She said it was her fault. I think she felt so much guilt all her life. That’s why she never talked about any of it – the war, the camp, nothing. She couldn’t open that box, because once she did she’d face her guilt.”
My great-aunt was silent. She pulled her hands into her lap and stared at them so long I wondered if I should leave – if that box was too painful to open after all. But finally she closed her eyes and sighed. “I knew it was her. They came because the grocer snitched on her. Did she think I couldn’t figure that out? But did she tell you who the apple was for? Our mother.”
I shook my head. Grandma was cryptic in her stories through the end. She had led me to believe the apple had been for her, selfishly taken.
“Our mother barely ate when we were hiding. She gave us all the food she could. It was her instinct to feed her children, the ‘best hope for the future,’ she always promised. And our father … well, he had enough padding to last him longer than mama. No matter what papa said, she wouldn’t eat much, and became so thin. We were all starving, but only she looked like she was.” She shook slightly and curled her shoulders into an aged stoop. “And mama was sick, too, by that time. She needed the apple. Well, she needed more than the apple. My sister knew it; we all knew it.”
This was the truth my grandmother always hid from us. It was perhaps a truth too painful to remember, let alone speak aloud. Yet it was the truth I wish she had revealed to me; it made her almost a hero in my eyes. I remembered her last moments when she spoke her confession to me, before she had fallen silent and left so much unsaid. Silence now took over this room, and I was unsure whether my great-aunt would continue. Her hands were starting to shake, and she was clamping her jaw so firmly it was pursing her lips.
I thought it was anger I was seeing, and I asked the one question Grandma never had the chance the ask. “Do you blame her?”
To my surprise, she smiled. “Yes. She is to blame for us being caught, but it would’ve happened no matter what. She was simply unlucky. What my sister did was brave, braver than I could have ever been. I watched our mother get weaker and give everything she had for us, but only my sister tried to help her. She had courage I have never forgiven myself for lacking.” She took my hands again in hers and looked at me with the defiance she showed me before. “She stood up to evil and tried to fight back, in her way. We were so powerless then – do you know what it is like to be hiding like a rodent against giants? But she was brave against them, our little David against the menacing Goliath, and we had to pay the price. But we were already marked the day we were born, David – don’t ever forget that.”
“She would always say being Jewish is –“
“A gift from God. Our mother used to tell us that when we were hiding. One day, she promised, we would believe it. We would be free and tell our own children. It was something I doubted as we spent endless silent days in that attic.” My great-aunt paused and smiled even wider. “My sister faced evil with courage I still haven’t found within myself. How is there anything to forgive? She did what was right. Maybe that’s why I am still here - to be a fence against evil and make sure it doesn’t return.”
My throat and chest pinched tightly. I wished my grandma would’ve been able to hear her sister’s words.
My great-aunt pulled a very yellowed photo from the bottom of the box and handed it to me. “This was us, as children, before the war. I found very few photos from that time, but this one was hidden away. She was beautiful, my sister.” She ran a forefinger over the shape of a five-year-old posed in front of arched front windows. “I think about her every time I eat an apple.” And she wiped away the only tear I saw drop from her eyes.
