[Note: Where I grew up was heavily Jewish. I saw the camp tattoos on old people’s wrinkled forearms at the supermarket when I was a kid. Such a strange sensation as a child, not understanding but yet knowing it’s important. You were not supposed to stare!
The survivors of the Holocaust are a very human story that should always be remembered – a testament to human endurance, a role model of strength, which is the story's purpose for Emily's safta. When we think times are tough, remember the survivors of the Holocaust. Humans are highly adaptable and can handle just about anything! What does not kill me makes me strong – Friedrich Nietzsche. But Phebe poses a question: Will we ever feel joy again? That, unfortunately, is not a promise that comes with strength.]
Arielle Monteux, Emily Goldstein’s great-grandmother, was a teenager who faced horrors beyond horrors. Just a teenager. Her intelligentsia, artsy Parisian family did not practice Judaism. Arielle did not know they were Jewish. Half Jewish, for her mother was not of the blood. When the Nazis took France, they annulled the marriage of her parents. Or the French Vichy government did, but the same difference.
Arielle’s father’s lineage was French further back than Napoleon. He stood at six feet and looked like he could have been the Nazi’s idealized ‘Aryan.’ The family had drawn no attention for a long time, believing themselves no more than angry Parisians under the domination of the invading barbarian Reich, unaware the birds of prey circled over their heads. It came through a relative who did practice and he wore the yellow Star of David on his clothes. Somebody – Arielle never learned who – followed the family tree to the Monteux branch in Paris. The first sign of danger the teenager became aware of was the star badge sewn on her father’s, her siblings’, and her own exterior clothes by her mother who kept uncontrollably sobbing. The children knew what it was and what it meant – they saw the Jews and they heard the propaganda. They pleaded with their mother to not “make them Jews,” understanding little of these things adults could not possibly understand.
By the time of the badges, it was too late to flee. They were trapped. They tried anyway. Her mother and uncle took the children – wearing clothes without badges – to the train station – her father prepared to sacrifice himself and stayed behind. SS Guards everywhere with frightening guns. Black and red swastika flags marring the buildings and lamp posts. The children understood the intensity of the adults and obeyed as if soldiers. Arielle never knew what went wrong. Only that they sat on the train, her mother and uncle suddenly grabbed their hands and told them to be absolutely obedient. The children witnessed an arrest of Jews on the platform. Jews without badges. Jews with blond hair and blue eyes like them. A Jewish man protested. They shot the man right there. The youngest children cried at the violence, hiding their faces in their mother’s and uncle’s coats. The family ran all the way back to the apartment, avoiding public transportation. Her parents spoke in harsh hushed voices too low for Arielle to eavesdrop. Parents did not explain things to children back then.
Decades later, Arielle forced herself to read a book from a young girl’s diary. She recognized the desperation. The girl’s name had been Ann Frank. She studied the young girl’s picture, wondering if she had ever seen her at the camp. They both were at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Strange, the thought of someone from a different country in a book read so much later and so far away, and having been in the same dreadful place, wondering if they had been there at the same time. Had she ever seen the face of the child? They had been the same age, she and Ann. Unlike Ann, her family had not hid. Out in plain sight, until the star badges came.
After arrest and transport to Auschwitz, Arielle was chosen as a sorter of possessions, primarily because of her ‘Aryan’ appearance. Yet that appearance gave her a new terror, because ‘Aryan’ Jews were often chosen to act as servants to guards, something she knew she’d not be able to do. Impossible to swallow her rage and revulsion, and it would lead to her execution. She was fifteen when arrested, or close enough, with height compensating for the lack of final months to the birthday. Her bones went cold at how the SS Guards looked her over.
A Nazi soldier liked her, because of her button nose, wavy blond hair, and bright blue eyes. He snuck her more food. Even with the additional calories, she grew brutally skinny. Not only her hair, but her whole body, riddled with lice. The maddening constant itching sensations everywhere, night and day. Scratching; tearing at the flesh, making open wounds that grew infectious from living in a dormitory covered in excrement filth.
She’d die soon, she knew, if a miracle did not happen. The constant shits finally got her – dysentery contracted from the lice. She saw many waste away quickly from the constant shits, and die. Some stone cold by morning, laying beside the warm living on the racks passing for beds. Long ago, Arielle stole extra clothes from the hills of dead people’s possessions to keep her warmer. Those women and girls who only possessed the misfitting rags of dead women’s possessions distributed at arrival died fast in the constant cold. The teenager did whatever she had to do to stay alive, though looking back, she did not understand why she struggled so hard to keep living. It was as if she existed on autopilot, continuing to live because you simply did not know what else to do. Some committed suicide – death by electric fence or death by provoking an SS Guard or simply giving up the will to live. She kept living because she didn’t know what else to do.
How long she had been at the camp, she did not know until later. Endless days of horror and terror, hunger and cold, until she felt nothing at all, except for the constant itching. Even the hunger pains and constant thirst numbed. She felt as stone cold as those dead women and girls in the racks they woke up to.
One day, the SS Guards began rapidly murdering Jews who worked at the camp – the people spared so as to do the work. Crematorium workers. Body haulers. Sorters. Arielle hid under a pile of dead people’s clothing as people she worked with died. She could not afford the waste of calories required for emotions, even if she had not hardened and hallowed. She impassively watched people she knew die. More death. More loss. That was all she knew of life, no longer able to recall the good times before the Nazis. It felt as though there had never been a time before the Nazis.
Buildings containing the hills of dead people’s possessions set on fire. Forced to flee her hiding place, terrified the Guards would catch her as she hurried through the smoke screen. The Guards rounded up people, putting them into a long column, facing the gate out. Arielle laid on the ground beside corpses and pretended to be dead, holding herself perfectly still and controlling her breathing so the monsters would not see through her ruse. The cold seeped into her bones. Lice constantly itching her skin tortured her, begging her to scratch. Only pure animalistic terror held her still. She reached our mind to her grandparents, comforted by picturing their faces, and pleaded for their aid to make her invisible to the Guards’ eyes.
People barely able to walk forced to march out of the camp. From her position among the dead, she felt a slight trace of mourning for them at seeing them go – a glimmer of the emotions she once knew as daily companions. Nothing good could come from wherever those prisoners would be going. Getting away from the SS Guards stood as the ultimate desire. Just get away from the monsters!
The camp fell as silent as a tomb. The SS evacuated for an unknown reason. The healthier people – for there were no truly healthy people – came out of hiding to help the desperate. Arielle walked among animated skeletal people. She saw but felt nothing; merely registered the sights, noting somewhere in the recesses of her mind that these were appalling visions. Children came out – sunken large eyes wide and older than their years. She searched them for her younger siblings but found none. She searched among the animated skeletal people, hoping she’d recognize her father’s face in that state, but did not find him.
Prisoners left behind with nothing. No water. No food. No fuel. Left behind to die. What were they to do? What did this mean to be left? Arielle joined the other people who examined the fences and gates, willfully and stubbornly seeking to escape.
The children were the first to see the soldiers coming. Arielle eyed them warily – what was this now? They busted open the gate and came in, staring with vivid shock on their faces. Russians, she realized. Red soldiers. Were they be friend or foe? She had no trust in the Soviet Union, being a member of the educated, artistic bourgeoisie, the people they massacred during their revolutions.
The soldiers handed out drinks and food. Starved, frantic people rushed them. Hugged them. Kissed the hems of their coats. The children, desperate for affection and kindness as much as for food and water, held onto the soldiers' hands.
Having more food than most, Arielle did not grow sick when she ate the Soviet food. Nothing more than pain in her hollow stomach. Many grew sick. Some even died right then and there from the irony of being fed. Finally rescued and they died at the eleventh hour.
Arielle did not trust the Soviets. She wanted to return to the West – go to Paris and look for her mother and uncle. Would those married to Jews have been arrested too – perhaps sent to another camp elsewhere? She had to learn her mother’s fate. What if the rest of the family survived? They too would head home.
The Soviets set up makeshift hospitals at the camp. Townspeople came to help. Arielle spoke German, but not their language. The Polish Red Cross arrived to give them aid.
Arielle rested, rehydrated, and ate while wearing clean clothes, devoid of any badges. As soon as she felt stronger, she walked out of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp after God knows how long kept there. A kind Polish townsman drove her as far as he could. He spoke some German, so she could communicate her intention to head west. Thereafter, she walked and hitched rides. She knew when she reached Germany because everyone around her spoke German. Communication vastly improved.
Upon reaching Germany, though, she realized she made a mistake. Into the heart of the war – a war she had not then known occurred, since she spoke neither Russian nor Polish to receive the news. A war, she’d learn later, that involved the whole world.
Allied forces bombed German cities, and she felt the glow of vengeance, despite the physical danger this made for her.
Her distrust of the Soviets turned into loathing, despite their liberation of her. They invaded east Germany, and they behaved in a vicious, barbaric manner. She hid as the Soviet soldiers grabbed German women and raped them. She too easily could be mistaken for German, but her camp-learned hiding skills excelled.
The teenager looted abandoned homes, taking whatever food had been left. She stayed in abandoned buildings through the nights, always on the second floor so she could keep her eyes on the street. Now, the Soviets posed a greater threat than the Nazis. Entire platoons murdered civilian Germans and raped German women, taking vengeance on them for things Arielle knew nothing about. Women raped to death. Aerial knew no Jewish prayers, but she knew Christian ones from her maternal grandparents. She prayed those prayers for the poor German women. No woman, not even Germans, deserved this savagery done to them.
She reached the Western Allies and fell into a British soldier’s arms, her voyage too much after so long in the camp. She pointed at herself and said, “Juive. Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
“Oh, dear Lord in Heaven,” he replied. “You’re from those god-awful camps we been hearing goss about? How did you get here, love?”
But she fainted from exhaustion.
She awakened in a hospital ward. Her body clean. The itching gone – deloused of the menacing lice. Clean sheets. Clean clothes. A clean-smelling building. She smiled for the first time since before the star badges were sewn on their clothing. Clean water tasted and felt divine. She couldn’t get enough, hardly ever without a glass next to her. When she walked the wards, she carried a glass of water and wore extra clothing because she hated any trace of cold, real or imaginary.
Walking the wards, she saw injured American GIs. Their accents easily distinguishable from the wounded British soldiers. One GI called out to her and coaxed her to his bedside. A charming man who said he was from a famous place called New York. He spoke Yiddish, which was close enough to German for her to mostly understand. Turned out that the fella was a Jew. They spent time together as he healed from a gunshot wound. The staff allowed Aerial to stay out of sympathy – she helped out in return for her room and board.
More and more people heard the gossip about the camps. Many disbelieved the level of horror they heard. Emaciated bodies stacked like lumber. Hills of possessions, and of ashes of the cremated. Medical experiments on children. Even human skin lamps. All Aerial would say is “it’s all true.” She would not share what she had been through – this would require remembering, and memory was a new threat.
Though Aerial was two weeks shy of sixteen, much to her surprise to learn, she and the GI married. She had things to do before leaving for her exciting new home in New York. Medically discharged from the army, her husband escorted her to Paris. The city stood fairly untouched by the ravages of war, nothing like she had seen in her journey through Germany. She felt relief to see the swastika flags gone. That was her last memory of Paris before shipped east.
They witnessed men shaving women’s heads at the center of jeering crowds. Arielle heard enough to understand they had been lovers of Nazi officers, and thus traitors. The shaving of a woman’s head an act of shaming her. Strange to Arielle, since the gentile French had betrayed the French Jews.
Her husband reluctantly stayed outside the apartment house she and her family lived in. She felt she needed to do this alone – and that he might strike someone if he learned what happened that day.
Her apartment stood unlocked and empty. Pushing open the front door, she gasped. The neighbors looted them of their possessions. All the furniture gone. All the clothes removed. Everything of any value, stolen.
In the remaining mess, she spotted photographs on the floor, now without their valuable frames. She treasure hunted for photos through the debris, gathering them to her chest. Those photos of her family would forever stand in silver frames on her fireplace mantel in New York.
But something important Arielle came for posed missing from the apartment.
She knocked on a neighbor’s door. At first, the couple startled at seeing her there. They said a lot of “you look good” to her. In their fifties, they were gentiles who did nothing when the monsters came to arrest the family. Her mother frantically pounded on their door for help while her husband and children were dragged off screaming, but they did not open. Arielle resisted the urge to ball up her face and punch them both in the nose. They had been such friends before the Nazis.
Frantically pounding on the neighbor’s door was Arielle’s last memory of her mother – the last she saw of her while dragged away by soldiers. The neighbors said she died. Her mother took to hard drinking, believing her children murdered. Wandering the halls night and day, weeping, a bottle in her hand. She accused all the neighbors, called them cowards, and spat on them. When the drink did not kill her fast enough, she took her own life and ended her suffering.
The neighbors thought the family dead. Arielle spotted some of her family’s furniture in their apartment. The couple kept pretending they felt grateful she survived. They asked if she would take over the apartment. She said, “No, you can have what remains of it.”
Her mother was buried in the family plot at the cemetery. Her mother’s cousins took care of the funeral and burial, except for her mother’s brother. One of the treasured photos held Arielle’s uncle – his arm around his sister as they smiled at the camera. Her uncle had always been good to them. She felt close to him.
Her uncle had not betrayed. She learned he had been killed while working with the Resistance – his body smuggled to the cousins by his fellow Resistance members. She felt proud and grateful to him for not being a coward like everyone else. He didn’t lay down and allow the Nazis to roll over him. They stole his nieces and nephews and destroyed his sister. He fought back. Pride and love for him, his photo stood in a place of honor on the mantel.
Her new husband escorted her to the cemetery. She carried what flowers she could acquire and laid them on the graves of her mother and uncle. They lay side by side. Another headstone stood beside her mother’s – one Arielle never saw before in their visits to the grandparents’ graves.
“Oh, my God,” her husband uttered. “It’s your grave.”
Indeed, it was the grave of all of them: her father, brothers and sister, and herself. The words beneath told what had happened: Murdered by the Third Reich. It was as if whoever did this wanted the world to always remember. Had it been her uncle or the cousins?
Her husband searched the ground and, finding what he sought, placed little stones on the headstone. “Jewish tradition,” he told her. “Says we were here and we remember them.” So she did the same.
An old man tended to flowers at a nearby grave. He watched them, then came over. “You know this family?” He spoke French. Her husband didn’t understand.
“I am of this family,” Arielle answered. “I was in a Nazi camp.”
He nodded, frowning deeply. “The cousins to them were never found. Their bodies rotted somewhere out there. There are plots that will never be filled.”
“Excuse me?”
“They were Resistance, mon cheri. They were very good people. Very brave.” He nodded several times.
She cocked her head to the side and wondered if he had been Resistance, too.
Arielle left her contact information with the Red Cross in case anyone else in her family survived the camp, and boarded a ship bound for New York Harbor with her new husband and her new American passport.
None of her family ever contacted her. The realization seeped in through the years: the Nazis had murdered her entire family, relatives too. She was the sole survivor of both sides of her family tree.
She pledged to never step foot in France again. A country of weaklings and cowards, she called them. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees, a phrase she stitched into a throw pillow later in her life. She approved of the British, though, for they fought hard against the Nazis and would not surrender.
Never a stronger, prouder American than Arielle. The flag hung outside her home. She believed with all of her heart in the United States. Until the neo-Nazis appeared and the American people did nothing. Again, the Jews left to fight on their own against Nazis. Nothing changed. America would do the same as France, she felt. The flag came down to never hang again. She bought a gun and put more locks on the doors.
Her new husband introduced her to Judaism as a religion. Ironic that the Nazis made her Jewish, first in persecution, then in religion. If they never came, she would never have known of her father’s side and simply continued life as a quasi-Christian, quasi-atheist like her family, debating philosophy and theology as her parents had done with their friends.
The memories continued to flash whenever Arielle saw the Star of David, though. The star badge on the clothes. The last memories she had of her siblings, wearing the star, as they disembarked from the cattle train carriages and sorted into different lines on which to stand, then marched away. She to survive, and them to die on a bitterly cold day. The star badges stitched on clothing filled the hill of clothes she sorted and hid in. The Star of David, despite what her husband and rabi tried to help her with, always flashed the memories. Indelible memories a survivor carried.
When the Gay Pride movement began, Arielle looked with dismay at the pink two triangles, still, the Star of David triangles, one up and one down, for it had been the badge symbol for male homosexuals. She remembered seeing that badge every once in a while among the clothes she sorted, placing them, too, on the hill of dead people’s clothes. She witnessed some men with the pink badges used as target practice by the raucous SS Guardsmen – another day of numb feelings in the gray gloom while the rosy-cheeked monsters smiled and laughed. She told anyone who would listen that the homosexuals should not use such a badge, but she was dismissed as a crazy old Jewish woman obsessed with the Holocaust. Even gays resented her, believing she only wanted Jews remembered, and not understanding her fear that it was not over … it would never be over.
Safety was nothing but an illusion floating in the ethers. Monsters were real. People needed to know monsters were real. They lurked behind human flesh and human eyes, but as ghastly real as anything. Evil was genuine and it lurked at the edges of the light’s golden glow, waiting for any opportunity to pounce and resume its predation on the innocent, consuming them, smashing their bones, and devouring their souls. Once erupted, evil was as contagious as any disease. No one had friends once targeted. Alone and desperate, living by the mercies of others. People needed to know.
She saw the homosexuals flouncing about during Gay Pride parades in Greenwich Village, flaunting their sexuality in public, and she feared. Her fears, though, were taken as anti-gay. She felt far beyond such things, for this was life and death. They were women’s sons. To hell with the morality of her generation, she only cared that mothers would weep, for she was now the mother and grandmother of sons. The memory of the shooting for sport replaying in her head, dormant until the Gay Pride movement began and the badge symbol appeared. A child forever scarred by the acts of monsters who posed as men.
The nightmares were a constant companion. Always, the SS lived in her sleep. No such thing as PTSD back then. No help for the haunted. She could have made the blue tattoo on her forearm disappear, covered by a skin graft and later removed by lasers. She refused to do so, wanting what she felt on the inside reflected on the outside. But she could never bring herself to wear the Star of David – never to wear the badge again.
Arielle painstakingly wrote journals of her terrible memories so her family would always know and always remember. She wrote on the first page of the first journal, and on the last page of the last journal before she died: It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees! – the Mexican Emiliano Zapata.
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