FAMILY STORY

My Step-Grandfather Was a Holocaust Survivor

I was grateful for the chance to know him

Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children and to your children’s children — DEUTERONOMY 4:9

My father didn’t want my grandmother to marry again. She was eighty in 1975, and my father thought she was too old for marriage. But my henna-haired grandmother was strong-willed. She raised two boys by herself and had a luncheonette for years. She married her third husband despite not getting my father’s blessing.

“He makes me happy,” she said with a tear in her eye.

So, she got hitched somewhere in the Catskills, and she was happily married until her new husband, Aron, died a few years later. My father eventually accepted the marriage and admitted he was wrong. He was just being selfish and didn’t want my grandmother married to anyone except his birth father. Grandmother kicked his father out of the house years ago in the late 1940s because he was an abusive alcoholic.

My grandmother’s third marriage would be different. There would not be any drama or abuse. The octogenarian couple would get along like two peas in a pod.

Aron G., her new husband, was eighty-five. He was short and friendly, wore an old gray cardigan, and talked with a Polish accent. Before going to bed each night, Aron drank one shot glass of whiskey, a schnaps, he called it. He said it kept his heart ticking. Whether it did or not, he lived a long life despite his history of trauma.

Grandma needed to remind Aron about his chores constantly, but he was not offended. He was open to helping her with anything — if she needed milk or bread from the store or to vacuum the living room carpet, he never hesitated or complained. He moved slowly, but he always got the job done.

He had a career as a plate designer in Poland and transferred this skill when he relocated to New York City. He painted floral designs on ceramic dishware and still had one of his prized creations in a box.

“No one does this anymore,” he said. “The designs are created by machines now.”

Aron also played the violin. He removed it from an old violin case one night and tuned it for us. Due to his age and declining cognitive health, he barely remembered how to play. What he did recall was sadly beautiful; it made me cry. He didn’t remember the songs’ names. It didn’t matter. Playing seemed like an expression of his youth coupled with his lasting pain.

I wondered if he played the violin for the Nazis, and that’s how he survived. In several holocaust movies, I saw Jewish musicians entertaining the Nazis in exchange for preferential treatment.

Aron often wore short-sleeved shirts, revealing the faded blue numbers on his arm. Even though I was a teenager, I heard a lot about the Holocaust, especially the numbers that were tattooed on those people in the death camps. I couldn’t help looking, imagining a Nazi imprinting it on his skin.

“That’s the numbers they gave him in the concentration camp,” said Grandma, noticing me staring at his arm.

Aaron didn’t say anything except that he was in a camp called Auschwitz.

I wanted to ask him questions, but I wasn’t sure which ones to ask. And I sensed that it was not something a Holocaust survivor wants to talk about over dinner. It would be better for him to share when he feels comfortable and ready.

Knowing that Aron was a survivor made me view him differently. I didn’t see just a short, feeble man taking directions from Grandma but a strong man who survived the worst kind of torture. Years later, long after Aron had died, I went to The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. Inside the museum, which was unbearable for me, were the sights and sounds of the children crying, women screaming, German Shepherds barking, glass breaking, gunshots, and explosions.

I couldn’t last fifteen minutes in the museum and came out crying. The tears seem to be endless and impossible to stop. I couldn’t imagine how Aron G. lasted several years in Auschwitz during the brutal weather without heat or adequate clothing. The Second World War only happened in the early 1940s, but it seemed centuries ago.

Aron was one of the few survivors of that death camp, in which over a million Jews and other brutalized people had died. Yet, he did not come out bitter or angry. He was mannerly and a gentleman.

Grandma once told me, “Aron felt fortunate that he survived and was happy when he woke up each day to freedom, not locked up in Auschwitz. He never forgot what happened and was grateful to be alive.”

I only knew Aron briefly, but he was my spirit guide. If he could survive a world that turned his life upside down, I could stand up to anything my comfortable world could dish out.

RIP Aron G.

© 2024 Mark Tulin

Here’s another story by Mark: