You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish by Susan Kushner Resnick Read Free Book Online Page A

looks to be wet pajama bottoms.
It is blue.
    I first saw the book in the library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington when I was hunting for clues about your history. This was back when you were still merely the subject of a potential story. It was quite easy for the librarian to find
Sefer Zychlin
for me. She even translated a couple of the captions as we stood between bookshelves.
    “These are people who survived,” she said, stopping at a group shot of twenty-five people.
    I didn’t even recognize the man in the top row, far right.
    She told me one page listed the town’s martyrs, which is what the authors called everyone who’d died during the Holocaust. I asked ifshe saw any Libfrajnds in the list. Yes, she said, there’s a Mendel. Your older brother.
    I couldn’t take the book with me, but when I got home I searched the Internet to see if I could find one at a nearby library. Instead, I located a copy for sale on eBay. Two weeks later, it was mine.
    The book is not only blue; it’s also thin, but heavy, like you when I grasp your elbow to help you stand.
    I thought I would find all kinds of stories and secrets about your life between those blue covers—stories about you and your parents, the cattle business and the creamery with the pretty girl, the temple and the fountain and the courtyard. Those anecdotes might be there, but not for my eyes.
    I own the book of your life, but I can’t read it.
    It’s written in Hebrew and in Yiddish, and I’m so ignorant that I can’t even tell which is which. Not that I haven’t tried. When I first got the book, I asked a friend’s mother-in-law to translate it. This woman grew up in Germany, but escaped to Israel before it was too late. Presumably, she spoke both languages in question and would be able to Anglicize the whole book for me. She’d done translating before, my friend told me, and had lots of free time. She’d probably love the intellectual stimulation of a taking on a big project.
    The woman agreed to look at the book and seemed enthusiastic about helping me. A couple of months after I gave it to her, she invited me to her house. I was so excited to finally learn about your childhood.
    “I cannot do this,” she said, handing it back to me. “It is too much. I cannot take the time.”
    She was apologetic, but wouldn’t explain further. When I got home, I called my friend. She didn’t understand her mother-in-law’s sudden change of heart, either. Maybe, she guessed, reading the book was too emotional for her. Maybe her translation skills weren’t as great as she’d assumed, and her mother-in-law was embarrassed to admit it. Maybe she really didn’t have time.
    Later, some other people, mostly Israelis I found through an online Jewish genealogy website, helped me translate snippets of the book.None of them described your life. They’re mainly about good times that happened long before the men with the rifles came to town. Few potential contributors survived the Holocaust, so the stories mostly came from people who’d left in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the decades when my relatives emigrated from their Old Country villages. At least that’s what I think most of the book consists of. Like I said, I can’t read it.
    The pictures, however, are not all so irrelevant. After I bought the book, I showed it to you. I worried that it would trigger a nasty flashback—that you’d flip out after seeing those men in the snow. But you didn’t.
    “That’s me,” you said, tapping your thick finger onto the top corner of the group photo of the Zychliners who’d outlasted Hitler. There are seventeen men and eight women, all wearing business suits. Most of the men, except for you and a fellow with a thick neck and impressive pompadour, have covered their heads with hats. The faces have filled in and the hair has grown back. No one smiles or frowns.
C ANDY
    So, do you give the people in the nursing home candy