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 B

bars because it’s the kindest thing that was ever done for you, or because you see them as guards that you must bribe? I have always gone with the second theory. How else can I explain your franticness when the Snickers stash in your top drawer gets low?
    “She makes my bed!” you’d say.
    Or: “The Little Doctor—she’s good to me.”
    At least the need to restock takes you out of your room once in a while.
    You charmed the ladies who ran the gift shop, of course. When you still left your wing of the floor, your first stop was their minuscule place of business. They displayed the candy on one end and the coffee pod machine on the other. You’d collect $20 worth of Snickers and enough rolls of wild cherry Life Savers to get you through the week.Then you’d pay an extra dollar for a coffee and ask the proprietor du jour to make it the way you like it. It isn’t their job to make the coffee—that’s why they set up a self-serve system. But the chicks can’t resist a man who shuffles the hallways wearing a blazer and who refers to them as “my baby.” Who knows how many
That’s my baby
’s you collected, but one of them will stand respectfully when you go, in a mink no less, just as sad as the rest of us.
B ACK WHEN P OLAND W AS R USSIA , T HAT’S H OW L ONG A GO
    The
Yizkor
book that I can’t read says there was a sugar-beet processing plant in Zychlin, and a pretty bridge where young couples would make out. I can picture the bridge, but I have to tell you I have no idea what a sugar beet is. I spent years writing a book about an American town that was also full of sugar beets, and even though I’ve looked up the term in several places, I still don’t get it. Are they like regular beets except sweet? Are they like sugarcane, but called “beet” because of their shape? Are they sugar or beet, for God’s sake?
    Why didn’t I ask you this question? Surely, you’d know the answer if this mystery crop really was part of your town’s industry. I guess I cared more about atmosphere than the exports, so I pressed you to tell me whatever you remembered about Zychlin. It wasn’t beets. It wasn’t much of anything, really.
    There was one big church and one synagogue, which stood around the corner from your uncle’s house, but no hospital. If there was a fire, people ran around with buckets of water to put it out. Most of the streets were made of cobblestone or dirt, the houses, of wood, though some photos show homes of stucco or cement behind the people lining up for deportation.
    Everything else I’ve learned about Zychlin comes from websites, reference books, or the
Yizkor
book, which is being translated for the public one frustrating section at a time. I buckle these facts together as if I’m writing a term paper so I can imagine where you spent your happy years.
    The town is almost dead center in the middle of the country, about fifty-nine miles from Warsaw and eleven from Lodz, its closest big city. Around ten thousand people live there now, though there’s no indication that any of them are Jews. I can’t even tell if Zychliners like Jews these days. On a website that appears to be dedicated to children’s welfare and is in need of “passionate” volunteers, there’s a cartoon that looks blatantly anti-Semitic. It shows three bearded, hook-nosed, black-hatted men standing in a row. One is looking at a book, and one, who happens to be holding his
tallis
over his head (in case you weren’t sure of their background), is screaming at the others. I write down the caption and type it into the Google translator.
People with passion
, it says. And now I’m confused. Are they saying that the Jews in the cartoon are respectably passionate … or crazy-passionate?
    Other than this, there isn’t much information about Zychlin that doesn’t involve history. I learn that in your day, the water pump was right near the
mikveh
, the chicken slaughterhouse, and the tin-roofed, stone-walled synagogue. There