Essays
I have been a journalist for 50 years. My expertise is essays on the OP-ED pages of three newspapers: the Los Angeles Times, the Hartford Courant, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Most of my subjects were political opinions, many in the form of a narrative essay.
I remembered its smell
For five years—half my life—I hadn't seen soap. I didn't remember exactly what it was, or what was its color, shape or texture. But because senses have a strange way of playing tricks even with the youngest of minds, I remembered its smell, and that created a corner of loveliness in my soul.
I forgive the sins of Catholics in Poland during World War II
Last month, in universally Catholic Poland, 100 bishops apologized for the wrongs committed by Catholics against their Jewish compatriots during World War II.
Final farewell for a soldier who lived life
My husband Irving Patron died on Memorial Day. The timeline was fitting. At the start of 1944, Irving "Pat" Patronsky of Garden Street in Hartford, Conn. went off to war. And so did most of the boys from Weaver High School class of 1939.
I remembered its smell
For five years—half my life—I hadn't seen soap. I didn't remember exactly what it was, or what was its color, shape or texture. But because senses have a strange way of playing tricks even with the youngest of minds, I remembered its smell, and that created a corner of loveliness in my soul.
It was on the evening of June 20th, 1941 that I had my last bath with real soap. That night, shortly before dawn, we were deported from our home in Soviet-occupied Poland to Siberia. My mother said it was because we were Jews and because a high-ranking KGB official coveted the house we lived in.
For the next five years we were political prisoners in a land of eternal snow, where the regime dispensed daily doses of brutality to its own people , and worse to foreigners whom it deemed dangerous and subversive. 60% did not survive.
Under those circumstances no one gave much thought to the absence of soap. Except my mother. She always remembered the nice things in life, such as her Lalique pitcher or her silk handkerchiefs trimmed with Belgian lace. I think that's what pulled her through the horror and the hunger—the idea that her crystal and her lingerie were waiting beyond the bleak horizon.
Actually, we did have soap of sorts, at least that's what the Siberian natives called it. It was made of a sticky substance, yellow with streaks of brown that felt like glue and smelled like cow manure. When you took it in your hand it squished all over and oozed disgustingly through your fingers.
Mother had to use it regularly for our laundry, but only occasionally when my body odor became more offensive than the yellow soap, would she make me bathe with it. There was never enough water for a clean rinse and for days after each purification I would walk around feeling that my body was covered with a film of stinking slime.
When I was 10, the war came to an end and the Russians said that we were free to go home. Once more, on a day in June we were put on a freight train. But unlike five years earlier when we traveled north at breakneck speed and in sealed cars, our return trip south was leisurely. The boxcar doors were wide open to the sun and the lush fields, and we children sat on the floor with our feet dangling outside, getting dizzy when we looked down at the railroad tracks, and giggling a lot.
The conductor was a kindly old man with a bushy Cossack mustache who gave us candy, which was hard and sweet and lasted for a long time. We could even negotiate with him and with the other personnel -- who didn't have guns or army uniforms this time—to allow us to walk around a bit and talk to people when the train stopped.
When we reached the Ukraine he recommended that we wait for Dobra Matka—meaning "Good Mother"—where we would have a lot of room to move around.
He was absolutely right. The town had an enormous railroad depot , with tracks criss-crossing the platforms, surrounded by wooden shacks of various sizes and shapes. Apparently the place was once an important junction and a central storage facility, but it seemed to have been abandoned , for we could see no other trains anywhere and no workers attending the warehouses.
The conductor said that Dobra Matka was absolutely safe, so we children dispersed all over the station, happily stretching our numb limbs. We soon became bored with hopping on the tracks so we decided to play hide n'seek. When it was my turn to seek, I covered my eyes with my hands and leaned against a small shack. I heard my friends scramble away very fast. After a while their footsteps could no longer be heard—and everything became eerily still.
I became aware of a smell coming from inside the shack. It was the familiar scent that I remembered from so long ago, the perfume that I associated with cleanliness and wealth, with a time when life was mellow and people loved each other.
I pushed a board and it gave way without difficulty. I crawled inside the shack. Now the smell was all around me, intensified a hundredfold. Yet it was too dark for me to see the source. I resolutely plucked another board from the wall and soon was able to identify the contents of the shack: row upon row of lovely little bars of soap in stacks covering the floor and reaching all the way to the ceiling. I gingerly reached for a bar nearest me. It was smooth as silk and nestled comfortably in the palm of my hand. There was even some decoration on it. I peered closer. Now I could distinguish three letters, like a monogram, but in the Polish alphabet, not Russian or Ukrainian.
By this time my friends came to look for me. Their anger with me leaving the game turned into joy when I showed them my find. There was a well near one of the shacks, and we ran there as fast as we could, each holding a bar of soap. We took off our clothes, brought up a pail of cool, clear water and lathered ourselves with thick sweet-smelling suds. We played and splashed and giggled for a very long time.
When we heard the train whistle call out, we put our clothes back on our damp bodies and ran to the shack to collect more soap.
"Mama, mama, look what I found!" I cried as I ran across the tracks, holding on to the bottom of my dress which I had filled with bars of soap. She helped me up into the car, and took one of the bars, holding it away from her face as if it were a foreign object that had fallen out of the sky.
"Look Mama," I said, trying to excite her, "there's even some writing on it..."
At that moment the train pulled away, and the wheels began to turn, chugging heavily, and increasing their speed and noise. My mother and I stood in front of the open door, she turning the soap over and over in her hands, while both of mine clutched the skirt holding my treasure. Suddenly Mother's face turned ashen and her eyes opened wide with fear, as if locked on the sight of a terrible monster coming to devour her, She said nothing, but her fear communicated itself to me and I began screaming: "Mama! Mama! What's wrong? What have I done?"
Still she said nothing. I thought she couldn't hear me because the wheels were making so much noise. I started to tremble and then I screamed as loudly as I could and stomped my feet hysterically because I was terribly frightened— and I didn't know why.
So she had to tell me. Not knowing, would do me even more harm. Grasping me by the shoulders, she said: "The letters RJF mean Rein Judish Fett!" She said it in German, but I understood because it sounds the same in Yiddish: Pure Jewish Fat.
I let go of the bottom of my dress and all the soap came crashing to the floor, many of the bars chipping and losing their smooth surface. I bent down and started throwing them out of the train , one by one, looking down to see them crushed between the sharp wheels and the steel rails. And all the time tears were rolling out of my eyes, covering my clean, sweet-smelling body.
I forgive the sins of Catholics in Poland during World War II
Last month, in universally Catholic Poland, 100 bishops apologized for the wrongs committed by Catholics against their Jewish compatriots during World War II.
And I forgive them. Almost completely.
On June 21, 1941 at 2 a.m. in Bialystok, Poland, my family and I were picked up by a KGB truck, and at 9 a.m. found ourselves aboard a freight train headed for Siberia.
The next day, at 4 p.m. , we heard distant thunder as the Germans bombed Kiev.
Back in Poland, 17 days after our departure, the 1000 or so Christian inhabitants of the town of Jedwabne in Bialystok County massacred their 1600 Jewish neighbors. A Gestapo film crew took pictures. The Poles claimed, with no basis in fact, that the Jews had collaborated with the previous Soviet occupation.
And for that I forgive them.
My 12 year old cousin, Bronek Kagan, was blond-haired and blue-eyed, a real Aryan. In the summer of 1943, as the Bialystok ghetto was being liquidated, Bronek escaped into the countryside and found refuge with a Polish farmer's family. Some time later, the Gestapo picked up Bronek leaving the rest of the family unharmed, proof that the farmer had betrayed him.
Poland was the only country in Europe singled out by the Germans for excessive collective punishment. If one member of a family , unbeknownst to others, was found sheltering a Jew, the entire family would be killed. Clearly, the farmer felt that he had no choice in the matter.
And for that I forgive him.
By autumn 1943, the Bialystok ghetto no longer existed. But my uncle, Leib Rakowski, and his family were still alive.
He had once owned a building in Bialystok, left vacant when its inhabitants were herded into the ghetto. While the ghetto burned, my uncle, his wife, son and a dozen friends and relatives, made their way to the building where Leib, a civil engineer, constructed a bunker in the cellar.
During the days, the building was guarded by the Gestapo, but not at night, when the bunker dwellers would go upstairs to use the toilet. One night, a Polish passerby heard the water flush and called in the Gestapo. The Germans found nothing and were ready to leave , but the Pole insisted they continue the search.
Ripping out the floorboards , they discovered the bunker and shipped the occupants to Auschwitz.
Perhaps the German's cruelty in Poland had hardened the passerby's heart.
And for that I forgive him.
The Third Reich surrendered in May 1945. Ten months later, in March 1946, my parents and I returned from Siberia to Bialystok. A couple hundred more Jews came back, some reemerging from the forests, where they had spent the war fighting as partisans.
The Poles were stunned to see the returnees, and a rumor spread that we planned to reclaim our properties. All of us rented an abandoned monastery and hid behind its iron gates, with the partisans and former Red Army soldiers standing guard. We children were strictly forbidden to leave the premises. But I was 10 and accustomed to roaming freely in Siberian fields. So I sneaked out of the compound and went into town, joining a group of local kids.
Soon I found myself in church and, crossing myself, sat down to listen to the priest. "Easter is coming and with it the Jewish Passover," he said. "Some people say that on Passover Jews murder a Polish child and drain his blood to make matzo. And today we have Jews back in our midst. Personally, of course, I know nothing bout such doings."
At home, my father beat me for running away, then told me to repeat the priest's sermon. Father decided that we must leave the city before Passover.
Mother, who looked Aryan, covered my dark hair with a scarf and we boarded a train to Warsaw. My father boarded a few cars behind passing himself off as an Armenian which was easy because he was 6'2 and Poles didn't believe that Jews could grow that tall.
These precautions were necessary because many trains had been stopped passing through the forests, and boarded by anti-Communist Poles who claimed, erroneously, that Jews had brought the new Communist regime. They dragged off the train whoever looked Jewish, dumping their corpses on the railroad tracks.
Fortunately, our train was not stopped. We arrived safely in Warsaw. There we heard that those same gangs were busy killing Jews in another town in Bialystok County.
For all the crimes committed against Jews in 1946, in what was then a free and independent Poland -- I shall never forgive them.
Final farewell for a soldier who lived life
My husband Irving Patron died on Memorial Day. The timeline was fitting. At the start of 1944, Irving "Pat" Patronsky of Garden Street in Hartford, Conn. went off to war. And so did most of the boys from Weaver High School class of 1939.
He was buried in Avon, Conn., first settled in 1645. Many towns around here go back to Pilgrim times, with names such as Windsor, Essex and Cheshire, New Canaan, Bethel and Hebron. You can still buy a handmade quilt at the Arts and Crafts Fairgrounds in Farmington.
Having lived in the artificial splendor of Florida for the past ten years I am overwhelmed by the natural greenery and heavy-limbed oaks that must have witnessed the Revolutionary War. There's an acknowledgement of history, a cohesion of land and people. I am glad that 46 years ago my husband brought me here from abroad.
Meeting Irving's contemporaries during my first year in Hartford, I was surprised these fellows rarely engaged in gossip. When I lived in Israel, my intimate group of friends held what we liked to call "social therapy sessions," amusingly gossiping about everyone who annoyed us. But these guys liked to say: He's a nice person. She is so sweet and a good sport ..." This is reticence run amok.
And they dressed funny. They shopped downtown at Tryon's, substituting one navy Brooks Brothers blazer for a newer identical twin. The more prescient would buy several at a time. Why burden the future with extra shopping? But truth be told: no one wears chinos with more panache than a New Englander. Our Israeli khakis were a necessity — theirs oozed nonchalant chic.
Irving grew up in what is now, heartbreakingly, the most dangerous part of downtown Hartford. He'd been an usher at the Majestic, and one afternoon sat on pins and needles with the rest of the family, waiting for his mother Dora and his aunt Sadie to return from the Great Circus Fire of 1939 He never had a bar mitzvah because during the Depression his parents couldn't afford it, and were not religious enough to care.
Irving studied engineering at the University of Connecticut and in 1943, when American pilots were already flying missions over Germany, he enlisted. Everyone enlisted. No one of that generation that I'd met in my thirty-seven years in Hartford had stayed out of the war.
First Irving trained in England. Then, on Dec.13, 1944, he found himself in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes in Belgium, in what was Hitler's last outburst of rage against the allies. A year ago I learned from the Weather Channel that 1944 was the coldest winter in a generation. Three days later, Irving's platoon was captured by the Germans. It was a lucky break because a day later, on the 17th, in nearby Malmedy, the Germans massacred 80 American POWs.
Irving's two best friends also enlisted. Julius "Juke" Fegelman was a platoon sergeant in the 1944 beach storming in Anzio, Italy; and Seymour "Shloim" Nathan became a navigator on a B-22 bomber. Him being a tall guy — we never understood how he could fit into the navigator's tight spot. "There was leg room," he explained.
Irving spent the rest of the war in Stalag 13 and in May 1945 was liberated by the Red Army.
We always hear from family and friends that their loved ones never talked about the war. Irving did talk, but they were mostly stories and anecdotes. In later years, when the timelines in his brain became scrambled, he cried for the boy who was in the foxhole next to him and was blown to pieces, his blood splattering Irving's uniform. He never knew the boy's name — but he talked about him in his dreams.
It was 97 degrees when he was buried. The Army provided military honors. Two men folding the Stars and Stripes. In slow motion, with precise steps, thirteen folds in tri-cornered shape in honor of the thirteen original colonies. Of which Connecticut, the Constitution State, was one..
