Jan 7, 2019
The Phoenix and His Shadow
The Story of My Father-in-Law
We sit around his bed in the Palliative Care ward at Mackenzie Health Centre. I have been reading article after article about the end of life — what to expect, how to support the person dying, how to support those who are closest to that person, and how to prepare yourself for the imminent loss. The nurse, Miryam, a woman from Russia, comes in to help Ted eat — several spoons of chocolate pudding is a victory. She tells us that we must tell happy stories, stories about love and laughter, courage and strength. When we laugh, he will feel at ease. His breathing is deep and laboured and Miryam tells us that he feels our angst and he must feel our love. We laugh about stories of vodka and youthful indiscretions. Jeff tells stories about when he was younger and Dorothy laughs. Miryam shows us how peaceful Ted is now. Breathing is slower and calmer. He is settled.
My father-in-law, Ted, Tibor is his Hungarian name, and Tibby is what Dorothy (my mother-in-law) calls him, has just celebrated his 85th birthday on January 1st— against all odds, in the Palliative Care ward as he awaits his final days of life. He represents all that is strong and safe to his family. Even in his weakened state, he is what gives them all solace. He is silent and has spoken little in the last few months and yet, as he lies there in the hospital bed first in his dining room and now at the hospital, they all wonder what they will do when he is gone. He is a powerful man. He complains about nothing. Ever.
We always wait for the call from my mother-in-law, Dorothy. He has been sick often since I have known him —Crohn’s disease, seizure disorder, strokes, brain tumour, perforated bowel, renal failure, pancreatitis and now, the tumour and subsequent radiation have got the better of him. We prepare for the worst every time and every time he rises. Dorothy calls him the Phoenix who rises from the ashes. This time, there is no talk of the Phoenix.
Each time, Dorothy is there, by his side, caring for him and keeping him comfortable, fed, nurtured and loved. She thinks nothing of herself as her hair slowly grows into grey and her ankles swell for lack of movement. It is beyond understanding that he has survived all that he has. He has a survival instinct beyond any I know and at his side is her…always…tending to his needs and thinking nothing of her own because all she wants is for him to live, in any state. Nothing else matters to her. She has told me many times, “Honestly Debella, I swear I was put on this Earth to keep him alive.”
As a young boy, growing up in Budapest, he lost most of his family in 1944 when the Hungarians handed over their Jewish population to the Nazis. After Ted’s brain surgery, he had a brief window where he began sharing about his story. The gigantic wallets (he always carried two with all of his personal papers in them) were pulled out of his pockets and put onto the kitchen table and he began telling us some of the story that has been locked inside him for over 70 years. He told us that his father died before that in a Labour Camp in 1941 and realized that his mother spent the rest of the war with both her children and the children from his first wife.
He had half and full siblings as his father had been married to another woman prior to Ted’s mother. We assume the first mother passed away. There was Bella, Olga, Elsa, Julius (Juicy) were from the first marriage. Iboja (Ibby), Zoltan, Irene, Klara and Ted were from the second marriage. His father was Alexander (Sandor) and Malwin was his mother’s name. Juicy had been involved in the resistance and didn’t come to Canada until after the Hungarian Revolution around August of 1957.
We know his mother was given one Wallenberg passport and gave it to him and kept his young sister, also pictured above, with her. They gave him an address of a safe house and he didn’t want to go but he did. He found his way to the house. His sister and mother both perished, along with all but three of his siblings — there were eight of them before the war but beyond that, there are no details about it. It is known that many of the Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz in 1944 nearing the end of the war in Hitler’s last ditch attempt to rid the world of its Jewry.
At ten years of age, Ted was on his way to this safe house when he saw a red headed boy walking in the wrong direction and he stopped him and told him to turn the other way and follow him because the Nazis were in the direction the red headed boy was walking. We don’t know who that boy was or if he survived.
He lived in the safe house until January 18, 1945 at which time the Russian Army took over the town. He then went to live with his step-sister Elsa and her husband Gaza until the beginning of 1948. During the three years that he lived with his sister he received letters and parcels from his first cousin on his mother’s side who lived in Toronto. His family didn’t want him to go to Israel where his life would be endangered again. They wanted him safely tucked away in Canada.
In March of 1948, Ted left Hungary on a long journey to Canada beginning with travel to a displaced persons camp in Vienna which was a converted hospital in Rothschild. In May 1948 and weighing only 48 kilos he was sent to a children’s home for orphans run by the International Red Cross in Bad Schallerbach, northern Austria where he was nursed back to health reaching 55 kilos a few months later. In September 1948, the International Red Cross in communication with the Canadian Jewish Congress from Montreal facilitated his immigration to Canada. Ted departed Europe out of Bremerhaven and arrived in Canada at Pier 21 in Halifax on September 30, 1948 aboard the S.S. USAT General W.C. Langfitt, a Navy ship that was converted to transport WWII refugees abroad. He was placed with a foster family until he turned 18 years old and moved out on his own.
Ted attended high school at Central Tech where he learned to be a plumber and steam fitter. He only worked in the field for one year before starting a long and successful career as a mechanical estimator in the HVAC industry.
He had learned to expect nothing but his life soon changed as Ted and Dorothy met when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-eight. She was convinced she would be an old maid. She went to a Jewish party. She almost didn’t want to go because it was too much of a shlep to go all the way downtown. They clicked right away and she told him about her life — her brother, the loss of her father at a young age and it just worked. He told her that he was from Hungary. He was living with a friend from Hungary. He was tanned and handsome and they were married six months later, August 4th, 1963 at Beth David Synagogue with 90 guests and Dorothy’s brother, Reuben Feld and sister-in-law, Judy, paid for the wedding.
We don’t know what happened to Ted’s brother and the other five children. Admittedly, I have scoured pictures on the Internet trying to match the faces of the children in the picture above with the deportation of the Jews from Budapest but always to no avail. The story was silent. For those who have heard parts of it like Dorothy, or Jeff’s Auntie Judy, we know pieces. I had always heard that survivors may not tell their children but will often begin to open up to their grandchildren but this didn’t happen either. It took the removal of a brain tumour in his frontal lobe to break down the walls Ted built at a very young age.
As Ted began unfolding the papers from his giant wallets, Jeff began unlocking some of his history. One day he pulled out a creased paper that showed the boat he came into Canada on in 1948. The General W. C. Langfitt which was a container ship that landed at Pier 21 in Halifax. Another piece of the puzzle revealed. It sends my husband, Jeff Ecker, on another quest to learn his father’s story. No one asks Ted directly. He just slowly reveals pieces when we least expect it.
Jeff tells me that his father changed when he was a child. He suffered post traumatic stress disorder like so many Holocaust survivors. He lost his way, his home and his business. Jeff’s memories of his childhood are broken — he remembers traumatic events, injuries, and vacations to the Catskills and Fern Resort. There are huge blanks — no memories at all, for years at a time. He spent most of his childhood and youth hanging out at his friend’s homes, particularly his friend Brian, who took him in and offered him an alternative universe.
As long as I have known Ted, twenty two years, he has been a soft spoken and gentle man. Jeff remembers another person. He remembers the fierceness with which his father protected him from others. His strength. And then his silence which was sparked by the pronouncement of Raoul Wallenberg’s death. There were fits of rage. He stopped working for a time. This was a man I never knew. The man I knew had brain surgery and went back to work proving that he could. He was driven to provide for his family no matter the circumstances.
The day Ted meets our daughter, his first grandchild, he is consumed with joy and Jeff is in awe because he does not recall that happiness in his father since he was a little boy. Each time we bring Rachel and Max over to their home, Ted revels in their presence. He wants nothing more than to see his grandchildren around him.
He has his chair and he sits there, as if on a throne, soaking in the love and beauty that his grandchildren bring to him and you can feel his heart growing as he quietly sits beside them, smiling.
Then there was the day that Max had his Bar Mitzvah — a luxury that Ted was not granted given what was happening at the time in his own life. During the service, the Torah was passed from Ted, to Jeff and then to Max and it was a profound moment where we all knew the significance of it in the moment. There are no other Eckers — just our two children, Rachel and Max, who carry the name forward. A family that was destroyed and yet, like Dorothy asserts — he is the Phoenix who rises from the ashes. When his days are done, he has them, Rachel and Max, to carry on his name, his story and his legacy of strength and boundless courage.
Whatever the shadow of pain that he caries with him dissipates and he rises again — just by being with them. Jeff shares a moment with me. After I left the hospital, Jeff sat by his father’s side and Ted reached up for Jeff’s hand and held it tightly and looked at Jeff and said two words — “my son”. And with these two words, Jeff, who would much rather show rage than pain, rage over weakness, rage over shame, crumbles. He knows that those two words are filled with every ounce of love, pride and gratitude for being the son he is — the pillar of strength for his family, the one who got married and had children and will bring forward the stories and love and legacy.
I have always been on the outside of this family looking in. I imagine that is always this way when you marry into the family. I have borne witness to the love and acceptance, the enduring strength, the life of struggle that makes the smallest moments the most profound joy. There is no expectation that life will bring these moments so when they happen — the birth of your first grandchild, passing the Torah across three generations — these small moments are enough — an opportunity to see light in the midst of darkness.
The Rabbi sends us the prayers to guide Ted into the end of his life on Earth.
Between Two Worlds
The time between life and death is considered extremely sacred in Jewish tradition. On one hand, the passage marks the conclusion of the soul’s journey on earth. On the other hand, death heralds the beginning of the soul’s eternal life in Heaven.
Kabbalah teaches that at the moment of passing, every positive thought, word, or deed that occurred during the person’s life is concentrated into a pristine spiritual light. This light is revealed to the world and in the Heavenly spheres, where it continues to shine and have an effect on those above and below. (https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/364288/jewish/Jewish-Prayers-for-the-Final-Moments-of-Life.htm)
NOTE: I began writing this blog four years ago during one of Ted’s illnesses but stopped. This morning, on January 7th, 2019, I woke up at 3:00 am and re-wrote it. After sharing it with Jeff, he added content based on the research he has done since his father shared his wallets with us and the story began to unravel. Jeff has spent countless hours researching to learn his story, the story of his father and now the story of our children. We have written this while sitting with Ted and his beloved wife, Dorothy, in the Palliative Care Unit at Mackenzie Health. This is first blog I have co-written with my husband of 20 years, Jeff Ecker.
Do you want to read more of my blogs? Check out my publication, Reflective Stance on my website, http://debbiedonsky.com/
