For Real?
How we come to believe what we believe
Every story they shared about their lives fit into five precise time-periods: “when we were at home,” which referred to the pre-World War II years when they lived with their parents and extended family in rural Romania. Next were the war years about which they said, “when they took us away.” They began with Nazism’s rise and Mom’s and Esther’s deportation and imprisonment in Concentration Camps.
After that was their liberation from Dachau by American soldiers, including the three years during which they lived in Munich. That period was simply referred to as, “After we were liberated.” Last in the sequence was their transitions from post-war Germany to immigrant status; for my mother it meant going to Canada and for her sister, Esther, it meant her move to the United States.
In 1945, the two sisters had been taken to a Red Cross hospital in Germany located on the campus of the American-run displaced persons camp, Feldafing.
I’d always harbored deep doubts about some of their stories and given my relatively sheltered life, they sounded either unimaginably horrible or totally far-fetched. Consequently, I listened to Mom’s and Aunt Esther’s tales with tremendous skepticism. In all likelihood, I reasoned, their recollections had been embellished with each telling and by the passage of time.
Their favorite story — the one Mom assumed primary responsibility for telling, and one I’d memorized, even though I didn’t entirely believe it, was that the two of them had been visited in the hospital by the then American General Eisenhower. As I listened to them I always tried to keep from looking doubtful.
Decades after Mom and Esther had died, an unanticipated series of events in my professional life banished every ounce of my skepticism.
In fact, they threw me into a tailspin. The crucial event, that turning point? I was hired as principal researcher for a World War II Holocaust related documentary film entitled “A Voice Among the Silent”. I dreaded knowing that my research would take me to the United Stated Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I’d always been hyper-sensitive to war movies, photographs, and anything else that was evocative of man’s inhumanity to man.
Even as I was in a taxi headed to the museum, anxiety filled me about the possible visual images I was likely to encounter during my research. Some well-known photographs had become imbedded in my memory and often triggered my nightmares. Such problems, I was to discover, were not at all unusual among offspring of survivors of trauma — be it the Holocaust, Vietnam, or any other man-created genocides.
Taking the museum’s elevator to the third floor library and reference center, my stomach was churning. My familiar anxiety was building as I waited for the librarian to bring me files and video clips I’d arranged to review at the center.
Sure, my primary purpose of visiting Washington, D.C., was to conduct research for the film but as I scrolled through reels upon reels of historical images, I began to realize that I was on the look-out for documents and photographs that might include anything relevant to Feldafing, the D.P. camp (displaced persons’ camp) in which my mother and her sister were living after the war.
The place held significance for my father and my brother as well. It was where my parents had met, where they married, and where my brother was born. Maybe it was possible that over the course of decades when so much material had become part of the public record, I could encounter something, anything, about them?
I sat in front of the computer screen in the Holocaust Museum’s library, scrolling through photo upon photo upon photo with dizzying speed. There were group photographs, pictures of ORT workshops, wedding parties, images of Jewish holidays, birth records and graduation certificates.
Suddenly, something on the screen caught my eye, demanding I scroll back instantly.
Right there on the computer, in front of my eyes, was a grainy black and white image of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, future president of the United States of America! In the photo, he strides across a wide courtyard at what seems a brusque pace. He’s flanked by an entourage of men attired similarly in military garb. They pass low-rise brick buildings marked as residence halls and official buildings can be seen behind the group. But on the left edge of the photograph, two concrete steps lead through an archway and on to a door. Above it, an American Red Cross flag furls in the wind. The caption under the image:
General Eisenhower tours the Feldafing Displaced Persons’ center and visits women concentration camp survivors in the hospital ward.
It was there my mother and her sister were recovering after being liberated from Dachau. That was one of the stories, among so many others, they told and retold to us. They were like a well-practiced stage duet.
— — —
“So, I bet you didn’t know that it was General Eisenhower who gave your Aunt Esther the nickname of Tommy?” My mother began each telling the same way. “And you know that he became president of the United States, right?” Anyone listening feigned well rehearsed looks of surprise or simple disbelief.
“It’s true, really!” Aunt Esther chimed in, her effort to add credibility to the story.
“So exactly what was it that made that World War II hero General Eisenhower decide to nickname Aunt Esther, Tommy?” I asked, despite being well-aware that this particular question provided the lead-in for the story. I dared not deviate.
“So I was in the hospital recovering from typhus and so many other really horrible wounds and I weighed only sixty pounds and couldn’t eat so was on an I.V. drip. Esther was recovering from bullet wounds in her back and from surgery they’d done to get shrapnel out of her head. In case that wasn’t enough, practically none of us had grown back any of our hair yet.” She explained. “They shaved our heads again when we were put into the hospital for all kinds of reasons. But that’s beside the point.”
”Anyway, because your aunt had to have surgery on her head, American doctors who operated on her shaved her head very cleanly when they prepped her so any hair that actually had started to grow back was totally gone again! They’d wrapped her head around and around with white gauze, but the rest of her head was kept clean shaven all the time — an extra precaution to prevent infection. Esther was recuperating much faster than I was. So every day after breakfast and doctors’ visits, she was allowed to come onto my ward where she sat on my bed next to me.” Mom explained.
“Okay, okay, I know all that. Get to the part about Eisenhower.” I said, impatiently.
”Alright then. One morning while Esther was sitting on my bed, we heard a huge commotion on our ward. She helped me sit up so we both could look around to figure out what was happening. Our nurses were running around, excited and chattering — giggling as they rushed to clean up the ward.
They were emptying waste baskets, fluffing pillows, making sure the water decanter next to each bed was filled. You can’t imagine the scene! Suddenly it went from hushed quiet to a buzz like a beehive! It was as though they’d become teen age girls who were about to meet a movie star. I’ll never forget the sight of them all squeezing in front of the one small mirror near the sink, passing around the only lipstick anyone had. I’ll never forget it, a bright red they called British Flag Red. They were adjusting each other’s little nurse’s caps when the screen door flew open.
”Most of us, the patients, didn’t understand more than a few words of English but those of us who did, told the others what they thought was happening when an orderly ran through the wards to warn our nurses that Eisenhower was on the grounds asking to visit the women’s infirmary.”
”None of us believed it.” Esther added. “We figured that the woman who thought she understood English better just heard the name Eisenhower and then made up the story. The only reason we weren’t sure was because the nurses were acting so crazy.”
”So what’s the Tommy thing?” I asked, trying to keep them on topic. It was my mother’s turn to take the story to the end, the part during which her smile grows wide and her eyes seem to grow bluer.
“The second after the nurses stepped away from the mirror, the door flew open and two soldiers came marching in. One was on either side of the door standing at attention and another soldier screamed out words that included Eisenhower. And suddenly, there he was! We were overwhelmed with excitement.
He walked to the far end of the big room then started to make his rounds, stopping to greet each woman, touch her hand, and say a few words probably none of us understood but we didn’t care. My bed was in the middle of the room and Aunt Esther was sitting with me. She was bald, skinny and you know how tall she is!”
“And I was watching him come towards us,” Esther added, “but your mom couldn’t turn her head so she didn’t see him. The next second, he was at your mom’s bed and standing right next to me. First he took your mom’s hand in both of his, patted it and said who knows what? First, his voice was quiet but then he rubbed his hand across the top of my bald head. Eisenhower shouted at me and all the soldiers with him laughed hysterically.
‘Hey you, Tommy!’ he screamed at me, ‘Isn’t this is a woman’s ward, huh? So Tommy, what are you doing in here?’”
— — —
Was it possible that had happened? Did an important world figure of the time, General Eisenhower, not only visit Feldafing but also walked through the women’s hospital ward and take time to greet each recovering female survivor? Or was it one of those family stories, told and retold so often that it acquired a life of its own?
Sure, I thought, maybe Eisenhower had been at the camp but most likely he probably had simply walked across the grounds in an obligatory good-will tour. I wondered whether Mom really met him or if it was just that she was there when he visited the region?
There were other stories Mom had told me as well; about the brutally sadistic S.S. Guard, Dorothea Bintz, the way in which the camp had been constructed at the edge of a large river, and how the camp’s prisoners could see people across the river — seemingly regular citizens of the town, who regularly watched the inmates carrying out daily forced-labor activities.
Just as Eisenhower’s visit to Feldafing had been confirmed by the photograph in the USHMM’s archives, I was astounded once more by documentation and photographs I encountered more recently, published by a British journalist. While decades have passed since my mother’s death, new documents and photos continue to become part of an ever-growing public record.
I have only to ask one increasingly critical question: why do we question personal eye-witness accounts as frequently as we do?
