Lanka's Story·Part 8 of 8
Later Years and the Weight of Memory
Chapter 8
Later Years and the Weight of Memory
In the decades after she settled in Michigan, Lanka Ilkow lived the life of a postwar immigrant survivor, running her catering business, raising her daughters, and eventually becoming a grandmother. From the outside it looked like a successful rebuilding. Inside, the past never loosened its hold on her, and it reached my grandfather too, though he had not been in the camps. He told Dr. Bolkosky that he also dreamed of flying and running from the Nazis, because of the stories he had heard from his wife, and he believed that a person who had not heard them could not be affected as he was. He thought that every Jew who had lived in Europe during the war, whether or not he had been in a camp, deserved compensation from Germany, since everyone had been damaged by it.¹ When he sat down to watch a war film, Lanka would not stay in the room. She could not bear the sound of German voices or the marching music, which she said rang in her ear, and she would scream at him to turn it off.
Martin had a grandfather of his own, to whom he was as attached as she was to hers. He told the interviewer that when his father once struck him as a boy, his grandfather pinned his father against the wall and ordered him never to lay a hand on the child. During the war he prayed to that grandfather, and he believed that he was the one who saved him. My grandparents had never met each other’s Zeidees, but they understood without explanation what the other meant when one of them spoke about one.
She remained especially close to two of her grandsons, and I was the older of the two. We spent a great deal of time in her house when we were young, and she raised us nearly as much as our parents did. She told us stories about her grandfather, about the songs he sang and the way he had defended her and the warning he had given her on his deathbed not to stay in Europe. We returned the attachment, and she said that we hugged and kissed her with a special closeness. When I planned my bar mitzvah and at first resisted having the wider family there, I ultimately insisted that my Bubbie and Zeide be present, and I said that I loved them and that they had always been good to me. Bubbie , who had been a caterer for years, refused to let my mother pay the going price of a hundred dollars a plate, and she planned to cook the meal herself, hire the waitresses, and serve it on a Sunday in March. She and my Zeide gave me a thousand-dollar bond, a necklace, and a ring.
She watched the next generations with a mixture of pride and unease. A cousin who had been raised with almost no Jewish education decided, after moving to the small town of Woodstock, to raise her own children as Jews. She traveled to Czechoslovakia for a Torah for the local synagogue and was given two scrolls, one so badly torn that it could not be used and the other in good condition, and she created an album about the town and the history of its Jews, which she presented to the congregation.² Lanka attended two of the bar mitzvahs there, and the local newspaper listed her among those present as a Czech survivor. She was deeply moved by it. At the same time she worried openly about mixed marriages and about what she saw as the growing indifference of American Jews to their own survival. She told interviewers that she did not believe the hatred of Jews had disappeared, and that if the American people were told what had happened to the Jews of Europe, most of them would not care, so long as it did not happen to them. She thought that something drastic could happen again, though perhaps not in the same way, and she had heard casual anti-Semitic remarks even from people who treated her well. She did not believe the threat had ended in 1945. She was also grateful for the people who were good to her. The Christian family next door, devout and kind, had a key to her house and looked after it while she was away, and one afternoon she was babysitting their small boy. She never saw a contradiction. She believed that the best of the Gentiles were nearly always the first to mention what the Jews did.
Even in the early years the family kept to the synagogue, buying seats for the High Holidays in the kitchen of Beth Moses for fifteen dollars, since a person did not need to be a member to pray. They joined only later, when Beverly belonged to the youth group. She disliked the way congregations sold the best seats, and she said that every synagogue should be ashamed of what it did for money. When they joined one where the reserved rows were filled and she was told to sit at the back, she was so offended that she left. Keep in mind this was very strange and not a normal practice. Most synagogues allow you to sit wherever you want.
In the camps she had often felt that God was absent, and she did not return to the full observance of her childhood. She thought that something existed to lead people through life, but she said she could never again be as religious as she had been in Europe, and that after Auschwitz she could not understand how anyone could pray as they had before. She remained a Jew in every sense that mattered to her, and she raised her children as Jews. She never claimed to have resolved the contradiction. Even in old age she continued, in moments of difficulty, to speak to her grandfather, asking him to hold his right hand over her.
On her walks she would sometimes find herself crying. She thought about her parents, who had worked from dawn until night on the farm and never had a good day in their lives, and about her own lost childhood, and about the cows she had milked with hands that were too small. She was dieting at the time, on account of her heart, and she remarked that it seemed absurd, after what she had endured, to have to deny herself food. She cried at the thought, and she cried because her mother had cried over the potatoes.
On two mornings in October 1991, she sat in her home in Southfield and told Dr. Bolkosky the whole story of her life, from the farm in Nowosielica to the ramp at Birkenau and the barn in the snow, interrupting herself once to offer him a taste of her plum preserves. When he asked her at the end whether there was anything she wished to add, she answered that she thought she had told him everything.³
In the years after that interview she began speaking in schools. She told the children, in short, how she had been born in Europe, how they were treated, and how they were taken away from home, and the children wrote her letters and sent her small presents. At a private high school where she had been invited, the students sat on the floor to listen, and afterward they sent a single letter that every one of them had signed. She was told that they could not believe the woman in front of them had gone through it. She was struck that it was the way she looked that they found hard to believe, and she said that in the camps she had never believed she would survive, but that she had told herself every day that she had to.
Her final recorded reflections returned to the same points she had carried since 1945. Jews needed to stay together and to help one another. They needed to support Israel. What had happened to her must never be allowed to happen again. She had seen the corpse piles of Bergen-Belsen, the frozen bodies along the January roads, and the moment her father and little brother walked to the gas chambers. She had also seen her sister open her eyes under a pile of the dead and had dragged her back. Both realities remained with her.
By the time she recorded her fullest testimonies she was in her seventies. The young woman who had been dragged from her bed at age seven to feed chickens, who had watched her father and brother walk to the gas chambers, who had kicked frozen corpses off her sister’s legs in a barn in January 1945, and who had crawled across the dirt at Bergen-Belsen to find food, was now a grandmother in suburban Michigan. The distance between those two realities never disappeared. It simply became the ground on which the rest of her life was lived.
She did not ask to be called a hero. She asked only that what she had seen not be forgotten.
Footnotes
¹ The 1991 Bolkosky interview and the 1996 Shoah Foundation interview, together with the German pension document, form the primary documentary basis for this account. The pension was granted under West Germany’s compensation legislation, which began in 1953 and allowed persecutees to claim payments for imprisonment and for lasting damage to their health. The interview with Dr. Sidney Bolkosky is held in the Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. The Shoah Foundation interview was recorded in Southfield, Michigan on April 14, 1996, by Hanan Posner, on five tapes.
² After the war, Torah scrolls from destroyed Czech Jewish communities were collected in Prague, and in 1964 a collection of 1,564 of them was transferred to the Westminster Synagogue in London, from which scrolls have been loaned to congregations around the world. A scroll that is torn or damaged beyond repair cannot be used for reading, but is kept as a memorial.
³ The two sessions were held at her home on the mornings of October 12 and October 19, 1991, and are the longest continuous account she gave. Her husband, Martin, joined the second session near its end, and the interview closes with the three of them in her living room.