Every Sunday of my childhood, my Papa came to our house bearing bagels, lox, and the Holocaust. His name was Nuchuum Lewin, born in 1922 in Łódź, Poland. He carried a large handkerchief to wipe his tears when he spoke about the past. He read the Encyclopedia Britannica cover to cover. He wrote letters to the editor of the Forward. He went to his Holocaust survivors’ group in Skokie every week. He used to say he never thought he would live to see another generation of Jews. We grandchildren were his naches, he told us. His treasures. His dividends.
He grew up in a home filled with music, laughter, borscht, gefilte fish, and potatoes. His parents, Fischel and Bluma, were hardworking people who were good and kind and full of love. He had a younger brother Max and a sister he recalled as the baby of the family, named Chana. He remembered his mother as a Yiddishe Mama, and said his parents “had to fight for a living,” which meant they were poor, but they were happy and always had enough to eat. He was the captain of his soccer team, Olympia, the only Jewish kid among his Polish peers, with a big crowd of Polish friends who had his back. Before the war, he could walk in any Polish neighborhood at any time of day or night. He had a girlfriend named Freda Shirlovich. He wanted to be a “Big Shot.”
He hadn’t a clue what was coming.
Together, he and Max built a lending library. They saved every coin. They bound some of the books by hand, inscribing them with their library’s name. For a small fee, friends and neighbors could borrow their collection of rare and foreign books from Russian, French, American, and Polish writers like Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Victor Hugo, and Upton Sinclair. Some of these books were now considered dangerous. All of them were beloved. Max dreamed of becoming a librarian. My Papa dreamed of money, influence, soccer stardom. But the library was something they built together, and it mattered to both of them more than anything else they owned.
In their separate Shoah Foundation testimonies, recorded fifty years later, each brother recalled their collection of books, naming some of the same titles and authors. It was the only subject that appeared in both testimonies. Max broke down crying when he remembered the library. My Papa laughed joylessly when the interviewer called the burned books cookbooks. The books had been burned in the same wood stove where their mother, Bluma, used to cook their meals.
When the Nazis invaded, their father Fischel burned the books one by one. He didn’t do it out of hatred. He did it out of love. Out of fear. Out of protection. Certain books were now contraband, books they had hand-bound and saved money for months to buy, and could be used against them to justify their torture or murder. Their library was gone, not by Nazi hands, but by their own.
Papa told us: first, they said not to buy from Jews. Then, they told us Jews should go back to Palestine. Then, Jews could not work. Then, Jews could not go to school. Then, Jews were forced into ghettos.
My Papa’s last day of work was September 1, 1939. Eight days later, the German soldiers reached Łódź. He went home after seeing the first occupiers in his city and cried for an entire day. He simply said, I lost my voice.
On September 8, 1939, his seventeenth birthday, he watched the SS raise their swastika flag in the center of his town, where everyone would have no choice but to see it flapping in the wind. His life as he knew it was over.
In the early days of the occupation, my Papa tried to help his family survive by taking over their milk delivery business. He would walk seventeen kilometers a day with two cans of milk across his shoulders, buying milk from German farmers near the border who risked their own lives to continue meeting him. But soon it became too dangerous to leave home. Soldiers were always waiting to grab someone off the street. Some people had already been sent to camps and had come back, reporting hard labor, bad food, humiliation, but they came back alive. No one knew that was about to change. If they had known, my Papa said, everyone would have run.
He used to say he never thought he would live to see another generation of Jews. We grandchildren were his naches, he told us. His treasures. His dividends.
He begged his family to come with him. His mother Bluma wanted to go. She begged Fischel to make plans. But Max and his sister Chana were too young, and Fischel could not bring himself to leave. He always called it running away. But it was the bravest thing he ever did. Out of hundreds of family members, he was the only one who ran.
He left the Łódź ghetto on November 26, 1939, carrying a small bag with a few clothes, some money, a bar of soap, and a piece of bread. He took no souvenirs or photographs, nothing but the barest of necessities. Before he left, his father shook his hand and lost his voice. They hugged. His mother ran after him through the streets, crying, until he begged her to go back.
He took the train to Warsaw and stayed there in the Jewish community for a night or two, but kept heading north towards Bialystok. He made it to the demarcation line, the border between the German and Soviet zones, and waited there for months before being admitted into Russia. On his first day waiting in a long line of refugees, the bread packed in his bag got wet and mixed with the soap.
He was so hungry he ate it anyway.
In August of 1940 he was finally able to go across the line to the Soviet Union. He was eventually sent to a labor camp in Magnitogorsk, where he worked in a tool-and-die factory for the remainder of the war. He had no idea what had happened to his family.
Meanwhile, Max stayed behind. He was put to forced labor, whatever the Nazis required of a Jewish child who was useful enough to keep alive. At one point he was forced to work with Zyklon-B. Later, he worked on electrical wiring at a train station.
It was common for families being deported to call out the names of loved ones from inside the cattle cars as the trains passed through. Everyone who worked at the stations dreaded hearing their own name. One day, a train passed through the station where Max was working. He thought he heard his family screaming his name from inside the cattle cars. He thought he could see his mother, Bluma, reaching for him through the slats. His little sister Chana was only eight years old. His father Fischel, the man who had burned their books to protect them, was on that train. They were bound for Treblinka.
Far away in Magnitogorsk, while his family suffered under Nazi rule in the Łódź ghetto and then met their fate at the camps, my Papa met my grandmother Rachel, who had also fled east through Soviet territory with surviving members of her family. Somehow, a love story was born from a connection at the tool-and-die factory where my Papa worked as a laborer. She was introduced as an heiress from a good family by a mutual acquaintance who had known her family before the war. No one asked what was left to inherit. Nuchuum and Rachel were married during the war, with no chuppah, no celebration, just a civil ceremony. My Papa was in a hurry to build a family. He used to say he never thought he would live to see another generation of Jews, and he believed it was his duty to bring more Jews into the world.
When the war ended, they tried to go home. They went back to Poland. Their homes had been taken. Nobody wanted them. They had survived the unsurvivable only to be told, again, that they did not belong. The world had closed its doors.
For years after, my Papa would walk up to strangers and say, “My name is Nuchuum Lewin from Łódź. Do you know what happened to my family?”
One day someone answered him. Max had survived. But they were far from one another.
In 1947, he found his brother Max in Frankfurt am Main. He found the street and knocked on the right door. He recognized him immediately, he said, because “he looks just like me!”
Max was the one who told him what had happened. Their mother, Bluma. Their father, Fischel. Their little sister Chana. Sent to the gas chambers in 1942.
Before the war, they had been told to go back to Palestine. After the war, that was still the answer. Max married and eventually made his way to Chicago. My Papa and Rachel went to Israel with her family—her sister Selia, her brother Shmuel, and Selia’s young son, Dov. Rachel refused to give birth on German soil. When my mother was born, she was born in Israel, ha’Aretz. She lived there until she was nine years old. She has not been back since. I went for the first time this past December, 52-years-old, to celebrate Dov’s 92nd birthday with my Israeli family whom I had never met.
My Papa used to say, to know where you are going, you must know where you are coming from. He spent his life trying to forget what he had seen and lost, but he also spent his life making sure we knew. And when he was asked what he would tell his grandchildren, he said that they should remember they are Jews. That they are awake.
That was the advice he left for us. His grandchildren. His naches. His dividends.
They never rebuilt their library… but I’m building one in their name. Not with shelves and bindings. I am building it the only way I know how. Collecting the record, case by case, holding onto what is true, refusing to let it be flattened or rewritten or erased.
My Papa used to say, “Love is five minutes. Obligation is twenty-four hours.”
This is both.
