Three months ago I became a grandmother. Full of joy and gratitude, I eagerly welcomed my new title and role. Momentary rapture gave way to a clutching anxiety as I reflected upon a truth. No fond memories of birthdays, holidays, bedtime stories or Shabbat dinners, spent with grandparents, could ever come to my mind. In fact, “grandparent” is purely a concept to me. I never had grandparents in my life. That is part of my legacy as a child of two Polish Holocaust survivors.

Following their respective liberations, Fajwel Kaminski and Chana Neumann learned of each other’s survival. They had known one another and lived in the same neighborhood before the war. Familiarity led them to marriage. Hitler, not cupid, served as their matchmaker. In May 1949 my parents left Germany and Europe forever. They had planned to join cousins in Toronto, Canada. Unfortunately, at that time, the Canadian government was not granting entry to Holocaust refugees.

According to family lore, these cousins had left Poland in the 1930’s, with the financial help from a successful, ambidextrous tailor in Sosnowiec, Poland, my future father. Before Fajwel Kaminski could pay the ship fare for his immediate family which included a wife and two young boys, the war had begun and they were trapped. I had heard this tale during my early teen years but it wasn’t until decades later, long after World War II and long after the death of my father, that “Uncle Max”, one of the cousins who was saved by my father’s generosity, looked at me with tears in his eyes and whispered that he loved and missed my father; his beloved cousin who saved his life. So my parents began their new life in the new world in Detroit, Michigan, where my older sister and I were born. It was a four and a half hour car ride from the family in Toronto.

Growing up in Detroit in the 1950’s and 1960’s, my sister, Marisha, and I always knew that our family was “different”. Our neighbors referred to my parents, “Philip” (Fajwel) and “Helen” (Chana Neumann) Kaminski as “greenhorns”. Their references were to the obvious: the peculiar pronunciations and creative English sentence structures my parents used, the unusual foods my mother prepared and regularly offered them, and my father’s disinterest in hunting or baseball. But I felt my family’s differences in more profound ways.

My earliest memories are those of being woken up at night by the screams of my father, “Arbeite Fajwele Arbeite! Arbeit Macht Frei!” I understood the literal translation, “Work, Fajwele, work! Work sets one free!” but my three-year-old mind did not grasp their meaning. When I asked about my father’s nightmares, I was told to ignore them. My queries about the tattooed numbers on my father’s left forearm were met with silence or the reply, “You will know when you are older.”

That time came when I was ten-years-old. My fifth grade social studies class project was to map out my family tree. I carefully drew rectangles with lines in them on poster board. My mother recited the information to me, as best as she knew it: the names and birthdates of my maternal and paternal grandparents, my father’s four brothers and one sister, only one brother still alive; my mother’s three sisters and one brother, only one sister and brother, still alive. Curiously, the others all died in 1942. My mother, whose gaze had been elsewhere, looked down at my handiwork. In a stern tone she said, “You will erase the word ‘died’ and write, ‘killed’ instead!” Always an obedient daughter, I made the changes. My mother’s voice, now soundless, spoke through the sadness in her eyes. The next day I had to present my family tree to the class. I remember the anger I felt toward classmates and especially the teacher, a middle-aged woman, when no one in the class responded to my sad story.

Neither of my parents spoke much about their lives in Europe, especially during the years of the Shoah. I know my father, born in 1906, was the second oldest child of four brothers and one sister born to Wolfe and Mirrel Kaminski in Miechow, Poland. Around 1951, my father learned that a younger brother, Ben-Zion, who had spent the war years in Siberia, survived and had made his way to Palestine. He lived in Afula, Israel with a wife and two daughters. The Kaminski brothers maintained a relationship the rest of their lives. Their sister, Sprinka, ran off with a Polish gentile shortly after the Germans entered Poland. My father never learned of her fate. Two favorite brothers, Avrum, a tailor, and Shmuel, a violinist and violin maker were greatly missed and often mentioned in my house, by my father, the brother who grieved their absence endlessly.

The Kaminski family had left Miechow and moved to Sosnowiec. Fajwel got married and became the father of two young boys, Szabasaj, born in 1933 and Chaim Jehuda, born in 1935. The Gestapo officers who took charge in Sosnwiec on September 4, 1939 soon became acquainted with the excellent skills of the German-speaking tailor, Fajwel Kaminski. My father’s frequent contacts with the Nazi officers did not shield him. In 1942 he watched helplessly as his beloved blonde-haired boys were tossed out of their second floor apartment window, onto the pavement below. Soon after,

Fajwel and his wife were on a transport to Auschwitz. There he was assigned to head a “tailor shop” which produced uniforms for the Wehrmacht. In 1944 he was transported to Dachau where he also worked as a tailor. Then he was transferred back to Auschwitz. At the time of liberation, Fajwel Kaminski was in Dachau: a “Muselman”, starving, exhausted, apathetic; near death. I met a survivor who knew my father in Auschwitz. He witnessed him save lives. Fajwel took inmates into the tailor shop though they did not sew. Others were too weak to even thread needles. Mr. Kaminski would sew enough to cover all their quotas.

My father never mentioned his boys to me. Nor did he boast about his bravery in the camps. I learned all this, and that he was a good skier and soccer player, from his friends, after his death. Sadly, the father I knew was older, nervous and sickly. He left me shortly after my seventeenth birthday. A command he repeated to me often, that stays in my heart, is “Remember who you are and where you come from! Gedenke!”

Chana (Helen) Neumann Kaminski was the middle child of five: four girls and one boy. She was born in 1918 to David and Gitla Neumann in Sosnowiec, Poland. In 1938, their eldest child, Sprinka, newly wed, moved to Paris with her husband. They soon left Paris with forged identities, for the countryside. There, they welcomed a daughter, Anne, and a son, Jean-Daniel. Ruchel, the second of the Neumann offspring and her young daughter, Helenka were hiding in a cellar, near the family home, in Sosnowiec. Two months before the end of the war, they were seen and betrayed by a neighborhood drunkard. The Gestapo promptly shot them and rewarded the snitch with four kilos of sugar. Leah died in Auschwitz of typhus. The youngest Neumann, a boy, Groynim, was shuffled between several hard labor arbeitslager from 1939 until his liberation at Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

Shortly after the Nazis invaded Poland, Chana Neumann, an idealist, fled to the East with friends from Hashomer Hatzair, a zionist, socialist organization, to which she belonged. They went as far as Turkestan. Chana Neumann, so far from home and her culture, was homesick. She decided to face the future, no matter how precarious, with her family. She made the perilous journey back to them. After a few weeks of being hidden from sight by her siblings because the Nazi police had been looking for her, Chana went to register with the Gestapo. She was immediately sent to a munitions factory. Over the next few years she was transferred to a few slave labor camps. She was liberated by Russian troops from a slave labor camp in Czechoslovakia.

My mother barely spoke about the camps. She only spoke about the German soldier who saved her life when he convinced her to hand over a gold watch she had been safeguarding for a friend. It was her campmate and best friend, Mania, who told me

about the vicious beating Chana received from a sadistic female camp guard that left her with lifelong sinus problems and severe headaches, but alive.

Chana Neumann Kaminski maintained optimism, a zeal for new adventures and a tendency to find goodness in people, all her life: a life that was cut tragically short by ignorant medical care in 1989. I think her disposition was lovely, one I admire even if I can’t consistently adhere to it.

Baby Lilah is named after Leah, my mother’s younger sister, a budding artist, who perished in Auschwitz. With pride and affection, in memory of Leah Neumann, and all the “Leah Neumanns” who were denied the chance to be grandmothers, I pledge to be an attentive, caring and consistent “Bubbie”. I will remember them to my Lilah.