It was 11:00 a.m. and it was already the third phone call from my sister that day. Staring at the “caller ID”, a favorite feature of telephone technology, I smiled and picked up the receiver. In Yiddish I said, “Die bist shoyn vieder du?” which roughly translates as, “It’s you again?” This longtime private joke between us began decades ago when we used to laugh at how often our distant cousin, Bessie, who lived in Toronto, chatted on the phone with her married daughter, Edie. The distance by car between their households was no more than ten minutes. Yet they preferred to spend hours each day communicating with one another by telephone. Our phone communication schedule was well on the way to rival that of our Canadian relative mother/daughter team.

“And did I tell you about Uncle Gary?” my sister teased.

“What about him?”

“He spent the night, last night, in jail.”

”What?” I gasped. “What happened? And who told you?”

“He did.”

“You are kidding!” I said.

I could hear my sister take a deep breath before beginning her narrative. The story she relayed is pretty much as I memorialize it here.

Our Uncle Gary was driving to his neighborhood bank on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn when he spotted a vacant parking space right in front of the bank. He slammed on the car brakes, swiveled the steering wheel and maneuvered his car into the space. He figured he’d just run in to make a quick deposit and, like usual, ignored the parking meter. Unlike usual, he didn’t have a passenger who could drive the vehicle around the block, should the meter police show up. Anyway, his taxi sign “on duty” was displayed.

There was a bit of a line and a wait for service inside. As he finished his transaction and headed to the exit door, he noticed a “meter maid” approach his vehicle, pen and ticket pad in hand. Gunther Neumann nearly forgot that his body was eighty-seven-years-old, with a bulging gut, a bad ticker and a limping right leg. He sprinted to the meter beside his car. The ensuing leg pain and heart palpitations he endured immediately reminded him that he was old. With shaking hands he fed the meter a quarter and looked at the police lady. She was writing out a ticket.

“What are you doing? You see I’m here!” called out a panting Mr. Neumann.

“It’s too late,” shrugged the indifferent policewoman. “I already started writing it.”

Enraged, my indignant uncle lunged at the pad held by the heavy-set, young, unsympathetic African-American woman. “Stop it!” he sneered. “Give me that.” Attempting to snatch away her pad, my uncle fell into her and the two wrestled as they tumbled to the ground. A backup police car was called to the scene. By the end of this brief scuffle my uncle found himself in handcuffs, in the back of a squad car, in transit to his apartment to pick up his medications and toothbrush, in the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon. He was being taken to jail for the night. He was to be booked for “resisting arrest” and “assault on a police officer.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Gunther Neumann’s shocked roommate Jadwiga, watching a cuffed Mr. Neumann being led into the apartment by two police officers. “I’ll tell you later,” said my uncle. “I have to pick up all my medications for today and tomorrow.” The cuffs were unlocked and his hands released.

Slowly and carefully Gunther Neumann sorted through the thirty or so plastic bottles of pills he kept on top of the refrigerator. Later, when recounting the story to me, he laughingly confessed that he had deliberately reviewed and packed up his overnight pills and supplies as slowly as possible. “Oh! I am out of my Diabetes prescription medication. We’ve got to stop off at the pharmacy to get a refill,” my uncle informed his police escorts. Then he took his overnight bag filled with underwear, a toothbrush, toothpaste, reading glasses, diabetes test strips and lances and his various medications and walked to the front door. “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” he called out as he walked out of his apartment.

And so he left his home at 135 Tehama St. accompanied by two perplexed members of “New York’s Finest”, headed for the pharmacy to get his prescription filled so that he could be chaperoned by them to the local police station’s holding cell. Hands cuffed again Mr. Neumann could only stare at the open-mouthed, stunned Jadwiga as the police squad car pulled away from the curb and entered traffic.

The pharmacist who had tended to Gunther Neumann’s prescription needs for the past twenty years at least, was no less rattled than Jadwiga had been. With an anxious expression on his face he refilled the prescription and handed the medication to the police officer that stretched out his hand to receive it.

“Oy! Look at the time! I got to eat before my sugar drops!” warned my uncle. The threesome then stopped off at a Wendy’s fast food restaurant where they bought my uncle a hamburger, curly fries and a glass of orange juice. The NYPD treated my uncle to this feast. He had left his wallet at home, after all.

This jaw-dropping day was followed by a head-scratching night.

Mr. Neumann was placed in a large locked cell with several men, each one more unsavory than the next. They were all waiting to be booked and charged for alleged crimes. The offenses ranged from theft to car jacking to drug dealing to assault with a deadly weapon to prostitution to murder. Fearless and curious, my uncle spent a sleepless night chatting with young gang members, mafia hit men and middle-aged pimps. Different backgrounds. Different ethnicities. Mr. Neumann listened to their stories with great interest. He shared with them some of his own experiences. They all had, at the very least, one quality in common. They were all tough.

Gunther Neumann never showed a hint of “stranger danger.” Having been born a Jew in a far from ethnically and religiously harmonious Polish society of 1922, he understood and witnessed early on, Evil. His suffering during the Holocaust revealed to him the darkness of human nature. It was only surpassed by his personal, more profound desire to challenge and triumph over the inevitability of his murder. His focus was to survive, to live the proverbial, “one more day.” With determination, intelligence, luck and maybe, divine intervention, Mr. Neumann saw many more days indeed.

From his background in war-torn Europe, driving a taxicab throughout the five boroughs of New York did not seem dangerous at all. Rather, in his words, a “piece of cake.” Knowing how fearless my Uncle Gary was, I was not surprised by his answer when I asked him about his fellow overnight jail mates at the Brooklyn Police station.

“Weren’t you afraid they’d hurt you?”

“ Afraid of those punks? Of course not!” he replied.

A few moths later, Gunther Neumann had his day in court. He had opted for a trial by jury. The meter police officer showed up and testified, “This old man attacked me!” My uncle objected to her description of the incident. He stated that she began writing the ticket after he had inserted money into the meter. He also argued that he was operating his taxi and had a right to leave it momentarily at a meter, regardless of the metered parking status.

I was not there that day in that Brooklyn district courthouse but I can vividly imagine it. I can envision my diminutive, sallow looking, elderly immigrant uncle with a heavily- accented English as he stood next to a much larger, much younger, woman of color. Beside the point, yet clearly, it would not be possible, unarmed as he had been, to pose any physical threat to her, a trained police officer. As it turned out, the jury of “his peers” was just not. The verdict, “Guilty”, was proclaimed by the jury foreman. The young, presiding judge thanked the jury members for their service. They were dismissed. He upheld the verdict and fined my uncle a monetary penalty.

An angered, imprudent Gunther Neumann addressed the unwise and unfair judge with the following taunt, “Did you take a page out of Himmler’s library?”

“You said that to the judge?” I asked my uncle. I was shocked, though I don’t know why I was, really. After decades of adventures with my uncle, nothing about him should have evoked surprise.

“I sure did,” he said with self-satisfaction. Genuinely sad I replied, “Himmler! He probably didn’t even know who Himmler was, that he was the head of the SS and responsible for the implementation of ‘The Final Solution’ through the creation of extermination camps.” Without a trace of emotion Uncle Gary agreed with me and added that the young judge probably didn’t even know what the Holocaust was.

My uncle was proud of how he had manipulated his arresting officers.

He was also very pleased of his ability to be heard in court and even challenge the presiding judge. This strange weekend provided us all with many moments of laughter. Not just us! The entire situation, including the complimentary dinner at Wendy’s and, most especially, the irrepressible and unforgettable character of my dear uncle, Gunther Neumann, has entered the annals of “legends” at the local Brooklyn police department. A young officer I met just a few years ago had heard the story but didn’t believe it. “Oh yes. It was true,” I assured the doubting man. “Every bit of it!”

My sister and I reflected upon our uncle’s day in court then, and often, over the years since. We note that he is the only Survivor we ever met who didn’t automatically elicit people’s sympathy or empathy. Regardless of the facts of the incident offered, we thought his personal history and his personal presentation would result in a dismissal of the matter. We obviously were wrong. The fact that this case was judged only on merit was a tribute to my uncle: that Gunther

Neumann was not perceived as a victim. He was judged as a responsible man equal to all others before the law. This spelled “victory” to him. This is what he demanded of society in his everyday life.

When it was all over I asked my uncle what he thought about this experience and his day in court. “Well,” he answered, “The judge and jury were anti-Semitic and brainwashed and intimidated by “Black Power” politics. And, I won’t drive to the bank ever again without somebody who can drive the car around the block while I am inside doing my business.”

Classic Neumann.

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