About Uncle Ezra

My father and Uncle Ezra might as well have been twins. They had the same quirks and mannerisms, they finished each other’s sentences with the same Yiddish inflection, and they had almost identical blue concentration camp numbers tattooed on their left forearms.

Uncle Ezra was at all of our gatherings – bar mitzvahs, weddings, and the funerals. He always sat on my father’s right while my mother sat on his left, almost as an afterthought. He was also a regular every Friday night for shabbos dinner, when my mother said prayers over the lighting of candles, and it would fall upon Uncle Ezra to recite the blessings because my father adamantly refused to utter even a single word of piety.

When it was time for my baby sister Deena and me to go to bed, after we’d brushed our teeth and put on our pajamas, Uncle Ezra would pull a chair between us and tell us fairytales: Goldilocks being chased into the wilderness by a demented fourth uncle bear and getting hopelessly lost; Rapunzel’s children perishing after her thorn-blinded prince tossed them into a fast-moving river; Hansel and Gretel, after tricking the old woman into the oven, being caught by her even more evil sister and then roasted and devoured. In Uncle Ezra’s versions, none dared to live happily ever after.

That was back when Deena and I shared the large bedroom, before it was divided by a thin sheet of paneling for the sake of modesty and decorum. I claimed I was too old to be read to, but I still listened to Ezra’s stories through the wall, and giggled into my pillow when Deena fled crying downstairs because she was too frightened to fall asleep.

Uncle Ezra died three months ago. It was only at his funeral, the day after Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run to end the 1960 World Series, and two weeks after my bar mitzvah, that I discovered he wasn’t even related to us. But we still sat shiva as if he were.

After I finished some homework today, I found my father in our stuffy den, again sitting by himself in his tattered recliner. It was getting dark and he hadn’t bothered to switch on the pole lamp. A New York Times was scattered on the floor at his side.

I sat down in my mother’s armchair and remained still. Every now and then the tip of his Lucky Strike flared orange. Behind the stream of smoke I could almost sense him crying inside.

I tried the best I could to find some words. “C’mon, Dad. Uncle Ezra’s gone ...”

“How do you know what’s good for me? What do you know from healthy? What do you know from anything?”

I felt slapped. My parents had never hit me, except for that one time when I bloodied Deena’s nose.

“I’m sorry, Nathan. I didn’t mean it. It’s just ...” he paused “... that he was a soul-mate. You can’t even know the end of it.”

Of course I knew that Uncle Ezra and my parents had been in the concentration camps, but I knew little more than that from my father and even less from my mother. When I asked my father about those years, his reply was always “Nathan ... Nathan ... Nathan ... Why do you want to know such things?” And when I once asked my mother, as she stood scraping pans at the sink, her answer was a slow shaking of her head, a furtive wiping of her eyes, and a flurry of intense and furious scrubbing.

I sat in my father’s darkness, while he took another drag. From down the hallway came the muffled sounds of my mother’s dish- and pot-clanking preparations for shabbos dinner.

“We were in the Nazi concentration camp near Krakow in Poland called Monowitz, which was part of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a labor camp for a big German company. We were in the same barracks. We slept, or we tried to, anyway, on bare wooden planks, stacked next to each other with all the others who weren’t selected right away for the showers and the crematoria. You know all about that, Nathan? You learn about that in school?”

But before I could answer: “It wouldn’t’ve been much longer for us either, if it wasn’t for Ezra.

“All our families were gone, up the smokestacks like all the others. You could’ve had grandparents to spoil you, Nathan. Aunts and uncles. Like Saul and little Abie, my brothers ... may they rest in peace. And cousins, too.” I sensed my father shaking his head. “But now there’s only us.”

“Anyway, that Ezra had such an imagination. He made up stories. Told them to the guards. And even to the muselmänner.”

“Muselmänner. The walking dead. Like skeletons, Nathan. What we would’ve become.”

“I don’t know. How can I remember? Stories about everything. Beauty, love, sex – can you believe it, in such a place? Stories about people doing strange things – women, especially – those were a favorite of the guards – women with each other, women with dogs and animals and beasts and ... well, you shouldn’t know from such things ...”

“The guards would slip him a couple of crusts, maybe an extra ration, a scrap of food now and then. And what they gave him, he’d share with me. Why, even now, I still don’t know. But it kept us alive. He kept me alive.

“And Ezra kept the others alive with his stories. Gave them hope. Made them laugh. Could you imagine? A starving man, lying on his back with rotting teeth, and smiling?”

“One of the SS guards hated Ezra. Hated his stories. Said they were – how do you say it? – sacrilegious. One day, they came and took him away. When they brought him back, he was bent and broken and covered with bruises all over his body. When he was finally able, he told us that they kept kicking him between his legs, kept taunting him as he was screaming. That they were yelling, ‘Tell us one of your filthy stories now, Juden!’ And he told us that they wanted to keep him alive to teach us a lesson. To make an example.”

“Now it was our turn. We nursed Ezra back from the dead. We shared with him the little we had: food, soup, rations. Whatever medicine we could get our hands on. A few nights later, that Nazi bastard was bludgeoned to death. We were blamed, of course. The guards marched into our barracks and picked out half a dozen muselmänner who were so far beyond hope, so weak they couldn’t’ve possibly done it, and dragged them out through the dirt and shot them. Left them to die in their own dark pools of blood. But it was those guards who actually killed that SS bastard. We all knew. The whole camp knew.

“Ezra got better, but he never got well. None of us ever got well. He suffered and still told his stories. And he continued to keep us alive.”

“Anyway, many months later, when the Russian troops marched in, the few of us who were lucky enough to live through the last exterminations and not be sent on the death march were liberated. Ezra and I – almost muselmänner ourselves, Nathan – barely made it out of there.”

My father took a deep breath, held it in, let it out, and coughed into his handkerchief. Then he put the cigarette to his lips and inhaled. The tip glowed. The brown callouses on his fingers from smoking them down to the end were as indelible as the faded blue digits on his arm. He reached over and snuffed out the cigarette in the ashtray.

He bent over and massaged his forehead. Then he started to rub his hands together as if cleansing them. All at once, he shuddered, sat up straight, breathed in deep, clenched his hands into fists and pounded them against his chest. I thought I heard a whimper.

“Dad? You all right?” I started to get up but he waved me back down. When he turned his face aside, I noticed him wiping away tears.

He sighed loudly and then continued. “Anyway ... anyway, we stayed together after the war like brothers. We were brothers. I met and married your mother soon after, but Ezra never even tried to meet someone. I didn’t think he could, uh ... if you know what I mean.”

“No, he couldn’t, Nathan. And now, stop already. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Don’t you understand?”

My father picked up the pack of Luckys, tapped one out into his mouth, struck a match and lit it. And then he took a long, mournful drag.

Rev 9 / April 20, 2008 .. Rev 10 / December 10, 2014

-- Appeared in Grassroot Reflections Number 34, February 2015

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January 2105…Copyright © 2015, Lloyd B. Abrams

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