Only their reproach- you are the source of our misfortune-was constant.) (Whether that was the case was never clear, for the stories she told were always changing: In one telling they were distantly related, a connection discovered via stealth and acknowledged in disbelief, while in others the relation disappeared entirely. I grasped for the first time how the emptying of Szikszo had unfolded, the initial transport consisting of its nominal leaders (including her father) who were brought to Kosice, and how that first group was forced upon the Jews in Kosice, explaining how it was that her religious family had come to lodge with assimilated and acculturated Jews who looked down upon them with undisguised contempt and who may have been related to her family. I pieced together experiences that she could express only in fragments. In the stories of those “Szikszovers,” as she would have referred to them were she still alive, I discovered echoes of her childhood, if not mine: of the Hasidic father she’d loved more than life itself, his voice resounding in the Great Synagogue on the High Holidays, and the work he’d performed as chazzan, shoykhet, and melamed of Szikszo. Which is not to say I didn’t come across interviews with people my mother had known-either from Szikszo, her hometown in Hungary, or from Boras, the Swedish town where she and other women who survived Bergen-Belsen were brought by the Red Cross to work after the war. My hope was that the voices of strangers would awaken the sleeping sounds of childhood. I, however, never took classes in that department. In fact, when I attended Brooklyn College it was practically a requirement for students taking courses in Judaic Studies to interview and record the testimonies and remembrances of anyone having outlived the destruction. Not that my mother or father had been interviewed for the Shoah project: Neither of them had ever told of their wartime experiences in a systematic, coherent manner, despite there having been ample opportunity to do so.
That was the rationale behind my listening to interviews conducted by the Shoah Foundation.
My only thought was to resurrect the sounds of words, spoken and unspoken, that had served as the context for our lives and others around us. When I began work on a book about my mother and her friends I had only a vague notion of what I wished to do, much less how to go about doing it. How my father, a Holocaust survivor, found beauty in a soccer match
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