I had no close relatives of my own still in Europe when the Holocaust happened. My paternal grandmother had left one brother behind in Russia when she came to America in the early 1900’s but had long since lost touch with him and hadn’t seen him for 30 years by that point. He was just a distant memory to her by the time World War II took place and even less of that to me. But these people – suddenly it was as though I had lived through it all with them. I trembled and felt a coldness in the hollow of my stomach.
There was still more to this. When I finally came to the end of the manuscript my eyes widened. I hadn’t known it when I began, but there it was, right in right front of me. These people, Jafa Wallach and her husband Dr. Natan Wallach and their daughter Rena, had actually lived fewer than four miles from my own home in Queens in the years when I was growing up.
In 1947 the Wallachs had made their way out of war-ravaged Europe and settled in the community of Arverne where Dr. Wallach practiced medicine until 1963. Though I never knew them, they had been my neighbors and their children had attended the same schools I did. Having no known relatives of my own who had been trapped in the Holocaust, I suddenly felt as though I was a part of their awful story, too.
Jozef Zwonarz, the man who saved them all, died in Poland in 1984 after falling on hard times immediately after the war years. Dr. Wallach was blinded in a freak auto accident in 1976 in Israel and lost his ability to practice medicine or to pursue his great love, philosophy. He had to live out the rest of his life in darkness, tended by a loving wife with whom he had shared so much pain in those war years.
Other Wallach family members who had survived were scarred by their experiences – deeply withdrawn, troubled, gloomy. In 1959 Jafa Wallach wrote it all down in a manuscript that she kept hidden away for her own reasons. Only now, in 2006, she and her daughter, Rena Wallach Bernstein, have decided to release it to the world.
Editing this book was a gut-wrenching and harrowing experience for me. But in the end I’m not sorry I did it or that I ran into my friend last summer as I was walking aimlessly along the beach on a hot summer’s day. If not for that fortuitous turn of events, I would not have had the chance to live all these months with the Wallachs and Manasters, and to see, firsthand, what some will do to their fellow human beings – or to what lengths others will go to save them.
Wallach’s book, Bitter Freedom, is being released this week by Hermitage Publishing with a foreword I wrote specifically for it. Pick it up, read it, and see what I mean.
