Our family lost pretty much everyone in Europe during the Holocaust. A couple of folks had made it to Israel. Three people survived in the camps and returned to Prague. Emil Spitzer, his wife, and his nephew Karl Unger. Karl has appeared in some histories of the Holocaust. I have an original letter after the war from Emil to my Aunt Bess, his first cousin. The only survivors I knew were my Aunt Rochel and Uncle Leon Golombek (Rochel was pronounced like Ru-chel with a short u and e and a guttural ch; Leon was pronounced Lay-on with long a and o). They were cousins of my mother’s mother, but because of our respective ages I called them Aunt and Uncle. Leon was a captain in the Polish army during the Blietzkrieg (Lightning War) on September 1, 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland. It did not help that the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on September 17th! Warsaw fell on the 29th.
The Germans were not ready for such a quick victory. The leadership of the government and the armed forces were held in camps of little more than 2x4s and chicken wire. Leon tried to convince his fellow officers they would all be killed. Few believed him. The Germans did that very thing. He escaped the inadequate enclosure and made it back to Warsaw where Rochel was. They could not convince her sister what was coming and she did not leave with them. They never saw her again.
At first they stayed on a farm near Vienna but soon realized it was not safe. Unlike so many others who didn’t survive, the Golombek’s got the message and left. They began their trek east across 6,000 miles of the Soviet Union. They never stopped till they were found by my family in Vladivostok in Siberia on the Pacific Ocean in 1946. My cousins Henry and Sarah were born on the way.
When they were brought to the United States the family set them up on a small farm in New Egypt, New Jersey, raising egg laying hens. New Egypt was right in the middle of the state, in the Pine Barrens, halfway to New York from Philadelphia. It was a spit and a holler from McGuire AFB. It was just a bit farther to the Lakehurst NAS, where the Graf Zeppelin exploded and burned in the Thirties.
My father decided that the ten-year-old city kid needed toughening up. I spent summers living on their farm and working. Now this was a bit of a projection on my father’s part. He spent a lot of his childhood out at his grandparent’s farm on Long Island. The town was called Hollis in a section called Jamaica. Now it is just another section of New York City (think JFK airport; yeah, really!) but then it was rural.
I took my first plane flight that first summer. It was an Eastern Airlines Constellation. That was the plane with the three tail fins, probably one of the coolest looking planes ever flown. It was a night flight. We get home from the Newark Airport very late. I am put to bed. Remember, this was a chicken farm. It was a feather bed! The mattress was this big sheet stuffed with feathers and sewn together. I lay down on it. I float gently down suspended gravity-less until the feathers are compressed. My G-d did that feel cool. I get up, fluff it up again and this time I get a running start from the other end of the bedroom, sail through the air and land on the mattress, feeling like an autumn leaf drifting lazily down through the air to the ground. I have never felt anything so good in my life. Remember. I WAS still only ten! Better things WERE coming (I have a knack for some funny word choices!). I do it a couple of times when the door flies open. It was Uncle Leon. He knew exactly what I was doing.
“Stop that and go to sleep!”
I lay there. It was like a compulsion. I HAD to feel that freedom from gravity just once more. I got out of bed, fluffed up the mattress and got a running start. Slap, slap, slap; bare little feet hitting the hardwood floor were my doom. The door flew open, light streamed in from the kitchen; there stood Uncle Leon belt in hand. He whipped the hell out of me. Yeah, I went to sleep. Him and my father believed in corporal punishment!
Then what happens? My cousin Henry is waking me up. He was fifteen at the time.
“Get up, Philip. It is time to work!”
“Huh? Work? It ain’t even light yet!”
“This is when we get up around here. The people in the city expect their eggs!”
I get dressed and walk out into the kitchen. My aunt is there. I ask what’s for breakfast.
“Around here we work first and eat later!”
I am beginning to get a bad feeling about this summer. I’m also thinking this was my father’s way of getting even with me! I WAS a rotten child! We go out the hen house. Remember, this was the 1950’s. This was no factory farm, hens crowded into cages barely able to move, with disinfectants and chemicals sprayed keeping it clean. No, these chickens were uncaged anarchists. Try to take MY eggs, will you! They had beaks and knew how to use them!! They had the free run of their space. We pick up buckets at the door to collect the eggs. The door opens. My G-d, what is that smell? The strongest component must have been ammonia. It was a physical assault on my senses. Chemical warfare. Against ME!
“I’m not going in there!”
Aunt Rochel, tyrant #2, says “No work, no eat!” I am doomed. I like to eat. Remember, I am a Jewish kid of European extraction. We are trained to eat from birth. We are champion eaters. The thought of no breakfast is sufficient to propel me forward into the Augean stables. Where is Hercules when you really need him? To my surprise I survive. I even find it interesting.
There is this rolling device the eggs go on. As they are rolled along, they fall through levers according to size and weight thus sorting them by grade. We candle them, to make sure they are unfertilized, as these are chickens with access to the rooster. But the coolest thing of all were the double yolk eggs. Chicken twins! I was later yelled at for mentioning them to the egg buyer. Heck, how did I know he wanted them for himself? But so did the family. After all, that is where the all the fat and flavor is!
That night I ask if I can watch my favorite program
“No. We watch wrestling!”
Two educated Jews from one of the great cities of Europe. Warsaw! Wrestling. I did a lot of reading that summer!
I was still hoping for some redeeming experience. And then I learned Leon had been a Kosher butcher in Poland. He was going to kill a chicken for dinner. With an Axe! I wanted to watch.
“No! Your mother would kill me if I let you.”
What was the point of staying there any longer? Poison chemicals, corporal punishment, work, forbidden to see him kill chickens and WRESTLING! The next morning I walk out to the two lane barely paved road we lived on. Across from me were nothing but farm fields. I looked to my right. There was nothing as far as the eye could see. No houses, no neighbors. I looked to my left: nada, kaput, zilch! I was stuck, isolated, at the mercy of my relatives.
We ate hearty on the farm. Lots of chicken! I didn’t see a chicken killed, but my bloodlust did get an outlet that summer. Henry would take me hunting. They leased most of the land to another farmer. But the gophers dug huge holes which would catch a tractor wheel, quite dangerous. This was NOT sport though, killing gophers. This was murder, eradication, genocide! But it saved farmer’s lives, and I did get to shoot a gun which my father never allowed. He was in the Battle of the Bulge under Patton. When our friends were getting guns my father refused to let us:
“Guns are only good for one thing: killing people!”
We also did something more difficult. We hunted bats. I do not know why as we certainly did not eat them (they kept kosher). But it was fun. Years later, as an avid conservationist, I cringed to recollect my uneducated participation in that pointless slaughter.
One day I am walking out to the henhouse, and I stop dead in my tracks. Remember, I am eleven. I am also a city kid. Right in front of me, growing out of the ground, are GREEN PENISES! And don’t forget, aparagus penises are circumcised! Visions of the Jolly Green Giant flash through my mind. I have no explanation for what I am seeing. I am too embarrassed to ask anyone. It was not too many days later they turn up on my dinner plate. Before I can react, Aunt Rochel says, “Be sure to eat your asparagus. It is good for you!” Oh.
Eventually they sold the farm and moved to Denver, where Leon got back into the kosher meat business. He became fabulously successful and retired to Beverly Hills. My older girl Monica was Bat Mitzvah in 1993. The Golombek’s were invited. They did travel across country to my wedding in 1975 but were too elderly to make the trip 18 years later again. Leon was one of the witnesses for my Ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract. They sent Monica a card and a very generous check.
We are home one afternoon. Monica is checking the mail for the day’s loot. At the time “Beverly Hills 90210” was very popular with teeny boppers her age. We hear a shriek:
“There really IS a ‘Beverly Hills 90210’!”
She was looking at the postmark on Aunt Rochel’s and Uncle Leon’s card from Beverly Hills.