My Cousin Manya - The American Scholar
My cousin Manya, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, passed away on June 10, 2024, a day before the Jewish festival of Shavuoth, and two months before what would have been her 100th birthday. I hadn’t even known of her existence until 2004, when Manya wrote me a letter care of The New York Times. She had read an article I’d published there about the emergency quintuple bypass surgery that had saved my life.
“This is a long shot,” Manya’s letter began, “but I can lose nothing, maybe gain a lot.” She wrote that she had spent three years in Auschwitz, had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen, had lost her mother and father and eight siblings (four sisters, four brothers) to the camps, and had come to America in 1947. When she was a young girl, at the time of her father’s sister Sarah’s wedding, she heard her grandfather speak of a sister in the United States who had married a man with an unusual name—Neugeboren —and she “had always wanted to search into this matter, since there is not a soul left on my father’s side of the family.” She had never forgotten the name, she wrote. She added that her “grandfather’s name was Mendel Gerlich, and he came from Rimanov.” Would I please respond, “regardless of whether there is a connection or not.”
My grandmother’s family name was Gerlich, and she and my grandfather came from Rimanov, a shtetl in what is now Poland, near the present Ukraine border and not far from Kyiv. I telephoned Manya, and we talked for a long time. Manya lived in Ellenville, New York, a town in the Catskills about two hours north of New York City, where she had made her home for more than 50 years. Her husband, Herman Eisner, also a survivor of the death camps, had been the rabbi at Congregation Ezrath Israel, an orthodox synagogue in Ellenville, from 1949 until his retirement in 1988. He had died in 1995. By chance, Manya said, she was coming to New York City the next day to see an opthalmologist who was treating her for macular degeneration.
We met in the doctor’s waiting room. “Neugeboren?” she asked when she emerged from the doctor’s office and saw me. We embraced, after which she asked me to return to the doctor’s office with her so he could meet me—she had told him the story of how she’d found me, just as, in the days, weeks, and years to come, she would tell the story to others. Then we went to a coffee shop. The evening before, after I talked with Manya and telephoned my children and several cousins to tell them about her, I’d gone through folders that contained information about the Neugeborens and Gerlichs, and I’d brought some of the information with me—a page from my “baby book” in which my mother had written my grandmother’s name (“Bela née Gerlich Neugeboren”); a page from the 1910 U.S. Census that listed the names of my grandparents and their children, and provided data about them.
Both Neugeboren and Gerlich are rare names. Any Neugeboren I’ve ever met has come from Rimanov or a village near Rimanov, and for Manya the same was true of the name Gerlich. In the coffee shop, we talked, and we laughed, and we sat there astonished—“I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” Manya kept saying as we tried to comprehend our story’s obvious and wonderful conclusion: her grandfather and my great aunt had been brother and sister.
“Then we are cousins!” Manya said, and after I told her that she had lots of cousins now, she talked of the family she’d lost and, holding my hand, recited the names of her mother and father, and of each of her eight brothers and sisters.
My father, like Manya, was one of nine children, and I had grown up with 22 first cousins on his side of the family (and with more than a dozen cousins on my mother’s side). A month or so after Manya and I met, I held a gathering in my Upper West Side apartment to which I invited as many Neugeboren cousins as I could locate, and on that afternoon, Manya kept saying what she would say each time she told the story of how we met: “It’s a miracle! After all the years … it’s a miracle …”
Manya and I got together whenever she came to New York for a medical appointment, and we talked by phone regularly. When she and her friend Sherry Solomon came to see a play about the Holocaust, the three of us went together, and Manya and Sherry stayed over in my apartment. The play was based on a book by Primo Levi—Manya had called me as soon as she heard about it on NPR—and we talked about Levi, whom we both admired, as a writer and a man, much more so than Elie Wiesel, a writer Manya considered “too much the showman” to be trusted.
On another visit, when I had lunch with Manya and her granddaughters, Rachel and Ilana, I presented her with an advance copy of a new book of mine: News From The New American Diaspora and Other Tales of Exile, a collection of short stories whose dedication page read, “For my cousin Manya Gerlich Eisner.”
I visited Manya several times in Ellenville, in the house located across the street from Congregation Ezrath Israel. The synagogue was situated on a small knoll the town had named Rabbi Herman and Manya Eisner Square. In earlier years, Ellenville had been a vibrant town with a substantial Jewish population—home to The Nevele, one of the largest borscht-circuit hotels, and a hotel some of my aunts, uncles, and cousins had stayed in while on vacation. By the time I first visited Ellenville in 2005, however, the hotel had fallen on hard times (it closed in 2009), many of the town’s stores had closed, and most of the young Jewish families had moved away.
Manya’s friendship with Sherry Solomon had spanned more than 60 years. “I don’t believe in soulmates,” Manya’s granddaughter Rachel wrote me, “and yet that is exactly what they were: they spoke every single day … walked together and supported one another through all that life is.” Sherry had been a high school English teacher, a college instructor, a secondary school principal, and had earned two doctorates, and when, one afternoon Manya accompanied Sherry to the nearby State University of New York at New Paltz, where Sherry was registering for several classes, Sherry urged Manya to register for a course. When she arrived in the United States, Manya spoke no English and had only an eighth-grade education, but she signed up for a course that day, and subsequently took one or two courses a semester until, in 1979, she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree, with honors.
When Sherry’s health began to decline, she moved to Florida with her husband, and after he died, she moved to California, where she lived with family, and then, her memory failing, in a nursing home. In 2009, not long after Sherry left Ellenville, Manya asked if I could visit her for a weekend and help her go through documents, correspondence, paintings, and photos because she’d decided it was time to leave Ellenville. Sherry was gone, the synagogue often did not have a minyan on the Sabbath, and her eyesight was failing in a way that made ordinary chores increasingly difficult.
Manya loved to read, and the good news, she reported—Manya was forever finding good news in situations that made others despair—was that she had discovered books on tape. She had recently finished listening to Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and was now about to listen to the third of six short novels by Anton Chekhov. We talked about our great love for these two writers: James, who’d been born in New York City but had spent much of his early life in upstate New York, not far from Ellenville, and Chekhov, who’d been born in Taganrog, Russia, but who’d spent some of the happiest years of his short life in Odessa, where my mother’s family had come from. We talked, too, about a recently published novel of mine, 1940, which was, in part, about Hitler’s childhood doctor, Eduard Bloch, a Jewish man who had been able to emigrate from Linz, Austria, to the United States—due to Hitler’s intervention.
While we went through items Manya had gathered, including photos of her and her husband with Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, and other notable politicians, Manya talked about how much she missed Sherry, about the vanishing of Ellenville’s Jewish community, and about her plans to relocate, probably to New Jersey, where relatives on her mother’s side of the family lived.
In 2010, Manya moved into a three-room apartment at The Lakewood Courtyard, an Orthodox Jewish assisted-living facility in Lakewood, New Jersey, where Rachel and I would visit with her until shortly before her 99th birthday. Then, unable to care for herself, Manya moved into a Lakewood nursing home, The Leisure Chateau.
In Ellenville, New York City, and Lakewood—on walks, in her homes, and on the phone—Manya and I talked endlessly and easily. She always asked first about my children and grandchildren, and when I’d report that they were all well, she’d always say a quick “Thank God” before asking for details. She talked with me about her only child, Moshe, who was living in Florida, and was, like my son Eli, an artist and illustrator. She talked about Moshe’s family—his wife and their three children—and about her two granddaughters and her hope that each of them would meet and marry “a nice young Jewish man.” And she talked about her childhood in Czechoslovakia, and about her years in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen.
In one of the courses Manya took at SUNY–New Paltz, a man gave a lecture on the Holocaust in which he talked about Holocaust deniers, at which point, Manya told me, she stood up and said, “I was there and I will talk about my experience whenever you need me.” And so she began talking about her time in the camps to schoolchildren, and also to interviewers from the USC Shoah Visual History Foundation, an organization founded by Steven Spielberg, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. When she talked with me about her years in the camps, she did so with the same almost defiant directness that she did in the more formal interviews. And because she said that her story, like all stories about the Holocaust, should be told as often as possible, when I returned home from my first visit with her in Ellenville, I did what I would do in subsequent visits, and made notes about our conversations.
Manya was born in Svidnicka, a village located on the northern border of Czechoslovakia, about 130 miles southwest of Krakow, Poland, in what is now Slovakia. Svidnicka was, Manya said, “a little hamlet that had only a one-room schoolhouse,” and when she was six years old, her parents sent her to live with her grandparents—the Gerlichs—in a larger town, Bardejov, so that she could get a better education. Bardejov, its population 40 percent Jewish, according to Manya, was about 100 miles southwest of Krakow, and was, Manya said, “a lovely historic town” that had “a nearby spa, a beautiful town square, a museum, a handsome Gothic church.” Bardejov was surrounded by a moat so that “the town could close the drawbridges when its enemies attacked.” Manya spent her childhood there, going home to Svidnicka only for holidays and summer vacations. And in Bardejov she received what she said was “unusual for a young Jewish woman in that part of the world at that time”: a good Jewish education. This happened at Bais Yaakov, one of a group of schools that had recently been developed in Poland expressly for the education of Jewish girls and young women.
On my first visit to Ellenville, I’d brought Manya a copy of my novel The Stolen Jew, set partly in 19th-century Russia, which had at its heart the dread cantonist gzeyrah: the edict that required Jewish town councils to select young Jewish boys for 25 years of service in the Tsar’s army, a period of service so long, it usually meant the boys would never return. Sometimes, when the son of a wealthy family was selected, it would have a poor Jewish boy kidnapped and sent off his place. And when Manya and I went through family photos in 2009, she gave me one she’d found of a group of young Jewish women from Bais Yaakov who, when she was 14 or 15 years old—some 40 years before I wrote The Stolen Jew—put on a play about the cantonist gzeyrah. In that performance, Manya had played the role of “the stolen Jew”—the young Jewish boy who was kidnapped to take the place of a boy from a wealthy family.
Manya’s father, Moses Gerlich, was from Bardejov, but her mother, Rachel Spira, was born in Svidnicka, and when her parents married, Manya explained, her mother “was given the family business, and this was so to speak, her dowry, and my father went to live in Svidnicka and run the family grocery store.”
Manya completed school in Bardejov in 1938, and then returned to Svidnicka and lived with her parents for a year or two. “I really can’t remember how long exactly,” she told an interviewer from the Holocaust Museum, “but at that time, most of the girls learned to sew because sewing was very important. There were no readymade things in those days, so everybody had to learn to sew in order to make things for themselves. It was only practical.
“I began to earn some money from my sewing, but in 1940, or maybe a little bit before, some of the Jewish businesses were taken away, and my father lost his business and it was given to a gentile man, and so life became very difficult because we were a large family. Then in 1941, I began to hear about Polish Jews smuggling through the border to escape what was happening in Poland, and they came to our town and told us these terrible stories, which were very hard to believe were real. But some people were farsighted enough to believe, and they made provisions and some of them did emigrate, especially those who could afford it. But some rich ones remained, and they also wound up in the death camps.”
Manya recalled in particular a young man who escaped from Poland and brought news, via an uncle of his still in Poland, that people were being taken to labor camps, where they were tortured and where many of them died. Somehow, however, people kept believing that what was happening in Poland would not reach Svidnicka. “Mostly people felt helpless and didn’t know how to deal with what we heard about but could not see,” Manya said. “But of course I was 16 years old then, so I could not feel it as intensely as an adult would, because when you are young, you don’t have the understanding and the maturity.”
In the spring of 1942, Manya heard that Jewish girls in Bardejov were to be rounded up. “I remember that I wanted to go home to be with my family,” Manya told me, “but my parents sent me a note saying, ‘Please do not come home, because they will take you immediately—you stay where you are.’” (Many years later, after the war, when Manya had returned to Svidnicka because she needed some legal papers, one of the peasants told her that when her parents were being taken away, her father looked at the townspeople and said, “Whatever you see is happening to us will happen to you.”)
With one of her cousins and several other girls, Manya hid in various places. The Germans searched from house to house, and when she was hiding in her grandparents’ attic, they somehow did not open a particular door, though she recalled hearing them searching downstairs.
After the first roundup and transport of Jews in April 1942, there was a brief reprieve, but then Jews were told that they were going to be “resettled,” and shortly before Shavuoth, a holiday that celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, placards were posted around town: all Jews were to pack their things and be ready for deportation.
Three of Manya’s cousins—one girl, two boys—decided to go into the woods to hide, and Manya went with them. They took blankets, some clothing and food, and created a shelter for themselves between trees from branches. “One day a peasant came around, and we gave him money,” Manya said, “and I told him to see a friend of mine whose father was a dentist—he had what was called an ‘exception’ that made him legal because he was necessary for the welfare of the town—and I sent a note to my friend, and she wrote back that my grandparents were deported—the railroad went through Bardejov, where they concentrated all the people they were taking away—and this man kept coming and was menacing to us and kept asking for money.”
Manya and her cousins stayed in the woods for about three weeks, and the man continued to visit them to ask for money, and when their money ran out, they feared the man would report them, so one evening they left the woods and returned to her grandparents’ home, which had been sealed on the outside. They crawled in through windows, and lived there for a short while, going out in search of food only at night. “Then one evening,” Manya said, “the police came into the house, and they took us all to the local prison, and in the morning, we were taken to a central point. And from there we were taken to Auschwitz. This was in June 1942, and I was in the camps till October 1944. And my parents and grandparents, and my eight brothers and sisters, they all went to Treblinka, and I never saw them again.”
In the waiting room at her doctor’s office, and at the family reunion in my apartment, Manya met, talked with, and embraced relatives from her father’s side of the family for the first time in more than 60 years. After we made a blessing over wine and toasted Manya, we recited the traditional shehechayanu prayer, thanking God for having kept us alive, for having sustained us and allowed us to reach this moment in time. When, very gently, I’d first asked Manya how this moment had come to be, she laughed lightly—bitterly?—and said that she asked herself the same question every day of her life.
Although some of the girls with whom Manya had gone to school were already in Auschwitz when she arrived, she hardly recognized them. “Everybody was transformed because of the haircuts, and also because by that point, they were already emaciated,” Manya explained, “And also you were in shock, and had no time to think. You just had to act on all the orders that were constantly being given to you, and everything that had been yours was taken away.”
Manya spent her first months in Auschwitz digging up hills and making them level, and in the beginning, she said, “this was fine because you still had your health and energy. But you had to march a long way to reach the places where you worked, and soon everything started to catch up with you. Your feet became irritated, and when the shoes went, you wore wooden shoes or whatever you found, and infections developed, and there was very little food, and slowly, slowly it affected your health. Then, after maybe four or five weeks, they moved us to Birkenau, which wasn’t too far from Auschwitz and was also known as Auschwitz Two, and I think it had once been a prisoner of war camp, and we were put into bunks, not beds, and Auschwitz seemed like a country club compared to Birkenau, because in Auschwitz you had running water in each block, so when you came home you could wash yourself and also you had water to drink.
“But in Birkenau, typhus immediately broke out with full force and everyone became sick. I did not—my good fortune again—and then happened what saved my life. People grouped together—you found your own kind, so to speak—and I stayed with some Slovakian girls, and one day someone told us they were looking for a group to form a Kommando. Each group, whatever they did, they were a Kommando, and this Kommando was called a Leichen-Kommando—Leichen is a corpse in German—and they wanted to form this Leichen-Kommando to pick up the corpses that were lying everywhere and bring them to one area. And they said that if we did this job we’d have enough to eat, and would not have to march, and not have to stand for hours in Zählappell—roll call—and by the time you were counted, you were half dead from standing, which when winter came was a terrible thing, and they said we could sleep longer, and I said to a friend, ‘A corpse at least can’t hurt us,’ and so 18 of us, maybe 20, said ‘Okay.’”
Most girls in the Leichen-Kommando, like Manya, had never seen a corpse before Auschwitz. “At the beginning, it was very terrible, but after a while you just did it automatically,” Manya said. “We had stretchers, and every time we found a corpse lying around we picked it up and carried it on a stretcher. You did not think, and you became very callous. You just did what you had to do, and your main objective was to have some comforts, and not to be too tired or hungry or cold. Unfortunately, it was a very busy job because people were falling like flies—they were dying in such masses, it couldn’t be handled by the selection, where they weeded out everybody who, if there was nothing left to get out of them, were removed.”
As more and more of the camp’s inmates died and were removed, the camp seemed “almost empty,” Manya said, and one day, “our Kapo told us they had to make our Kommando smaller because there weren’t so many corpses, and I was one of those who lost a job. And the irony of it was I was crying because—can you believe it?— I lost my job picking up corpses! And it was maybe October or November by then, and getting very cold and rainy and muddy, and I had to start getting up at three in the morning to stand Zählappell, and march out for work. And I became sick also. I caught typhus, but I kept working every day, and I was about to fall apart, but one day they told me to hurry quickly because, in the morning, they were planning to organize a new Kommando. I couldn’t sleep all night, and worried about how I would get to the place, which was at the other end of the camp, and the mud was very deep and sticky, and the camp was full of ditches for the water to run off, and if you fell into a ditch, nobody had the strength to pull you out, so that was the end of you. But I got there somehow, and the Kapo was the same one who was in charge of the corpses, and she recognized me, and she picked this one and that one, and then she said ‘Und du,’—and you—I was picked for the new job, which was called EssKommando, which means ‘food commando,’ and 20 or 25 of us had wagons and brought food from the kitchen to the sick blocks.”
But one day, stricken with an acute case of diarrhea, which everyone suffered from constantly, Manya left her wagon and went to the bathroom, and when she returned the wagon was standing in the middle of the road by itself, with no people near it. She hurried back to her block, where an inmate told her to hide herself quickly because they had just made a selection in which everyone who’d been pushing wagons was taken into the selection.
When the interviewer from the Holocaust Museum asked what Manya thought it was that had enabled her survival—whether it was luck, chance, faith—Manya replied that it was God, and added, “God, yes, but everybody gives it a different name. There were chains of circumstance that let you survive, and there was no rhyme or reason. First it was one job, then it was the other job. It was my going away from home at the right time, being in the right place at the right time—or not being there—and I looked more sick than any of the girls who were selected because I had just finished with typhoid, and I was all skin and bones, and I do not even have a memory of the time in the EssKommando.”
But then another Kommando was created called the SchmutzKommando, and that was actually “a fun job,” Manya said. “We were six girls, and we went around with a pail and a stick to pick up paper around the block to make it look like a country club,” she laughed. “It was very easy—no strain and with all the advantages: no Zählappell, no roll call, more food, and you were with your friends, but that’s when I became very sick—so weak, I could not walk. And there was a doctor from Czechoslovakia named Emma who some of the girls got to examine me, and she said I had pleurisy and pneumonia, and I could not work. But my friends covered for me, and one girl, who came from my town—I think this was in the spring of ’43—she brought me some food—even some olives and halva because she worked in the Rotäappchen—the Little Red Riding Hood, we called it—where all the food was brought, and they could smuggle things into the camp, and gradually, from rest and a little more food, I recuperated.”
After that, Manya was given a job cutting the hair of new arrivals to the camp, and when large numbers of Hungarians started arriving—this was in 1944—she was transported to Brezinka, where she continued to cut hair and also to work in the disinfecting center. “And we did not believe they would send us someplace,” she said to an interviewer, “because we were as close to the crematoria as from here to that hall there, and I did not believe they would let us live. But then one day they put us on a bus, and took us away. And we did not believe we were going to see the sun again.”
In other interviews with the Holocaust Museum and the Shoah Foundation, and in our conversations, Manya sketched in the story of what happened to her after she left Auschwitz. They took her first to a camp in Hindenberg, a small town surrounded by ammunition factories where an SS man named Tauber was in charge, and when he looked at the number tattooed on Manya’s arm, she recalled him saying, “Ihr selt doch von den Alten”—“You are from the old ones, from the early ones.“ And he gave her and the other “early ones” jobs inside, like Stubendienst (room service), which were easier, and Manya stayed in that camp through November, December, and January.
When the Russian army began to advance toward Hindenberg, the Germans gave her and the other inmates all the food they could carry, and started them on a march that, in the dead of a very cold winter, lasted two days, after which point they put her and the other inmates on a train, in boxcars, where they lived for “a day or two, or a week or more”—Manya had no idea of time by then—and when the train stopped, they let the inmates out of the boxcars, fed them, and then put them back into the boxcars, where they stayed until the train reached Bergen-Belsen.
“That was the last stop,” Manya said. “They concentrated as many people there as possible because as the Russian front was moving west, they kept moving the people east. And they could not take care of so many people, and food was getting scarcer and scarcer. And the last few days, they said they we are going to feed everybody poisoned soup in order to finish everyone off. But whether they were too late to do it, or they did not have the time, whatever the reason was, the English came in on April the 15th, and we were liberated.”
Near the end of her testimony for the Holocaust Museum, an interviewer asked Manya if she had any bitterness.
“Bitterness is a mild term,” Manya said. She then told the interviewer what she told me. “I was able to renew my life, thank God,” she said, “and the most important thing is that we preserved our humanity—all the girls I was with, we were just as human at the end as when we went in—perhaps more human because we became more sensitive.”
I asked if she could elaborate on what she meant, and on some of what she felt so many years later. “What we knew was how easy it is to become dehumanized,” she replied. “I thought about this many times, and I think the important thing is to nurture your humanity because it’s very brittle, and it can disappear very easily under very little provocation. Certainly we had enough provocation to become dehumanized, and that is the thing I feel most proud of from our experience, because brutality brutalizes, and we certainly did not become brutal. That’s the last thing we became. We became more sensitive—more understanding—because we learned what a human being is capable of.”
A moment or two later, and taking my hand in hers the way she had the first time we met, she smiled: “And also,” she said, “sometimes, like you and me, something happens, and it’s a miracle …”
To which I responded, as I had the first time, with an old rabbinic saying: that a person who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.