By Shelli Fedullo
Something came out of the ether, at random, a few nights ago. I am still reacting. Processing. I hope writing brings me some clarity.
For context, as I shared in a two-part discussion piece titled, “Born in the USA” published in The Philadelphia Lawyer last year, my father Andre was a Holocaust survivor. He died in 1961 when I was nine. There have been large gaps in what I knew about his background. I knew he had been taken to Auschwitz, that he had been in several concentration camps, that he was put to work in a mine. I knew that his first cousin, Toby from the same town, was the only other family member in Europe who survived. I knew little about his post-war experiences before he emigrated to the United States in 1948, except that at some point he received training to become a tailor. Growing up, my mother gave me bits and pieces of his story, but we never talked about it in depth. It was not an easy subject. When I was well into adulthood, I pressed her about some specifics. When I got one of the answers, I was sorry I asked.
My father lived with Toby and her husband in Philadelphia for about two years until he and my mother married in 1951. They relocated to Florida a few months after my parents’ wedding. I don’t remember meeting Toby, but according to my mother she visited a few times when I was little. Toby did not visit when or after my father died. I guess she had her reasons, but my mother never got past it. For a few years she sent me clothing and sometimes money. She called from time to time through my middle 30’s much more often when I was younger. I remember her voice, beautiful but tinged with sadness, like music written in a minor key. One of the last times we talked, I asked her to tell me about our family. She said she would, but only in person. It would have been easy enough for me to visit her in Florida, but I never did. I guess I had my reasons too although I didn’t know or understand them then, and I’m not sure I know or understand them now.
Toby passed away in 2013 at age 88. So, a few nights ago, out of the ether, or more accurately out of cyberspace, some of our family stories found their way first to my son, then to me. Being fairly clueless about how most social media works, here is my best description. A guy my son knows from the internet with expertise in genealogy contacted him. The guy knew that my son’s grandfather was a Holocaust survivor and offered to do some research, and my son accepted. Now, in addition to information and documents, some especially chilling, we have a link to a 1996 interview of Toby for the Shoah Foundation, which collects and preserves survivors’ testimonies. This all happened in the space of a few hours.
Toby’s interview was two hours long, in four tape segments. I watched all the tapes alone, mostly sobbing, sometimes almost uncontrollably. A few days later, I rewatched three with my son. I just watched one for the third time, to take notes. There is one tape I’m not ready to rewatch, but I will soon. If she could live it, I can watch it.
Toby was a year younger than I am now when she was interviewed. I was struck again by her beautiful voice with its melancholy undertone. She and her husband, also a survivor, had a good, happy life. They had built a successful business, had a son who is a lawyer, and a grandson. Giving the interview was an act of strength and bravery.
My father’s name doesn’t come up until the third tape, and he mainly has a small supporting role in what, after all, is Toby’s story. Still, some questions about my father were answered, and Toby’s story is part of my family history.
It is heartbreaking and harrowing to hear and watch anyone, much less a blood relative, talk about their arrival at Auschwitz to be greeted by Josef Mengele who performed the “selection” and their experiences from then until being liberated at Buchenwald. It is also infuriating, blood-boiling infuriating.
After liberation and a complicated, chaotic journey, Toby along with other women from her now Russian occupied town arrived home. Toby was 21 years old. She learned, as she had feared but hoped wasn’t true, that she was the only survivor of her immediate family. She had 21 cousins. Only one, three years her junior, had survived and was already home. His Hebrew name was “Mordecai”. His secular, Hungarian name was “Endre”. Later in America he used “Andre”. My father.
Toby married a man she met before the war from a different town with family in hers. She felt like she was “living in a cemetery” and they agreed to try to get to Palestine or America. Toby preferred America where they both had some family. Leaving was not going to be easy because Russia had “dropped the iron curtain”. Along with my father, who she would not leave behind in Europe without any family, the three of them were smuggled (she did not go into how) across borders and got to Prague.
They later traveled to a displaced persons camp in Germany. At some point, they met an American chaplain who wrote to her husband’s relatives in Philadelphia with a list of Toby’s relatives to contact and let them know they had survived and were trying to get to America. Toby and her husband waited about a year before they got called to the American Consulate. There was competition for visas and the clerk who interviewed them was reputed to be antisemitic. He asked for their birth certificates which they didn’t have and which he knew were impossible to get and sent them away. They were able to leave in 1949 due to increased quotas, and I guess a different clerk. When they got here, my father was among the family greeting them. He had been able to leave Europe about a year earlier and had lived with one of their aunts until they arrived.
There is much more, and what I learned raised more questions, probably unanswerable. Have I moved toward clarity? A little, maybe. I do know that the guy my son knows from the internet gave us a gift. Gifts are not always what you want, but sometimes they are what you need.
Rochelle M. Fedullo is a former chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association, co-editor in chief of The Philadelphia Lawyer magazine and of counsel to The Weitz Firm, LLC.
