Haunted by Yellow Stars

As a child, Howard Reich, a Chicago Tribune jazz critic, imagined himself an all-American boy living with his parents and younger sister in a cramped ranch house in the predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois. He may have watched The Honeymooners and found inspiration in An American in Paris, but there were a few pronounced eccentricities in his upbringing: His parents hid their Jewishness from the German-Americans who shopped at their bakery. He was forbidden from taking showers. And his mother, Sonia—who was 10 when the Nazis invaded her hometown of Dubno, Poland—guarded her offspring with a zeal few mothers could muster.

“At night my father slept in one bedroom, I in another, my sister on the living-room sofa, and my mother watched the hours go by in the kitchen,” Reich writes in The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich: A Son’s Memoir, “sipping black coffee late into the night. Throughout the evening, she walked to the front and back doors, checking to make sure that the locks had been dead-bolted shut, the little chain protector fastened into place. Three, four, five, 10 times in a row she would tug at the door latch and push at the chain. Long after all of us had fallen asleep, my mother turned off the lamp in the kitchen, but only after she had switched on a night-light. My mom then moved into the living room, near my sister’s sofa, seated herself on the floor by the picture window and peered through the narrow space between the frill of the window shade and the sill underneath. I saw her perched at her lookout whenever I got up to go to the bathroom. Silently, she stared through her self-styled peephole, studying the empty street or the occasional car that drove by. I did not consider any of this unusual—it was the normal course of events in our home and, I presumed, every other home, where surely mothers stayed up all night protecting everyone who slept and checked the locks over and over.”

Reich’s father Robert was also a survivor: He was 20 when the Nazis put him to work lifting heavy asbestos plates at Fünfteichen Concentration Camp and he was one of 200 who survived a 6,000-person death march to Buchenwald. Like many young survivors, Sonia and Robert were drawn to each other after the war. Together they constructed an emotional world in which they could live fairly normal lives.

Still, phantoms of the past raise their hoary heads in the guise of excruciating extended family feuds and the utter panic brought on by the planned march of neo-Nazis in Skokie in 1978. But when Robert dies in February of 1991, the past begins to overtake Sonia. At first she behaves more or less like a typical bereaved spouse but as years pass she sees yellow stars littering her lawn, her walls and her refrigerator. She hears voices, too: her husband’s sometimes, but more often that of a man who repeats: “I’m going to put a bullet in your head.”

Ten years later—on the anniversary of Robert’s death—Sonia, now 69, flees her house with two brown paper bags filled with neatly folded sweaters and skirts. She is convinced that the man who is threatening to shoot her has entered her house even though police find no evidence of an intruder. The psychiatrists at the hospital where she ends up find her alert and well-oriented, and are at a loss to explain the cause of her delusions. She refuses the drugs they offer and so remains haunted by yellow stars and imaginary killers. Forced into assisted living, she keeps a vigilant watch on all comings and goings.

Finally, a psychiatrist brought in by the German consulate in Chicago diagnoses her problem—Sonia is suffering from classic late onset “survivor syndrome.” Because she will not talk to anyone about her past, Reich has only one last option: To fill in the blanks of her life for himself in the hope that they will help him to help her.

We journey with Reich to Warsaw and eventually to Dubno, now a part of Ukraine. There, on a street beside the river, still sits a house once inhabited by a girl named Bluma. In this comfortable home, shared with grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, Bluma knew sweet and lovely days in a town that pulsed with Jewish life. There were 12,000 Jews, 11 synagogues (including the main one, a grand three-story edifice that is now a garbage dump), Klezmer bands, Yiddish theaters, Hebrew bookstores and Hasidic schools that drew Jews from throughout the region.

In 1939 when Bluma was eight, the Soviet army came to town and commandeered her house, forcing the family to live together in a back room with no door to the outside, only a window. Things went from bad to worse on June 22, 1941, when German tanks rumbled in. Bluma and other Jews were forced to wear white bands with blue Stars of David, then yellow stars. Soviet soldiers were imprisoned near Bluma’s house and one day the girl was caught giving one of them food. A German soldier threatened her with a “a bullet in the head.”
The roundup and execution of Dubno’s Jews commenced almost immediately and continued unabated. Bluma and her family survived longer than most, but huddled in the room without a door, they knew that their time would come. False passports with Christian names were obtained and younger family members were sent out into the world alone. “At some time my mother stepped out of that window one last time,” writes Reich.

Bluma—now Zosia, a classic Polish Christian name—escaped Dubno’s Jewish ghetto and hid in fields and forests for the duration of the war. Little is known of what she experienced except that when she resurfaced, she was infested with lice, and her fingers and toes were frostbitten. Zosia—who was to rename herself Sophie and then Sonia—was one of only several dozen Jews from Dubno to survive.
Survivor syndrome was first identified in 1964 and is a subset of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In a 1969 study, 130 patients who were believed to have shown no after effects of concentration camp experience all showed signs of “pathology” on closer examination. In particular, children who didn’t have the chance to go through normal adolescent development were found to be vulnerable to delayed onset PTSD.

Like Sonia, whose symptoms took 60 years to develop to the point where she could no longer discern between past and present, most survivors did not seek psychiatric help, nor were they encouraged to. The world was largely indifferent to their personal histories: no one wanted to hear what they had been through. They learned to keep their stories to themselves, even hiding them from their children.
It took decades for it to become socially permissible to speak and write about Holocaust experiences. For many survivors, like Sonia, acceptance—even interest—came too late. And so, Howard Reich spins his mother’s life in reverse, slowly unwinding her fiercely kept secrets. But even armed with details, he can’t reach her. Sonia gazes at the photographs from his trip to Dubno, then sternly admonishes: “You can pack up the pictures and put them back in the envelope. I do not want to remember this.”

Otherwise lucid and aware of current events, Sonia hoards food, imagines strangers want to harm her and remains poised to sprint out the door at the slightest provocation. Reich finally realizes that she is unlikely to ever “get better.” All he can do is admire the way his mother, as a child, faced down mortal peril and her later determination to protect her children. “She had spent several decades shielding me and my sister from the events of her frightening past, and now I feel oddly grateful that she spared me until I was ready to face them, deep into middle age, although that silence took its toll.”

Faced with actual evidence of the reverberations through time of the traumas of war and genocide, Reich is left to wonder about their impact on today’s generation. “Surveying the psychological wreckage of the war this many years later, I couldn’t help but think of the children of the world today—in Iraq, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Darfur, Liberia,” he writes. “Youngsters in these war-torn places are suffering from experiences with too many similarities to those my mother and father endured. These children, too, typically receive scant treatment for a disorder virtually unrecognized by practicing psychiatrists.” When, he asks, will the world come to recognize the power that trauma holds over the human psyche? Its consequences last a lifetime, and then some. As can be seen in many Jewish and non-Jewish families, they may take generations to heal.

Nadine Epstein is the editor of Moment.