A World Erased

When I refused the fourth bowl of chicken soup, she pulled out the number as well. Six million Jews die in the Holocaust, and you're not hungry? Six million was printed on a poster that hung on their living room wall, greeting guests with that integer twisted up in a barbed wire star of David. That's Noah Letterman. As a journalist, Noah has written about travel, sports, even beer, but his deepest exploration is a memoir A world erased a grandson's

search for his family's Holocaust secrets. I grew up in a town on Long Island, pretty Jewish town, and my grandparents lived in Brighton Beach, New York. Probably moved there from like Canarsi, which is also in Brooklyn, maybe when they were when I was eight years old or something like that. And you know, between Brighton Beach in Brooklyn and Great Neck, New York, I really sort of lived in these two very Jewish worlds, and they were quite different.

I mean, Long Island was, you know, a nice suburban area, and Brighton Beach was a little more like beach town if you could picture it in Brooklyn, so uh it was. It was filled with all of these survivors um and Jews from the Old Country, as well as you know, various other populations, and it really just sort of always felt like I was moving between these two very different worlds.

And whenever I was in Brighton Beach, I was always curious about all of these men and women who had had these numbers, you know, these these tattoos, uh scrawled on their arms. Most of my friends, all of their grandparents were born in America, where I had these two grandparents who had come from Europe, came with nothing and really had all of their murdered family members is hanging

on the bedroom wall. So to visit with my grandparents and to see these numbers and to see these people who I had never known but should have been, you know, my great uncles and my great grandparents and cousins however removed. Um, it just left me with all of these questions. And so you know, when when a kid, I think, is denied stories and answers, it just makes them more curious. And I was always sort of like interested in in my family's history on those on those trips to Brighton Beach.

How old do you remember being when you first actually noticed the numbers? You know, I think growing up the numbers always just seemed like they belong there, and I think it was like it was more striking to me when people didn't have the numbers on their arm when

I was really young. That's how I remember it. And then obviously I got to a point where, you know, I realized though there there there are a lot of people of my grandparents generation who don't have these numbers, and it obviously means something very different and and it's very unique in a in a very terrible sort of way. UM. So I think I was always aware of the numbers, just the meaning of these digits on their arms changed for me. Describe your grandmother for me, Um, so she

was this very stubborn, domineering and loving person. You know, she grew up in a time where she starved every day, and she made it her business, um to feed every single member of her family. Um. You know, there's even a story of her inviting a cab driver who dropped her off because the guy was hungry. So she felt it her duty to feed this this guy I And you know, she took feeding to the extremes. So she never sat down at the table to join us for

a meal. Um, but she always stood over us and hounded us to eat, eat, eat, And these were the commands that she always gave. And you know, through food, she controlled us, and through food she showed us her love. And she was just this like sweet woman if she loved you, and she could be, you know, quite the opposite if she didn't. But for every single member in the small family that she and my grandfather created in America, you know, she loved us all and and she and

we could do no wrong in her eyes. So um, yeah, that's that's that's sort of her in a nutshell. That's great. And and how about your grandfather? Describe your grandfather? My grandfather was also loving I called him Poppy um, and you know, he and I would just spend our days whenever I would come over to visit playing cards. Um. He'd always sort of let me win in the beginning and then you know, show me that that he still

you know, controlled the game at the end. And then if we weren't playing cards, we were watching wrestling on television. And you know, he and my grandmother had this very um interesting relationship where they just you know, went at each other all the time. But you know, he always sort of let her win. But then he would look over at me, give me a little wink and a nod that, uh, let me know that he somehow, in his own way had had the upper hand at things.

But he let her think that she was winning the fight. And I guess she probably also thought she was winning the fight. But you know, they I think they loved each other very much, but I never saw it expressed when when I was there. It was just them going

at it all the time. But you know, towards the end of every fighting, guess today I shouldn't say and see expressed, because at the end of her sight she would always go over and say, you know, oh, my husband and give him a little loving pinch or a meal. In your book, pretty early in your book, you described as a kid knowing that your grandparents had kept their stories secret. I think that was the line, actually, you know,

And am I correct? And remembering that you would, you know, sort of snoop around, kind of looking for what they didn't want to talk about. Yeah, So as a kid, they kept all the stories from me, um and and the main reason for that was what I would learn later on is basically they told their children. So my father and my aunts everything about what they had been through. And this traumatized my father and and and it traumatized

my aunt. They have this like one shared nightmare um of hearing goose stepping, seeing this fog all around them, and feeling like they couldn't move. And when they told my grandmother about it, she realized that disconnected to the time where she was thrown from a barn uh loft and she couldn't move, and right after that, her mother

was murdered while they were holding hands. Just think about a nightmare so vivid and powerful, so connected to traumatic family history that a brother and a sister actually dreamed the same recurring dream being the children of Holocaust survivors. The second generation informs so much of the inner world of Noah's father and aunt. My father actually slept with this suitcase pack beneath his bed because he sort of believed, not like, would the knockis come to Brooklyn, New York.

He was pretty certain of that, But you know, will I be ready to run when they do arrive? Um? So you know, to have that sort of ingrained in your in your being when you live in a relatively safe place, UM, is pretty troubling. And my aunt, you know, I think partly because of the stories and maybe also

to sort of challenge my grandmother's you know rain. Um. She she had all these eating disorders because it was sort of like the one thing that she could control, like not to eat her food that her mother forced onto her plate and and sort of monitored that that

that this would go down her throat. As far as you know, who they were as adults and how these stories affected them, um, you know, my my aunt was always seemed much more fragile than my father, and my father had a very you know, he had a great sense of humor, and I think it was his way of sort of deflecting and when I started writing this book, and I would go to my aunt and father and ask all sorts of questions. Everything was buried, nothing was remembered.

Let's take a quick break here. Noah grows up in suburban Great Neck, but always in the shadow of what had transpired two generations before him, haunted by the stories his grandparents carried and the impact of those stories, he begins to internalize it as some kind of responsibility. If anyone in the family is going to unpack the history of his grandparents and what they went through, it's going

to be him. Then, when Noah's eighteen, his grandpa dies and he's afraid that all of his grandpa's stories will die with him. I'd always been the grandchild, I think, with the most questions when it came time to, uh, you know, to sit around at the meals. I was always trying to get nearest to my grandfather and and

ask the questions. But it wasn't until I think my grandfather died and I'm standing in the cemetery burying him, um, and I'm and I'm sort of looking around, and I'm noticing that all of the all of the gravestones have the stars of David on the appropriately at the Jewish Cemetery, but inside those stars of David, a lot of the tombstones had Holocaust survivor Holocaust survivors written within the star. And I looked over at my grandfather's casket and then

out at the cemetery. It really felt like we were burying all these stories, you know, all these things that I would never learned, or so I felt at the time. Then later on that that day and week um, when we had the Shiva, all of my grandparents friends started to come to the apartment, and you know, these Holocaust survivors, they would like shuffle in and sit at the table. And for all the years I had known them, they always sat there and spoke in this like coated Yiddish.

And you know, it's probably comfortable for them to speak in Yiddish, but also it was convenient for them to not have to, you know, have this kid snooping in on their conversations and not have the burden of like damaging another another young kid in the family. So they spoke in Yidish. But at the shiva, and you know, at this point, I'm eighteen years old. I think for my benefit, they started speaking in English, and they started

telling all these stories about my grandfather. Noah hears two incredible stories during the Shiva as the old Jews sit at the table nothing on bagels and lucks in the First, his grandfather, who's working on the ship that's taking him and Noah's grandma to America, is accosted by a sailor. My grandfather had a job on the ship, and this other sailor came up to him and he was an anti Semit and basically just said, it's a shame that

you should see the end of this war. And then my grandfather knocks him out, and you know, to me, that was just such like a phenomenal moment because it's this little Jew who's standing up to this like six ft six anti Semite. And then you know when when he's taken to the ship's captain, the ship's captain just looks at the giant sailor and the little Jew and he laughs. But you know, in my mind, I'm realizing, Wow,

this is like a really brave and tough man. And then that was confirmed for me even more when when I learned this story that took place in the Barn and the Barn story takes place during the Holocaust, when my grandfather is essentially high in this barn with a friend and um a Nazi walks in on him and

he demands my grandfather's boots. My grandfather Poppy, he doesn't wanna, He doesn't want to turn over his boots, so instead he tells his friend to extinguish the light, and he runs this pitchfork through the Nazis throat and he leaves him dead there. These stories make Noah hungry for more. He worries that now many of them are gone forever. His grandma falls into a period of mourning that lasts five years. During this time, she cries and whales her

husband's name repeatedly and essentially waits to die herself. When Noah tries to speak with her about the past, she responds by saying, boy, it's too much. So when it comes to his grandparents stories, he's now in a holding pattern. His father won't talk about it, his aunt won't talk about it, his grandma won't talk about it. After he

graduates from cal Noah sets off to travel. He's a surfer, a detail I love about him, and he essentially follows the waves wherever they take him, this was purely a trip to catch waves around the world. You know, so I essentially just had a backpack and a surfboard, and I was working jobs, uh, saving up the money from those jobs, and just you know, buying flights to the cheapest place I could go, and you know, trying to live off like a few hundred bucks in a month,

like Central America. And then I had buddies all over like New Zealand and Australia where I'd find work there, and you know, it was just the sort of break away from the life I had known. And one of the things that I had always known in life is to trust nobody, you know, because I grew up with not my grandparents stories, but the the warnings sort of

implied by their experiences and their and their histories. This is this idea that you know, your own neighbors will turn on, this idea that you'll never be safe in your own home. And I guess that, you know, in some way which was never said to me, always kept from me, but somehow I understood that. Um, when I went off on this trip, I didn't trust people, and I think that was sort of like one thing that had to change, you know, and and and I think

overall it mostly did. I don't think you could ever change that completely. But you know, I was sharing hospital rooms with other random strangers. I was, you know, hitchhiking through various Central American bill in cities and throughout Australia, and I guess, you know, at a certain point I had to put my entire belief system aside and try something different to get by it. After a year, Noah's girlfriend, who was a year behind him in college, meets up

with him in Europe. Money's tight and they're getting by staying in hostels, cooking their own meals. But at some point his girlfriend checks her at M balance and it's zero. She probably had been hacked or something. You know. We realized that if we wanted to sustain any sort of global travel, we'd have to go farther east, because at the time two thousand four, most of these countries were not in the euro Things are really cheap in the

East as compared to the West. Farther east, inching dangerously close to the one country. Noah was never ever going to set foot in the place where the atrocities happened to his family, Poland. He started in Hungary and Hungary. I saw the this new museum that was built and it was really the first time in a year I'd seen this word. But it appeared on the side of the building. It's at Holocaust Museum, huge letters. Well, I walked into the museum and we wound up sneaking into this, uh,

this private tour for these Americans. You know, they invited us to join them throughout the museum. And then when my girlfriend and I got to the Czech Republic, we saw thee Joseph of which is the Jewish quarter in the Czech in Prague, and it was preserved because Hitler wanted to create this sort of museum to an exterminated people.

So well, essentially all the synagogue are still there, and you know, obviously he failed in his plan to commit full extermination, but it saved this little community over this little town. And then when I went to a concentration camp for the first time, you know, I started to have all these questions and feelings and memories of my grandparents,

sort of like flood back in. Noah doesn't know what to do with these feelings and memories, so he reaches out to the one person who he thinks will understand what he's going through. I sent this email to my father, but I also kind of half expected that he would just right back, like lea me alone, I don't want to talk about it, as he always had when I

was growing up. But oddly enough, he sends me this email with my grandparents addresses in Poland and all the camps that they had been in, And I had never known this information existed, Like I didn't know he knew any of the camps besides Auschwitz and ma Donic because they were sort of like household names when I was growing up, you know, like when whenever anybody would ask my my father, like what his parents had gone through, you know, he'd say, house was in my Donic and

now let's not talk about it anymore. Where had your father kept this list? So they kept a list in the liquor cabinet. So I think if I was a little bit more daring as a as a young man and you know, rebellious, I would have had access to this information reaching for the vodka and instead of finding the list of yeah, or maybe it would have turned

me off to alcohol. But in any case, I had their addresses, and I was one country away from Poland, and I thought, wait a minute, like what could be there? You know, what could I find out? I can't shy away from this now, And so it was really the first time I had legitimate information, and so I kind of amended my one rule and I went into Poland. And that's sort of where all of this became possible. We're going to pause for a moment for a word

from our sponsor. Increasingly, Noah's explorations make his inner world more and more populated by his lost relatives. He had always been haunted by a family photograph of his grandma's of an enormous clan gathered around the sader table that

passover thirty of them. There were no memories of these people because they they just sort of like haunted us, like ghosts, you know, hanging there and this and this one family photograph, and you know, whenever I asked about who they were as a kid, my grandmother just summed it all up with the same word repeated three times every time, and it was just dead, dead, and dead,

because that was everybody's story. Every single person in that photograph had been murdered except for my grandmother, and my grandfather had no photographs. And he also had no people left in his family either, because every single person had been murdered um when when his town was liquidated, you know, so I didn't even have names to attach to any of those people. And I think as I started to learn more, you know, and when I learned more, because

I came back from Poland, my grandmother opened up. I went to her apartment in Brighton Beach and remember being a nice day. Everybody was sort of like down on the beach, enjoying, uh, enjoying the ocean, playing volleyball and walking the boardwalk. And then there I am with my grandmother. She's crying to the ceiling. Still she's she's got this. She had this necklace made of my grandfather where he's like laser printed into gold and she wears him around

her neck like he's a he's a god. And you know, she would carry this photograph of him to every room in the house wherever she went. So it was it was both touching and and and and pathetic. Um. But this was like the life that she sort of subjected herself too, and it was just full of of self inflicted suffering. And you know, to watch that for thirty minutes when everybody is enjoying the day outside and these two scenes are juxtaposed together. Um, I couldn't take it anymore.

At ten minutes would go by, and you know, twenty minutes would go by, and you'd just be watching the second hand on the clock, tick pass, tick pass. And then so finally, at the thirty minute mark, I just said to my grandmother, you know, I went to Poland. And I figured, you know, at first I shouldn't say anything like that, because who knew what it would trigger.

Her eyes lit up, and she she leaned forward and she asked me if I went to the Muslim plots, and she also had this strange smile on her face. And I call it strange because Ompstion plots was the place that the Jews were transported from two basically their death. Pretty much everybody who went to the Omph Plots would die because they wound up in a concentration camp. This was not only just like this depot into the concentration camps, but it was really, you know, the depot into all

of my grandparents Holocaust stories. And you know, from then on, we just sat at that table and she told me her stories what made her open up. And I think it's because maybe she realized her time was running out

and she wanted to tell her stories. Maybe it was because she was tired of suffering the way she had forced herself to suffer over the death of my grandfather um or maybe it was you know, she felt like I did what was necessary two understand her as much as I possibly could in you know, the year two

thousand and four. You know, because obviously I'm a Jew from New York who is known a pretty you know, easy life compared to what my grandparents had gone through, so there's no way to get any to get anywhere near what they had experienced. But maybe she felt like, all right, I saw their house, I saw their street, I spoke to the neighbors who probably turned on them.

So you know, maybe I did what was necessary of a grandchild who just willing to take on the burden of the stories and and the importance of the memories. And how long after that did she pass away? We had about six years where where we sat at that table, you know, every week, two weeks, three weeks, how you know, however long between visits, and we'd sit there for a couple of hours or however long she could handle, and she would tell me her stories and UM, yeah, so

six years of that. I mean, what a gift that you gave her. Um, you know that she also gave you. But I'm imagining that you weren't looking at the second half of the clock anymore like that. It was now there was, you know, like something broke open and her where she was able to to speak about all this in a way that was very different from before. It was like two thousand and five six and I thought to myself, I'm going to write a book because I

started getting answers to my questions. And I figured, you know, when I'm going to write a book about about my grandfather because to me, he had always sort of been like the hero, right, like the guy who I would learn would break out of a cattle car that went to Triblinka. Nobody escaped Treblinka, and yet here's this guy who escapes the cattle car going to Triblinka. Everyone who went to Treblinka died, but not him. Here's this guy who runs a pitched fork through some Nazis neck and

and and lives to tell about it. Here's this guy who was part of the Warsaw gheto uprising. He worked as a sewer ratte right, one of the guys who essentially broke out of the Warsaw Ghetto and traded for arms and food so that they could live to fight another day. And he was just such a phenomenal person and a tough guy. And I guess, being a grandson, maybe there was something silly in me that, just like I was more attracted to his stories than to hers,

for whatever reason. And so when I sat down with my grandmother to ask her questions like, oh, tell me about Poppy and the Warsaw Ghetto. Tell me about Poppy and Mike Donic a concentration camp. Tell me about Poppy and Auschwitz, she just shrugs and said, you know, I don't know about Poppy and the war Saw Ghetto. I don't know about Poppy here or there. But I could tell you about what happened to me there. And that

was such a powerful moment for me. And to think that like my grandfather was, you know, capital s survivor and she was just this lady who survived was was a ridiculous thing for me to think. And so you know, I think she gave me a gift as well, to to just open not only to share her stories, but to open my eyes to like the reality of things. There's one story Noah tells about his grandma now whenever anyone wants to know more about her, which sums up

her courage and her conviction. This one time in the war Saw Ghetto, she is um, She's walking down the street and there's just bonfire, and she could feel the heat before she turned the corner. And when she does turn the corner to see the fire and all those these books burning, This Nazi says to her, I wanted to go up into that building and bring down the books, throw down the books. So you know, she complies. She goes up into the building and she sees that these

are books with with her God's name in it. And you know, she she looks down at the book burning and she says herself, this is not something that she's

gonna take part in. So instead of throwing the books out the window like the Nazi had instructed her to do, and as the Nazi was yelling for her to do when she looked out, she takes a little string and ties up the books and walks downstairs with them, and when she gets there, the Nazi points a gun in her face because she defied orders, and she just closes her eyes and accepts the bullet. And obviously that bullet

never came. But the books are ripped out of her hands, and you know, I guess in her mind she did what she had to do to to stand for what she believed in and had sort of you know, very telling about who she was at the person. The Letterman story, like many stories of inherited trauma, is so much about the way that the aftermath of trauma shapes our lives from one generation to the next. When it's buried, hidden, pushed to the side, it festers and creates new difficulties,

suitcases beneath beds, shared nightmares, eating disorders. But then sometimes it passes like a lip torch, into the hands of a curious child who has questions he can't let go of, and that child grows up to research and report a story that restores dignity to the lost and gives his grandmother the gift, however painful, of having her own life witnessed and scene. I think my father and my aunts have a a new found perspective of on on who their mother was. You know, I think they they both

found her to be very difficult. Um. She was difficult, but you know, at the same time, she was this person who went through such suffering to you know, to survive the war and to create a life for generations that would follow. Um. So I think. You know, every time my father would come home after my grandfather died and and he was like cursing her for for driving him a crazy, because she did. She she made his life miserable. UM, and she said things that were very hurtful.

He was just able to then like put it all on perspective and say, wow, like this is what she went through, and I could take a few punches from from this lady who gave me life. So I think, um, I think that was cathartic for him as well. And I think both of them just appreciated having these stories written, you know, having them recorded, and having them have a future. You know, whether it's a wider audience or whether it's just my children when they grow up sitting down and saying, wow,

were my great grandparents. No one has two young daughters who will never know. Those thirty people gathered around the Stater table all the branches of their family who were killed. How will they metabolize the story of their ancestors, what kind of meaning would have for them, and how does a family hold such a story generation after generation. I think they'll maybe understand what the Jews and more specifically

our family had gone through. But I'm sure that there's also like a mythical quality to reading a book about people that you've actually never met. Um So, while you know, my grandfather and my and my grandmother were real people to me, to them though, you know, I guess they'll be sort of legends, and I guess if that's the only way to keep them alive from my children and

still be it. But I think there's also plenty for them to understand and to appreciate, as far as like what it means to have great grandparents who survived the Holocaust, and what it means to have such a small family. Even though you know we're a few generations removed from it, it's still lingers. Many thanks to my guest Noah Letterman. Noah is the author of A World Erased, a Grandson's search for his family's Holocaust secrets. You can find him at Noah Letterman dot com. Family Secrets is an I

Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer, Lowell Bolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, and at Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny

Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,