Betrayal
I met my mother’s Uncle Ellis, an Auschwitz survivor, when he came out of his retirement home to visit my mother, my younger brother, and me for lunch at a Jewish deli in Miami. This was in late July of 1973. We had spent most of the summer in Washington D.C. while my father trained for his new job: to be a high-level Peace Corps administrator in Nairobi, Kenya. Just before moving to Africa, we flew from D.C. to Miami to see my father’s parents.
My mother’s Uncle Ellis lived in Miami as well. He was in his eighties by now. We sat across from each other at the deli’s dining table. He had on a collared white short-sleeve button shirt, light blue trousers, and tan loafers. He wore glasses, was bald on top, and had a baby’s smooth, slightly oversized cheeks. I could see the faded identification numbers tattooed on his tanned hairless forearm.
We ordered matzo ball soup and made small talk about our six-week stay that summer at a hotel in Washington D.C. across from the Watergate Hotel, which had become a tourist attraction while the Nixon scandal was raging. We talked about the sweltering humidity of D.C., how we were missing our friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, and how we were progressing with our Swahili lessons as we prepared to go with my father, an engineer taking a leave of absence from IBM, to Nairobi.
Ellis was soft-spoken and had a quiet reserve about him. His words seemed carefully measured. He appeared to be a kind and gentle man, but let there be no mistake about it: There was a haunted expression behind those thick spectacles. I could tell he had borne witness to things that were unimaginable to me.
My mother had explained earlier that Ellis didn’t socialize much, but when she had reached out to him to tell him we were visiting my father’s parents in the Miami area, he wanted to see us. I didn’t understand at that point in my life that for him having any family at all was almost akin to a miracle.
I was eleven at the time, not old enough to grasp the full horrors of the Holocaust, but I could tell by my mother’s tone whenever the subject came up that Ellis had experienced hell on earth. A Polish Jew, he had lost most of his immediate family in Poland from anti-Jewish pogroms in the 1880s and then in Hitler’s concentration camps.
The thing I will remember most about that meeting in Miami was Ellis’ eyes. Though he was largely silent, his sad eyes seemed to long to impart an important message to me: Be faithful, be true, always stand up for your people, and never forget.
At the age of eleven, I was too young to connect Ellis’ plight with the Nazi sentiments that I had confronted six years earlier when I became friends with a five-year-old boy, Teddy Heinrich, who had German-born parents and who by all evidence was raised to be proud of the Nazis and everything they stood for. This would have been 1966. I was in kindergarten, too young to understand that I was a Jew or the meaning of the word Nazi. But Teddy, my classmate and a neighbor at the Royal Lanai Apartments in San Jose, California, had introduced me to these terms. He boasted that his father was the son of an SS officer and was a proud German Nazi.
My only knowledge of Nazis and swastikas was from seeing them in The Sound of Music, the most popular movie at the time, and it was clear that the Nazi soldiers were “the bad guys” who threatened the safe passage of the Trapp family, so Teddy’s adulation of Nazis confused me.
I met Teddy’s parents at his apartment after school where he and I would watch Superman and The Three Stooges in his living room. We could not watch these shows at my apartment because our TV didn’t have a UHF antenna.
For some reason, the parents, especially the father, didn’t come out of their bedroom much. They seemed to always be secluded in the master bedroom, and they looked too old to be Teddy’s parents. The father always wore a black suit even while lounging in his bedroom. His face was large, ovular, and severe. I never saw him smile once. Teddy’s mother, with her bifocals resting on her pale nose, always wore gingham dresses and had her gray hair in a bun. She had an anemic air about her and looked to be in a constant state of worry. I could not see the resemblance between Teddy and his parents. They had dark hair. Teddy’s was blond. But for all I knew, the parents were old enough to hide their gray hair using dyes.
One afternoon while we were watching Superman, Teddy told me his father was in possession of a Nazi SS uniform. He ushered me to the hallway closet, opened the door and showed me the black Nazi tunic with the red and black armband featuring a swastika.
“My grandfather belonged to the greatest fighting machine the world has ever known,” Teddy said.
His father then opened the bedroom door and furtively glanced at us and then the SS uniform before quickly withdrawing to his room.
A few days later it was a warm sunny afternoon. Teddy and I were on the apartment grounds, lying on a large stretch of grass along a white cement walkway that connected the apartments to the community pool. Teddy was using his large magnifying glass to try to burn a slow-moving Jerusalem cricket. The oversized cricket looked less like an insect and more like a shiny rubber toy. I kicked at the alien creature to make it scurry on its way because I didn’t want to see Teddy burn it alive.
Teddy then squatted down, and with a wood block, he showed me how to use the magnifying glass to burn the shape of swastikas and to write the word “Nazi” into the wooden slab. He seemed to take great pride in his ability to do this, and soon enough, I learned how to draw swastikas, which I started drawing at home.
When my mother asked me who taught me how to draw these images, I told her it was Teddy. She told me to stop because those images were awful.
I stopped drawing swastikas at home even though I would do so at school because I found there to be a geometric boldness to that design that appealed to me.
On a subsequent afternoon, Teddy and I were on a large stretch of grass, and he was once again using his magnifying glass to burn swastikas in a wooden block.
“My mom says those are bad,” I said.
“They’re not bad,” he said.
“I’m not allowed to draw them,” I said.
“What are you? A dumb Jew?”
I didn’t know what a Jew was, or that I was Jewish. Nor did I know if Teddy knew that I was a Jew because I was on my father’s side a gentile with a conspicuously Irish-sounding last name, but for some reason, my instincts alerted me to the fact that he had crossed some line, and I immediately attacked him. I dove into his chest and straddled him while repeatedly punching his blood-soaked face and pinching every square inch of loose flesh on his cheeks. For whatever reason, he did not offer any resistance but remained still during my assault as if he were completely helpless.
The weirdest thing about the attack is that I don’t remember feeling the anger or the compulsion to beat him. Rather, I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience in which I was witnessing myself attack him. I was too young to understand the gravity of his hatred for Jews. What caused me to assault him with such abruptness and ferocity remains to this day a mystery to me.
After the attack, I walked home, and I didn’t tell my mother what had happened. Then about an hour later, Teddy and his mother came to our door. I could see by the mother’s pursed lips and pinched face that she was upset. My mother told me to go into the kitchen while she stood at the front door and listened to Teddy’s mother explain how I had beaten up her son. She was telling my mother to examine all the welts, cuts, and marks on Teddy’s face.
At one point my mother said, “Did my son really do all of this?”
“Yes, he did,” the mother said in her heavy German accent. “I was afraid I was going to have to take him to the hospital. He was so close to needing stitches. I don’t think your son should be allowed to play with Teddy anymore.”
My mother agreed, Teddy and his mother departed, and then my mother walked into the kitchen and asked me why I had attacked Teddy. I told her he was making swastika symbols, and when I told him to stop, he called me a dumb Jew. She seemed more taken aback by a boy’s hateful remark than my attack, and she decided not to punish me.
To this day, I still think about Teddy showing me the SS uniform in his parents’ closet, how proud he was of this family heirloom, which had brought him, and his entire family, presumably, so much pride. This uniform, which spelled death for the Jews, was for Teddy a symbol of something empowering and sacred.
I started thinking of sacred garments that family members pass down to one another in September of 2017 when my Jewish cousin Garrett got married under a gazebo at the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens in downtown L.A. Evening was beginning to break. The rabbi draped Garrett and the bride Emily with a prayer shawl, which the rabbi referred to as a tallit. This tallit had special significance, the rabbi explained. Garrett’s grandparents on his mother’s side survived one of the concentration camps while in possession of that very shawl, and they had taken it with them after being liberated and eventually making their way to the United States.
After the ceremony, I talked with Garrett’s mother, my cousin Sherry, in the reception dining hall about the tallit, growing anti-Semitism in the form of hate crimes, and the terrifying riot in Charlottesville that occurred a few weeks earlier when white supremacists boldly proclaimed death to Jews. Rather than condemn them unequivocally, the president said there was plenty of blame to go around and that there were “good people on both sides.”
“There’s evil in the air,” Sherry said. “I can smell it.”
Under the dining hall’s giant patio skylight, servers were walking around with platters of crab cakes, tamales, and teriyaki steak skewers, and crowds would descend on the servers and disappear before the platters were empty.
I then told Sherry that one of my African American students at the college I teach at had found his car in the parking lot spray painted with the letters “KKK” on his windshield.
“In my twenty-five years of teaching,” I said, “I’ve never seen any such incident.”
And then Sherry said something that I will never forget: “Don’t you dare not think that the trains will come for us again. Because they will. Don’t you for a second doubt that the trains will be coming for us.”
I then told Sherry about a podcast I had recently heard in which film producer and comedian Judd Apatow challenged fellow comedian Adam Carolla’s blase attitude about the current political landscape. Carolla was not anxious about what Apatow called a breaking of democratic norms. Rather, Carolla’s position was that all politicians were more or less the same, a bunch of corrupt hacks, and it was easier just to ignore them and go on with one’s life. Apatow would have none of this. He told Carolla that because of their history, Jews have a survival gene that “goes ape shit” whenever they get the slightest whiff of fascism.
Sherry nodded in agreement with Apatow. Then I said, “Did I ever tell you about the time I beat up a child Nazi?”
She shook her head. I then recounted the incident with Teddy Heinrich at the Royal Lanai Apartments, and I included the part about the SS uniform in the parents’ closet.
“I don’t know what had gotten into me,” I said. “I was only five years old, and I beat up the boy to a pulp.”
“You were defending our people,” Sherry said.
“I never thought of it that way,” I said, and then a horrible memory came to me, one I couldn’t shake on the most important day of my cousin Garrett’s life.
“I feel like I need to make a confession,” I said. “Not a very pleasant one for you to hear on the day of your son’s wedding, so we can stop right now if you’d like.”
Sherry took a bite of her tamale, then said, “No, please, go on.”
“All right then. During my senior year of high school, a Christian classmate gave me a copy of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, and I was terrified that I was going to spend eternity in hell, so I converted to the Christian faith. As a teenager, I did not understand that there was in my conversion an implicit condemnation of my Jewish family and Judaism in general.”
Sherry looked at me aghast. I could have just told her I had a felony record for committing crimes of smuggling contraband and gotten a milder response.
“Even worse,” I continued, “I was too young to see that Christianity’s hellfire doctrine summoned associations with the Jews who were sent to their death in the concentration camps’ blazing ovens. Many Christians believed that those same Jews who burned in the ovens woke up to the eternal flames of hell. To underscore this belief, I remember my edition of The Living Bible had footnotes that speculated the Jews may have suffered the Holocaust as God’s punishment to them for having rejected Christ.”
Sherry continued to look at me with a horrified expression. Now her hand was on my shoulder. She seemed to pity me.
“At the time,” I continued, “I worked after school at Taco Bell with a high school classmate, a Catholic girl, who once told me the Jews deserved condemnation for crucifying the Lord. I’ll never forget the sour look on her face when she spit out the word Jews.”
It was getting almost too loud to talk inside the patio as a server approached us with a platter of empanadas, so we walked outside. There was a relatively quiet courtyard with tan Mexican cobblestones, a decorative tile fountain, and fragrant flowers.
“I had another high school classmate,” I continued, “who enjoyed talking about how the unsaved would suffer in hell. She once told me in class that our Jewish social studies teacher Mr. Horowitz who had once told the students that he did not believe in Jesus Christ was going to burn in eternity. Her expression was too gleeful for my tastes. I tried to be glib by telling her that one would eventually adapt to hell so that the tortures would eventually become boring. She retorted that in eternity the damned would suffer the burning of a specific body part and then the next day, as if actual days exist in eternity, another body part would be burned, and then another and another forever and ever. She appeared to relish in the idea of others suffering in hell. Perhaps she looked forward to Judgment Day when she would get revenge on all the nonbelievers who had made fun of her for her faith and had failed to heed her warning of hell.”
“She sounds like a real winner,” Sherry said.
“I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but that same girl who said Mr. Horowitz would burn in hell held my hand at Youth Group as we swayed back and forth singing a hymn called ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready.’ It’s a song about how there will come a time when it’s too late to make a decision about not going to hell or not.”
“Have you seen a therapist about this?”
“No, but I’m sure I should.”
“So how in the hell did you get out of this mess?”
“I was still getting sucked into the church more and more. By fear mostly. I was too young to entertain any such nuances about hell or other Christian doctrines. Either you were saved or you were not. Either you were a believer or you were not. Everything was cut and dry. What kills me to this day, and what feels like a betrayal, is that shortly before my conversion, my Jewish grandmother Mildred had died of leukemia, and some of my Christian friends at the church told me I had to accept the hard truth that she was in hell. I was disgusted that I was being taken over by a religion that claimed to be putting my grandmother in hell and that my fellow believers had no qualms about telling me this. Every day I felt like I was going to throw up. Part of my disgust was over my own cowardice. I felt that by saving my soul, by getting hell insurance essentially, I was at the same time subjecting my grandmother to eternal damnation.”
“Not just your grandmother. The whole Jewish people.”
“Exactly.”
“So what happened? How come you’re not hanging out with all those white evangelists who believe the president who’s caging little children and servicing the needs of foreign dictators is doing the blessed work of their Great Lord and Messiah?”
“That is never going to happen.”
“Are you so sure?”
“Well, I can’t be sure of anything, of course. But I will tell you as my hostility toward the hell doctrine intensified, I struggled more and more to be a true believer. To add to my struggle, I had never warmed up to the doctrine of the Crucifixion in which God must punish Christ as a substitute for our sins in order to satisfy his wrath. Such a God seemed so full of human vengeance that I could not square that god with the cheery adage that God is love.”
A server with a platter of wine glasses filled with sangria stopped in front of Sherry. She grabbed a glass and took a gulp.
“Sorry if my story is hard to take,” I said. “I can stop now if you’d like.”
“It’s excruciating,” she said, taking another gulp of wine. “But I want to hear it. Continue.”
“One of my biggest struggles was Paul.”
“Paul?”
“You know? Saint Paul?”
“Oh, that guy.”
“Paul struck me as a genius, and a tormented one at that, but his tormented soul wasn’t the problem. It was his writing tone. Regardless of the biblical translation, his letters reeked of self-regard and grandiosity.”
“You grew up to be a college writing instructor, and you hated his writing tone. That’s funny.” She took another sip of her red sangria.
“In addition to his self-regarding tone was his claim of superiority over the other apostles. He bragged that even though he had not met Christ in person, he was, by his own self-appointment, ranked number one above all the other apostles. He went out of his way to make it known that he had more than any apostle firsthand communication with the living resurrected Christ. Paul claimed that, unlike the other apostles, only he knew the intimate desires of God and he had been chosen by divine providence to make those desires known to mankind. Therefore, Paul’s word should take precedence over the other lesser, more fallible, lower-ranking apostles. What were supposed to be Paul’s epistles encouraging love, kindness, and piety seemed to me flagrant expressions of one-upmanship. That Paul peppered his letters with self-effacement here and there did little to nullify his ongoing self-aggrandizement. I had a hostility for Paul that would not go away.”
“So you and Paul had a wrestling match, is that it? That’s when your Krav Maga skills kicked in. You got Paul into a reverse choke hold and made him tap out. Is Paul’s arrogance the reason you’re no longer a Christian?”
“It wasn’t Paul that made me leave the church. It was Junior Rangers. At the church, I volunteered to be a Junior Rangers Captain, which meant every Wednesday night I’d lead a group of fifth-grade boys through a Bible study, athletic events, and singalongs. I had to wear a heavily starched brown collared short-sleeve shirt with Junior Rangers Captain patches sewn on the breast pocket and upper sleeves. Every time I put this shirt on, I felt like a total idiot. And for some reason, the shirt made me feel like I was a backstabber of the Jewish people.”
“It was your Nazi shirt,” Sherry said. “Assigned to be the concentration camp kapo.”
“That’s what it felt like,” I said. “On Judgment Day, I’d wear that brown shirt while I watched my grandmother sentenced to eternal torment. I felt like a complete hypocrite teaching the Bible stories and taking orders from a religion that said my grandmother would be sent to hell.”
“Not just your grandmother. The whole Jewish people.”
“I wanted to quit being a Ranger after a few weeks, but I completed the six months of duty. It was the longest six months of my life.”
“So what are you now?”
“What am I?”
“Your religious beliefs.”
“I guess I’m agnostic. I won’t lie to you. Like it or not, my conversion left a permanent stamp on me. I’ve been in a limbo all these years. I have no peace in belief. But nor do I have any peace in unbelief.”
Sherry finished her sangria and put the empty glass on a passing server’s platter.
“I feel like I betrayed my people,” I continued. “And I have to tell you, when I saw your son and Emily standing under the gazebo with the tallit draped over their shoulders, and the rabbi said that your parents had preserved it while being imprisoned in the camps, I had to use all my strength not to lose it. To think I could embrace a religion that would use images of people burning in flames. That would be the ultimate act of betrayal of my people. I hope you don’t hate me.”
“Of course, I don’t hate you.”
“Whenever I think about those painful years I attended that church, I always see my mother’s Uncle Ellis, a Holocaust survivor. The one time I met him at a deli in Miami, the thing I remember most was his sad haunted eyes. They seemed to be imploring me--be faithful, be true, stand up for your people, and never forget.”
