​Masha
A cry pierced my dream in the darkness of the night. I woke up startled but happy to find myself comfortably ensconced under the heavy quilt in my bed. Frightening images continued to drift before my eyes and a feeling of alarm dominated my consciousness. I was dreaming again. The same recurring dream I used to have when Masha lived with us for several months. In that dream, I was packed into a windowless car in a slow moving train. The car was teeming with people of all ages standing along the walls, crouching in the middle of the floor, sitting wherever they could squeeze their bodies; contorting themselves into tight spaces that were scarcely available. The people had no faces, only limbs that seemed to belong to no one in particular.  
In my dream, I sweated heavily and felt I was going to gag. Dreading I would suffocate, I was overcome by panic so powerful that I cried out in sheer desperation: “Please open up a window, I need some air”. But there were no windows to open. The smell of human excrement was overwhelming, and I felt I was going to puke. “I will die, mommy, please help me”, I screamed. People around me were collapsing in the hazardous confinement of the sealed box car with its lack of oxygen.  Here and there, in the dark recesses of the car, a lifeless human body was laid under covers of discarded coats and jackets, as if taking a little respite from the oppressive conditions.  
I used to wake up from that dream, my heart palpitating strongly. Trying to console myself, I imagined hearing the soft voice of my mother, who often tried to comfort me by rubbing my back, telling me to breathe slowly and deeply.  As I lay quietly in bed, I reassured myself by listening to familiar sounds of the night: the gurgling water coming up in the sink, the snappy sound the refrigerator makes when its motor goes on and off, the creaking chair adjusting its joints from the daily weight of those who sat on it, and the howling cries of jackals. Oh, how those jackals used to frighten me when I was younger. 
On winter nights, when the heat from the kerosene stove had long died out, the room was very cold and dark. I was freezing and scared to get out of bed, although I desperately needing to pee. The bathroom was a distance away, through a long corridor in which a make-shift sofa during the day was converted into a bed where Masha slept at night.
Masha arrived in Israel, sometimes in the early 1950s, after spending several years in DP (displaced persons) camps in Europe. She found my mother through the bureau for missing relatives and came to stay with us until a more permanent living arrangement could be made for her. My mother was her first cousin and the only surviving relative of what was once a large extended family.  
One day, when I came home from school, without any warning, Masha was just there.  She was a frightening sight, a human being of indistinguishable age and gender, dressed in mismatched clothes. I remember most distinctly that she was wearing a large woolen overcoat, and on her head a knitted cap, pulled down over her forward, even though summer was around the corner and it was quite warm that day. “It is so warm, why is she wearing a coat and a hat in the house?” I asked my mother. “Masha is always cold” was my mother’s only explanation.
Over the next few months, in response to my curious questions, my mother would reveal all sorts of details about Masha. Gradually the accumulation of anecdotes and the little sketchy stories divulged from time to time, joined together to form a portrait of Masha’s life.
Masha was the only daughter of five children. Her father, according to my mother’s story, was smart and entrepreneurial. He succeeded in establishing a substantial lumber business in the outskirts of Krakow, Poland. Not being educated himself, he saw to it that all his four sons were sent to study in a Yeshiva, leaving only Masha to help with the family business. The enterprise thrived and expanded, and Masha’s family became wealthy, at least by the standards of the Jewish shtetl, where most people were struggling to put food on the table to feed their brood of children. Masha had apparently inherited her commercial acumen from her father and by the time she was in her mid-twenties was practically running the business. 
My mother described Masha as a rather tall woman. “She used to be so tall that she towered over most people in our community”, she said. I was astonished, “What do you mean, used to be tall?”, “She is not all that tall now”. “Well”, said my mother. “She shrunk”.  I was flabbergasted. Can people shrink, like some clothes we wash in hot water? But my mother insisted and though skeptical, I remained quiet yet alarmed at the prospect of shrinking.  We had no family albums that could provide a pictorial connection to the past, only a scarce few photos, kept in a locked wooden box that only my mother was permitted to touch. I never saw a photograph of the young Masha. The only picture I formed in my mind’s eye came from my mother’s fragmented depictions of her.  “Masha was not a beauty”, mother told me once, “But she was very elegant and poised. She had an indelible charisma that forever commanded respect”. 
When she combed Masha’s thin hair that showed many bold spots on the top of her head, mother would sigh and say, “Oh, you should have seen Masha’s hair. She had gorgeous black hair that she wore tied in a bun on the back of her neck”.  Sometimes when helping Masha put on the heavy oversized shoes she always wore, mother would sneer, “You call these shoes? Masha would never have worn anything like these back then”. “Back then” used to refer to anything that happened before the war, when people harbored dreams and hopes and believed in a bright future for themselves and their children. “Back then” was before people like Masha were reduced to mere shadows of their former selves. 
According to my mother, Masha was one of the most elegant women she knew. “She possessed a sense of style equal to none but the very rich ladies of society, seen only in fashion magazines”. But whatever Masha used to be, unquestionably, she was not any longer. To me and my friends, she looked like a skeleton, a ghost with a vacuumed expression and a profound disinterest in whatever was going on about her. I was a little scared of her, although she took a liking to me, stroking my hair whenever I passed near her, saying in her croaky voice, “you are a good girl”.
I remember trying to guess Masha’s age. Yael, my friend thought she was at least 100 years old. “Don’t be stupid”, I recall snapping at her one day, “no one lives to be a hundred”. I thought she was probably 70, since the oldest person I knew was our next door neighbor, who was 65 and Masha looked older than him. In later years, I was amazed to realize that Masha, born in 1904 was only 48 when she came to stay with us in 1952. But whatever her age, Masha always appeared frail and lacking in energy. My parents placed a recliner on the porch overlooking an empty field below our house. Masha liked to sit on that recliner, a blanket covering her body, often napping, or just staring out into space. Sometimes, she helped my mother prepare supper by peeling potatoes or shelling peas. Once I asked my mother “why is Masha always sitting outdoors?” To which my mother replied mysteriously, “she had enough of darkness; she needs to see light and breath fresh air!”
What happened to change Masha from a stylish and confident person to a broken creature, with only a vague resemblance to being a woman? This, as all the other questions I asked about the past, was answered with one brief sentence: “the Nazis happened”. When pressed to tell me more about the Nazis and what they did, my mother frowned and replied: “There are no words I know in Yiddish, Hebrew or Polish – the three languages she spoke fluently - that can possibly capture the hideous deeds of the Nazis. Their crimes were too shocking, too sickening, too appalling for words. So we cannot and shall not talk about them”. After a while, even an inquisitive child as I was, stopped asking questions.
There seemed to have been an unintended conspiracy, a consensus at silence when it came to talking about the Holocaust. Yet sometimes, when refugees gathered in our house, I would sneak closer to them, eavesdropping on their conversations. The people in my parents’ circle spoke Yiddish, their mother tongue and the language they felt most natural speaking. I, on the other hand, spoke only Hebrew. But at some point, during my childhood, I am not sure when that happened, I began to realize that I understood a little of what my parents and their friends were saying. I could understand a few words and bits and pieces of sentences, my imagination providing the rest of the context. Occasionally I could overhear fragments of stories from “over there”, a vague reference to the concentration camps. But when one of the adults would spot me, sitting quietly on the floor in the corner of the room, he or she would shake their head and pointing to me would warn the others, “Sh, the child is listening”. 
Masha’s nightmare, as my parents referred to it, was brought to light inadvertently one day, when a neighbor came rushing into our house, excitedly telling my mother that she heard over the radio Masha’s name. “Someone is looking for her”, she whispered,” I think it’s her son”. No son was ever mentioned that I recalled. Yet, as the story unfolded, I learned that Masha did have a son, who was thirteen when the war broke out. She also had a much younger daughter, who at that time was around six years old. 
When the Germans invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, many Jews fled east, toward the Russian border, to escape slaughter. At around 1941, the Nazis started shipping Jews into concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau being one of the largest, close to Krakow. Masha was separated by the Nazis from her husband and son, who were hurled into a concentration camp around Krakow sometime in 1941, while she and her daughter were deported to Auschwitz. I do not know how long they were there. But I found out that her daughter died in the camp within a few months. Masha was then smuggled out of the camp by a childhood friend, a woman who grew up with her and who lived on a farm not far from Krakow. 
Masha’s friend brought her to the family farm, hiding her under a pigpen at a great risk to the lives of her entire family. Masha was kept in a hollow cavern, not much bigger than a grave, for over a year. During most days, she had to be hidden in the cave, covered by a rooftop made of wooden slats strewn with hay. Only in the darkness of the night she was brought out for short periods of time to stretch her limbs, eat a little food, and breathe fresh air. The story of Masha’s survival in a pigpen on the neighbor’s farm defied my imagination and although I heard it several times during my life, I could never fathom how a human being could possibly survive such deprivations.
For many years after the war, and despite considerable effort to find out what had happened to them, Masha had no word of her husband and son’s faith. She assumed they both perished in the camps. And then, in the autumn of 1952, news of her son’s survival and presence in Israel came through the radio sending shock waves among our family and friends. 
Masha accepted the news of her son’s survival with equanimity, masking most likely an inordinate fear that it may not really be her son. On the day of their reunion, we sat with Masha in our living room, awaiting the arrival of Binyamin, Masha’s long lost son. Binyamin, the son Masha had last seen when he was barely a teenager was now a grown man of twenty five. He was short, somewhat stooped, very thin, with a receding hairline and a rapidly blinking nervous tick. Instead of falling into each other’s arms, as we all have expected, the two stood anxiously eyeing each other, perhaps trying to recall the bond that once joined them together as mother and son. Not much was said on that first reunion and neither mother nor son displayed any feelings, rather remaining subdued throughout their meeting. It was as if their ordeals had drained them of all emotion.