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Victory over Holocaust: Families go on

by Daniel Rubin

Philadelphia Inquirer Sept. 2, 1997

Miriam and Anshel Caine at home in Philadelphia

At first, the words don't come. The small, white-haired man's face turns scarlet, and his hands draw to his mouth. His body quakes, and soon the entire kitchen table is rattling, the twisted, brass candlesticks knocking as Allen Caine finds his breath and a way to begin.

"Years back, when I came to this country, I came uncivilized. I lived in Germany from 1945 to 1949. I became an alcoholic just to get rid of the things I had in my mind. I didn't eat. Instead I drank. I didn't consider myself a human.

"Somehow, I became a little person again. I got back to civilization ... but it was hard to adjust. Especially, the bad dreams. I was fighting the war every night. I hit my wife one night by. They made me go to a German psychiatrist when my kids were born. It was the worst, the dreams. They were taking my kids to camp."

Caine, 73, pauses and smooths his hair. He takes another breath. He is at the edge of his chair in the kitchen of his Far Northeast twin. His wife, Miriam, is in another room, cleaning windows.

"The psychiatrist asked me what dreams I had. Before I told him, he knew. I wasn't his first one. I told him they are taking away my kids and I couldn't watch the end, what they would do to my kids. And he says, 'It's because you love them.' The first time, my wife woke me up. I was hollering, crying, speaking German. I told her, 'Don't wake me up. I want to know what happens to my kids."'

The dreams have continued for decades. "It's a little bit less now, but once in a while. I always think it is because I'm talking about the Holocaust." He is 5-foot-3 and solidly built, with long wicks of snowy hair combed straight back. His eyes are pale blue, and his raspy voice is still full of his native Poland. He wears a neatly pressed dress shirt and trousers. His number is pale blue as well - 73590 inked deeply into his left forearm.

His wife passes to retrieve some rice cakes and yogurt from the refrigerator, which is papered with the family Picassos - drawings and holiday cards and school photos from their two granddaughters in England. Miriam does not linger. It is his story. She has her own.

So do 560 other men and women who will gather today at Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia. This afternoon, those who lived through World War 11 are not just celebrating their survival, but the continuation of their families through children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. "This," says Miriam Caine, "is the victory for us survivors."

In the lives of survivors - and the lives of their families - Holocaust stories remain the dominant chords, reverberating tales of faith and disbelief, smarts and chance that helped them endure unspeakable horrors. A half-century later, a legacy of strength thrives from acts never considered to be strong, only stubborn or desperate, perhaps.

"We were seven kids," Allen Caine says. "I was the fourth one. After me, there were two girls and a little boy. The worst part with the dreams was when my kids were the same age as my sisters and brother when they were taken away. They were just looking at each other. So pale from the war. Never having enough to eat. When we got off the train, 1, myself, was 16 years old."

The Germans called it "resettlement." The train came to his hometown, Ciechanow, on Nov. 6, 1942. His mother had died when he was 3 months old. His father had not made it through the German occupation. Ordered to clean out the religious figurines from a Catholic family's home, he moved too slowly. He died from the beating the soldiers gave him.

The boy rode with his grandparents, an aunt and uncle, his three older brothers, and the three little ones. His grandfather prayed prayers he usually said before going to bed. "'Why are you praying?' I asked him. 'Because,' he answered, we are going to die."'

Their stop was Birkenau, the death camp three kilometers from Auschwitz. "I heard them yelling. 'Everybody out!' All the people were separated. Women and children, separated. Able-bodied, separated. I was standing by my grandmother. She pushes me away. 'Why don't you go with your brothers,' she says.

"I cried to her, 'I told you when I got older I would take care of you., 'No,' she said. Finally, she said, 'Sonny, go to your brothers. Your mother will take care of You.' I didn't even say good-bye to my sisters and brother. I went with my older brother, and he put his arm around me as we waited for a doctor.

They started marching. A band of musicians played inside the gates. The boy was thirsty. He saw a little pond. "I jumped down. I went to my knees. I started clearing the water when I heard screaming. 'Dummy, you can't drink that."' It was a capo, a boss. "'There are ashes there,' he yelled. I didn't know what he meant. I put my hands in deeper, then I knew what he was saying. There were skeletons in the water. ... I didn't drink any more."

A barber shaved their heads. It took some time to learn the layout of the 425-acre camp, but when he did, he realized what was happening in the next room as his blond hair fell to the floor.

"One thickness of a wall away, my people were getting gassed."

Miriam Caine's family had 15 minutes to pack. Cattle cars were waiting to take them to Siberia. Their crime was being capitalists.

Miriam's father had owned a grain mill and textile factory outside Bialystok, Poland. The Krugmans were rich. She grew up in a big house, with gardens, fruit trees and her own maid. When the Russians came, they let her father work in his own factory.

The Krugman house was too big for one family. The Russians turned it into a kindergarten. Her parents found a smaller place to rent where soldiers had been living. They shared it with two schoolteachers and a Russian general.

When he saw the china an tablecloth - a green one, velvet with gold embroidery - he said, "Before long this is going to be mine." She was 7 in the spring of 1941 when the Russians ordered her family to the Siberian labor camps.

"My mother was a very organized person. She took a couple of sweaters, even though it was July. A couple aspirins and a little ball to make an enema with. I still have it. My children laugh at me, but that little ball saved my brother's life."

She is 64 now, with a well-creased face and a slight hitch in her step from six hip operations. Her accent seems more Philadelphia than Poland. She wears her hair blond. It was dark brown then.

Her family traveled for more than a week to a small town where they lived in a hut and ate with the group.

"In Siberia, the winter starts in the middle of September and lets up in the middle of May. The part where I was, there were swamps. You'd spend the summer with a fish net and dipped in tar so the mosquitoes wouldn't eat you up."

Her mother had saved a silk bedspread from their home. She traded it for a bucket of potatoes.

After nearly a year, they were moved to barracks, where they won a little freedom. "If you owned a chicken, then the eggs could belong to you," she says.

Finally, by the middle of 1943, her father proved himself trustworthy, and was moved from the fields into an office as a bookkeeper. They were put on a train to central Russia. There, eight people shared a room until the war ended.

"'We surmised that none of our family was left," she said. A few months after they left Poland, in June of 1941, the Germans had stormed into Bialystok. Half the city's population did not survive. Nearly every Jew perished, more than 700 of them herded into the main synagogue, Poland's largest, doused with gasoline and torched.

"What they thought was punishment for us turned out to be a lifesaver."

The number showed on his forearm as the trolley bounced up North Sixth Street.

Allen Caine was 26, a newcomer to Philadelphia, where he lived with the one brother who had survived the camps. A boy and his father sat across from him and stared that day in 1950. Caine noticed that they spoke to each other in Yiddish, and he introduced himself. They were from the same block. They invited him to their home, and what he found there astonished him - a mother and father, son and daughter. A grandmother, even.

"I had not seen a family like that since 1939," he remembered.

Dark-haired Miriam was not quite 17, a student at Kensington High School. He recognized her from the neighborhood. He was working for a cabinetmaker and beginning his way back to civilization.

On their first date told her a little, how he was a survivor of five camps, his compact body hardened by the years at Golleschau, where he broke rocks with a sledgehammer so the Nazis could make cement for their Normandy bunkers. He kept inside him the beatings and dogs, the images of children being strangled, the uncle he watched pummeled to death, the brother made to work in the killing pits.

They saw each other again and again. Then he had to make a choice: His brother's wife told him he'd have to find his own place, because her father was coming to live with them. Miriam was still in high school. He pleaded with her to marry him. She acted not out of love, but fear.

"On Front Street, the majority of businesspeople were Jewish," she says. "Two or three had daughters or sisters who were old maids. They instilled such a fear in me. 'You don't speak the language,' they'd say. 'You don't this or that.' I can't really tell you I was in love with him when we got married. I think we grew and the love grew.

"Because of our past, our experiences, we were able to be together maybe better than someone else," she says. "You take more and you give more of yourself."

They married in 1952, and three years later, their first child was born, a son they named Arnold.

Rachel Caine asked if she could bring a visitor to class. The 10-yearold was studying World War 11 with her fifth-grade class in Prestbury, England. In March, they were beginning to read a novel about two German airmen who crash into the countryside at war's end and save a British boy from drowning.

Her grandfather, who was visiting, had a real story, she told her teacher.

Arnold Caine, 43, had never heard his father address a group. He went with his wife, Diane, to their daughter's school outside Manchester, where he works for a pharmaceutical company, and prepared for the worst.

"I think everyone in the class' eyes were wide open," says Rachel. No one was talking. It was amazing that someone still living had gone through something like that.' Allen Caine remembers looking he teacher as he was about to describe the ovens at Birkenau, and wondering how far to go. 'We’ve prepared them for your speech" she told him.

Rachel says her grandfather shared some memories "that you couldn't imagine he'd tell us."

Right after Liberation, the Allies were still rounding up Nazis, he told the class, when a young American soldier threw a machine gun onto his shoulder and invited him to exact whatever revenge he needed.'

Caine walked away.

In the succeeding days and weeks, he wandered around Germany drinking, dealing on the black market. Food was surreally plentiful for those with numbers carved into their forearms. As he was waiting for soup, a young German boy, about 5 years old, tugged on Caine's pants. He told the boy to get a bowl. The boy returned with his twin sister. She had a bowl too.

"My whole history came before me as I was standing there, my sisters and my little brother."

He poured them some soup. That's when he saw their mother, with tears in her eyes. "Hunger hurts," she told him. He could not begin to answer her.

Rachel Caine carries one message in particular from that day her grandfather stilled a classroom of 9and 10-year-olds for more than an hour.

"He said never to use the word hate, Because this is what it can lead to. it is a very strong word. My mom is always telling me not to use it against people I dislike. It's such a strong word. It is amazing it can start something like this."

Arnold Caine marvels that his father has never harbored the need to get even. He’s a pretty happy guy. He smiles a lot. He's really happy to be alive. He gets a lot of joy out of his children and grandchildren."

Being the children of survivors has not always been easy.

"How can you compete with that?" Arnold Caine asked a group of relatives and family friends gathered in April to honor his parents. The real pressure, he told them, came from within. "All they want is for life to be easier for me."

His sister, Sharon, 39, knows the source of her toughest reserves. "I do endure. Maybe a bit more than I should."

For 16 years, Sharon Caine has worked at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where her patients in rehab tend to have the, most severe disabilities - amputations, strokes, paralysis. "I’ve always had a weak stomach, but it amazed me things I can do at work. I think sometimes my dealing with people comes from the way I was brought up."

Growing up, even though he was other survivors, Arnold Caine knew his family was different, His friends seemed to have more cousins, aunts and uncles. He and Sharon would listen to tales m the old country when their parents had friends over. They'd be sitting on the stairs avoiding bedtime when they'd hear the story again of how someone stole a piece of bread, and the laughter would fill their house on Brighton Street. The full horror of their family history hit home five years ago, when they decided to travel back to and Arnold was standing inside Birkenau - "the killing machine" as his father called the death camp, with its four crematoriums, its funeral pyres, its killing pits.

"Mom," Arnold remembers asking, "how did he manage to become a human being again?"