TheBanyanTree: yet more stories

[Tobie Shapiro]

September 19, 2000000000000006


Dear Important People,

	I'm getting a lot out of writing these things down.  So much 
can get packed into a life.


                                         yoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy

Bully

	I must have been very very little because we were living in 
the apartment complex in Hyattsville (which I may have misspelled), a 
group of tall brick apartment buildings clustered around some walk 
ways, and in back were sand boxes and play equipment, very forward 
thinking for back then.  My big sister had a tricycle and she was 
pedalling it on one of the walk ways.  We were approaching the center 
of the cluster of buildings, when I saw the neighborhood bully coming 
in the opposite direction.  What a four year old bully looks like is 
a mystery to me now, but I swear he had a shaved head.  Very short 
hair was all the rage on boys.  I was afraid that this bully was 
going to hurt my older sister on her wheels.  So I walked or toddled 
in front of her and spread out my arms.  I can't remember if I said 
anything threatening or admonishing in tone.  Probably not.  It would 
look silly on a two and half year old.  The bully stood his ground, 
and I turned around to see how my big sister was faring in this 
crisis.  She was faring quickly, pumping the tricycle pedals as fast 
as she could back where we came from, leaving me there facing the 
bully, alone.  I think at that point I chose to save myself and ran 
away after my quizzling sister.  No one was hurt.

                                         yoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy


Who My Sister Was

	Inside the apartment at Hyattsville was small, but it seemed 
big enough to me.  I remember being on my stomach and on all fours 
watching my mother's ankles and legs in the kitchen.  I remember 
sitting next to my Grama Lena watching the tiny round television in 
its huge wooden cabinet.  My sister was going to be on the television 
with her kindergarten class.  I stared at the set, and there she was, 
on a stage in front of a tall velvet curtain, talking into a 
microphone,  the older sister who tortured and teased me, the one I 
worshipped as the wisest, biggest, most learned, clever, beautiful 
being in the world.

                                         yoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy


Lesson about Human Kindness

	On Saturday mornings when we lived in Silver Spring, 
Maryland, my mother would go off to her job in a laboratory, 
processing tests.  She still had her laboratory technician's licence. 
The owner of the lab was a friend, and he just needed a little help. 
On those mornings, my father was left in charge of us, and what a 
fine time we always had with him at the helm!  He could get into all 
sorts of trouble.  Saturday morning was the time of the endless 
Saturday morning cartoons, the networks' gift to working stiffs who 
wanted to sleep in while the kids were occupied.  And most Saturday 
mornings, that's exactly what we did: Popeye, The Little Rascals, 
Bugs Bunny, the little clown who climbed out of the ink bottle, Betty 
Boop.

	But one time, my father led me over to a chair he'd placed in 
front of the television.  This was when televisions came in sizeable 
cabinets, a legitimate piece of furniture, with the speakers below 
and the television tube above, housed inside a real wooden box that 
had french doors that opened to reveal the electronic miracle within. 
It took time for the television to warm up, too.  None of this 
instant gratification.  No.  You turn it on, and the screen remained 
blank for some time, until all the vaccuum tubes within got toasty 
and active.  Then the picture would appear.

	My father put me in the chair in front of the T.V. and tuned 
in to a documentary called, "The Life and Death of Hitler".  I will 
never forget that title.  I couldn't have been older than seven.  He 
ordered me to watch it.  The documentary was rivetting and 
horrifying.  There was a lot of footage of bodies being shoveled into 
ovens, of mountains of emaciated corpses stacked up in piles.  One 
shot I remember well had a worker standing outside the oven door, 
having to deal with a recalcitrant dead body that half fell out of 
the oven and had to be stuffed back in.  There were conveyor belts of 
glasses, of gold fillings, and fields of hair.  There were countless 
minutes documenting the starving incarcerated Jews, dressed in filthy 
striped suits staring at the camera from behind barbed wire fences.

	The effect of all this on a seven year old girl (or maybe I 
was only six) was catastrophic.  For two weeks I shook and couldn't 
sleep at night.  I cried to my mother about it.

	"Why did Hitler do that?  Why would anyone do that?"

	She answered me that Hitler wanted power.

	"Who wants power?!"  I wept.

	The world became a much more dangerous place, a frightening 
place.  I could not get the images out of my mind.  I trembled 
constantly and wondered what it meant to be a Jew.  I felt a kinship, 
a oneness, with all the dead and half dead Jews in the movie.  I have 
never lost that.  For two weeks I had to sleep in the bed with my 
mother, her arms protecting me from the gas chamber.  I was too 
terrified to sleep alone in my own bed.  The thoughts plagued me:  I 
was frightened of looking at the evidence, viewing the holocaust, 
from my safe distance, but there were six million who lived and died 
among the throes of that reality.

                                         yoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net