A World Erased

Growing up Noah knew his grandparents had survived the Holocaust, but his questions had always been sidelined. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets. The secrets that
are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. In my family,

(00:30):
the number six million had been ubiquitous. Grandma would use
it as a non sequitur when my father was growing
up and claimed to be bored. Grandma would say, bored.
When I was your age, we had no food. Your
family is dead, six million Jews dead, and your board.
When I refused the fourth bowl of chicken soup, she

(00:51):
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

(01:15):
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

(01:39):
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.

(01:59):
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,

(02:21):
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

(02:42):
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

(03:05):
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

(03:28):
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

(03:51):
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.

(04:15):
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,

(04:38):
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

(05:01):
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.

(05:23):
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,

(05:46):
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.

(06:06):
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

(06:26):
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

(06:47):
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.

(07:12):
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,

(07:33):
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

(07:56):
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

(08:16):
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

(08:37):
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,

(08:58):
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,

(09:19):
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

(09:39):
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

(09:59):
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

(10:25):
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

(10:46):
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

(11:08):
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,

(11:31):
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

(11:53):
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.

(12:14):
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

(12:34):
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

(12:56):
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

(13:16):
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

(13:37):
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

(14:00):
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.

(14:25):
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

(14:48):
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

(15:12):
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,

(15:36):
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

(15:57):
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

(16:20):
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

(16:40):
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,

(17:03):
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

(17:24):
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

(17:45):
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

(18:08):
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

(18:30):
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

(18:52):
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,

(19:14):
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

(19:34):
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

(19:56):
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

(20:17):
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

(20:38):
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

(21:09):
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

(21:30):
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

(21:50):
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

(22:12):
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

(22:34):
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

(22:56):
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

(23:18):
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.

(23:42):
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

(24:02):
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

(24:22):
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

(24:42):
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

(25:04):
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,

(25:26):
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

(25:50):
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

(26:12):
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

(26:34):
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

(26:55):
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

(27:16):
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,

(27:39):
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

(28:00):
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

(28:21):
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

(28:43):
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

(29:05):
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

(29:26):
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

(29:47):
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,

(30:08):
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

(30:31):
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

(30:56):
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

(31:17):
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.

(31:42):
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,

(32:08):
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

(32:28):
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

(32:55):
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

(33:17):
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,

(33:38):
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

(34:00):
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

(34:23):
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,

(34:50):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows,