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In a crescendo of insults, Rifka pleads that I end the relationship, firing off a barrage of grievances. 

“You are not right for our family!” she protests weepily.

“What do you mean, not right?” I ask indignantly.

I hear a groan from Ruthie’s room, “Shit!” as I slide my back down the wall and sit, legs outstretched on the linoleum settling in for the rant, the receiver pressed to my ear.  

“Not right means not right. That is what I mean,” Rifka shouts. “You come from German parents!” 

“What difference does that make? They’re Jewish, for God’s sake!”

Over the next few days, my father pours out his fatherly wisdom—I’m not the first girlfriend to run the gauntlet of a Jewish mother’s meshugaas (craziness). It’s an old story. Jewish mothers and their sons - you know how that goes. A right of passage. No girl is good enough. But, you wait. She’ll come around. In the end, she’ll love you like a daughter.

Still, I’m inconsolable. Nothing he says can stay the hurt and seething anger.  

The sun had barely risen when, a year later, on September 1, 1939, the skies above Zakrzówek shuddered as a swarm of Stukkas with swastikas on their wings shrieked overhead. Windowpanes rattled, teacups danced on shelves, dogs howled, furniture gyrated. Villagers with pale faces looked out from windows, listening to the crump crump of bombs exploding a few kilometers away. Terrified worshippers ran home from the synagogue and gathered around radios.  

“Germany has declared war on Poland!”

At a Holocaust authors' symposium, someone asked what my biggest takeaway from Rifka's story was. "The banality of evil,'" I answered, quoting Hannah Arendt. To a man, the commandants who ran Rifka's camps were ordinary, unexceptional people. They weren't mentally deranged; they had no criminal records or histories of violent, sadistic pasts. In Arendt's words, they were "terrifyingly normal"

In the words of Atticus Finch, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." For over thirty years I inhabited Rifka, so much so there were times I couldn't separate my authentic self from my Rifka self.

In his book Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes that the wiring of the brains of Holocaust survivors changed during their incarceration. At first, the newly arrived prisoners would watch with pitying eyes or look away when fellow inmates were tortured, hung or shot. However, within a few months, sometimes weeks, a psychological transformation took place, and the prisoner would pass into a state of emotional apathy and observe such cruelties with indifference. He describes this state of detachment as an “emotional death.”

Budzyń 10.00 p.m.

Most nights, the camp had quietened to a hush by ten o'clock. Yet, on this night, the inmates were woken by the pounding of boots rushing past the barracks and the furious barking of dogs straining their leashes. Bolted awake, their eyes flown open, the inmates listened. Before long, sirens screamed across the campgrounds. Klieg lights lit up the skies. From all corners, loudspeakers blared: Alle zum Appelplatz! Alle zum Appelplatz! (Everyone to the roll call area! Everyone to the roll call area!) And from stall to stall, they whispered—A hanging!