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bothsidesnow-plog · 4 years

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Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question.

Was she the reason he was alive today?

By Keren Blankfeld Published Dec. 8, 2019Updated Dec. 9, 2019

The first time he spoke to her, in 1943, by the Auschwitz crematory, David Wisnia realized that Helen Spitzer was no regular inmate. Zippi, as she was known, was clean, always neat. She wore a jacket and smelled good. They were introduced by a fellow inmate, at her request.

Her presence was unusual in itself: a woman outside the women’s quarters, speaking with a male prisoner. Before Mr. Wisnia knew it, they were alone, all the prisoners around them gone. This wasn’t a coincidence, he later realized. They made a plan to meet again in a week.

On their set date, Mr. Wisnia went as planned to meet at the barracks between crematories 4 and 5. He climbed on top of a makeshift ladder made up of packages of prisoners’ clothing. Ms. Spitzer had arranged it, a space amid hundreds of piles, just large enough to fit the two of them. Mr. Wisnia was 17 years old; she was 25.

“I had no knowledge of what, when, where,” Mr. Wisnia recently reminisced at age 93. “She taught me everything.”

They were both Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, both privileged prisoners. Mr. Wisnia, initially forced to collect the bodies of prisoners who committed suicide, had been chosen to entertain his Nazi captors when they discovered he was a talented singer.

Ms. Spitzer held the more high-powered position: She was the camp’s graphic designer. They became lovers, meeting in their nook at a prescribed time about once a month. After the initial fears of knowing they were putting their lives in danger, they began to look forward to their dates. Mr. Wisnia felt special. “She chose me,” he recalled.

They didn’t talk much. When they did, they told each other brief snippets of their past. Mr. Wisnia had an opera-loving father who’d inspired his singing, and who’d perished with the rest of his family at the Warsaw ghetto. Ms. Spitzer, who also loved music — she played the piano and the mandolin — taught Mr. Wisnia a Hungarian song. Below the boxes of clothing, fellow prisoners stood guard, prepared to warn them if an SS officer was approaching.

For a few months, they managed to be each other’s escape, but they knew these visits wouldn’t last. Around them, death was everywhere. Still, the lovers planned a life together, a future outside of Auschwitz. They knew they would be separated, but they had a plan, after the fighting was done, to reunite.

It took them 72 years.

On a recent afternoon this fall, Mr. Wisnia sat in his house of 67 years in his adopted hometown in Levittown, Pa., looking through old photographs. Still a passionate singer, Mr. Wisnia spent decades as a cantor at the local congregation. Now, about once a month, he gives speeches where he tells war stories, usually to students and sometimes at libraries or congregations.

“There are few people left who know the details,” he said.

In January, Mr. Wisnia plans to fly with his family to Auschwitz, where he has been invited to sing at the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. He expects to recognize only one fellow survivor there. The last big anniversary, five years ago, which he attended, included about 300 Holocaust survivors. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany estimates that only 2,000 survivors of Auschwitz are alive today.

As the Holocaust fades from public memory and anti-Semitism is once again on the rise, Mr. Wisnia finds himself speaking about his past with more urgency. This is quite a turn for a man who spent most of his adult life trying not to look back. Mr. Wisnia’s oldest son learned only as a teenager that his father wasn’t born in America. (His father worked hard to lose his European accent.)

Mr. Wisnia’s children and grandchildren coaxed him to talk about his past. Gradually, he opened up. Once he started sharing his story, others convinced him to speak publicly. In 2015, he published a memoir, “One Voice, Two Lives: From Auschwitz Prisoner to 101st Airborne Trooper.” That was when his family first learned about his Auschwitz girlfriend. He referred to Ms. Spitzer under a pseudonym, Rose. Their reunion, as it turns out, hadn’t gone quite as planned. By the time he and Ms. Spitzer met again, they both had already married other people.

“How do you share such a story with your family?” Mr. Wisnia wondered.

Ms. Spitzer was among the first Jewish women to arrive in Auschwitz in March of 1942. She came from Slovakia, where she attended a technical college and said she was the first woman in the region to finish an apprenticeship as a graphic artist. In Auschwitz, she arrived with 2,000 unmarried women.

At first, she was assigned grueling demolition work at the sub-camp, Birkenau. She was malnourished and perpetually ill with typhus, malaria and diarrhea. She persisted as a laborer until a chimney collapsed on her, injuring her back. Through her connections, her ability to speak German, her graphic design skills and sheer luck, Ms. Spitzer secured an office job.

Her initial assignments included mixing red powder paint with varnish to draw a vertical stripe on female prisoners’ uniforms. Eventually, she started registering all female arrivals in camp, she said in 1946 testimony documented by the psychologist David Boder, who recorded the first interviews with survivors after the war.

By the time Ms. Spitzer met Mr. Wisnia, she was working from a shared office. Together with another Jewish woman, she was responsible for organizing Nazi paperwork. She made monthly charts of the camp’s labor force.

As Ms. Spitzer’s responsibilities grew, she was free to move around within parts of the camp and sometimes was allowed excursions outside. She showered regularly and didn’t have to wear an armband. She used her extensive knowledge of the grounds to build a 3-D model of the camp. Ms. Spitzer’s privileges were such that she managed to correspond with her only surviving brother in Slovakia through coded postcards.

Yet Ms. Spitzer was never a Nazi collaborator or a kapo, an inmate assigned to oversee other prisoners. Instead, she used her position to help inmates and allies. She used her design skills to manipulate paperwork and reassign prisoners to different job assignments and barracks. She had access to official camp reports, which she shared with various resistance groups, according to Konrad Kwiet, a professor at the University of Sydney.

Dr. Kwiet interviewed Ms. Spitzer for an essay published in the book “Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor.” In the book, edited by Jürgen Matthäus, director of applied research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ms. Spitzer was interviewed by five different historians, each chronicling her life from a different perspective.

“It’s certainly not surprising to me that people in Zippi’s position would have lovers and they would try to use their influence to save people,” said Atina Grossmann, a professor at the Cooper Union in New York, who interviewed Ms. Spitzer for the book.

“For everybody you saved, you were condemning someone else,” Dr. Grossmann said. “You had to be very precise, and that’s how you kept the Germans at bay.”

Mr. Wisnia was assigned to the “corpse unit” when he arrived. His job was to collect bodies of prisoners who’d flung themselves against the electric fence surrounding the camp. He dragged those corpses to a barrack, where they were hauled off by trucks.

Within months word got around that Mr. Wisnia was a gifted singer. He started singing regularly to Nazi guards and was assigned a new job at a building the SS called the Sauna. He disinfected the clothing of new arrivals with the same Zyklon B pellets used to murder prisoners in the gas chamber.

Ms. Spitzer, who’d noticed Mr. Wisnia at the Sauna, began making special visits. Once they’d established contact, she paid off inmates with food to keep watch for 30 minutes to an hour each time they met.

Their relationship lasted several months. One afternoon in 1944 they realized it would probably be their final climb up to their nook. The Nazis were transporting the last of the camp prisoners on death marches and destroying evidence of their crimes.

As crematories were demolished, there were whispers within the camp that the Soviets were advancing. The war might end soon. Mr. Wisnia and Ms. Spitzer had survived Auschwitz for more than two years while most prisoners never made it past a few months. In Auschwitz alone, 1.1 million people were murdered.

During their last rendezvous they made a plan. They would meet in Warsaw when the war was over, at a community center. It was a promise.

Mr. Wisnia left before Ms. Spitzer on one of the last transports out of Auschwitz. He was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp in December 1944. Soon after, during a death march from Dachau, he happened upon a hand shovel. He struck an SS guard and ran. The next day, while hiding in a barn, he heard what he thought were Soviet troops approaching. He ran to the tanks and hoped for the best. It turned out to be Americans.

He couldn’t believe his good fortune. Since he was 10 years old, Mr. Wisnia had dreamed of singing opera in New York. Before the war, he’d written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt requesting a visa so he could study music in America. His mother’s two sisters had emigrated to the Bronx in the 1930s, and he’d memorized their address. Throughout his ordeal in Auschwitz, that address had become a sort of prayer for him, a guidepost.

Now, faced with soldiers from the 101st Airborne, he was beyond relieved. The troops adopted him after hearing his tale, told in fragments of the little English he spoke, some German, Yiddish and Polish. They fed him Spam, he said, gave him a uniform, handed him a machine gun and taught him to use it. Europe would be his past, he decided. “I didn’t want anything to do with anything European,” he said. “I became 110 percent American.”

In his capacity with the American Army, Mr. Wisnia became “Little Davey,” an interpreter and civilian aide. Now he got to interrogate the Germans and confiscate their weapons. Now he took prisoners of war.

“Our boys were not so nice to the SS,” Mr. Wisnia said.

His unit trekked south to Austria, liberating towns along the way. The troops protected Mr. Wisnia, and he in turn transformed himself into an American. By the end of the war, they made it to Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. Here, they helped themselves to Hitler’s wine and myriad treasures. Mr. Wisnia took a Walther gun, a Baldur camera and a semiautomatic pistol.

Even though, as a Pole, he never could become a full-fledged G.I., Mr. Wisnia performed numerous jobs after the war with the American Army. He worked at the Army Post Exchange, which provided basic supplies to soldiers. He also sometimes drove to the displaced persons camp in the city of Feldafing to deliver supplies. Once he’d joined the Americans, his plan to meet Zippi in Warsaw was no longer even a consideration. America was his future.

Ms. Spitzer was among the last to leave the camp alive. She was sent to the women’s camp at Ravensbrück and a sub-camp in Malchow before being evacuated in a death march. She and a friend escaped the march by removing the red stripe she had painted on their uniforms, allowing them to blend with the local population that was fleeing.

As the Red Army advanced and the Nazis surrendered, Ms. Spitzer made her way to her childhood home in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her parents and siblings were gone, save for one brother, who’d just gotten married. She decided to leave him unburdened to start his new life.

According to Dr. Grossmann, the historian, Ms. Spitzer’s account of her journey immediately after the war was deliberately vague. She alluded to smuggling Jews across borders through the Bricha, an underground movement that helped refugees move illegally across Eastern Europe and into Palestine.

Millions of survivors were displaced, and Europe was teeming with displaced persons camps. Some 500 such camps materialized in Germany. Amid the chaos, Ms. Spitzer made it to the first all-Jewish displaced persons camp in the American zone of occupied Germany, which in the spring of 1945 housed at least 4,000 survivors. It was called Feldafing, the same camp that Mr. Wisnia would deliver supplies to.

The odds they would be in the same place were remarkable. “I would drive over there to Feldafing, but I had no idea she was there,” Mr. Wisnia said.

Soon after she arrived in Feldafing in September of 1945, Ms. Spitzer married Erwin Tichauer, the camp’s acting police chief and a United Nations security officer, roles that allowed him to work closely with the American military. Once again, Ms. Spitzer, now known as Ms. Tichauer, was in a privileged position. Although they, too, were displaced persons, the Tichauers lived outside the camp.

Ms. Tichauer, then 27, was among the oldest of the survivors in Feldafing. Because of her husband’s position, she told Dr. Grossmann, she was considered “top management” at the camp. As such, she distributed food among the refugees, particularly the booming population of pregnant women. In the fall of 1945, she accompanied her husband when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gen. George S. Patton came for a tour of the camp.

Ms. Tichauer and her husband devoted years of their lives to humanitarian causes. They went on missions through the United Nations to Peru and Bolivia and Indonesia. In between, Dr. Tichauer taught bioengineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Throughout their travels, Ms. Tichauer continued to learn new languages and use her design skills to help populations in need, particularly pregnant women and new mothers. Her existence was not defined by her experience as a Holocaust survivor, said Dr. Matthäus. “She had a much richer life,” he said. “There was a lot that she achieved with her husband.”

Eventually, the Tichauers moved to America, first to Austin, Tex., and then in 1967 they settled in New York, where Dr. Tichauer became a bioengineering professor at New York University. In their apartment, surrounded by books about the Holocaust, Ms. Tichauer spoke regularly with historians. She never gave speeches and said she despised the concept of the Holocaust as a business. The historians she entrusted with her story became part of her family. Dr. Kwiet, who called her from Australia every Friday, saw Ms. Tichauer as a mother figure.

“Her duty was not to be a professional survivor,” said Dr. Grossmann. “Her job was to be the historian’s historian. She was committed to this very sober, almost technical rendition of what happened.”

Yet throughout the many hours she devoted to detailing the horrors of Auschwitz to a number of historians, Ms. Tichauer never once mentioned Mr. Wisnia.

Sometime after the war ended, Mr. Wisnia heard from a former Auschwitz inmate that Ms. Tichauer was alive. By then he was deeply enmeshed with the American Army, based in Versailles, France, where he waited until he could finally emigrate to the United States.

When his aunt and uncle picked him up at the port in Hoboken in February 1946, they couldn’t believe the 19-year-old in a G.I. uniform was the little David they last saw in Warsaw.

In a rush to make up for lost time, Mr. Wisnia plunged into New York City life, going to dances and parties. He rode the subway from his aunt’s house in the Bronx to anywhere around Manhattan. He answered an ad in a local paper and got a job selling encyclopedias.

In 1947, at a wedding, he met his future wife, Hope. Five years later, the couple moved to Philadelphia. He became a vice president of sales for Wonderland of Knowledge Corporation, the encyclopedia company, until his career as a cantor took off.

Years after he’d settled down with his wife in Levittown, a friend of the lovers told Mr. Wisnia that Zippi was in New York City. Mr. Wisnia, who had told his wife about his former girlfriend, thought this would be an opportunity to reconnect, and he could finally ask how he had managed to survive Auschwitz.

Their friend arranged a meeting. Mr. Wisnia drove the two hours from Levittown to Manhattan and waited at a hotel lobby across from Central Park.

“She never showed up,” said Mr. Wisnia. “I found out after that she decided it wouldn’t be smart. She was married; she had a husband.”

Over the years, Mr. Wisnia kept tabs on Ms. Tichauer through their mutual friend. Meanwhile, his family grew — he had four children and six grandchildren. In 2016 Mr. Wisnia decided to try again to reach out to Zippi. He’d shared the story with his family. His son, who was now a rabbi at a Reform synagogue in Princeton, N.J., initiated contact for him. Finally, she agreed to a visit.

In August 2016, Mr. Wisnia took two of his grandchildren with him to the reunion with Ms. Tichauer. He was silent during most of the car ride from Levittown to Manhattan. He didn’t know what to expect. It had been 72 years since he’d last seen his former girlfriend. He’d heard she was in poor health but knew very little about her life. He suspected she’d helped to keep him alive and wanted to know if this was true.

When Mr. Wisnia and his grandchildren arrived at her apartment in the East 30s, they found Ms. Tichauer lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by shelves filled with books. She had been alone since her husband died in 1996, and they’d never had any children. Over the years, bed-bound, she’d gone increasingly blind and deaf. She had an aide looking after her, and the telephone had become her lifeline to the world.

At first, she didn’t recognize him. Then Mr. Wisnia leaned in close.

“Her eyes went wide, almost like life came back to her,” said Mr. Wisnia’s grandson Avi Wisnia, 37. “It took us all aback.”

Suddenly there was a flow of words between Mr. Wisnia and Ms. Tichauer, all in their adopted English tongue.

“She said to me in front of my grandchildren, she said, ‘Did you tell your wife what we did?’” Mr. Wisnia remembered, chuckling, shaking his head. “I said, ‘Zippi!’”

Mr. Wisnia talked about his children, his time in the American Army. Ms. Tichauer spoke about her humanitarian work after the war and her husband. She marveled at Mr. Wisnia’s perfect English. “My God,” she said. “I never thought that we would see each other again — and in New York.”

The reunion lasted about two hours. He finally had to ask: Did she have something to do with the fact that he’d managed to survive in Auschwitz all that time?

She held up her hand to display five fingers. Her voice was loud, her Slovakian accent deep. “I saved you five times from bad shipment,” she said.

“I knew she would do that,” said Mr. Wisnia to his grandchildren. “It’s absolutely amazing. Amazing.”

There was more. “I was waiting for you,” Ms. Tichauer said. Mr. Wisnia was astonished. After she escaped the death march, she had waited for him in Warsaw. She’d followed the plan. But he never came.

She had loved him, she told him quietly. He had loved her, too, he said.

Mr. Wisnia and Ms. Tichauer never saw each other again. She died last year at age 100. On their last afternoon together, before Mr. Wisnia left her apartment, she asked him to sing to her. He took her hand and sang her the Hungarian song she taught him in Auschwitz. He wanted to show her that he remembered the words.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/nyregion/auschwitz-love-story.html?smid=3D=

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question. https://nyti.ms/2YCGygV

This amazing story: “On their last afternoon together, before Mr. Wisnia left her apartment, she asked him to sing to her. He took her hand and sang her the Hungarian song she taught him in Auschwitz. He wanted to show her that he remembered the words.”

Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question.

Was she the reason he was alive today?

By Keren Blankfeld | Published Dec. 8, 2019, 3:00 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted December 8, 2019 |

“I had no knowledge of what, when, where,” Mr. Wisnia recently reminisced at age 93. “She taught me everything.”

It took them 72 years.

“There are few people left who know the details,” he said.

“How do you share such a story with your family?” Mr. Wisnia wondered.

Yet Ms. Spitzer was never a Nazi collaborator or a kapo, a Jew assigned to oversee other prisoners. Instead, she used her position to help inmates and allies. She used her design skills to manipulate paperwork and reassign prisoners to different job assignments and barracks. She had access to official camp reports, which she shared with various resistance groups, according to Konrad Kwiet, a professor at the University of Sydney.

“For everybody you saved, you were condemning someone else,” Dr. Grossmann said. “You had to be very precise, and that’s how you kept the Germans at bay.”

During their last rendezvous they made a plan. They would meet in Warsaw when the war was over, at a community center. It was a promise.

“Our boys were not so nice to the SS,” Mr. Wisnia said.

The odds they would be in the same place were remarkable. “I would drive over there to Feldafing, but I had no idea she was there,” Mr. Wisnia said.

Yet throughout the many hours she devoted to detailing the horrors of Auschwitz to a number of historians, Ms. Tichauer never once mentioned Mr. Wisnia.

Wisnia heard from a former Auschwitz inmate that Ms. Tichauer was alive. By then he was deeply enmeshed with the American Army, based in Versailles, France, where he waited until he could finally emigrate to the United States.

When his aunt and uncle picked him up at the port in Hoboken in February 1946, they couldn’t believe the 19-year-old in a G.I. uniform was the little David they last saw in Warsaw.

Their friend arranged a meeting. Mr. Wisnia drove the two hours from Levittown to Manhattan and waited at a hotel lobby across from Central Park.

“She never showed up,” said Mr. Wisnia. “I found out after that she decided it wouldn’t be smart. She was married; she had a husband.”

At first, she didn’t recognize him. Then Mr. Wisnia leaned in close.

“Her eyes went wide, almost like life came back to her,” said Mr. Wisnia’s grandson Avi Wisnia, 37. “It took us all aback.”

Suddenly there was a flow of words between Mr. Wisnia and Ms. Tichauer, all in their adopted English tongue.

“She said to me in front of my grandchildren, she said, ‘Did you tell your wife what we did?’” Mr. Wisnia remembered, chuckling, shaking his head.” I said, ‘Zippi!’”

The reunion lasted about two hours. He finally had to ask: Did she have something to do with the fact that he’d managed to survive in Auschwitz all that time?

She held up her hand to display five fingers. Her voice was loud, her Slovakian accent deep. “I saved you five times from bad shipment,” she said.

“I knew she would do that,” said Mr. Wisnia to his grandchildren. “It’s absolutely amazing. Amazing.”

She had loved him, she told him quietly. He had loved her, too, he said.

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janiklandre-blog · 7 years

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Friday, March 3, 2017

10:25 a.m. chilly morning - in Washington it seems the cherry trees are about to bloom - a frost could destroy it all

Still also a comment to my thoughts about documentation yesterday - in the 1920's there was I believe a Norwegian and also polar explorer (google) Fridjof Nansen who created a "Nansen passport" - there wer countless white Russians who had fled Russia and also others displaced by all the turmoil after WW 1 who were stateless and needed some document and I believe the Nansen passport did gain some limited validity - certainly a most welcome document by to many undocumented. A g;obal passport for everyone, that is what we need - not I with my American passport in Europe that I only need to flash - to watch on a train to Switzerland people with darker skins profiled, their passports requested - studied at length and I having to watch to watch their anxiety - and now - more and more anxiety and fear. I they even have a passport - the Iraqui friend of my friend had to throw his overboard when the boat taking him to Greece was about to sink - how many must be passport less - who even knows what sort of representation Iraq has in Finland - and from what I hear the Iraqui government is very hostile to those who fled the country. How does such a person obtain a travel document?

And also back again to my disrupted life - C,B. who used to come quite regularly in the evenings - has bowed out. I had been realizing and resenting that I was Marianne from 7 to 0 in the evenings in her rather rigid scheme - never asked to join her during the day - only asked to come and eat her soup - and asking myself why I depended so much on these evening visits when I listened at length to details about her large family, the many Iraquis in her life - and like myself also she is a people collector and more and more people are cropping up in her life - while she had little interest in people in my life. Then she brought movies "to relax" - that is also what I do with my mother, she said - I watched them while they had little interest for me - altogether I tried to please her because my evenings are lonely. She never would commit - if I asked her at noon she always would say - I cannot say how my day will go - she would not call and if I tried her by 7:30 I would find out she had gone to Brooklyn where she has a long time friend - about whom I have written here. She is very invoilved with charismatic Catholicism - very alien to me - visits lots of people in hospitals - I try to stay away from hospitals as much as I can - and should I ever end up in a hospital - I would find out how much visits by strangers would mean to me. Obviously since I am very delinquent on visiting the sick - I may not get many visits.

My mother when I was growing up always said: the only person in the world you can trust is me - and have found out - other mothers do that too. Early I realized this would make for a very limited world. She spoke a lot about how after 1933 when persecution began people began to withdraw into their blood families and became unavailable to her - specially the friend for whom I was named - in whose apartment in Prague I later was with my mother - in the early 1940's, first on the day when her friend had paid the Germans a large sum of money to release her husband from Dachau - her friend had tickets for a boat leaving from Genua for South America for her husband, herself and Annette her only child who had been billed my sister - her husband Paul never came - only later his ashes - she refused to leave without him. Soon after that my mother and I went to her apartment when she had to report for what was called "the transport" - first to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz where she and the child perished. My mother had considered hiding the child - alas that was impossible. Some Catholic nuns did in their monastaries - but we did not know any.

My mother's mother who came from extreme poverty had decided to have only one child - this child was to become "somebody" - my mother got a Ph.D. at 23 - still I have doubts about my grandmother's decision - a couple of siblings might have done more for my mother than a Ph.D. My grandmother it seems had one half brother who became a Catholic priest (mentioned in my mother's memoirs. My grandfather, her husband, came from a large Jewish family - a couple of cousins left after 1945, two in America, one in Israel - she never had had much relationship to them. My mother was a socialist and they all detested socialists. My mother had planned on five children but after 1933 was forbidden to have children, so I remained an only child - luckily had two sons - but they live in Western Massachusetts and my divorce from their father - or rather his divorce from me, he flew off to Mexico, I saw nmo need for a divorce - in any event - he too is among a good number of people whom, after I came to America - I did not assess well.

All my very best friends are in Europe - I took great pains to stay in touch with them - in my experience in my early years I seem to hav e been naturally attracted to people more congenial then the people later in America. Of course, these friendships at a great distance never experienced the wear and tear of daily friendship.

But my mother also was not a good judge of people - I have misgivings about some friendships she formed while living in Germany - from 1946 util 1969 - then she moved back to Vienna where she had lived as a student and later as a teacher - from 1923 to 1931, interrupted by a year in Paris - from 1931 to 1937 she lived in Germany, from 1937 to 1946 in Prague, where I grew up. Whereever she was she did make friends - only chnildren have to. When she moved back to Vienna in 1969 to a lovely apartment in the center of town - her street, Prinz Eugenstrasse bordering on the Belvedaire - she came back to friends from the 1920's who were good friends - but they had stayed in Vienna - her two best friends were not Jewish, they had families in Vienna and my mother kept insisting I MUST move to Vienna and take care of her - heer suicide in 1982 was an act of revenge on me. Deeply disturbing not only my life but also the lives of my sons.

In any event - my choice of male partners in my life while not exactly disastrous - there were good times with all of them - still, none of them was protective of me and none truly committed - with the exception of my boyfriend whom I met at 15 and gave up at 21 when I met Robert G. whom my mother adored - and misjudged.

My close women friends over the years - as I see it - chose me as a friend, rather than I chosing them. Hannelore, long dead, Doris, Christine F. - and also C.B. They recognized my usefulness to them at the time they chose me - all except for Hannelore ten to 15 years younger than I. at the time when they picked me looking up to me, over the years becoming in many ways a lot more successful than I am - very attractrive to other people seeking their friendship - their need for me deminuishing - and leaving me lonely as I grow old anbd older. Not that easy to deal with.

But one thing I had still meant to write about - in the NYT I just read - on page C5 The Right Woman Can Start a Revolution - a play: Bull in a China Shop - a play inspired by Mary Woolley - president of Mount Holyoke College in the first third of the last centurey - the college I came to in 1951 - and certainly heard that name - but very little about her - and not about her woman partner Jeannette Marks - whose name came to my attention only a couple of hours ago.

I think I wrote yesterday, or the day before, how much better I think I would have done remaining in 1951 with my sweet boyfriend in New York, attending with him Brooklyn College that was free then and a lot more interesting in those years that Mount Holyoke - where the only thing celebrated was a big fat diamond engagement ring to an ivy league graduate - that ring was flashed about, no mention of the very few admitted to medical school, or law school - the trophy was a large June wedding after graduation, followed rapidly b y children - andI suspect a good number of my class mates became alcoholics - of course they disappeared from the picture - a large number of my 1953 fellow grads have died - but my class collected more money than any other class and somebody always threw in a cou[le of hundred dollars in my name to claim a 100 % participation

Robert never bestowed any jewelry on me - not that I ever had any interest and every last little bit of gold I owned fell victim to the breakins while living in tenements - stil - between 1956 until 1964 I was living the model life of a model Mount Holyoke grad - and only after Robert divorced me in 1967 fell totally out of the role and have been struggling ever since since - labelled a destructive loser by Robert and also by others, a great disappointment to my social climber mother - and today - I let you find labels for me.

Still before I end I do want to pay tribute to two wonderful German friends I made in America - both suffering from cystic kidneys, one died, the other is thankfully alive due to a transplant and I cannot thank her enough for her friendship and great generosity. My gereat regret - she moved away from New York and I only see her very sporadically when she invited me to her wonderful house. She does live with family and she is extremely busy.

It is close to 11 a.m. - in the next days I may not find so much time to write - well perhaps still on Saturday and Sunday - but Monday early a.m. I have to see the eye doctor who is to do my cataracts in my right eye on April 3rd - tedious preps - then on Tuesday early morning I hope to head for Amherst - take a 5:49 a.m. out of Grand Central. Metro North to New Haven where I hope to find a bus to Northampton - and not sure about my time up North - and then much ado with doctors - the physical therapy in a crowded ill smelling place - I do suspect my walking is the best therapy - I should also see a dermatologisdt, my long year doctor retired - then the dental problems are up in the air - at some point I will have to deal with dentures - for now with these thesethat keep falling out and the dsentist sauggested I try to glue them back in myself - then the gynecologist I saw earlier would like to see me again - in the last analysis many try to make a buck - it seems medicare does pay most or all for the physical theerapy that C.B. so highly recommeds - I'm afraid for the eyes there will be a lot of co-pay, there always was for the dermatologist, the gynecologist demanded to be paid in advasnce and at some point I may get what medicare pays - and then there is stil the podiatrist, who asks doer $20 each visit - it's a mess and all bargaining and the best doctors no longer take medicare and ask for a yarly payment of $30.000 or more - then you will have a boutique doctor who will have some time for you, will come to your house when necessary - and increasingly - the poor are turned away from hospitals - the ambulances told to go somewhere else and with some luck they die on the wayh. When they finally get to some hospital willing to look at them - after hours of wait - lying in corridors - later staying in corridors because there is no room for them - I still remember the humorous way in which my sweet friend Ken described it "here I was in this lovely corridors surrounded by languasges from around the world" - this reminds me of Victor Frankel whom Molly and I googled who descibed finding even brief moments of delight in Auschwitz. By preference I would like to find ways to end my life with dignity before lying for days in a corridor surrounded by languages from around the world - yet Ken, who clearly had had a death wish, then with the help of Margaret still clung for two years to a painful existence, came to the park almost hours before he died and still made big plans for the future. Life is - what life is. Marianne And C.B. - having been hurt by you in those last several weeks - I do forgive you - and I'm glad you are convinced you are a saint.

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