Spring of 1998, San Francisco, California

By Mimi Pais

Memories are messy and refuse to be filed away neatly. Instead, they linger because they refuse to hide.

Memories are like something sticky under lots of clutter. Try to reach inside and pull out what you are looking for. A memory of something else will likely emerge instead.

We may try to alter them, to soften them, but they know how to outsmart us. They know how to stick around. When of great consequence, they can jump from one generation to the next, and to the one after that too.

I got a cheerful call from our rabbi one late afternoon regarding my daughter’s upcoming Bat Mitzvah.

“Hello, Mrs. Fried. Can you tell me something about your family?”

I mentioned the usual: the full names of my children, some not very interesting facts about my employment, and my husband’s profession.

“Well,” answered the rabbi, “do you have any pets?”

“Yes,” I quickly responded. “Our cat, Pickles.”

“Pickles?” The rabbi was quizzical. “What an unusual name for a cat.”

“Let me tell you why our cat is named Pickles,” I said, “if you don’t mind listening.”

I told the rabbi that my dad lived in Kovno, also known as Kaunas, a city in Lithuania, when the Nazis invaded in 1941. The Jews were forced into a ghetto, and my dad and my grandfather, like most other Jews, were put to work.

Conscripted into heavy construction crews working 12-hour shifts, they were beaten and horribly abused. People were going home crippled … if they were going home at all.

It was grueling, and everyone was searching for a way out. Then my dad noticed that the Germans were distributing a flyer asking for 1,000 educated men to do indoor archive work. The flyer said that all of the eligible men interested in this work were to meet at a certain gate at a certain time.

When the day came, my dad, who until the war broke out was a college student, and my grandfather, an accountant, were prepared. They put on their finest clothes and shined their shoes. They wanted to look best for the interviews. Then they asked my grandmother to hand them their lunches. After all, they thought, the interviews could take all day.

“Oh,” my grandmother realized, “I forgot the pickles.” She ran outside the tiny shacklike house they were living in and went to the cellar, a hole built under the house to keep food cool. Needless to say, they didn’t have refrigeration. My grandmother quickly added the pickles to their sack lunches and sent them on their way.

When my dad and grandfather approached the designated interview area within the ghetto, they saw guards closing the gates of the ghetto and the thousand men walking away.

Both my father and my grandfather were too late and reluctantly returned home, absolutely furious at my grandmother. Because of her, they missed their chances of escaping the brutal and very dangerous hard labor.

The men who left the ghetto didn’t return that day or the next. Rumors emanated throughout the ghetto that the men were employed in archive work and were fine. No one received any word or letter from them, and my father soon learned that the Germans didn’t get enough applicants for the jobs, so right before taking the men out, they started grabbing anyone they could find off the street. People remained optimistic, so I suppose that’s human nature.

My dad, fluent in German, had a casual sort of ‘familiarity’ with a German guard who was a high-school art teacher before the war. One day, my dad ran into this fellow and asked him if the rumors about those thousand men were true. Were they doing indoor work? Were they fine?

The German soldier held out an open palm and pointed to it. “Does hair grow here?” he answered flatly.

Those men were never heard of again. They were taken away and immediately shot to death. Historians now call this mass murder the Intellectuals Action.

The Germans wanted to eliminate anyone they thought could foment unrest. And if it wasn’t for pickles, my grandfather and my dad wouldn’t have survived the war, I wouldn’t be here, and my children wouldn’t be here.

“Pickles are important in our family,” I said, “so it’s the perfect name for our cat. I want a reminder for my children of how important pickles are to us.”

The rabbi hesitated. Then she said emphatically, “I want your daughter to tell this story in her Bat Mitzvah speech. I want everyone to hear the story of pickles.”

My daughter was very willing. On her special day, she related our pickles story, much as I had told it to the rabbi, to everyone in the main sanctuary of our synagogue. My father was there, along with her schoolmates and all of the ages of people in between.

Every family has important stories, important memories that linger for years.

For this child of a Holocaust survivor, the word “survivor” carries a very heavy weight. I want my children and their children to have the knowledge that their grandfather or great grandfather survived the Holocaust. I want the victory of his survival to remain present in our house and our lives. This is a memory that I hope will stick through generations.

Mimi Pais works with senior citizens in San Francisco. She is the author of a book on maintaining long-term love based on her parents’ successful relationship.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, July 30th, 2007 | Email This Post

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