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The Fateful Holocaust Secret: A Hidden Jewish Identity

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Gershom Gale was an editor of The Jerusalem Post for 25 years
Gershom Gale was an editor of The Jerusalem Post for 25 years
A mother who buried her Jewish identity, and her son’s astonishing quest to reclaim it

Tom Gale never knew what hit him. En route to a weekend home from college, he was cruising along a Canadian highway at 95 mph in his bright red Triumph Spitfire. The nasal decongestant he’d taken that morning made him drowsy.

“I took my eyes off the road for a minute,” Tom recalled, “and that’s all it takes at 95 mph.”

The convertible, with its top down, rolled over him.

Tom awoke two weeks later. “Most of the bones in my body were broken, including all my ribs. The doctors kept me unconscious during those first, most painful weeks. It was more humane.”

Tom’s odds against living were set at 1,000 to one. But since he was young and in top physical shape, his body was able to fight back. “During those two weeks I lost 80 pounds. When I woke up, I didn’t even recognize myself.”

Tom had a massive spinal injury which left the lower half of his body paralyzed.

Born of strong stock, Tom came to relish the challenge. “I resolved to move my toe. As the furthest extremity from my brain, it was my most effective way to demonstrate voluntary muscle control.”

One day he felt his toe twitch. He was able to move it! Surgeons flew in from around the country to witness this groundbreaking achievement.

After 18 months of intense physical therapy, Tom managed to struggle back to his feet and walk with a cane.

“The doctors put the odds against that at 5,000 to one.”

The Search

The accident shook Tom to the core. “Facing mortality always gets you thinking,” he says.

He began to explore spirituality.

Tom grew up in a Christian home, the eldest of four children. “My mother strongly believed in God, and always said she was Christian. But she had no religious observance and never stepped inside a Church. I never knew why.”

There were other unexplained things as well: His mother’s staunch support of Israel. The aunt who had a Jewish home. And the grandmother who kept a box of matzah hidden under her bed.

A voracious reader, Tom explored the gamut of religions, from the traditional to the bizarre. He didn’t find what he was looking for.

But at one lecture he met the woman who would soon become his wife.

Katherine had grown up on a farm in rural Ontario, with a similar religious upbringing as Tom. The foundation of her home was a strong belief in God, without Christian overtones or imagery.

One day in 1983 Tom wandered into a Jewish bookstore in Toronto. “I told the man I wanted to study Talmud,” he recalls. “He looked at me rather strangely, then handed me an English translation of Tractate Brachot.”

Tom devoured the material. “I can’t explain it,” he says, “but was pulling me like a magnet.”

One time Tom was reading the Talmud and weeping. His mother asked, “What’s the matter?”

“It’s just so beautiful,” he said. “This is speaking to me. I feel like I’m experiencing a ‘call home.’”

Tom’s mother didn’t say a word. But as he would eventually discover, it required superhuman effort to hold herself back.

In the meantime, Tom’s wife was looking on with curiosity. One day he brought home a copy of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan’s “Living Torah.” Katherine read it and said, “I’ve been looking for truth my entire life. The answer is here. Now what do we do?”

Tom opened the phone book and called a rabbi who happened to be Orthodox. They began studying for conversion.

It took nearly five years, but when the conversion was finalized, Tom and Katherine – now Gershom and Dinah – fulfilled their dream and, along with their two young sons, moved to Israel.

Gershom was hired as an editor for the Jerusalem Post, where he would work for the next 25 years.

Warsaw, 1939

Amidst all this – search, discovery, conversion, aliyah – Gershom’s mother never uttered a word about the secret buried deep inside.

Gershom’s mother grew up as Miriam Zimmerman in a Jewish family in the Polish city of Lodz. They celebrated Shabbat and the Jewish holidays. In 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Miriam’s father thought it would be safer in the larger city of Warsaw.

The move proved inauspicious. In time, the Nazi beasts clamped down on Warsaw’s 400,000 Jews, herding them into a 1.3 square-mile cage called the Warsaw Ghetto.

At the tender age of 13, Miriam became surrounded by starvation, disease, and deadly beatings at the hands of uniformed monsters.

The Zimmerman family lived in a cramped room. Miriam, whose blonde hair and blue eyes gave her a “gentile look,” was sent daily to forage for food.

By the spring of 1943, Miriam’s father decided that their prospect of survival was slim in the Ghetto, and they must go into hiding on Warsaw’s “Aryan” side.

Through the kindness of a Christian woman named Christine Panek, Miriam’s family was able to obtain false Christian papers.

Miriam Zimmerman henceforth became known as Helena Maria (“Mary”) Plochocka, the “cousin” of Christine Panek. Miriam’s mother became her “aunt” Jadwiga Mozdrzvaske. And Miriam’s sister, Chaya, became a “cousin” named Helen.

These new identities became the family’s unshakeable guard against getting caught. Throughout the war, they used their Christian names exclusively, and never once spoke of their true relationship as parent, child, sibling.

Even out of the Ghetto, the fear of death was never far. Carrying false papers was not sufficient insurance, as Miriam’s uncle discovered. He was stopped on the street by a group of Gestapo soldiers who demanded that he expose himself. When they saw he was circumcised, they shot him dead.

The Zimmerman family lived in an apartment with Christine, where they often hid in a cupboard so tiny that they were truly in danger of suffocating. “We were constantly petrified that our secret would be discovered and that we would all be killed,” Miriam later recalled.

One time the apartment was broken into by a bunch of Nazis. A stormtrooper shoved Miriam into the bathroom, put a gun to her head and said: “If you do anything, I will shoot you right here.” Miriam looked up at him very calmly and said: “If you shoot me, I will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

He left her unharmed.

One day in 1944, pandemonium broke loose when a German officer was killed in the Wola district of Warsaw where Miriam’s family lived. The German response was a rampage of shooting, looting and raping of Poles. Forty Polish men were taken out of their homes and shot dead.

Miriam heard shots in the street. She ran outside. There she found her father… lying in a pile… of dead bodies.

A few weeks later, Miriam awoke at 2 a.m. to find someone sitting on her bed. It was her dead father: “I came to warn you. This house will be bombed in the next 10 minutes. You must get to shelter immediately.” Miriam believed it strongly enough to wake up her mother and sister and convince them to follow her. As soon as they exited, the building blew up.

Death March

Although they had Christian papers, Miriam, along with her mother and sister, were rounded up as “Polish political prisoners” and deported in a cattle car. “The heat was oppressive and we had no water to drink,” Miriam says. “Little droplets of water appeared on the walls of the train car, created by the breath of all the trapped people, and we tried to lick the droplets off the walls because we were so thirsty.”

The train took them to Ravensbrück, the notorious women’s concentration camp filled with gypsies, nuns, Polish patriots, criminals, Soviet POWs, Communists, lesbians – and about 15% Jews.

As a “Christian,” Miriam was given a “red triangle” patch designated for political prisoners.

Soon after Miriam was transferred to Buchenwald. Conditions in that camp were unspeakable, with widespread starvation, disease, human experimentation, backbreaking labor, and execution. One time an SS officer kicked Miriam in the side of the face – knocking out half her teeth and breaking her jaw. “I could never open my mouth properly after this happened,” she says.

Miriam, at age 17, weighed 80 pounds.

Due to malnutrition, her legs became covered with oozing boils. “The sores were so deep that I could put my finger into them and touch the bone in my leg,” she says.

She was forced to stand for hours in the cold, with bare feet and hands. To this day, her swollen hands are a grim reminder of freezing in Buchenwald.

(To be continued next week)

 

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