A Quiet Life

I love Frank. We met in the neighborhood and started taking walks together. It's difficult for him to walk but he pushes himself because he knows he needs to. I'll walk with him to the vegetable store at the end of our block and help him carry his groceries home. Or we'll go to Abe's apartment where we'll sit on the stoop and talk like three alter cockers. Frank never married. He told me that after he came out of the war he wasn't emotionally able to have a long term relationship. He confided in me later that he did have a girl he loved when he was 18. She was 16 and from a religious family. She would sneak out of her parents house to go to the Socialist party meetings in his Polish town of Lodz, where Frank first laid eyes on her. Too shy to speak, he didn't have the courage to approach her. "I was always an introvert," he told me. One day the Germans were "putting shells in buildings" and he found a hiding place from the shootings. The girl he had been too scared to talk to hid in the same place. They soon fell in love but as the war got worse, Frank planned his escape. The girl's little sister showed up with a gift for Frank to take with him on his journey - a beret. Frank heard that his first and only love was sent to Auschwitz. Not wanting to deal with the horror, she ended her life by running into an electric wire. Frank told me, "I still have dreams about her."

Frank escaped to Russia, where he first worked in a Kazakhstan factory - and at 18, while using a planer, he chopped off the first digit on the pointer finger of his left hand. He went to a doctor, wrapped up the finger, and was back at work. Some time later, his shoes fell apart. Not being able to work without shoes, he stayed home for about two weeks. After much difficulty, he found a place which sold him shoes that were made out of used clothing and then attached to a piece of wood. He had to shuffle his feet to walk because the wood didn't bend. But he could go back to work - and he went right back to the factory where he continued to make store fixtures.

Weeks later, someone came in to arrest Frank. It turns out that Russia had instituted a law against anyone who didn't work, and he was reported for having not worked those two weeks when he didn't have any shoes. He was held for days without food inside of a tiny barn-like room with armed guards stationed outside. Eventually, because his store fixtures factory was owned by a railroad company which was in turn owned by the military, he was put on trial in a military tribunal. He explained that he had no shoes but he lost the case and was sentenced to six years in prison. "Do you understand?!" they shouted in disgust. He was in shock. He was shuttled from prison to prison, eventually landing in Siberia - the Gulag - where he became so sick he almost died. But, when Russia decided to invade Poland he was freed. He had torn up his Russian papers, thrown them in the toilet, and managed to get Polish ones. Russia, desperately wanting Poles to help fight in the war, released the Polish prisoners.

Frank has so many amazing stories and after the war he found his dad (still alive after the concentration camps) and they eventually settled in Los Angeles. Frank worked until retirement, making cabinetry for a factory in downtown, while he and his father shared the upper level of a duplex he was able to buy after working for a few years.

I walked by his apartment tonight, after having a pretty tough few days myself, and he told me this story which always helps me get things in perspective. And, of course, I also asked him for advice. Thankfully, although he tells me he's too shy to talk on camera, he was willing to do this for me. When we were done, he said, "I'm appreciative that I'm still alive after all I went through."

Frank, age 88.