Gene Feder’s Story
My mother, Marika Boehm, was born in Keszthely, Hungary in 1925. Most of her family were murdered in Auschwitz, including her father Jeno (Eugene), a cousin, grandmother, grandfather, and great uncle. My mother and grandmother, Elizabeth, survived.
Pity only pity
Only child
on the shores of Lake Balaton
laughing with Eva on the dock
sun sparkling on waves lapping
from passing boats
Foreboding hangs heavy
in your dreams
parents next to the radio
grim faced shaking their heads
as harsh words fill the room
Running home with your diploma
graduated with distinction
So what?
says your doting father
We are going to the ghetto tomorrow
He is beaten again and again
and crawls back
on his hands and knees
in the brickyard
by the railway spur
Your elegant grandfather
delirious with thirst
drinking urine
closed railway car
crammed with incontinent bodies
Elegant Mengele
white uniform and shiny boots
German shepherds barking and lunging
herding terrified people
strange burning smell in the air.
Hungry all the time
thin soup
with rotten beets
dreaming of noodles
with poppy seeds and sugar
A Krupp factory
with your mother
filling shells with TNT
nauseated and jaundiced
but still alive
The Russian front approaches
marched westwards
people drop in the road
and are shot
or left to die
You run towards the field
of iridescent mustard flowers
The SS guard lifts his rifle
Das ist mein Kind
your mother pleads
Then Dresden flattened
a smoking rubble desert
What did you feel
walking through those ruins?
I ask you a lifetime later
Pity
only pity
After the war, my mother returned to Hungary and started studying medicine in Budapest. In 1949 she fled under barbed wire to Austria, then finishing her medical education in Munich.
My father, Theodore Feder, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin came to Europe near the end of the war working first with UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and then "The Joint" (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) supporting the survivors of the Holocaust (avant la lettre).
They first met in 1949, when my father was the Joint director in Germany and my mother was applying for funding to finish her medical education. They did not meet again until 1951 and married in Vienna in 1952. My father continued to work for the Joint and we lived in Vienna, Frankfurt, Teheran, Tel Aviv and Geneva. My mother worked as a psychiatrist in Geneva. They retired to New York, where my sisters live, in 1994.
My support for Palestinian freedom is rooted in my Jewish identification with justice. As a second-generation survivor of genocide, I know genocide when I see it and am devastated that this is being done in my name:
I am active in Na'amod Bristol and have worked for over a decade with Palestinian colleagues in the occupied Palestinian territories supporting the development of family medicine and research on domestic violence.
“Even Jews”
[Quote from an organiser of a demonstration against Israel’s murderous siege of Gaza October 2023, describing the range of people taking part]
Despite
millennia of pogroms and exile
mountains of bodies last century
piles of bodies October 7th
Because
millennia of pogroms and exile
mountains of bodies last century
piles of bodies October 7th
Now
we hear the monster wake again
steel boots thud down history’s hall again
I cannot close my eyes and remain silent
Again