BENJAMIN HILLCollege of EducationUniversity of OregonEugene, OR 97403

SOLOMON FRY, SURVIVOR

SUMMARY Solomon Fry survived the Holocaust. Decades after liberation, he continues to survive theHolocaust day by day. In this brief ethnographic life history I explore cultural aspects of Solomon'ssurvival, including strategies for enduring both immediacies and memories of Nazi oppression. ForSolomon Fry, and perhaps for all of us, there is more to survival than staying alive.

Solomon Fry sits outdoors reading, now and thenglancing up from the spring 1990 issue of Responsemagazine to admire his tomatoes and squash. "Thegarden is mine," he will tell you. "Ruth helps a little,but really it's mine."

At the age of 68, Sol's wavy, salt-n-pepper hair isbarely receding, his smile is merry, and his handshakefirm. Brooklyn mingles with Warsaw in his accent.Hard w's become v's. Final ng's are embellished witha k. As he reads about arms sales to Egypt, he grum-bles, "Vhy, iff dere iss a Gott, duss he do nottingk?"

While Solomon reads, his wife of 40 years chatswith a friend on the telephone. Ruth is a gregarious,even brash woman who dotes on her husband asmuch as he allows, which is quite a lot. She is protec-tive, for example, if an ethnographer tries to speakwith Sol, and she takes great joy in reminding thewaitress at their favorite Chinese restaurant, to "besure and cook the broccoli a little better, you know, forSolomon."

Sol and Ruth have friends in town. They are in-volved in the lives of their two sons, ages 36 and 40.Occasionally they travel. They are hardly obsessedwith the past. In fact they rarely talk about it. Still, thecentral fact of their lives is that Solomon is a Holocaustsurvivor.

Sol does not need to look at his arm to recite thenumbers tattooed there. "Six two nine one fourthree," he says dryly. Sol spent the war years in theWarsaw ghetto and in four Nazi death camps.

A LIFE HISTORY

As Oregon rains subsided that spring of 1990, and oneafter another variety of vegetables emerged from hischerished garden, Solomon related his life's story tome a little bit at a time. On rainy days we talked acrosshis kitchen table. When the sun shone we worked inthe garden.

Born in 1921, Sol was a baby when his parentsmoved from Grojec, Poland, to nearby Warsaw in or-der to establish a dry goods store. There young Solo-mon attended a segregated Jewish school and helpedwith the new family business. He was the youngest ofsix children, two girls and four boys, all sharing hisparents' two-room apartment a few doors away fromthe store. The neighborhood was arranged in asquare: four-story brick buildings facing a small cen-tral park, almost exclusively inhabited by Jews, andsealed from the rest of the city by a locked gate. Evenas a young boy, Sol knew his parents were "worriedabout theft, and about getting beaten up." And hewas well aware of Polish anti-Semitism.

They blamed everything on the Jews. If something didn'tgo right, it was the Jews' fault. If they worked and madea salary and went to the bar and drank it up, they weremad at the Jews, because they didn't have money. Do youunderstand what I am saying? They didn't save theirmoney. They spent their money. The Jews were morethrifty. They wanted to have a little business. Theywanted to live in a cleaner place. I don't say they were alllike this, but the majority.

If they wanted to scare a Polish child they would tell him,"The Jew will grab you." Scare him to death. There werestories about the Jews and Passover: that they would sac-rifice a gentile boy and drink his blood with matzos.

Sol helped out at the store, from which his familyearned "a meager living."

For years the Jews opened little stores, because youcouldn't do another job. If a family had a store, everybodyhad to help. Put away; do the dusting. You had to go buygoods and bring them to the store. All kinds of things.Milk. Everything. You know, something salable, wewould sell it. It wasn't strictly groceries.

Sol enjoyed school, and especially the study of biol-ogy, but he did not expect to attend college. "You

Hill 1991 121

couldn't go to a college or university. You had to bereally rich to get into those places. You had to pay un-der the table. So the average student, no matter howgood he was, couldn't go." A more realistic aspirationfor Sol was to learn a trade through apprenticeship.

Shoemaker, tailor, glazer—all those trades. That was theonly thing available because the Poles didn't want to learnthose. If you wanted a government job, you couldn't be aJew.1 The police couldn't be Jews, and to sweep thestreets you couldn't be a Jew. No government job at all.You couldn't own land, be a farmer. When you wereyoung they sent you away on a trade. Go and work,sometimes in a different town. No pay. You'd have a fewcents, just.

But Sol's apprenticeship never materialized. Thoughthe Jews of Warsaw could not have been prepared forthe Holocaust, Sol recalls that by his 16th birthday, in1937, he knew that "something was going to hap-pen."

Hitler would have speakers on the radio, telling thewhole world that he planned to annihilate the Jews. Theykept reminding you. Friends would say, "I'll kill all theJews, but you I'll keep alive." But nobody would reallylisten. Nobody believed. Even the Jews themselves didn'tbelieve it. How could they believe it, to kill that manypeople. I remember our neighbor said, "What is Hitlergoing to do? Dry out the ocean?"

What Hitler did, of course, was to invade Poland onthe first of September, 1939. Warsaw became a for-tress that endured only a month under siege. WhenGerman troops took possession, a fourth of the citylay in ruin, including much of the predominantly Jew-ish northern quarter where Sol's family lived.2

The Poles made sure they showed the Germans who is aJew and who is not. They used to take the Jews to workwhen there was snow; to clear the roads. If the Germansneeded Jews to work, they had to work or they'd beatthem up. "Work makes life sweet"—that was the Ger-mans' motto. First thing, they confiscated all the stores.They took it for the army. Then they came to all thehouses, for sheets for the soldiers. Furs. Jewelry. Theysaid if you don't give it up you're going to be shot. Theydidn't ask; they just came in and looked around all overthe house. You couldn't do nothing. They took whateverthey wanted, and that's it.3

Sol's parents managed to sneak the family out of War-saw to a nearby village, but they were soon discoveredand returned to the city in accordance with Germanpolicy. Shortly thereafter they were confined to theWarsaw ghetto.4

They took the Jews from all the country around there andput them in the ghetto, about a 20-block area, and theyput walls, like the Berlin Wall. You couldn't get out of it.

People took whatever meager things they had, and theyput them in there. Then you needed food. You didn'thave money. You would have to sell your furniture. Peo-ple would come, Poles, and buy all those things for nextto nothing. When the money ran out, people died.Hundreds of Jews in the ghetto died of hunger. If youdared to go out of the ghetto, and they caught you, theywould shoot you. Children used to go through holes inthe wall. They could push through to the other side andmaybe bring back a few potatoes. They called this "thePolish side." If they caught them there they would shootthem right away. Then they started to send people out.They told them they wanted them to work for industries,all over Poland and Germany. They sent them mostly toGermany. Instead of sending them to factories they sentthem to gas chambers. They used to give them half abread and preserves. Some of them were glad to go.

They told the Jewish government5—the people they hadmade responsible—they told them they needed 500 peo-ple. At the beginning they sent them. But then theyfound out they didn't go to work, so they didn't sendthem. So then they came in, and whoever was on thestreet, they grabbed you. Two or three hundred Germanswould circle around the whole place and grab whoeverthey could: men, women, children. If you were out of thehouse you might not come back no more. They wouldtake you to the camps in trains. In the trains, they wouldpile up . . . you couldn't move. No water, no nothing. Athird of them died out in the trains. They sent us to Maj-danek.6 It's a camp in Poland. When you get there theyput you in a line, the back or the front. The back of theline, they take you to the crematorium. They incinerateyou. A German comes in and says "You. You. You. You."And that's it. I went to Majdanek with my brothers. Wewere separated there.

At Majdanek, Sol was sent on various work details.During one of these he escaped by hiding under a pileof leaves. But escape offered little relief. Soon Solmade his way back to the ghetto, because "there wasno other place to go." "When Jews got out of theghetto, running away, the Germans would give peo-ple so much flour to tell where a Jew is hiding. Fivepounds of sugar or flour."

Conditions in the ghetto had deteriorated.

The ghetto was like an inferno; like Hell. We used to usepush carts to clear away the dead lying on the street everyday. And when the Germans started to clear the ghetto,we lived together with the rats underground—it's true.

There was an uprising.7 Young people started to defendthemselves. At night they used to go out of their hidingplaces. If you see a German, call him over and kill him;take away the gun. That was how they acquired someguns. But later they [Germans] didn't come into theghetto no more. They were afraid. So they came in withtanks and started to burn the houses. If you were hidingin a building, you either get burned to death or smoth-ered to death. Some of them would jump from windows,and the Germans would laugh and call them "para-chutes."

I was hiding in a bunker, underground. They had babiesin*the bunker, and if the baby cried, the mother would

122 Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 16(4)

hold the mouth. When she took away the hand the babywas dead. She choked it and she didn't even know it.Somehow they found us. They had dogs and listening de-vices. At the beginning they threw in a hand grenade.People blown apart. But they sent me back to Majdanek,and then they sent me to Auschwitz.

A period photograph (Meier and Hellman 1981)shows Jews amassed for "selection" in front of freightcars that had carried them to Auschwitz. Above an ex-panse of barracks and barbed wire, the ugly chimneyof a "killing facility" is visible. Behind them standsAuschwitz's main gate, bearing the motto ArbeitMacht Frei: "Work will make you free."

You want to know about the work? There were about twohundred of us sent out in a field, and we used to take thejackets and turn them around and put them on like a bib,backwards. [Sol pantomimes as he tells the story] Andyou take rocks or sand, somebody puts it on there with ashovel and you carry it a mile and empty it. After a weekthe whole pile was over there, and then they did the samething—took the same pile and put it on the same placeagain. They would kill a lot of people in the process andpile them up like sticks. German criminals, prisoners whowere crazy, they would put them in the camps like over-seers. No talking. They had dogs and sticks. When wewent out to work, they used to show how many theywere going to bring back dead—ten, fifteen [Sol holds uphis fingers]—to the guard. They would take people, putthem in barrels of water, turn them upside down anddrown them. Who would believe this?

Somehow, Sol stayed alive and sane in Auschwitz,and after that for a short time in Buchenwald, wherethe scenery did not improve.

They took a father and a son, a twelve-year-old boy, andmade the son pull the rope to hang the father.

From the crematorium they made soap, and gave it to usto wash ourselves. In the beginning we didn't know itwas made from human fat.

Near the end of the war, Sol was relocated once again,to a labor camp near Frankfurt where the Nazis wereattempting to build new aircraft factories. But timeand materials were running short, and few of the cap-tive laborers were really able to work.

They were burying people in mass graves, some of themstill half alive. Then they had to evacuate the camp be-cause the English and Americans were coming. They said"Whoever can walk, we are going to another camp. If youcan't walk, you are going to be shot." But I couldn't evenstand on my feet, I was such a skeleton. I said I'm notgoing no more. The hell with it. Let them shoot me. But Ilooked up one morning and there were no guards. Thewhole camp was deserted. So they didn't shoot us.Maybe they were saving the bullets. There was nothingleft. No food. Nothing. Two days later the Americans andthe English came in. They took me to a hospital. I

weighed eighty pounds. They put me on a liquid diet, butit was about six weeks before I could stand on my feet.Most of them died, even after being liberated. There waspeople who seen the war was over and they couldn't liveno more.

I worked for the U.S. Army in Frankfurt for about a yearthen. I used to cook, clean. Then I had an uncle in theUnited States who brought me over. He made the papersout.

Sol emigrated with little in his pockets, little knowl-edge of the English language, and little idea what toexpect. On the advice of his uncle he Americanizedhis name, changing "Frei" to "Fry."8

I had to find work in Brooklyn. The first job I had, I wascleaning Singer machines. They had the Marshall Plan.They were sending sewing machines to China. Where Iworked they used to buy those machines and clean themup, and sell them as new machines. They used to bakethem in the oven. The government paid them goodmoney for old machines. I had many a job. I worked in aplace where they made frankfurters and salamis. I wentto night school to learn English. I met my Ruth there inBrooklyn.

Like Solomon, Ruth had recently immigrated, butfrom England instead of the Continent. "Being inBrooklyn then," Ruth recalls, "I was a little on theedge: neither a real New Yorker nor like other immi-grants. I couldn't understand Yiddish."

Solomon and Ruth married, and remained in NewYork for more than 30 years, both working in the tex-tile industry while raising their sons. In 1979 they re-tired to a town in Oregon where their eldest son wasemployed. Sol established his garden, and Ruth in-volved them with an active senior social group. Theyvacationed to Israel and to Palm Springs. Then oneApril afternoon they received a telephone call from ananthropology student who wanted to interview Sol.

THE SURVIVOR AND THE ETHNOGRAPHER

It was Ruth who answered the telephone. On my endof the line was the 30-year-old grandson of an immi-grant Norwegian schoolmarm. A local Rabbi's wifehad given me Sol's number, but when Ruth picked upthe receiver I was wondering how I would ever ex-plain my intentions, and even if I could, why on earthSol would choose to cooperate. My own.choice to seekSol's story was both idealistically and practically mo-tivated. As a novice anthropologist, I was interestedin a survivor's knowledge and perspective, and in thecontribution I felt he and I together might make to hu-man understanding. As a veteran graduate student, Iwas no less interested in surviving my fieldwork sem-inar for which an ethnographic essay would be due inseven weeks.

Hill 1991 123

With the exception of interviewing some studentsduring a winter spent teaching in Japan, I had neverconducted field work but was eager to try my hand. Icame prepared with a loaded tape recorder, and abundle of fieldwork notions and no-nos gleaned frombooks by Spradley and McCurdy (1972), Van Maanen(1988), Agar (1980), and Wax (1971). Inspired espe-cially by Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography(Langness and Frank 1981), I planned to construct acompact life history in my own words and the wordsof my informant—"two voices singing different ver-sions of the same melody" (Langness and Frank1981:96). This seemed especially appropriate to thecase of a Holocaust survivor because of "the capacityof the life history method to elicit specific data of anintensely personal nature that sheds light on the de-tails of large-scale social and historical events, as wellas of the individual personality" (Angrosino1989.103). I knew little about the Holocaust, even lessabout Jewish culture.

Ruth said "Hello" and I responded in my North Da-kota accent. She was polite and patient but not aboutto summon Sol before grilling me thoroughly. "Whatkind of interview? For what?" When at length Solcame to the phone he was not enthusiastic, but agreedto let me explain myself in person. So I followed hisdirections, parked my pickup in front of a strikinglywell-groomed garden, and knocked at the front door.

Sol's firm handshake surprised me; I guess I had as-sumed a survivor would be frail. He invited me into asmall but sunny kitchen, where Ruth joined us andagain proceeded to grill me. I lamely explained my in-terest in a survivor's life history while Sol dug aroundin a cupboard and produced an old newspaper articleabout his wartime experiences. "It's all in there," hetold me. I said I was interested in the article "for back-ground and some idea where to begin," but that I alsohoped to talk at length with him myself. "What's totalk 'at length' about?" Sol wondered. But finally heagreed to assist me. "Listen, Ben, if I can help you, Iwill help you." I thanked him and promised to call.Ruth let me out the side door, gesturing toward thefront and commenting, "No one ever comes in there."

In Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Art Spiegelman (1986) de-picts his father's Holocaust experience in the dialogueand pictures of a comic book. Nazis are drawn as catsand Jews as mice, but the Disney-esque image this in-itially evokes is demolished by the gravity and sensi-tivity of the work. Maus conveys a detailed account ofJewish life in occupied Poland, which is made espe-cially powerful by interspersed vignettes set in pres-ent-day New York. Besides portraying his father'smemories, the cartoonist portrays himself—a ciga-rette-smoking mouse with a notebook—in the act ofeliciting and reacting to those memories. Interaction

between elder and younger Spiegelman reveals howthe past affects them, both individually and in theirsometimes strained relationship. In one scene, Artpromises not to publish certain memories which hisfather finds too personal, though the promise has al-ready been broken when we learn of it (1986:23). Inother scenes, father and son argue about the son'staste in clothing, or about fixing a drainpipe (1986:68,73, 96). In effect, the Holocaust memoir is a storywithin a story, with inner and outer narratives reveal-ing meaning in each other.

My version of Solomon Fry's life is also a storywithin a story, and an outer narrative must also beshared—the story of getting the story—in order to in-form the reader of how and by whom the story is told,and to situate the telling within the context of the sto-ry's collaborative construction. As Catani puts it, a lifehistory is "above all the product of an encounter"(1981:212). Crapanzano is also clear on this point:

The life history . . . is the result of a complex self-consti-tuting negotiation. It is the product (at least from the sub-ject's point of view) of an arbitrary and peculiar demandfrom another—the anthropologist. (At some level the an-thropologist's demand is always a response to the infor-mant.) The interplay . . . of demand and desire governsmuch of the content of the life history, and this interplay,the dynamics of the interview, must be taken into consid-eration in any evaluation of the material collected. [Cra-panzano 1984:956]

In the days and weeks that followed our initial en-counter, I spent many hours in Sol's kitchen, facinghim across a faded Formica table, my tape recorder be-tween us. He spoke slowly and patiently, sometimeswith a note of anger or anguish in his voice. When hepaused, I asked questions, sometimes drawing onother survivors' accounts9 for inspiration. When thememories grew too painful, Sol would rise from hischair and I would follow him out to the garden, wherewe spoke of easier topics or simply pulled weeds insilence.

It was not the first time Sol had been asked for hisstory. Once he had spoken to a World War II historyclass at the local college as a favor to a friend of afriend. More recently there had been the newspaperreporter. In listening to Sol I began to understandsome of his reasons for self-disclosure: to teach, towarn, to impress, to confess. I also became aware ofthe price he paid in remembering. He cut me off some-times, when I asked too many questions: "No morenow, Ben. When I talk so much, you know, I getdreams."

Sol and I became friends, but as with the Spiegel-mans, some tension persisted between us in the ask-ing for and telling of the story. "Many people," Bar-bara* Myerhoff observes, "believe taking their picture

124 Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 16(4)

captures their soul, and taking a life story is even morethreatening" (1978:42). Especially threatening to Solwere my questions about family and friends, andabout emotions he attached to specific events. Sol wasprepared to recite an eyewitness account of Polishanti-Semitism and Nazi war atrocities. He was pre-pared to recount seeing "two children and theirmother, lying there hungry." But he was neither pre-pared nor willing to say what it meant to know thechildren by name and yet watch them die withoutsharing one's own meager sustenance. By his reti-cence on some topics and readiness on others, hetrained me to ask "How did people react?" instead of"How did you react?" and to settle for more fact thanfeeling in his answers. But I was consoled in the com-promise, because the more I learned from Sol the bet-ter I understood how his preferred modes of disclo-sure themselves cast light on his feelings.

After our fifth kitchen session I wrote in my journal:"I am convinced that the ways Sol chooses, andchooses not, to talk about the Holocaust speak vol-umes about the way he relates to his past and copeswith a re-normalized life." I grew interested in thetransitions and readjustments Sol had managed in hislife, and began to perceive how the cutoff points10 heimposed on our dialogue helped him to live with hispast. The category "strategies for survival" reasserteditself as a viable tool for interpretation, though I hadrejected it when I first scribbled the phrase in my note-book weeks earlier. Then I had been thinking only ofstrategies Sol employed in staying alive between 1939and 1943, but now I realized that staying alive wasonly one aspect of Sol's survival. An equally impor-tant aspect involved surviving and thriving after lib-eration, which required adjustment to Sol's Holocaustexperience in the context of postwar America.

STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL

In the sense I now intend, survival means more thanstaying alive, and much of any person's privateculture11 amounts to strategies for survival. In the lifeof Solomon Fry, I perceive six such strategies in par-ticular.

Be independent.Don't remember too much.Don't give up.Don't be a hero.Don't appear injured, sick, crazy, or weak.Learn.

Sol is an independent man. I believe that the Holo-caust reinforced his independence.

In early interviews I had hoped he would talk abouthis family, friends, the Warsaw community, and their

collective response to Nazi oppression. But to the ex-tent that examples of community response appear inhis accounts, Sol does not place himself among the ac-tive community members. He did not participate inorganized efforts to aid the sick or starving. He joinedneither the military resistance12 nor the Judenrat gov-ernment. Sol reports that some Jews responded totheir plight through intensified group prayer, but thathe grew less religious: "Pray to God: ask why. Why,why, why, why, why, why, why? Why does this hap-pen if there is a God? But they didn't get no answer. Ithink I lost some faith because of what I saw."

In general, but especially when he speaks of hisfamily, it is apparent that Sol's interpersonal ties grewweaker during the war, not stronger. He grievesdeeply for his parents and siblings, all of whom diedin the camps. Their final hours are replayed in hisnightmares. But guilt accompanies his grieving, atleast partly because he was not close to them near theends of their lives. One of the most poignant and cou-rageously self-disclosing comments Sol offered was inresponse to a question about how his family discussedtheir plight. "Parents couldn't tell the children noth-ing. At a time like this . . . there is very little familyunity. Everybody wants to save themselves."13

As a Holocaust survival strategy, the value of in-dependence is readily apparent. Not only do the im-mediacies of self-preservation monopolize personalenergy; grief threatens to overcome those with toomuch emotional attachment. "Why make a friend inAuschwitz? You are talking with someone; next dayhe is lying there dead. Some people didn't live twodays."

His independence allowed Sol to maintain neededemotional distance from other people during the Hol-ocaust, but even 50 years later, he continues to main-tain needed emotional distance from the events hewitnessed by carefully controlling his memories. Byremembering too much or too often, Sol could allowhis current life to be dominated by horror and guilt.14

I still have nightmares. I see my brothers taken to the cre-matorium and I know where they are going, and my sis-ters, and them beating and chasing me. Lots of nights Iwake up screaming. It's impossible to block it out of yourmind.

After our first interview, I wrote in my journal:"Some of Sol's stories have a varnished quality. Ge-neric mobs of oppressors and victims have replacedthe faces of individual participants, even Sol's ownface. This is especially true when he talks about thecamps. Often he slips into second or third personwhen the going gets roughest." At first I thought thiswas because Sol had repeated the stories so often, butSol'explains, and Ruth concurs, that he very rarely

Hill 1991 125

talks about the Holocaust, even with Ruth and othersurvivors they have met. Now I believe that the "var-nish" is a shield between Sol and his past, and like hisaccustomed reticence, a memory control strategywhich makes the past more bearable.

A reluctance to evoke specific events, and, espe-cially, specific people from the past is shared by manysurvivors, as I learned at a Yom Hashoah (Day of Hol-ocaust Remembrance) ceremony I attended with Soland Ruth. I recalled part of the event in my journal:

Rabbi Epstein asked Elly to come forward to light the sixCandles of Remembrance, one for each million Jews mur-dered, and to say a few words if she chose to. A reservedbut earnest woman, Elly began to comply, but paused be-fore lighting the candles to ask the congregation to recallthe names of victims they had known. Our silence deep-ened noticeably as soon as she made the request, and itoccurred to me (again) that in all of Solomon's tales of hor-ror, I had never heard him recall a person's name.

Nobody volunteered to speak, and I was careful not tolook at Sol, lest my gaze be interpreted as a nudge. ButElly was firm. She suggested that someone on the left sideof the aisle begin, and a woman over there audibly askedher husband to comply. He gave a frown of adamant re-sistance, but finally said, "My mother, my cousins, all mymother's family." His wife looked at him, then turned to-ward Elly and pronounced her late mother-in-law'sname. Then a woman in the next row back began recitingthe names of her uncles and aunts, and one by one mostof the people in the room told of a victim related to them,while Elly began to light the candles.

This was a surprisingly electric moment. The speakershad trouble getting names out, as if reluctant to break anaccustomed silence, or as if the names had gained a sortof magic by long disuse, and pronouncing them was adangerous or taboo act. I think it might have been easierand more natural for people to curse aloud in the templethan to name their parents and sisters.

Sol didn't speak 'till nearly everybody else had, but thenhe listed maybe twenty relatives in a quiet deadpan. Ellyspoke last. She named both her parents.

Memories as specific as names are dangerous to Sol,because they personalize the past and cut through theprotective varnish that more general and "objective"recollections support. Sol's identity and sense of pur-pose nevertheless require him to recall and recount tosome extent. This is why I glossed the strategy as"Don't remember too much," instead of "Don't re-member at all." In an epilogue to her ethnography ofPeruvian earthquake survivors, Barbara Bode trench-antly speculates that "to endure is perhaps to livethrough the tension between forgetting and not for-getting" (1989:503).

Another strategy that has guided Sol might bephrased imperatively: "Never say die." I speculatethat my own response to experiences like those Sol

endured might be simply to give up. Clearly manyHolocaust victims did just that.

Some of them wanted to commit suicide and they talkedit over. There were electric fences. Plenty of people ran tothose fences. They didn't want to live.

But Solomon Fry never quit wanting to live: "Takethousands and thousands, millions, and gas them,burn them. This is inhuman. You want me to work foryou? Give me no pay? It's alright. But let me live."

Though he reports having given up in those finaldays before liberation ("I said I'm not going no more.The hell with it."), he also reports that at that time hecouldn't stand up, much less march as was ordered.From all that he told me I would say that to the utmostof his capability, Sol never quit doing what was re-quired to keep on keeping on. Neither did he do morethan was required. Sol avoided aggressive heroic15 re-sponse to the injustices he and his community suf-fered. "You couldn't fight against an army, withtanks, armor, and all kinds of things."

Like the distance he put between himself and hisfamily, choices Sol made not to fight, or not to saveothers, now haunt him to some extent. Out of all thehorror of his past, nothing seems to bother Sol morethan the image of two starving children he did not at-tempt to rescue.

You could come out of the house and see two childrenand their mother, lying there, hungry. Some tried to helpthe orphans. Mostly women.Hundreds of Jews in the ghetto died from hunger. Youknow how a human being dies when he doesn't have anyfood? He gets swollen, not thin. The stomach gets big andeverything else. It is hard. You see two children sitting,and the mother is dead. Four, five years old. People be-came very. . . . It didn't help anyway because eventuallythey killed them.

Regardless of values Sol or the rest of us may attach toheroic action, however, the survival ethos which Solacquired and lived by during the war clearly devaluedit. Some young men in the ghetto joined in organizedresistance. But Sol gingerly communicates that he wasnot an active participant:

Sol: There was an uprising. Young people started to de-fend themselves.

Ben: Were you part of that?Sol: Yeah. . . . Not really. . . . I was there.

In addition to posing no threat to his captors, it wasnecessary for Sol to avoid appearing defective,whether injured, sick, crazy, or weak. Once, duringan interview, Sol took my hand and held it against hischest, It seemed to me that his right pectoral musclewas anchored several inches higher than his left.

126 Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 16(4)

What do you feel there? Nazi soldier, S.S. [Schutzstaffel],wanted to kill me. He was kicking me and kicking me,and I felt something snap. They left me for dead. When Iwoke up it hurt, but mainly I was scared. If you are hurtor something, they usually kill you right away. I had trou-ble breathing for a few days, but I didn't tell it to no one.

Of course it was important for Sol to avoid actualinjury, sickness, insanity, and loss of strength. But inhis wartime environment, the appearance of afflictionwas at least as dangerous as affliction itself, and in anycase more controllable as a strategy for survival.

If you said you were sick, and a lot of them was sick, theysaid they were going to shoot you. They said if you gottoo weak to walk they would put you in the hospital.There was no hospitals. You've heard of Mengele, theGerman doctor? They were experimenting with people.Twins: with their eyes, and playing to see how long ittakes, without oxygen, to live. When they accumulatedenough sick people they would put them in the crema-torium. Some of them went crazy and they killed themright away.

Without appearing likely to rebel, it was vital for Solto appear strong enough to pass the deadly "selec-tions."

The selection; lining you up. One way they used to do it,they would set dogs and make you run from them andafter so far whoever was behind they would send to thegas chamber. That way they would test to see if you werestrong or not.

Independence. Memory management. Not givingup. Non-heroism. Not appearing defective. From thefirst days I spoke with Sol, I have perceived thesestrategies in his life. But above all I have marveled atSol's facility in acquiring new culture and adjusting tonew cultural terrain, that is, his ability to learn. Sol isfluent in Polish, Yiddish, and English, and conversantin German and Russian. Yet language is only one as-pect of his adaptive learning accomplishments.

In David Mandelbaum's coinage, a "turning" is amajor cultural transition in which the individual"takes on a new set of roles, enters into fresh relationswith a new set of people, and acquires a new self-con-ception" (Mandelbaum 1973:181). Solomon Fry expe-rienced two radical turnings in less than a decade,when Hitler's troops descended on Poland, and againafter liberation. Both turnings required massive cul-ture acquisition and unlike many cultural journeys,such as those experienced in cross-culture marriage orby anthropologists in the field, Sol's turnings camewith little warning, no choice, and dire consequenceshad he failed to adapt swiftly. In the first case a failureto learn would have been fatal. In the second, it wouldhave prevented survival from mattering. But in bothcases, Sol learned admirably.

Presumably Sol learned the other strategies I haveidentified, and still others I have not. Demonstrablyhe learned to get by under Nazi oppression more suc-cessfully than most. And considering that he has beencomfortably retired for 11 years with a devoted wifeand a blue-ribbon vegetable garden, it seems he hasalso learned to manage in postwar America.

CONCLUSION

Let me say one thing further about Solomon Fry: al-though his story is sobering, he is not a somber man.Sol's lively interest in the world around him, his pro-clivity for wry commentary, and the obvious joy heextracts from, among other things, his marriage andhis garden, undermine any attempt to view his life asmere tragedy. Triumph tempers tragedy in the life ofSolomon Fry. It is a life which attests to human cru-elty, but equally to human perseverance. The last timeI saw Sol, the day was warm and bright and we spokein the present tense. "This year my tomatoes are reallydoing fine," he jubilantly declared. "Possibly betterthan ever."

NOTES

Acknowledgments. For his patience and his story, mythanks to Solomon Fry. For their editing, encouragement,and many useful suggestions, my thanks to Nancy Ander-son, Marcel Joos, Debra Posen, Carol Silverman, Solot Siri-sai, Harry Wolcott, and an anonymous reviewer of this jour-nal.

Though theoretically entitled to equal rights at that time,Polish Jews were effectively barred from government jobsand jobs in heavy industry. According to Gutman(1982:xvi), a 1931 Warsaw census placed 47 percent of Jew-ish laborers in crafts and another 33 percent in commerce.Overall, 47 percent of the Jewish labor force was self-em-ployed, compared to 17.5 percent of non-Jews, making theJews especially vulnerable to political and economic crisis.

zGerman bombing raids had specifically targeted War-saw's Jewish population, including raids during Rosh Has-hanah and Yom Kippur (Gutman 1982:6).

3Gutman reports that where relief stations were estab-lished by the conquering army, hungry Poles who couldspeak no other German learned to exclaim "Ein Jude" tohave Jews ejected from the bread lines. He also reports thatJewish property was confiscated and that Jews were fre-quently kidnapped for labor (1982:8-9).

4On September 21, 1939, the German command decreedthat Jewish communities of less than 500 individuals wereto be dissolved and relocated to urban areas (Gilbert1982:41). Later the policy was applied to all Jews, restrictingthem to concentrated areas within cities, of which the War-saw ghetto was the largest. Over 400,000 Jews were con-fined to four square kilometers when the ghetto was sealedfrom the rest of the city in November 1940 (Lewin 1989:6),aftef which many were deported to labor camps. Many oth-ers starved.

Hill 1991 127

Though many Jewish cultural and political leaders wereamong those who fled Poland before the Nazi occupation(Gutman 1982:4-5), the Nazis established a puppet Judenratto oversee the ghetto. The diary of Judenrat leader AdamCzerniakow (Czerniakow 1979) chronicles his struggle withthe responsibilities and compromises of that office, and hiseventual decision to take his own life.

6It is estimated that 120,000 Jews perished at Majdanek be-tween 1939 and 1944 (Friesel 1990:107).

7In addition to scattered acts of resistance, ghetto inhab-itants mounted an armed revolt during April and May of1943 (Gutman 1982:364).

8All names that appear here are pseudonyms, but Sol'sreal name was similarly Americanized.

'Voices from the Holocaust (Rothchild 1981:364), was an es-pecially useful anthology. Other sources for primary ac-counts included memoirs, e.g., Bauman 1986, Isaacson1990, Orenstein 1987, and Spiegelman 1986; diaries, e.g.,Czerniakow 1979 and Lewin 1989; and fiction, e.g., Fink1987 and Lustig 1976. For an annotated bibliography of Hol-ocaust materials published before 1985, see Cargas 1985.

10"When to stop asking questions and when to give no re-sponse to the questions asked" (Henry 1955:196).

"Or "propriospect": one's "private subjective view of theworld and its contents—[one's] personal outlook" (Good-enough 1981:98).

12For an account of organized resistance in the ghetto, seeKrall 1986.

13Cf. a comment attributed to Vladek Spiegelman: "Atthat time it wasn't anymore families. It was everybody totake care for himself" (Spiegelman 1986.114).

"Survivor's guilt has been documented and explored inpsychological studies, including Barocas 1975 and Krystal1968. Also see Myerhoff 1978:22-26, for an insightful dis-cussion of the subject.

15I struggle with my use of the word "heroic" in this con-text. I use it to describe the sort of aggressive rebellion whichSol did not assert in the ghetto or camps, but perhaps I con-strue the word too narrowly. Ironically, I would say that inthe broadest sense of the word Solomon Fry is my hero. Iaspire to survive and thrive as well, in my own shelteredlife, as Solomon has in a life of hazard and hardship.

REFERENCES CITED

Agar, Michael H.1980 The Professional Stranger, An Informal Introduc-

tion to Ethnography. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.Angrosino, Michael V.

1989 Documents of Interaction: Biography, Autobiog-raphy, and Life History in Social Science Perspective.Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.

Barocas, H. A.1975 Children of Purgatory: Reflections on the Concen-

tration Camp Survivors Syndrome. International Jour-nal of Social Psychiatry 21:87-92.

Bauman, Janina1986 Winter in the Morning, A Young Girl's Life in the

Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond. New York: Macmillan.Bode, Barbara

1989 No Bells to Toll. New York: Charles Scribner'sSons.

Cargas, Harry James1985 The Holocaust: An Annotated Bibliography. 2nd

edition. Chicago: American Library Association.Catani, Maurizio

1981 Social Life History as Ritualized Oral Exchange. InBiography and Society: The Life History Approach inthe Social Sciences. Daniel Bertaux, ed. Beverly Hills,CA: Sage.

Crapanzano, Vincent1984 Life Histories. American Anthropologist 86:953-

960.Czerniakow, Adam

1979 The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, Preludeto Doom. Raoul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and JosefKermisz, eds. New York: Stein and Day.

Fink, Ida1987 A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. Madelaine Lev-

ine and Francine Prose, trans. New York: Pantheon.Friesel, Evyatar

1990 Atlas of Modern Jewish History. New York: Ox-ford University Press.

Gilbert, Martin1982 Macmillan Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: Mac-

millan.Goodenough, Ward

1981 Culture, Language, and Society. 2nd edition.Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin Cummings.

Gutman, Yisrael1982 The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943. Ina Friedman,

trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Henry, Jules

1955 Culture, Education, and Communications Theory.In Education and Anthropology. George Spindler, ed.Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Isaacson, Judith Magyar1990 Seed of Sarah, Memoirs of a Survivor. Chicago:

University of Illinois Press.Krall, Hanna

1986 Shielding the Flame. Joanna Stasinska and Law-rence Weschler, trans. New York: Henry Holt and Co.

Krystal, H., ed.1986 Massive Psychic Trauma. New York: International

Universities Press.Langness, L. L., and Gelya Frank

1981 Lives, An Anthropological Approach to Biog-raphy. Novato, CA: Chandler and Scharp.

Lewin, Abraham1989 A Cup of Tears, A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Antony Polonsky, ed. Christopher Hutton, trans. NewYork: Basil Blackwell.

Lustig, Arnost1976 Children of the Holocaust: The Collected Works of

Arnost Lustig. Three vols. George Theiner and JeanneNemcova, trans. Washington: Inscape.

Mandelbaum, David G.1973 The Study of Life History: Gandhi. Current An-

thropology 14(3):177-206.Meier, Lili, and Peter Hellman

1981 The Auschwitz Album. New York: RandomHouse.

Myerhoff, Barbara1978 Number Our Days. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Orenstein, Henry1987 I Shall Live. New York: Beaufort Books.

128 Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 16(4)

Rothchild, Sylvia, ed. Van Maanen, John1981 Voices from the Holocaust. New York: New Amer- 1988 Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chi-

ican Library. cago: University of Chicago Press.Spiegelman, Art Wax, Rosalie

1986 Maus: A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon. 1971 D o i n g Fieldwork: Warnings and Advice. Chicago-Spradley, James P., and David W. McCurdy University of Chicago Press.

1972 The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in ComplexSociety. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.