"Tomorrow they will be here. They will shave our heads. We will stand naked in front of them. They will humiliate us and in the end they will kill us. So I want to use my only freedom - to choose the way I die." His father and stepmother lay on the bed dressed in their best clothes, leaving enough poison for the boy to join them if he chose. He held their hands and waited for them to die before climbing out the window, sneaking to the train yard and clinging to the undercarriage of one of the cars to escape.
I went to high school at a small co-ed boarding school in the southwest and by my senior year half the teachers and most of the administration hated me. I guess I’ve always had a problem with authority. Nevertheless, one of the new teachers invited me to an evening political discussion group at his house (all the teachers lived on campus) which I flaked on in order to spend more time in bed with my girlfriend. Not just once, but God help me, twice. After the second time he caught me outside the dining hall and said “You know what you are? You are a phony!” spitting out the word “phony,” like it was the worst thing he could think of and turned his back on me before I could answer. I knew I was a jerk for not showing up, but still his anger took me by surprise: the guy hardly even knew me. Thirty-five years later I’m browsing through netflix and see his picture on a documentary called “Fighter.” This is the guy who called me a phony:
Jan Wiener was born in Hamburg in 1920 to Czech parents who fled back to Prague in 1939. His mother was caught and died in a concentration camp. He left Prague with his father and stepmother to Yugoslavia, and with the sound of Nazi boots on the street, held their hands as they took their lives. Clinging to the bottom of a train car for 18 hours he made it to Italy where was caught and sent to an Italian POW camp, escaped, got caught again, escaped again and made it to the Allied lines. Then he went to England and served in the RAF’s all-Czechoslovak bomber squadron 311. Their motto was “Never Regard Their Numbers.” When the war was over he returned to Czechoslovakia and was imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp for five years, along with most of rest of the Czech resistance. When he got out he emigrated to the United States and taught European History, married the love of his life and eventually ended up at my boarding school. That was the guy who called me a phony.
One of the stories he tells in Fighter concerned a Czech collaborator during the Nazi occupation whom Jan had to ask for clothing and shoes. When he asked for four pairs of shoes the functionary laughed and said “Four pairs of shoes? You poor dirty little Jew… you won’t last long enough for one pair of shoes!” Jan clung to that memory throughout the war and when he returned to Prague he hunted down the collaborator, who by then was working for the Soviets, and confronted him with a Colt 45 strapped to his leg and the full intention of killing him. “You said I wouldn’t last through one pair of shoes… he told the man behind the desk, I have made it through six!” Then he held the gun up to the guy’s head and found, like any decent man would, that he couldn’t kill a man in cold blood. So instead he punched him in the face and walked out the door. “The war was over for me at that moment.” he said. He’d go on to spend five years in the gulag before finally becoming free.
Hearing that story it finally dawned on me why he’d been so angry when I, the rebel kid, had let him down. And I thought I had a problem with authority… They ended up kicking me out of school the day before graduation, presumably as a pre-emptive measure, although honestly I didn’t have anything planned. On my last day Jan took me aside and said I’d been a trout in a carp pond (or a carp in a trout pond - I can’t remember which and google isn’t helping…) but essentially I’d been the sort of fish that kept the other fish from getting too complacent. And it’s only now, thirty-five years later, I realize what an honor it was coming from him.
Since then I’ve lived a life - tell me if this sounds familiar - chock full of questionable choices and easily regrettable decisions. And I’ve been able to explain away or rationalize them all enough to say I had absolutely no regrets. Until I watched that documentary and realized how badly I’d blown it by not showing up for that discussion group. That is my one and only regret. I’m a Jew. And as a Jew I grew up hearing a lot about how many of us died and precious little about any of us fighting back. I’d been invited to the home of a Fighter - an Honest to God Jewish Hero - and I’d snubbed him.
For two weeks now my mind’s been working overtime trying to find some angle, some kind of spin, to feel better about this and I haven’t found it. Jan passed away four years ago, so it’s too late for a simple apology. Debts to the living can always be repaid somehow. Debts to the dead… those stay with you. It isn’t much fun, but guilt can be a powerful motivator, and if there’s any kind of silver lining here it’s probably that. Failing Jan like I did will keep his story alive for me, probably for the rest of my life. And so long as his story stays with me I’m gonna have a hell of a time ever feeling sorry for myself, or feeling like I’ve suffered, or feeling like somehow I’ve done enough.