I have been chatting with Horst Cahn for almost six months. His stories, like those of others, come to me without effort. It is comparable to eating a fine dinner. Without knowing it, you eat the plate. Today Lady Barbara is home nursing her back. I hope to go to the Spine Institute in San Diego with a picture of her x-rays.
This is my last day taking Penicillin. I needed to conserve my energy and allowed Horst to speak. Anyhow, the new George learns more by keeping his mouth shut and allowing his ears to do the job. It is Salisbury steak day at the Li'l Old Cafe in Encinitas.
"My four kids told me my marriage must have been a good one, since I was married for 58 years. I met her in Czechoslovakia where a farmer brought her to help with the farm. We became fast friends for one year and decided to marry."
"My two sons were born there. She was slim and the four came out without effort. I will never forget when Elizabeth gave birth to our first daughter in Rochester, New York. I took off from the Country Club where I worked as Chef and drove down a one-way-street to the hospital.
"A nurse came out to greet me. 'Mr Cahn, your wife beat the midwife, and you had a baby girl. Of course I needed to return to the Rochester Country Club to prepare meals for the club members. A Jewish family service placed us in a home. They only fun I had was to take my family out for a walk or picnic. We lived between Lake Eerie and Lake Ontario. We did go to Canada several times and go to their underground shopping center in Toronto, Canada.
What is it that you remember about when the Hahn Transport ship arrived in New York?
"The underground was filthy. I found out the street cleaners never worked on the weekend. We stayed on twenty second street and one day I asked somebody where the Metropolitan Opera house was."
"You are standing in front of it. The front door looked like a barn...I had trouble swimming since my body was all muscle and bone."
For newcomers to my many interviews with Cahn, he is the only living survivor of a 4000 inmate camp in Auschwitz. In a few earlier interviews. he spoke about how his sister and parents met their ends, and now resourceful he was to stay alive. His guile and personality kept him alive. Of course he was and still is a man of steal. He had won most medals several athletic tournaments. At sixteen, he and his parents boarded a train to Auschwitz.He witnessed his parents go the way of death while he took the other road to work. His story will live forever, and I will see to it.
To be one in four thousand is miraculous but seeing him is believing him. No matter what I say, he always interrupts me and others with "George, I want to tell you something...." and of course he speaks until the lunch time is over. For instance before his lift arrived I spoke about my experience in Dortmund, Germany and now clean the streets were compared to our in the United States.
'I want to tell you something...Inside our barracks, we had to shower every day and brush our teeth. Our beds would be run over by bugs if we failed to do this." Today, Horst could be mistaken for a golfer or a lover. He still yearns for women, and why not, he is a man's man and a Cohan or High Priest...as a matter of fact, I have nicknamed him Mr. Clean.
He wishes everyone to remember what happened to his and all Jewish families during the Holocaust. When somebody wishes his number, he shows the numbers tattooed to his left arm. The title of his book will be of course, "I want to tell you something..."
No comments:
Post a Comment