Our Holocaust by Amir Gutfreund

Grandpa used to say, "People have to die of something," and re-fused to donate to the war against cancer, the war against traffic accidents, or any other war. To avoid being considered stingy, he would occasionally burst into exemplary displays of tremendous generosity. He put on these shows with such proficiency that if not for us, his relatives, no one would have known the simple truth: he was a miser.

In his home, parsimony was the law of the land. He zeal-ously collected empty bottles for their deposits, and when one of them broke he glued it back together with great artistry. Like a cuckoo, he tossed his shirts into other people's laundry hampers, staging stains when necessary. He had a wonderful ability to catch colds in tandem with us, so he could take our cough syrup and conserve his own. He declared the colds over prematurely, pro-claiming, "We're better now!" and stockpiled the remaining antibi-otics. He kept a bottle of liquid soap in his bathroom, and when-ever the soap level dropped below a finger's width he watered it down in an endless process that ultimately produced a bottle of water convinced it was soap.

But his most wonderful ruse involved a magical power over tea bags. Each bag, even upon its tenth descent into boiling water, yielded something of itself-the merest vapor of tea, just verging on physically tangible material. The hoisting of the bag out of the water was accompanied by an expertly suspicious look at the bag hanging off the teaspoon by its string. Based on signs perceptible only to himself, he would estimate the bag's vitality and decree its fate. Selektion, he called this ceremony when he wanted to be cruel to Grandpa Yosef. We suspected that even when the bags were exhausted he did not throw them away, but rather hoarded them in a secret location so that he could one day make them into a new mattress. We spent our childhood hunting for them, but even in our nosiest searches, when we exposed his letters to Joyce the dancer and his debt to the late Jew Finkelstein, we never found a single tea bag.

We were happy, at times, to remind ourselves that he wasn't even our real grandfather.

We called him Grandpa--Grandpa Lolek--due to our family's Law of Compression, a wonderful invention of our parents, the first generation of the Holocaust. Lacking brothers, uncles, fathers and mothers, they had done away with the requirement for precision. Anyone belonging to our parents' generation was simply called "Uncle." Their offspring were our cousins. Not that every-one was up for grabs. There were certainly rules. There had to be a corresponding sense of closeness among all the generations, so that the stitches holding us all together could heal and all individuals could find their relatives. A fond relationship among the parents' generation meant that we could acquire their offspring as our cous-ins. Introvert "uncles" who tended not to take an interest in family affairs denied us entire clusters of willing cousins. Denied. End of story. The Law of Compression left no room for compromise. Our greatest need was for grandparents, and so we ploughed our way through the restrictions and gathered as many of them as we could. I never knew my father's father, Zev-Wolf. (In Dad's photo album, I was drawn to a small picture of his grave.) We chose his cousins, Grandpa Lolek and Grandpa Hainek, to be our grandfathers. On Mom's side we devised a similar ploy. Her father, sick Grandpa Shalom--who had yet to emerge from the Holocaust--was locked in the depths of a terminal illness brought on by Gestapo tortures, and so we annexed a distant relative of his as an official grandfather, Grandpa Menashe. At other opportunities we acquired Grandpa Ernst, Grandma Eva and Grandpa Weil.

My real family, the one we covered with camouflage relatives, was pitifully small:

Grandpa Shalom, 1912-1980.

One aunt.

Her son, one real cousin.

And yes, there was actually another uncle, my mother's half-brother.

"You don't need a psychologist to understand that," Effi responded when I told her once how I yearn to sleep with Anat every time we come home from one of her family weddings. Still in the car, both tired, I reach out to unbutton her dress and she barely has time to take her shoes off. From the back seat come the grumblings of Yariv, our five-year-old prince.

Grandpa Lolek, the tea artiste, was not the first of the grandpas. We got hold of him fairly late in the day. But he was a powerful axis in our lives, a figure who showered sparks onto our daily routines. He usually burst into our world in his 1970 Vauxhall, a moribund chassis of protestations upon which only he could impose life. Always wearing a tie, always smoking and dressed in colorful grandeur, he would emerge from the Vauxhall as if he were Kaiser Franz Josef out to wave at the masses from his balcony. Within minutes he would be sitting at the table drinking tea, eating whatever cake he was served, and smoking a cigarette.

Grandpa Lolek, the clear anomaly in our environment, was not a Holocaust survivor at all. World War II had caught him serving in the Polish cavalry, one of those wretched madmen who stormed German tanks yelling "Hurrah!" and waving swords. When his unit fell apart, Grandpa Lolek fled to Russia, where he joined the volunteer army of the Polish General Anders. With An-ders, he set off on a voyage through Persia and Palestine to England, to reenter the war. Anders' soldiers, with Grandpa Lolek among them, were thrown into some of the toughest battles and suffered the most terrible losses. These dime-a-dozen soldiers who were sent into battle every time a general in some war-room mumbled, "let's give them a try," sustained heavy losses that filtered and distilled them until all that remained were Grandpa-Lolek-types, people coated with a layer of pure luck, fearless in the face of their old friend Death. They faced it every day, watched it go about its business, and grew accustomed to acknowledging it with a polite nod or a tip of the hat. They did not meddle in Death's business, nor Death in theirs.