Guest column: Feisty

She was ten or twelve years old, and she wanted a piece of candy.

The store was family, more or less. Her paternal grandfather had died young, and her grandmother had married again the way the custom of that world arranged such things, and the house had filled up with half-brothers and stepmothers and arithmetic of who owed what to whom. When Rosa came in for candy, her nasty grandmother would chase her out.

She came back.

“I was very feisty,” she said, sixty years later, sitting in front of a camera in Burbank, California. “I would come back.” Eventually an uncle, her father’s brother, an unmarried man who seems to have been fond of her, would say from behind the counter: go ahead, take it.

“But I always had to fight for everything I got.”

Nobody in Borșa in the mid-1930s knew they were watching Rosa’s rehearsal.

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Borșa sits in Maramureș, in the mountains of northern Romania, close enough to the old Hungarian border that the border kept moving across it. Rosa Marmor was born there on May 15, 1924, one of seven children in an Orthodox Jewish family. Four brothers, two sisters, and Rosa, the small and youngest of the lot. Her mother was Sarah. Her father had worked his own father’s farm for years before he opened a liquor store in town.

The liquor store was not a genteel business. The men drank hard, and when they were drunk they turned violent, and what they liked to do was take hold of her father by the beard. He was an Orthodox man; the beard was not optional. From about the age of fourteen, Rosa and one of her sisters worked the counter, and Rosa learned the maneuver. Get behind her father and push him toward the back door. Get him out of the room. A girl of fourteen, in a room full of drunk men, calculating her father’s exit.

At even a young age she showed grit. There were papers her father could not get, the licenses and permits that in those years were either refused to Jews outright or delayed long enough to amount to refusal. So Rosa went. She found people outside the community who were willing to put their names to things on her behalf. Her father stayed in business.

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Then came the warning.

Rosa had a friend in town, a gentile woman, younger than she was, married to a man with some connection to the government. One day the friend came and said she had heard something. They were going to round up the Jews. She did not know more than that, and she was not supposed to have said even that much.

Rosa was nineteen. She went to the men who mattered, the prominent families, the ones with money and therefore with options. She reported what she had heard, and she said the obvious thing out loud: maybe people should get out.

They were pleasant about it. They did nothing. Someone went to the rabbi. Whatever answer he gave, the answer amounted to waiting. A nineteen-year-old girl with no standing and no money understood the situation, went to the people who could have acted on it, and could not make them move.

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The police came on a morning in the spring of 1944. Hungarian police, because Hungary had held that part of Romania since 1940. “Gather what you can carry.”

What Rosa remembered, fifty-two years later, were the cows.

The family kept cows. Every morning at six her mother went out to milk them and brought a cup upstairs to Rosa’s bed while it was still warm and foaming, because Rosa was the little one. Now they were being marched out and the animals were tied in the stalls. Her father was upset about it. They are tied up, he kept saying. What are we going to do about them. The next morning, she saw one of them dead on the floor. Rosa went and opened the door and let the rest of them out. That is the last free act she performed in the house where she was born: opening a door for the animals.

They were taken to Vișeu, the ghetto where the Jews of Borșa and the surrounding villages were being collected. A cousin’s family was still living there in their own home, not yet taken. Rosa found ways out of the ghetto and back in again with food. It lasted about two weeks.

Then the cattle cars came by train. Before they were loaded, her mother sewed the family’s jewelry into the seams of their clothing so there would be something to sell for bread. And she handed Rosa a ring. It had a loop, and Rosa braided it into her hair, because she had already worked out that whatever was in your pocket would not stay in your pocket. Three or four days in the train car. She remembers German officers boarding somewhere along the way.

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They arrived at Auschwitz at about five in the morning and were told they were going to have a bath. Men to one side. Women to another. Older people here, younger people there, children somewhere else. Rosa was holding on to her mother.

Her mother’s cousin was in the crowd, a woman with a two-year-old daughter. Her Hungarian name was Sidonia, and her Jewish name was Sarah, the same as Rosa’s mother. The cousin started to scream. She pushed the little girl toward Rosa’s mother and said take her, take my little girl, you will be able to take care of her. Rosa’s mother took the child. An officer came over and said that the child could not come with Sarah. They took her mother out of the line, and Rosa never saw her again.

She was nineteen years old, with a ring braided into her hair and her mother somewhere behind her in a crowd, and she did not yet know what the smoke was. They took the clothes and the shoes and issued sacking to wear and wooden clogs. They shaved their heads. “We didn’t even recognize each other.” Rosa was placed in Barrack fourteen with a blanket and half a cup. Roll call every morning was in the dark. The number standing in the yard had to match the number written down the night before. Her two sisters were with her, and two cousins.

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One morning at roll call, “Dr.” Josef Mengele—the Angel of Death—sent her to the other side. She was small. That was all it took. Her sisters started to panic. Rosa was told to stand and wait, and after a while a truck came, and she was loaded into it with about twenty-five other girls, and the truck started toward the crematorium. Two men were driving. They were Jewish prisoners themselves, assigned to the work. One of them said out loud where the truck was going and what would happen at the other end.

They told her, in hushed voices, to get down and hide. She was very small. She folded herself into a corner of the truck bed. When it stopped, German guards unloaded the girls, every one of them, but did not unload nor see Rosa hiding. The two men then drove the empty truck back the way it had come, and Rosa climbed down and went to barrack fourteen.

Which left the problem of the count.

Every morning the numbers had to match. Rosa had been subtracted and was now standing in the yard again, which meant the woman doing the counting had a figure in front of her that could not possibly be right. Rosa said nothing. She just stood there frozen. Whatever that woman did with the math, she did it in silence, and Rosa listened and did not say a word.

“And that’s how it was.”

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Rosa was moved later to a work camp, where the food was slightly better and the work was outdoors in the cold with a shovel. She got sick there. After three days lying in the infirmary, she heard a doctor say that if she did not improve, they would have to take her away, because she could not work. So Rosa improved. She got up and went around pretending to be well and said nothing to anybody. She was released back to be with her sisters.

Then, in the winter, the guards emptied the camp and marched them west, away from the Russians. Five full days of walking. People went down on the roadside and stayed there to die or be shot. On one of those nights they slept in a barn, and in the morning Rosa told her sisters she was not going to walk anymore. Her sisters pleaded “the guards will shoot you!” She said she didn’t care. She was the feisty one.

So Rosa and her two sisters (and a cousin) hid under the hay. The guards came through and drove pitchforks into it and did not find them. They stayed on that farm. Rosa dug potatoes out of the frozen ground with her hands and they ate them raw. When one of her sisters got too weak and sick to move, Rosa walked into the nearest town by herself and went into a vacant house to steal some bread and salami. She put it inside her jacket and ran the whole way back. Her sisters fell on her, they were so glad to see her.

A farmer found them the next morning and called the town police.

The city police put them in an overnight jail cell—no window and no room in it. Not enough space to sit down, not enough to lie down. Only enough to stand. They stood in it all night and looked at each other and could not move.

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In the morning the police brought them out to join the other death marches. Rosa looked at the size of the crowd and the confusion on the road and said to her sisters: “come with me. All of us. Let’s get lost.” They were afraid.

It was a reasonable fear. There were guards. They had no papers, no language, no destination, and everything Rosa was proposing was insane. Her sisters said no. Rosa went with someone else, a Polish girl walking with them. That was the last time she ever saw her sisters. None of her family came back. Not her mother, not her father, not four brothers, not two sisters. In 1996 the interviewer asked her the question directly, “did any of your family come back?” She answered with a single syllable: “No.”

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What Rosa did next was invent a person.

First, they approached a well-situated farmhouse. A German woman with a horse and buggy in the yard took the two girls in when Rosa told her they were fleeing the Russians. She fed them and let them wash. Rosa cleaned herself up and did her hair and said afterward that she made herself look human again. They had shaved her head in May. In a stranger’s house in Germany, she took that back. Her period came back that week, on regular food. They stayed until the evacuation order came through and the woman had to leave too.

Then Rosa and the Polish girl walked to the next town straight into a German administrative office filled with top Nazi generals and officials. And she told a story. She was Romanian. The Germans had been in her town during the war, and one of them had brought her to Germany and then abandoned her here. The Russians had killed her mother and father. For the moment, they believed her. She was given a house to stay in and work in a kitchen where German personnel came for their meals. She lived inside that lie for months, in the middle of a German town, in the last winter of the war.

And there was a Nazi officer.

He came to her one day and told her that he knew she was Jewish. Then he said: “don’t worry. I will take care of you.” He stationed a soldier in front of the house where she was staying so that no other soldiers could come to the door. When there were nightly parties with top Nazi officers, he brought her along. At one of them a high-ranking Nazi officer looked at her across a room laid out with the finest food and drink and announced that she was the girl he wanted. Her protector saw what was about to happen and ensured the Nazi General drank himself past standing, and the officer got her out of the building and home. She never learned his name.

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Then one morning the town was empty. Not quiet. Empty. She walked outside and there was nobody, and then the shelling started and the house next door came apart. Before long there were Russian soldiers in the street. She rushed up to them and kissed them. The war was over.

Liberation was not safe however. Her friend was cornered in a back room of the house and went out through a window screaming, and Rosa found a senior officer and made him put a stop to it. Another night a soldier came into her room with a gun, set it down on the nightstand, and told her what was going to happen. She said no.

A Jewish officer in the Red Army wanted to marry her. He warned her that people without papers were being sent to Siberia and offered to send her ahead to his parents until he was discharged. Rosa told him she wanted to go back to Romania and look for her family. So he got her the papers to travel.

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The house in Borșa was still standing and had been torn apart. Neighbors came out into the road and recognized her. One of them, a woman, said: your mother left a ring with me. To put away. And she went and got it and gave it back. A small diamond ring, kept safe through the entire war by a woman who had every reason to assume that no one would ever come to claim it.

Rosa sold some of her father’s land and came away with about two hundred American dollars. For a while she lived the way the young survivors were living, twenty or thirty of them keeping house together in the emptied homes, throwing parties at night with borrowed musicians. One evening she leaned out of a window and had the violinists play for her, and an old peasant woman she knew told her that was not a thing she should be doing, not now, not singing out of a window. Rosa took it hard and remembered it for fifty years. And she read the lists. Every railway station had them nailed up, names posted by people looking for people. That is how she found two cousins who had survived Budapest on false papers. She kept reading them after that. There was no one else.

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Budapest, then Vienna, then Munich, where more cousins had landed and were keeping a house. They entertained American soldiers, and one of the soldiers was a sergeant named Mayer Kramer. His job was the mail.

The displaced persons in Germany could not reach their relatives in the United States. The letters had nowhere to go and nobody to carry them. So Mayer carried them. Every day he brought mail out to the DPs, and he took their letters back with him so they could reach the people in America who might claim them, and he would not take money for it. One of the people he handed an envelope to was Rosa.

Her older cousin told her to marry him. Rosa said she didn’t know the man, how was she supposed to marry him. She married him in October 1946. It took permission from the army, a chaplain from Chicago for the religious ceremony, and a civil authority for the paperwork, because a Jewish wedding in Germany that year needed both. They went to Switzerland on a honeymoon. Then they went to America.

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They settled in New Hampton, Iowa.

Rosa Marmor of Borșa, Maramureș, spent roughly the first five years of her American life in a small Iowa town where her husband’s family had settled. She spoke Yiddish. Nobody in that town spoke Yiddish. She spoke no English at all.

“That was a hard life for me, because I didn’t have anybody there.”

A schoolteacher came to the house. She had heard about the young wife who could not talk to anyone, and she offered to teach her English, and she came and gave her lessons. Rosa’s one stated regret on the entire tape is that she never got a proper education. She had been in school in Borșa until the Hungarians came and the schooling stopped.

In 1951 Rosa and Mayer moved to California. Seven years in and she could not get pregnant. She saw doctors but nothing was wrong with her. One of them finally told her to stop thinking about it and go find a job. So she went down to The Broadway in Hollywood, which took on extra people at Christmas, and she got hired, and she got pregnant.

“So I said, that is a miracle.”

The first son they named Larry, after her father. Stanley came sixteen months later. She went back to work and stayed at work for about twenty years, most of it at Bullock’s.

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In January of 1996, an interviewer from the Shoah Foundation set up a camera in her house in Burbank and asked her, near the end of it, what she thought the world ought to learn from what had happened to her. She became emotional. She missed her family, that it mattered to have family and she lost hers, that people should be good to one another and try to understand each other and be kind. She said that if it were not for the personality she had, she would not have survived.

She was right. Not luck, though there was luck. Not providence, though she believed in that too. Temperament. The specific, ordinary, inconvenient stubbornness of a girl who kept walking back into a store where she was not wanted, because she wanted a piece of candy and could not see a good reason why she shouldn’t have one.

That girl who got off the truck instead of the gas chamber. That girl who went under the hay. Who disappeared into a narrow alley when her sisters wouldn’t. That girl who walked into a German office and lied for half a year without a slip. That girl who went back to Romania, alone at twenty-one, to read the lists. Feistiness is what kept her alive, but it is not the whole of what she kept. She was a person before they came for her, and she went on conducting herself as one. Whether that was in a truck bed heading to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the infirmary bed at the hard labor camp, day five of the forced death march, or in the kitchen where she cooked for the men who would have killed her: she was dignity.

She lived another sixty years. She played cards. She went to the coffee shops around Burbank and Toluca Lake and made friends with people. When schools called and asked whether she would come and talk to teenagers about Auschwitz, she said yes. Her last piece of advice on the tape, from a woman who lost her mother, her father, four brothers and two sisters:

I miss my family the most. I feel it is very important for people to have family, and love and I like people and I think people should be very nice to each other and try to forgive…if you are always mad it will affect your life very badly.

She died on May 13, 2017, two days short of 93.

To my knowledge no one has ever written this down. It is written down now.

Sixty years after the war, Rosa still remembered the girl who kept coming back to the store for a piece of candy. She had always been that way. Feisty. She had to fight for everything she got.

The Nazis took her mother and father, her four brothers and two sisters. They took her home and nearly took her life. But the girl from Borșa kept coming back.

Rosa always came back.

^[1] Mandel Kramer, my great-grandfather, is the brother of Mayer Kramer and brother-in-law to Rose Kramer. This story is written in honor of Rose and her enduring message to never lose hope and stay feisty. This essay is based primarily on Rosa Marmor Kramer’s January 1996 oral-history testimony preserved in the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation. Quotations attributed to Rose are drawn from that recorded testimony. Rosa Marmor Kramer, interview 11018, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, January 1996, tape 1-5. Images reproduced from the testimony of Rosa Kramer, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. © USC Shoah Foundation. A.I. was used to transcribe the videos into transcripts to aid in the drafting of the article.

 Judge John Sandy is a member of St. Mary Parish in Spirit Lake. He is a judge on the Iowa Court of Appeals and is a member of the board of directors for the Iowa Catholic Conference. A graduate of the University of St. Thomas, where he studied philosophy and Catholic studies, he writes on the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution, and Catholic social thought and culture, with work forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law.  He is a host of The Catholic Passage Podcast.