THOSE NUMBERS

“Like so many immigrant inner-city Jews in the late 1940’s through the 1960’s, the refugees of the Holocaust sought refuge in the hamlets and villages that were nestled in the Catskill Mountains…..

   There were wide lakes and rickety rowboats. Dirt country roads led to bungalow colonies in such far-flung places as Swan Lake, Liberty and Livingston Manor, Monticello and South Fallsburg.”- “Renewal” by Thane Rosenbaum SUMMER HAVEN The Catskills, the Holocaust, and the Literary Imagination (Academic Studies Press 2015)

     You can’t write about the Catskills without considering genocides—recent and long forgotten. Those “far-flung places” that Mr. Rosenbaum writes of are as familiar to me as my family and neighbors. Except for a twenty year stint living in cities, I’ve spent my entire life living in Orange and Sullivan Counties of New York State. The exotic, romanticized spin that literary witnesses of the Holocaust put on the dirt roads, morning dew and starry nights, that were so common to me, can be found repeatedly through the early pastoralism of Washington Irving and the Hudson River School. There’s a predictably rose-colored lens through which these writings of both the recent and more distant past are seen. Like a stone skipping across the lake’s surface, only to be rewound and run backwards through the projector—returning neatly into the pitcher’s hand— each dimple of intra-historical connection reveals something new. I learn more every day about the place I call home.

    Long before the word was coined, genocides took place in these mountains….. what the Holocaust survivors generically called “the country.” The first was accomplished by disease (germ warfare) visited upon the indigenous residents courtesy of European incursion/invasion. In return the Europeans received fur and untold wealth. The Columbian Exchange drastically cut down on the numbers of Indians. Then slowly, over hundreds of years, consumer capitalism, technology, religion, militarism and politics completed the task, annihilating an ancient “low impact” way of life; driving the indigenous residents from the Catskills, replacing them with European “Freeholders” and “Inhabitants,” my ancestors. A slow, but deliberate, genocide. 

    Within this process there were minor “holocausts,” the literal scorching of earth and flesh. Sullivan County is named for one such gore perpetrator. The surviving Jews of WWII knew nothing of Gen. John Sullivan and his “scorched earth” campaign waged against the Indians in 1779. It was way too much to unpack on a summer night of canasta and Glen Miller. But this early genocide, the long dead Indians of the Catskills, had much in common with the more recently traumatized survivors of Germany’s epic Nazi sin. Where I also knew nothing of John Sullivan and saw only “lakes and rickety rowboats,” anguished ghosts of past genocidal mayhem bore witness. Europe was not the only scene of Biblical crime. Ethnic cleansing had been a not so distant tradition in the very mountains where the Jews sought refuge.

   When I was a kid I can remember pale forearms sporting fuzzy, black/blue numbers, peeking out from under white shirt or flimsy blouse sleeves, as men and women ate hamburgers and drank cokes in Walden, or counted out change for a magazine in Monticello. I was ten years old in 1962 and knew nothing of what had happened in Europe only ten years prior to my birth. But nothing much got passed me on the home front. I was curious—why numbers? Maybe I asked my grandfather about the faded tattoos. I don’t remember. More than likely, if I had, the subject was glossed over in order not to ruin an afternoon’s fishing. Something like, “They were in the war.” What could you tell a ten year old about a recent genocide in Europe? “Where’s Europe?” 

    I can’t imagine what driving out of New York City, up 17k, through Montgomery and Wurtsboro, pulling into Glen Wild on a sultry, summer night in 1946 felt like for someone who had miraculously survived the unspeakable (and unspoken) Nazi Holocaust. My mind is too narrow, my experiences too limited. But “Haven” or Heaven probably comes close—the pastoral in full effect. It’s now very rare to meet a person with a concentration camp tattoo. Too much time has passed. Soon that last “marked” Auschwitz survivor will die. Maybe they’ll be buried here in the Catskills……. alongside the Indians.