Right. Left. Right. Left. Life. Death. Right. Left.
Adam Cintz is 95 years old, and he speaks quietly. But when the old man talks, everyone listens.
“They put us in a cattle car. As many people as they could pack in. And they put a bucket in the corner for a toilet. We were in there for a day or two, I don’t remember. And then they opened the door, and, take a look — Auschwitz.”
Cintz slows down. He squirms a bit in the stagnant San Jose heat and dabs his stunningly light blue eyes with a napkin. The memories are taking him to a place he thought he’d escaped for good.
“They separated us,” he continues, beginning, once again, to instinctively wave his leathery arm back and forth. Right. Left. Life. Death.
“My wife, she was holding the two children by the hand. And the SS man separated the children and the elderly to one side. And my wife didn’t want to give the children. And he hit her. He hit her, over the head …”
Cintz is really struggling now.
Across the table, Sasuki Sato and Shiz Hanada, who also spent the war years behind barbed wire — but in the United States — emit sympathetic moans. Their gritted teeth and pained expressions indicate they wish they could do more for Cintz. But all they can do is listen. And they listen well.
With a palpable effort, Cintz continues.
“My wife survived. But my nephew and my son — my son — they …” He runs out of breath. His next words are little more than a gasp.
“They got killed.”
Cintz breaks down and cries bitter tears.
Seated at the tables around him on the patio of San Jose’s Japanese American Museum, on a made-to-order sunny afternoon Sunday, June 12, are scores of fellow survivors and Japanese American internees. The diners are relating the great and terrible stories of their lives at a get-together organizer Professor Harvey Gotliffe thinks may be the first of its kind.
And, without even hearing the words, it is evident that many of the elderly Jewish men and women are recalling their own meetings with Dr. Josef Mengele, as they wave their arms. Right. Left. Right. Left.
The sum of one’s entire life was reduced to a simple flick of the Angel of Death’s cane. Right. Left. Life. Death.
Roy Matsuzaki spent the war light years from Auschwitz in almost every way, in Arkansas. To most people, the wide-angle, black-and-white photo of a dusty, drab internment camp, hanging on the museum wall, looks like what it was: a prison. But to Matsuzaki, it was his playground. When his family was forced off its Fresno farm, he was only 10 years old and too young to understand why.
After the war ended and the military vacated the camps, he remembers scaling the 32-foot-high wooden guard towers and playing king of the mountain. And there was always baseball, from sunup to sundown. But he couldn’t help but wonder, what did he do? Why was he kept behind a fence? Why were the guns pointing in and not out?
When asked if he’d ever had a discussion with a Holocaust survivor, Matsuzaki gave the exact answer several survivors gave when queried if they’d ever talked with a Japanese American internee: “I don’t know, maybe. But not about that.”
Gotliffe, however, has talked to scores of survivors and internees — specifically about that.
He teaches a course at San Jose State University about the American media’s coverage — or lack thereof — of the Holocaust and Japanese American internment. His Rolodex is bursting with the names of survivors and former internees and, in an epiphany, he decided it was time to have everyone over for lunch. The menu: sushi and bagels.
As the 50 guests availed themselves of the unusual buffet (more than one Japanese participant was spotted spreading cream cheese on a bagel and lox with a chopstick), Gotliffe encouraged the crowd to “share, not compare” their experiences. And, with the rapport only members of the same generation can share, they were off.
Bits of small talk and the occasional laugh wafted through the air. Yet, inevitably, a survivor’s visceral description of humanity’s darkest hour punctured the afternoon’s tranquil veneer.
“The streets, they weren’t paved like they are here, they were cobblestones,” Saul Golan tells his tablemates.
“And I will never forget what I saw. When they rolled the carts by with all the bodies on them, all the limbs, the arms and the legs, they were shaking. They were shaking.”
At 63, Rod Tatsuno was the baby of the group. He was born in the middle of the racetrack Seabiscuit made famous, as his family and so many others were held against their will at Tanforan in San Bruno. His grandfather retraced the great horse’s steps, racing young Rod around the track in a stroller.
Tatsuno’s 92-year-old father, Dave, took Super-8 movies of his time in the internment camp at Topaz, Utah. And, to this date, only two Super-8 films reside at the U.S. national archives: Tatsuno’s home movies and Abraham Zapruder’s film of the Kennedy assassination.
A remarkably spry man dressed in a tan jacket and sporting a bolo tie, the elder Tatsuno regaled the survivors at his table with his unique wartime experience. The guards entrusted him to obtain supplies for the camp, and he traveled more than 20,000 miles to Sheboygan and back and everywhere in between, negotiating purchases.
“They wanted merchandise, and remember, there was a war on and no one had merchandise,” recalls the old man with a smile.
“Sometimes you’d walk into a wholesale store and they’d look at you and say, ‘What nationality are you?’ But the trains were full of Armed Forces, and when you told them your story, they’d feel sorry for you. A U.S. citizen behind barbed wire! In 20,000 miles, I only had one unpleasant experience. There was a man with a Hitler mustache and he gave me a ‘Heil Hitler.'”
Across the patio, 93-year-old Eiichi Sakayuke noted, bitterly, that because of the 1940 census, American officials knew exactly where the Japanese were living. “When they came to round us up in ’41, they knew just where to go.”
How did the Germans know where to go for the Jews, he asked.
“That’s simple,” replies Jack Tramiel, an Auschwitz survivor who later went on to invent the Commodore computer.
“In the ghetto, there were only Jews.”
But why, asks Sakayuke.
“They gave orders,” pipes in Michael Novice, also an Auschwitz survivor, who wore a black yarmulke under his Boston Red Sox cap: “All Jews must leave this place and go to a destination area.”
“And,” continues Tramiel, “if you did not go, they had documents and they’d come look for us. We were transported from the ghetto by train to the killing camp. And there was Dr. Mengele. He looked at us and decided who would work and who was to be killed.”
Tramiel’s arm is waving. Right. Left. Right. Left. Life. Death.
Life.
Chaya means life. Chayale Ash, whose name, literally, means life, is a survivor. Her new Japanese friends tell her that, in Japanese, her name would be “Seimei.”
Ash spent the war years in a forced labor camp in Uzbekistan, where her father was worked to death. Despite the stirring of these tragic memories, she was smiling by afternoon’s end.
“I met a lot of wonderful Japanese people. They gave me their names, addresses, phone numbers,” says Ash, a former star of the Yiddish theater.
“Where would I have met these people if not for here?”
On a scrap of paper, she has written one word in five different languages: Mir (Russian). Béke (Hungarian). Euva (Japanese). Shalom (Hebrew). Peace.