Don’t Mess with Mrs. Hirsh

Michael Hirsh

I buried my 96 year old mother Lisl Zuckerbacker Hirsh after a short hospitalization for a neurodevastation event last week. The support I have gotten since her passing has been wonderful. Friends, colleagues, and strangers have deluged me with condolences, cards, texts, flowers and donations in her name. I am so grateful for all these well-wishes.

There is never anything good to say when someone passes away- but the consensus statement that most people arrive at when they see a nonagenarian has left us -“Well, she had a good long run”. Chronologically that is true. But my mother and I knew better.

Lisl Zuckerbacker was born on May Day, May 1, 1925 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna Austria where they were totally assimilated into Viennese life- season tickets to the Opera, attending public school, no Jewish education or upbringing so to speak. Her Dad was a leather goods store owner, her Mom worked in the store And helped do the books. Her Dad was a WW1 veteran. My daughter and I discovered his Iron Cross received as a combat medic in WW1. In many ways they thought of themselves as Viennese above all else.

Then came the Anschluss and the institution of “Nuremberg-like”restrictive laws for Austrian Jews. Mom was expelled from her school. The same friends she played with one day were throwing roses at the open limo of Adolph Hitler as he triumphantly returned to his native land. Then they wrote “dirty Jew” on her school desk the day she came to clean out her things.

Grandpa Carl Zuckerbacker thought perhaps this would blow over. He was Vice Chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Vienna and there were many who felt the same. But Kristallnacht changed all that. He was hauled off to the dungeon in City Hall on 11/9/1938. Interrogated and beaten by the Gestapo he made a vital decision. If he got out of prison, he would send my Mom and her older sister Trudy away in the Kindertransport refugee trains that he had been hearing about. On Dec 5 1938 he was released from prison. December 10 1938 he bade goodbye to his two daughters at railway station. Trudy and Lisl were to be housed in a displaced persons school for kids in the Netherlands. From 1938-1942 they were shuttled from school to detention camp to foster parent until finally the Nazi occupiers sent these refugees to the transit camp, Kamp Westerbork, in May of 1942.

Mom was one of the earliest denizens of this Kamp. She was immediately taken to the camp infirmary and trained as a nurse to help with the sick at the Kamp. This training saved her life. Her skill set became more and more indispensable as typhus, exposure, lice infestations took root in the Kamp and kept her job security. The Kamp’s purpose was to serve as collecting depot for German, French, Scandinavian, and predominantly Dutch Jews and eventually deliver them by rail to Auschwitz. The Germans were so efficient that they killed 102K of the 133K Dutch Jews alone. Only 800 were left in Kamp Westerbork when it was liberated by the 2nd Armored Division of the Canadian Army on 4/12/1945. The Canadian Army immediately recruited her at age 24 to join their nursing corps. Lisl was then off with her hospital group to help with the medical care of other concentration camp denizens and displaced persons. She had friends in the Kamp she left behind, including her platonic friend Warner Hirsh (my Dad) but her boyfriend had been shipped off the previous September to Auschwitz and ended up dying there.

After the war the Red Cross informed her that her parents had amazingly not only successfully gotten out of Vienna before the war but were living in Brooklyn, NY, USA. Her Dad told her that she could get an easy Visa if she was able to be discharged from the Army before her 21st birthday. That she did and arrived in NJ at the harbor in Hoboken on 4/30/1945.

Her Dad met her at the pier- the chlorine gas of WW1 had taken its toll on him. He was frail and had trouble helping Mom with her steamer trunk. She thought they would take a cab to Brooklyn- but my dear penniless Grandpa took her on a two bus, one subway journey to the 5th story walk up in Williamsburg that her Mom and Dad called home. After dumping off the trunk and exchanging hugs with the Mom she hadn’t seen for 6.5 years she asked to get some air She went up on the roof via a staircase she had eyed when she first got to the Zuckerbacker Apartment. There she had a panoramic view of the NYC skyline and the Statue of Liberty. Then she broke down and cried as she realized all that had been lost from the Vienna days.

But in true Lisl fashion, she put her head down and got a job as a nurse. She rekindled her friendship with other Westerborkers as they trickled into the NYC area. One such individual was my Dad, who like my Mom found out post war that his parents had successfully made it out of Berlin to settle in Washington Heights in NYC. Dad did not want to have anything to do with his old friends from Westerbork when he arrived. But when my Mom showed up at his Dad’s funeral, a spark was lit and Warner and Lisl became an item.

Life was tough in those postwar days for immigrants who weren’t part of the GI bill. My dad’s desire to be a journalist were cast aside once he got his high school equivalency (while in the same class as Henry Kissinger), and he worked as a freight forwarder in the NYC garment district. Mom was working the night shift at Madison Ave Hospital (now defunct). They married in 1950 and I came along in 1954. They truly immersed themselves in raising me up as an All-American boy- public schools, summer camp, baseball fandom, saxophone and tennis lessons. Despite their borderline economic picture, as an only child I wanted for nothing and thrived. Mom instilled in me an interest in medicine that never left me. She was the neighborhood “Mom of All Moms” as she was home during the day when kids/my friends got sick at school and came to my home from school when their parents were all at work. I don’t know how she did it all on very little sleep. She was the neighborhood nurse practitioner and diagnostician. I remember our local GP tell me how impressed he was at her ability to tell who was sick and who was not. She also was one of the earliest moms to drive a car, using two feet on the gas and the brake like she had been taught to drive military vehicles in the Canadian Army.

She was a righteously indignant person whenever she was crossed. She took to heart the Notion espoused by Eli Wiesel that what wounds a person the most is not what the oppressor does, it is what the bystander fails to do. So she got into rows with merchants and cops and teachers and bureaucrats to the extent that in our neighborhood the saying was “Don’t mess with Mrs. Hirsh”.

Those days of 50’s-60’s that took my mom through her 30’s-50’s were tough but wholesome. Family gatherings and getting the reputation for being a superb cook and hostess. Always welcoming my friends even when I started to row crew for Columbia – she would pack 6-10 of them around our Friday Night dinner table and feed these ravenous guys mass quantities of food which I am sure we could not really afford. These dinners always featured discussions of current events, historical events and the dispensation of collective wisdom from both Warner and Lisl that left a mark on College and med school friends alike.

One particular incident in the 60’s that stood out was when my Mom and Dad took in a wayward German immigrant kid of 17 who worked with My Dad at a Metals and Minerals training company and took Ill on the subway on the way home from work. After nursing him back to health he became my quasi adopted big brother Roger. And after he married his wonderful wife Barbara we expanded further.

My Dad was stricken with pulmonary sarcoidosis in the early 70’s and she became his patient care coordinator/advocate and NP until he passed in 2006. This was a tremendous weight on her shoulders but she handled like everything else, with dogged determination.

As my life expanded into marriage to my wife of 42 years,Julianne, and 2 wonderful Kids- Scott 38 and Esty 33 – Lisl morphed into OMA. She had already been acting in that capacity for Roger and Barbara’s ’s beautiful kids, Bruce, 44 and Claudia 41. She was an incredible grandmother. Funny, wise, tough, never shy about sharing her opinions. You would still not want to mess with her.

Just when things seemed to be settling down nicely, Lisl was stricken with another cruel blow- Macular Degeneration. It progressively robbed her of her vision until during the pandemic when she went totally blind. She could no longer work, no longer drive and worst of all no longer read which she used to do voraciously. But her compensation for this malady was simple. She became my dad ‘s legs and he was her set of eyes. They were a perfect Ying and Yang couple in so many other ways. He was soft and always seeing the other side of things – she tough and frequently unbending. But both together were a pair you wanted to hang out with and enjoy. They ran into some outstanding good fortune (finally) when a claim my Dad’s father had placed against the confiscation of his property in Berlin finally was approved and the monies awarded my parents allowed them to move out their tiny Inwood apt. in the northernmost district of Manhattan to a spacious condo in NJ overlooking the NY skyline and the Ramapo mountains of NJ. Dad and Mom looked at this a delayed wedding gift from Grandpa Max whose funeral was 2 years before their marriage and was the place they rekindled their friendship. This move added years to my Dad’s life and great joy for the 12 years they lived there together

Dad unfortunately passed in 2006. Mom soldiered on for another 15 years. She endured cardiac problems and almost died of a heart attack visiting our home in MA. The CCU nurse caring for her the post arrest night lates out the crepe for us. She doubted mom would awaken. But there she was the next morning, a little amnestic but hungry and wondering why she was in the hospital. When the same nurse came in that evening to care for her, she said “Oh, my Mrs. Hirsh, you’re a survivor.” Mom looked over to me and asked “Did you tell her?” Survivor she was.

The Trump administration was a big challenge for her. Charlottesville and The Tree of Life events made her make this chilling statement to me-“I have seen this movie before”. Then the pandemic came and telltale signs of her failing. Falls, periods of delusions when she was transported back to Westerbork. Repressed memories returning from that time. She agreed to give her Holocaust story both to the Leo Baeck Foundation in Austria and to a grad student at Clark doing her thesis on the Kindertransport. This seemed to have a cathartic effect on her.

Despite my pleas to have her move closer to Massachusetts she insisted that she was going to die in the condominium that Warner had given her. So we beefed up her security by providing her 24/7 Home Health Aides who did a wonderful job getting her through the pandemic. But the slow deterioration was inexorable.

All of which made her attendance at my daughter Esty’s wedding this past September all the more astonishing. She came up with a car service and an aide and held court during the reception as so many friends from so many different periods of Esty, Scott Julianne and my life came to kneel beside her wheelchair and talk loudly to her hearing impaired ears to say how good it was to see her and how much they valued those dinners or parties or visits that had brought them into her orbit.

She was extremely proud of having willed herself to make that trip. After that, the delusional episodes appeared more frequently and more dark. On 11/7 she left us after a brief hospitalization. And on the 83 anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night my grandfather made the decision to save his daughters, she joined her beloved Warner in the cemetery plot she had gone to great pains to maintain immaculately.

So when people say she had a nice long run. I thank them and superficially agree. If Mom were here to discuss – she would say “Such is life”. But I know better.

Dr. Michael Hirsh is a Pediatric Surgeon and Peds Trauma/Injury Prevention Specialist. He also serves as the Asst. Vice Provost for Health and Wellness Promotion.