![]() Profound terror shook me as I gazed at my baby boy lying in his bassinet beside me, and obsessive thoughts went through my mind – what if we were being hunted? What if boots were pounding up the stairs to our room? Where would I hide? What would I do if he cried? What if I had to give him up in order to save his life? Even as I looked around my little house in beautiful Newburyport, part of me was living in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War Two. When Ari was born, however, those feelings came back. But slowly I returned to normal, and I thought I had moved past the reaction the movie had caused me. For days afterward I couldn’t sleep, images of the movie haunting my imagination, a feeling of fear permeating my being so completely that I didn’t know what to do. But this movie somehow clarified the degradation, the humiliation, the slavery, and the pointless sadism that the Jews endured under the Nazis. I had read plenty of books, heard lots of stories, some even first hand. Of course, I knew about the horrors of the Holocaust. I can’t even remember any specifics of what I heard now, but I can very clearly recall lying in bed with my heart pounding, experiencing equal parts guilt for not having had to suffer as they had, and horror at what they went through.ĭecades later, while I was pregnant with Ari, Danny and I watched the Holocaust movie Schindler’s List. But the fear they elicited stayed deep inside me. Since I wasn’t supposed to be listening, I never spoke about these late-night reminiscences. The adults would put my sister and me to bed and then stay up talking about “the war.” But of course I was still awake, and listening, and could hear all kinds of scary things. When I was a young girl, we would sometimes drive up to Montreal to visit my father’s parents, Melly and Genek, whom I called Boma and Saba. It was deeply troubling and very strange. Despite the thousands of miles and more than fifty years of time separating my family’s traumatic wartime experiences from that of Ari’s birth, I found myself reliving the trauma. He had lived through World War Two as a young child in Europe. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. No, I was terrified because I was caught in a waking dream, that of a parallel universe, one in which I had given birth in a different time and place, in which an unspeakable horror was in store for me and for my child. My husband, Danny, was a bit scared in that way, but for me even the waking up at night to feed baby Ari was a cakewalk compared to the stress-filled, sleep-deprived years of my residency. Feeding and caring for my sturdy little son was not difficult for me. I had already taken care of hundreds of newborn babies, many of them premature or sick. And I don’t mean just the regular “oh my God I have a newborn what do I do” type of terrified. ![]() We were newly settled in a lovely community. ![]() Danny was working as a psychiatrist in a local practice, and I had four months’ leave before I would be starting work in a pediatric practice. Ari’s room held a light-colored wooden crib and changing table and a pretty lamp his aunt had painted for him, and sported a good-sized window which looked out onto a leafy street. We had just moved into a little carriage house in Newburyport, and had fixed up the smallest bedroom as a nursery. I could see Ari was a strong and robust baby. As a pediatrician I had more experience than most new moms. I really was not an overly anxious new mother. He had arrived ten days after his due date, pronounced healthy, and after four days at Newton Wellesley Hospital his father and I drove him home, me sitting beside him in the backseat because, like every new mother, I was worried he would stop breathing back there and who would know? But I only did that the one time, then I sat up front like a normal person, confident Ari would survive the car ride. It was the spring of 1997, and I had a newborn baby.
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