I have an old Parker fountain pen. Its color—bright green stippled with ivory—is turning an ugly dark brown. On the rare occasions when I use the pen to sign some important documents at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I have to make sure it doesn’t leak and leave a telltale stain on the inside pocket it typically occupies, spoiling yet another one of my better suits. The pen, my mother told me, was her birthday gift to my father, Simche Münzer, whom I sadly only got to know through photographs because he was taken from me by the Nazi hordes. He lies buried in the former Ebensee concentration camp in the Austrian Alps.
There are little indentations on the pen’s black cap that look like bite marks. Whose are they? I cannot imagine that they belonged to the pen’s original owner, my father—the always dapper man I have gotten to know through countless photos. Some were taken while he was barely out of his teens and still in his hometown Kańczuga in Galicia, Poland. Others were taken while he was on the way to becoming a successful businessman in The Hague, Netherlands, and the proud head of a beautiful family.
The bite marks are not mine, for sure. That’s one bad habit I never acquired. Could they be my mother’s? It would be so unlike her carefully cultivated persona. She certainly used the pen during periods of stress, especially in the post-war Netherlands. At that point, without the help of her husband, she had to carefully review and sign all sorts of complex license applications that were required by the government to set up a business.
I have other mementos of my father—stacks of photographs, some going all the way back to his days as a dapper young bachelor in his native Kańczuga. There is a sweet cameo photograph with my mother, then his wife-to-be, when they were both in their early twenties. Then there is, of course, a stunning wedding picture of my father in tails and a white tie and my mother in a regal, multi-layered bridal gown, holding an enormous bouquet that I am sure included some of her favorite flowers—carnations. This last photo occupies a place of honor to the left of the breakfront in our dining room. A picture of my partner Joel’s parents, similarly outfitted, sits to the right of the breakfront. Both invariably draw oohs and aahs from our guests.
We also have dozens of family pictures, most taken after the start of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In these photos my father always looks serious, except for in one —a 1930s forerunner of the now ubiquitous selfie—where he smiles broadly as he holds my sister Leah in front of a mirror.
I also have two watches that belonged to my father that I have never worn. One is a fancy gold pocket watch, whose chain my mother adopted after the war and wore with a cameo that had been a gift from my father. The other is a gold wristwatch that needed the band replaced—something I refrained from doing because I thought it would no longer feel like it was my father’s. They both speak of a man eager to show he had come a long way since his days growing up in the shtetl of Kańczuga.
In spite of its odd “QWERTZ” German keyboard, I did use his portable typewriter for some teenage attempts at playwriting and later for many of my term papers at Brooklyn College. It collaborated in the first paper that earned me a proud B- in freshman English—a proud B- because I was still far from fluent in speaking and writing English. The assignment had been to take an article from the newspaper and write about it in the style and spirit of Henry David Thoreau. The topic I chose was the Sunday blue laws that forbade certain activities on Sundays, a day deemed consecrated in the Christian religion.
But of all the mementos—either already or soon-to-be artifacts at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—the pen and I have a special relationship that I am reluctant to end. My mother frowned on amulets, like those that might have been given to poor Jews in her native Galicia by their rebbe when they sought his intervention with the Almighty. Whenever I faced a difficult exam or some personal life challenge or crisis, my mother would put her arms around me and reassure me that my father was standing by me. “Just hold on to the pen as a reminder,” she’d say.
Even without using the pen for the exam, just knowing it was in my pocket got me through the SATs, less than a year after our arrival in the United States, when I had barely mastered enough English to communicate with my classmates. Years later the pen was with me when I had to take the MCAT, an exam that would determine whether or not I would have the medical career I had aspired to since childhood.
As I look at the pen now, I think of all my mother’s stories about my father—all the times she mistakenly called me by his name and how she would smile, shake her head, and point out small gestures she felt I had inherited from him. One example is the way I hold my index finger over my right cheek when lost in thought. This was her way of making my father a constant living presence, not just the man who brought me to tears while she and I stood at his grave high in the Austrian Alps before we left for America.
There is a companion to the pen that I discovered in my mother’s wallet after she passed away: a small passport-size photo of my father, consecrated by a smudge of my mother’s lipstick. Their married life may have been brutally terminated after just ten years, but for my mother, my father’s presence lasted a lifetime. The photo is just a photo, and the pen is just a pen, but the stories they carry will make them worthy citizens among the many artifacts at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Simche Münzer’s pen. Courtesy of Al Mūnzer
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