Storytellers, Moving Online, Broadcast The Past

A grandfather who left his homeland, vowing never to return, and a grandson who visited that place to reconnect.

On Monday night, Saul Fussiner told his story as part of Storytellers New Haven, hosted by Karen DuBois-Walton.

The series usually runs out of ConnCAT on Winchester Avenue. With the help of Baobab Tree Studios on Orange Street, the series drew dozens to its YouTube streaming, keeping the connections that stories can create healthy and strong during the Covid-19 pandemic. (Social worker Amy Joy Myers also told a story; please watch the video above to hear it in its entirety.)

Saul Fussiner’s grandfather Joseph was a ​“very mysterious man,” Fussiner said. ​“I learned 40 years after his death that his real name was Jacob.” He learned that from Israeli cousins. ​“For some reason, he changed both his first name and the spelling of his last name when he came to the United States in 1914.”

He left his family in Poland to come here. Fussiner held up a picture of him with his three siblings who died in the Holocaust. ​“All of the children in this picture died in Auschwitz in 1941, and they were between the ages of 10 and 18,” he said. The stepmother is the only person in the picture who didn’t die in Auschwitz, because she died of a heart condition before the German invasion of Poland.

Fussiner’s grandfather lived in a town near Bialystock, Fussiner said, ​“but my father never knew that because Joseph was so determined that the family should never return to Poland that he wouldn’t tell the family where he was from.” Fussiner recalled his father asking if the town was near Warsaw, or Krakow. ​”I told you before: It was nowhere,” his grandfather replied.

Fussiner became a teacher of Holocaust studies at New Haven Academy, and now teaches at ECA. Both his grandfather and his father died. Fussiner became interested in going to Poland. He and other teachers and students were part of a program that toured Holocaust sites, but also ​“the places where Jewish culture happened” — synagogues, or ​“oftentimes now restored parts of town” where the synagogues and Jewish neighborhoods once were.

The group toured Poland in a bus, ​“and because there had been incidents in the past we had a Polish Catholic security guard to protect us.” The man, named Tomek, was bald and tattooed, and put stickers on the bus’s gas cap and luggage compartments so they would know if either had been tampered with. ​“He was the world’s greatest security guard,” Fussiner said, and because he was Catholic, ​“my grandfather would not have trusted” him. His grandfather, after all, was from the Polish countryside, where the Catholic farmers had been worried enough about Russian invasion to look at their Jewish neighbors as foreigners.

“But now we were being protected, this group of Jewish Americans, by this Polish Catholic security guard,” Fussiner said. He finally bonded with Tomek over the instant coffee provided on the trip, which Fussiner ​“hated.” Tomek noticed. Fussiner knew no Polish and Tomek little English, but they managed to talk about food they did like. ​“I like bigos but I can’t eat too much or I become bigos,” Tomek said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag of Turkish coffee clipped with a paper clip. ​“From now on, you come to me and we drink this coffee together,” Tomek told Fussiner.

They met over breakfast in hotel lobbies. When they got to Lodz, ​“there was a Polish film school walk of fame,” Fussiner said. Fussiner ​“had been the president of my film school in college” and recognized many of the names.

“You know Polish film?” Tomek said. ​“You must see this film, The Promised Land.” He tried to explain why, Fussiner said, but his English failed him. Fussiner rented it from Best Video when he got back to New Haven. It turns out it’s about Lodz before the Nazis came. It centers on three characters — a Polish Catholic, a German, and a Polish Jew, who all own factories and remain friends through everything.

Fussiner also visited a Jewish cemetery in Lodz. ​“The graves for the ghetto dead are just sticks,” Fussiner said. The graves from before the war, however, were beautiful, inscribed with Hebrew letters. The cemetery was neglected and overgrown, ​“but you can see they were grand graves, and you can see how they must have been accepted,” Fussiner said. He came across the mausoleum of Israel Poznanski, a Jewish industrialist, as grand as anything in the cemetery. ​“And I saw this symbol for a time when if you were Jewish you could still be accepted.”

He stood there regarding it, ​“and I felt a presence come up behind me.” Fussiner said. ​“But I didn’t look back. And I heard a voice say, ​‘this is my history too, Mr. Saul. We share this history.’” It was Tomek.

Fussiner still didn’t look back. Neither of them moved. ​“When two people are staring at this fixed point on the horizon,” Fussiner said, ​“it’s as if they are staring directly at one another.”

“This has been a beautiful evening of telling,” DuBois-Walton said at the end of the Q&A after Fussiner’s story. She hoped that those who had tuned in had enjoyed themselves, managed to “slow down a little bit, shut out some of the noise,” she said. She encouraged those who might be interested in telling a story to contact her. “It is as simple as agreeing to do it,” she said.

The next installment in the series is planned for Monday, June 8, at 6:30 p.m. It will be streamed again.

“I almost forgot we were in quarantine,” said Kevin Walton, who had been running tech at Baobab, when DuBois-Walton thanked him for his help.

“Covid will pass. We will be together again,” DuBois-Walton said. “But until then we will continue to connect virtually.”