I Didn't Tell Them Anything

By Jill Cousins

In one of Lee Shapiro’s earliest memories, she is three-and-a-half years old, and she’s on a train. Lee has no idea how her family got on that train, but it was stopped at the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria, which was heavily guarded by Russian soldiers. The year was 1945, and Lee – then known as Aleena – was with her parents Mundek and Rozia Rieger, two uncles, and three cousins.

The Riegers were fleeing from their hometown near Kraków, Poland. World War II was over, but when the family came out of hiding, they found that Jews were not welcome there. Their town had been destroyed. Their friends and family were dead. Lee’s mother would later tell her that the few Jews who remained in the town were subjected to severe anti-Semitism.

“Why are you here?” residents would ask. “You’re all supposed to be dead.”

Lee’s father decided it was best for the family to flee. That meant traveling from Poland to Czechoslovakia and crossing what was becoming known as the Iron Curtain into Austria, which was free from Eastern European rule.

“My family had to escape,” Lee says. “But how do you do that?”

The group made its way through a forest and somehow got on that train. When it stopped in Bratislava, at the border, Soviet soldiers came onto the train to interrogate passengers. This is when the family’s preparation would be its saving grace. The Riegers had heard that only Greeks were being allowed to cross the border because there was a civil war in Greece, and the Soviets believed that those Greeks who had been in Eastern Europe would support the Communist cause.

So the Riegers, who spoke several languages (but not Greek), decided they would pretend to be Greek when confronted by the Russian soldiers. Since they didn’t speak Greek, the Riegers spoke to each other in Hebrew, which – to the soldiers – could have been Greek. When the soldiers couldn’t get through to the grownups, they decided to snatch little Lee for questioning.

“The Soviets turned to me and said, ‘She’ll tell us the truth!’ And they picked me up and carried me off the train,” Lee recalls, “and they interrogated me.”

Before she was taken off the train, Lee looked at her mother, who put her finger gently to her lips. Lee knew what she had to do.

“I didn’t tell them anything,” Lee says. “Every question they asked me, I just said, ‘Mama!’ After half an hour, they brought me back to my father, and they said, ‘You can go.’ After that, everyone in my family treated me like I was their savior.”

After a few years in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany, the Riegers would arrive in the United States in 1948, settling in Chicago. Even though her parents rarely talked about their experiences during the Holocaust and after WWII, the story about Lee’s bravery at the train station would become legendary within her nuclear family.

Lee, who moved to Orlando from Manhattan in May 2020 with husband Richard, would eventually write a book about her family’s story. It is titled, naturally, I Didn’t Tell Them Anything.

“My parents never talked about the Holocaust, for a number of reasons,” says Lee, a retired attorney who is now 79. “One was because my mother was so ill [Rozia, who changed her name to Rose, was institutionalized for several years after the family arrived in the U.S.], and once she got better, a lot of her memory had been erased. Also, my father [who changed his name to Murray] was worried about bringing her memories back and making her ill again, so he kind of banished all talk about his early life. I think he just felt that he had to    go forward.”

So, Lee grew up not questioning her parents, but she knew, eventually, she would be the one who had to tell their story. First, Lee would go on to attend the University of Michigan, where she met law student Richard Shapiro at a Hillel mixer. The couple married in 1963, and after Lee received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Ann Arbor, the Shapiros moved to Long Island.

Lee worked part-time as a teacher and did public relations for local politicians while raising daughters Debbie and Randi. When Richard started his own law practice, Lee became his secretary. Then, at age 36, Lee decided to go to law school at New York University and would eventually start her own law firm in Manhattan.

It took the tragedies of 9/11 to finally spur Lee to write her memoir. Shortly after that tragic day, Lee – who by then was living in New York City – was walking around with Randi, noticing all the photos posted throughout the grim, desolated city. The photos all had captions: “Have you seen this person?” “Do you know this person?”

At one point, Lee saw a poster that made her stop in her tracks.

“I said, ‘Oh my God. This is like the DP camp in Germany,’” Lee recalls. “It took me back to my five-year-old self, when all the DPs, the refugees, the Jewish survivors were desperately looking for their loved ones who might still be alive. The bulletin boards had pictures with the same kind of things.”

Suddenly, all the stories that had been hiding in Lee’s memory for more than 50 years began to surface. By this time, both of her parents had passed away, so Lee no longer had to protect them. Also, by that time, Lee had become a grandmother and knew that one day her grandchildren would ask about her story.

Lee originally planned to write only a 20-page narrative for her grandchildren. But as she did the research to include accurate historical background, the story grew into a full-fledged, 200-page memoir, which was finally published in 2015.

“During the course of growing up, I heard bits and pieces about my mom’s history from both her and my grandparents,” says Lee’s daughter Debbie Hoffman, who lives in Orlando with husband John and children JP and Summer. “I was overwhelmed with emotion after reading the book. There were many passages that were simply never discussed or shared. It was probably just too painful to talk about in my grandparents’ lifetime.”

Debbie says she always thought of her mother as a “brilliant, dynamic, beautiful woman, wife, and mother,” but now she also views her as a true hero and warrior.

Lee, who calls herself a “quintessential American girl,” hopes that her story simply inspires others, particularly in regards to their views of immigrants who long for a better life in this country.

“I have created a good life,” Lee says, “not just for myself, but for my family, and I like to think we have contributed to the community at large, and my daughters and grandchildren continue to contribute in so many different ways. And we might not have had the chance, we might not have been here, if there had not been good people who supported us and permitted us to come here for freedom and a better life.”