I Want You to Know We're Still Here

by Esther Safran Foer

  The deli, such as it was, gave free drinks to local police and other authorities, I discovered from one of my father’s partners, to keep local officials lubricated and on their side. And the business that propped up the business was so successful that my father and his partners had a Jewish cobbler carve out the heels of old shoes as a hiding place for money and valuables. They used old shoes only so as to be less conspicuous—they didn’t want to draw attention with any suggestion of prosperity. I often wonder if this made my mother think of Pesha’s shoes.

  I learned most of this from Itzhak Kimelblat, whom I met several times in Rio and whom Frank was able to interview separately on a couple of trips to Brazil. The Kimelblats came from Trochenbrod, or actually from Lozisht, our particular “suburb” of Trochenbrod. The map of the shtetl shows them living across the road from my grandmother Brucha’s house. Itzhak told me that he went to school with Choma, my father’s half sister, and that Choma married Itzhak’s cousin Shai Kimelblat, which made us almost family.

  When I first met him in Rio, Itzhak was nearly ninety, fit, stylish, and equipped with a phenomenal memory. I asked him about the business the Kimelblats shared with my father and several other partners, and he said nonchalantly, “Oh, you mean at Seventy-eight Piotrkowska Street?” I searched for the address online—and there it was: the street and the building. I recognized it immediately as the backdrop of pictures of my parents along with their business partners, including Itzhak Kimelblat and his brother, Natan. It’s an elegant old building, with beautiful architecture, located on one of the most magnificent streets in Lodz. Today the street is bustling with cafés and bookstores and shops.

  I also learned that this had been the 1887 birthplace of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Today there is a plaque on the building and, outside it, a life-size bronze figure of Rubinstein seated at a grand piano.

  Across the street, at 77 Piotrkowska, is a former mansion and bank that once belonged to another successful Lodz Jew, the banker Maksymilian Goldfeder. Now it has been transformed into a club. The street is lined with mansions, banks, and textile factories that were once owned by other murdered Jewish industrialists. At one point, the largest building in the heart of Lodz was the “Great” Synagogue, which was burned down by the Nazis in 1939, along with the rest of the synagogues. There’s another chilling reminder of the city’s history: During World War II, the street was briefly renamed Adolf Hitler Strasse.

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  The business my father and his partners created required quick thinking; they had to memorize fluctuating exchange rates and be able to convert currencies without the aid of calculators. These guys from Trochenbrod may not have had much education, but they were shrewd. I sometimes thought of this as I watched my mother holding up the line at the CVS register, counting her coupons, running the numbers through her head to make sure there wasn’t a mistake.

  Given my mother’s wartime heroics, her cross-continental journey made largely on foot, and her ability to intuit the dangers ahead, it’s not hard to imagine her as a successful associate in the family’s shadow trade. She told me she once traveled to Kiev with gold coins strapped clandestinely around her waist. My father told her where to go, gave her the address and the names of the contacts. I’m not sure if she was trading currency for gold or vice versa. She had one close call on the train, when a man tried to pick her up. She was terrified that his advances might lead to him touching her and finding the secret belt of gold, but she managed to extricate herself somehow. Anyway, mission accomplished. I assume this took place before I was born and that after I arrived she gave up these sorts of gutsy missions, but, knowing her, I can’t say for sure.

  From what I now know about our time in Lodz, my parents engaged in their deli–cum–currency franchise for about a year and a half. And even though Itzhak helped fill in many details of this period, he and Natan were in business with my father for only a few months. There were other partners who came and went, as evidenced by the pictures outside the deli where my father poses with a changing cast of characters. In one photograph, Itzhak and Natan wear the war medals they received for fighting as partisans, Itzhak still nursing war injuries that have him leaning on a cane.

  Other landsmen came through Lodz, looking for whatever family they could find, including my father’s first cousin Gadia Bisker. When I met Gadia in Israel many years later, he bragged that he had been my first babysitter. My parents helped him get back on his feet, bought him new clothes and shoes, but apparently he was not all that eager to find real work, much to my father’s frustration. It’s not hard to imagine how he might have lost his will. He was the only one of my father’s cousins to survive the massacres in Trochenbrod. Gadia’s sisters and their families, as well as his mother, were all killed, probably alongside my own grandmother and Aunt Choma.

  Two of Gadia’s brothers had left before the war. Shmuel and Yehoshua Bisker were among the Zionists from Trochenbrod who went to Palestine in the mid-1930s, and Gadia was focused on getting out of Poland to join them, which he did, eventually. After the war, more than 70,000 Jews arrived illegally in British Palestine on more than one hundred ships that picked up refugees who had moved through Europe by foot or in disguised vehicles to ports along the Mediterranean Sea. Not everyone made it: Many more refugees were stopped by British patrols and sent to internment camps in Cyprus.

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  My parents may have managed to begin a family, to run a business, to wear fashionable-looking boots, but there were constant reminders that this was not where they were meant to stay. Between 1944 and 1946 there were a series of anti-Semitic incidents in Poland, occurring at a time of general lawlessness and civil war against the Soviet-backed Communists. And, it was increasingly clear that the “iron curtain” was going to make it difficult to leave. Itzhak said that a young girl sent by Brihah (which literally means “to escape” and was the name of an organization that worked to get Jewish refugees across closed borders from Europe to Palestine) came to their store one day and told them it was time to get out of Poland.

  Itzhak and Natan, both young and unencumbered, made their way through Europe to Italy and ultimately to Rio, where they had relatives. Once in Brazil, Natan began life as a peddler and went on to build one of the largest jewelry chains in the country, launching a brand of watches bearing his name. My husband, Bert, still proudly wears his Natan watch today. In fact, Natan arrived in the country shortly after two other Jewish immigrant jewelers—Hans Stern and Jules Roger Sauer—who were also fleeing persecution; all three built major international brands.

  We stayed in Lodz a little longer. Escaping for us was complicated because I was a baby. But there were constant reminders that we needed to leave, including individual assaults and pogroms, such as the one in Kielce, on July 4, 1946, where forty-two Jews were murdered and many more injured. It was time to get out.

  When I was close to six months old, in August or September 1946, we finally left Lodz. We had to employ some spycraft to slip away undetected. My mother traveled light, packing only a few things, and told her neighbors that she and I were going away for a few days. My father went to work as usual. At some point during the day, my father said that he was going out for a break, or maybe he said he was running an errand. He never returned.

  They met up at a designated location, where they had arranged transport from the middle of Poland to the middle of Germany and then to a displaced-persons camp in the American zone. My mother remembered a covered truck with a false bottom, which was where we hid for part of the journey. Among the things she packed were some small silver Kiddush cups, called becher in Yiddish, but along the way she started throwing them out, afraid of being caught with them if we were stopped. Knowing what I know now, I’m sure there was money or gold stuffed into the heels of shoes or in the linings of their clothing, and possibly other valuables hidden, as well—all easier to d
isguise than bulky silver cups.

  The biggest challenge, my mother said, was traveling with a baby. She had to stuff cloth into my mouth to keep me quiet as we made our way through dangerous territory. We traveled this way from Lodz to Berlin, which on a direct route was about three hundred miles. Today, on good roads in a modern vehicle, the trip would take about five hours, so I can only imagine how long and harrowing our journey was. My mother recalled few details, apart from how awful she felt having to gag her child. It’s probably just as well that she couldn’t remember more; surely these were not memories to preserve—apart from that we made it.

  5

  You see what you want to see, or maybe what you need to see, in a photograph, and for much of my life I would look at the pictures from the almost three years we spent in Germany and see all the signs of a normal family life. There I am, mugging for the camera, perched on my tricycle. And in another photo, looking adorably overwhelmed in my too-big, fluffy white rabbit-hooded coat. And there are my parents, fashionably dressed again, surrounded by friends, seated at an outdoor picnic. To see them you might think they are at a backyard barbecue, characters in a Cheever story, masking their suburban ennui with smiles.

  Look closer. In the background there are watchtowers, run-down barracks, and a barbed-wire fence. We were exiles. Stateless. People without a country. In Hebrew, we were She’arit Hapleta—the surviving remnant. We were displaced persons, and, accordingly, we were assigned to live in a displaced-persons camp.

  The DP camps, where most Jewish refugees ended up after the war, are often a forgotten epilogue. The very existence of these camps is referenced only in passing, if at all, in the otherwise vast body of Holocaust literature, even though nearly 300,000 Jewish survivors passed through these camps in Germany from 1945 to 1950. Scholar Margarete Myers Feinstein, in her 2010 book, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957, shares an amusing anecdote about this frequent omission: At the end of the film Schindler’s List, a Soviet officer arrives on horseback at the gates of a labor camp and tells the surviving Jews they are free to go. The film then fast-forwards some fifty years; the liberated Jews are now seen striding across the hills in Israel. But what happened to them in between?

  By the summer of 1945, Jews who had survived concentration camps, or had managed to hide, or had joined up with the partisans, or had survived in the Soviet Union, began arriving in Germany, viewing it as a stop on the way to a better life. The Allied plan was to repatriate the refugees to their home countries. For Jewish refugees, though, this wasn’t an option; not only were their homes gone and their families murdered, but in many cases the local population—their former friends and neighbors—had aided in their persecution. Understandably, they refused to go back, and no other countries wanted them. Palestine was closed to legal immigration at that time, and even the United States had immigration quotas that favored non-Jews. Virtually every option for emigration out of the graveyard of Europe was closed.

  Hundreds of DP camps were established, not just in Germany but also in Austria and Italy, and they housed some 850,000 people that, in addition to Jews, included Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Greeks, Russians, Ukrainians, as well as others.

  Accommodations were largely improvised. On one end of the spectrum, a DP camp was set up in a castle; at the other end, in a former concentration camp.

  Any available edifice had to do, including children’s summer camps, concentration camps, hospitals, private homes, and army barracks or POW camps.

  Camps were often filthy, reflecting poor preparation by the Allies, plain negligence, or, in more than a few cases, outright contempt for the Jewish refugees. Basic necessities such as underwear, shoes, toilet paper, and toothbrushes were in short supply. Some refugees still wore striped pajamas from the concentration camps, and—just as horrifying—others were given German SS uniforms to wear. There were reports that refugees were provided with less food per day than German prisoners of war had received.

  The war may have been over, but that didn’t mean sentiments had entirely changed. In some camps, German police, some of them ex-Nazis, were put in charge. There were reports of anti-Semitism among some of the American soldiers stationed at the DP camps, as well. Not to mention their DP-camp cohabitants—in the beginning, some Jewish refugees were living beside the same Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, and others who had collaborated with the Nazis.

  Two Jewish U.S. Army privates who were stationed in Germany in 1945, Edward Herman and Robert Hilliard, discovered the terrible treatment of a group of Jewish DPs at St. Ottilien, a camp run in the American zone by the U.S. military. Hilliard ultimately wrote a book about their experiences, titled, appropriately, Surviving the Americans. In Bavaria, St. Ottilien was the site of a hospital that was set up by the survivors themselves—a group that included several doctors who had been prisoners in concentration camps—because no medical facilities were being provided by the U.S. military at that time. Thousands of Jews were still dying from weakness and disease and were not able to find any medical help, other than from fellow Jewish survivors.

  These two young GIs smuggled whatever food they could carry, such as powdered milk and eggs, from their mess hall to the nearby hospital DP camp, where they found sick and emaciated patients who were not getting any attention. They recruited other GIs to help smuggle the food past the American military police, who were under orders not to let unofficial supplies in. Despite the American presence, the local civilian governments often had the same people in control as had been under the Nazis.

  In frustration, these American Jewish privates crafted a nine-page letter describing the horrors of what they were witnessing and accusing the American people of genocide. “By your unconcerned neglect,” they wrote, “you are just as responsible for the present death of the European Jews as the most diabolical of Nazis was in the past. No, you scream! Well, yes, we scream, as do thousands of Jews in Europe who are today destitute, without food, shelter, clothing, or medical aid.”

  They sent copies of the letter to anyone they could think of who might be able to help and asked recipients to forward the letter to others, especially to influential political leaders and Jewish organizations.

  One of their letters, it was reported, eventually reached President Harry Truman, who had already asked Earl G. Harrison, head of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a former commissioner of immigration, to personally investigate the conditions of the DP camps. Truman asked Harrison to also look into the charges in the letter and to check out these two GIs, to understand their background and possible motives. Harrison even visited Hilliard’s mother. They must have passed muster.

  Harrison reported back on August 1, 1945, that conditions were so grim that “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.”

  This led to a front-page article in The New York Times on September 30, 1945, under the headline PRESIDENT ORDERS EISENHOWER TO END NEW ABUSE OF JEWS.

  The worst situation was reported to have developed in southern Germany in the camps under General George Patton. Patton wrote in his diary that he believed the Jewish DPs were “a subhuman species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our times.” Patton was relieved of his command by General Eisenhower, and President Truman appointed an adviser to the military with sole responsibility for the camps. Jewish chaplains were also important in prodding the military to treat the refugees more humanely, as was pressure from relief workers. It all took time—too much time—but conditions began to improve.

  From what I can piece together, our family made its way from Lodz to a camp in Berlin, where we must have been for just a short time. Then, as some camps closed and others opened to accommodate the large number of people flowing west, we moved a couple of times before winding up in a former military barracks in Ziegenhain.

  Ziegenhain is a beautiful medieva
l town, which included a camp built by the Nazis to house their POWs. François Mitterrand, who was later president of France, was among the early inhabitants.

  By 1945, Stalag IX-A Ziegenhain’s population included more than a thousand American POWs, many of whom were captured at the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944. Jewish POWs were routinely singled out by the Germans, and many of them were sent to labor camps. But there are stories of heroics. In January 1945, the Germans announced that all Jewish POWs were to report the following morning. The highest-ranking American at the POW camp, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, who had been a prisoner for about one hundred days, ordered all of the Americans—Jews and non-Jews—to report and stand together. There were more than one thousand Americans standing in wide formation in front of the barracks, with Sergeant Edmonds positioned in front.

  “We are all Jews,” Edmonds told the German officer in charge. The German took out his pistol and pointed it at Edmonds. Edmonds refused to give in. “If you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us, and after the war you will be tried for war crimes.” Remarkably, this worked: The German officer walked away.

  After the POW camp had been liberated in March 1945, Stalag IX-A Ziegenhain became Internment Camp 95 and was used by the U.S. Army to hold Nazi soldiers until mid-1946.