I Want You to Know We're Still Here

by Esther Safran Foer

  My mother was actually Passover famous: She’d once taught Martha Stewart, on national television, how to make matzo balls. It was a segment meant to promote the 2012 version of the New American Haggadah, which Jonathan edited, and he had suggested that instead of talking about the book, he bring his grandmother along to give a cooking demonstration. In the green room, before the show began, she told the staff that she had survived Hitler, only to have them quip, “Well, then, you can survive Martha.” And she did, to rousing audience applause.

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  Between the many Passovers, and in the margins of the car pools and the homework and the meals and the bills and all the rest of the minutiae of daily life that was both wondrous and mundane, I continued, on the side, to conduct my search. And although I managed to keep pulling the thread forward in incremental ways, there were no major breakthroughs until our middle son, Jonathan, took the project on himself.

  As a rising senior at Princeton, Jonathan needed to come up with a topic for his thesis. He also hoped to spend the summer with a friend in Prague and was looking for a way to achieve both goals. I’m not sure how many ideas were floated, but I suggested going to Ukraine to see if he could find the family that hid his grandfather during the war. It was, of course, what I wanted to do, but I didn’t have the courage back in 1998.

  Jonathan was intrigued and I started working on logistics, putting together everything I could think of that might help with his mission. I made no less than forty copies of the picture of the family that hid my father, so that he could pass them out in Trochenbrod and in neighboring villages. I found maps of Ukraine in English and Ukrainian and marked the key shtetls he needed to visit, including Trochenbrod, where I thought my father was from, and nearby Kolki, my mother’s home. In addition to supplying Jonathan with Ziploc bags, I sent him off with a dozen rolls of black-and-white film to document his journey. I felt that the photos he would take on this trip ought not to be in color, perhaps because that way they would mirror the few photos that I already had from this place, but also, without delving too deeply into my own psychology, black-and-white seemed more appropriately somber.

  He was going to need a guide in Ukraine, so I put Jonathan in touch with Mark Talisman, the former vice chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, who was connected to a Jewish tour agency in Prague and could help him find a translator and a guide.

  Although my mother knew that Jonathan was going to be in Prague for the summer, we didn’t tell her about the other aspect of his trip. There was no way she’d be able to get her mind around the idea of her grandson going to Ukraine; to her it was the darkest place on earth, where the unspeakable had happened and, in her mind, could happen again.

  That Bert and I encouraged this trip didn’t mean we weren’t worried, too. This was 1998, pre-cellphone days and before the world was wired for Internet, so for the five days he was in Ukraine—in this remote, often fraught corner of the world—we couldn’t communicate with him. We called his roommate in Prague, Itamar Moses, to check in periodically, but he had not heard from Jonathan, either.

  Jonathan began his travels by seeking out his grandmother’s shtetl in Kolki, which was not difficult to find given that the town still exists and is on modern maps of Ukraine, albeit without any Jews. He wanted to go to the mass grave where members of our family were buried. At first, no one could remember where the grave was or how to get there—only that it was deep in the forest. Then finally someone remembered that a group had recently come through, inquiring about the mass grave, evidently hoping to dig up gold teeth. Like something out of a dark fairy tale, there was an old woman who had shown them the way. Someone managed to find her, and Jonathan and his guide followed her into the forest, where they located the grave.

  Before Jonathan left, the town’s librarian gifted him a booklet on the history of Kolki, written in Ukrainian. She inscribed it with the message “Don’t forget us.” Months after Jonathan’s safe return, by which time my mother knew of his trip, she read the booklet and observed that it never mentioned that the shtetl once had a sizable Jewish population. It was as if Jews had never been there at all.

  * * *

  —

  Trochenbrod, or where Trochenbrod had once been, proved more difficult to find—a journey that Jonathan re-created in his novel to hilarious effect. After stopping everyone they could find along the way, he and his guide finally managed to arrive in what was Trochenbrod, only to discover there was quite literally nothing there. Even the roads leading to where the Trochenbroders once lived were gone.

  Before Jonathan left, I had asked him to bring me back something for my memory jars—stones, dirt, anything. He said there was nothing there, not a wall, not a brick, not a nail, no indication whatsoever that this once-Jewish town had ever existed. When I asked him what he brought back, his message to me was: “There is nothing there to bring back; there is nothing for us.”

  In a sense, the fact that Jonathan couldn’t find anything gave him permission to invent. He filled in this hole with fiction, and the fiction ultimately helped to produce fact. In this unexpected way, he not only put Trochenbrod back on the map, but he brought home a piece of my father to me.

  Everything Is Illuminated, the fictionalized story about life in the shtetls of our ancestors, became an international bestseller and was published in more than thirty languages, awakening worldwide interest in Trochenbrod. Although nothing factual about the past was actually illuminated in his novel, it became the key to finding people who had information that would begin to unlock some of the deepest secrets of my family’s past.

  People with connections to Trochenbrod began to contact Jonathan and me—often to praise his book, and just as often to tell us what he got wrong. There were those who were outraged because they felt that the fictionalized account of Trochenbrod desecrated the memory of their town. Of course, many others were thrilled, including survivor Betty Gold, who now lived in Cleveland. She had written a memoir, Beyond Trochenbrod: The Betty Gold Story, and Jonathan’s book gave her a platform to talk about her experiences in newspaper and TV interviews.

  Then there was a call from a guy named Avrom Bendavid-Val, who left a message saying he knew the real story, and if I wanted to learn more, I should call him back. I didn’t return the call for several years. I’m not sure why, apart from that I was inundated at the time. Family members have since suggested that maybe there was some other reason that I didn’t reach out to him, some latent fear, perhaps, of what I might learn from someone in a position to really know, but, honestly, I think I was simply busy. I’d been receiving a huge number of calls in the wake of Jonathan’s successful book, not all of them friendly, and I wasn’t eager to engage with yet another person who was possibly calling to complain that my son’s work of fiction took some liberties with fact. But when I finally did speak to Avrom, he became an important part of the journey.

  Even after the initial wave of interest generated by Jonathan’s book subsided, I continued to meet people who, sometimes very unexpectedly, added pieces to the puzzle. In 2004, at Jonathan’s wedding to Nicole Krauss, Emily Kaiser, who was there as the date of Jonathan’s childhood friend Stewart Ugelow, mentioned that her family came from Kolki; she wanted to introduce my mother to her grandfather, Philip Kaiser, who had been the former ambassador to Senegal, Hungary, and Austria. We arranged the meeting months later, which took place at the stately apartment of Phil and his wife, Hannah Greeley. We entered through a long gallery that led to a residence every bit as grand as one might imagine an ambassador’s home would be. My mother was treated like royalty. There was a guest book open to a page that said, “Lunch in honor of Ethel Kaplan,” and she was presented with flowers. The ambassador broke the formality by introducing himself as Pinchas Mayer, startling his oldest son, Robert, a journalist who served as managing editor of The Washington Post, who had never heard his father use his Yid
dish first name. Over lunch at a large mahogany dining table, my mother held her own and didn’t seem the least bit intimidated by any of this grandeur or by being in the presence of an ambassador. One thing she was eager to tell Phil was that his Kolki-born father, Moishe Bear, had been the one to offer to sponsor her immigration to the United States, when he saw a list of survivors that included the name Bronstein. She explained how she wrote back to him that she was not his niece Lifsha but actually her half sister and how he had replied, “It doesn’t matter,” that he would still sponsor her. My mother told Phil how she eventually connected with her aunts in Washington but that she never forgot Moishe Bear’s offer and was glad that she could finally tell his son about it.

  Robert filmed the luncheon, and Phil’s niece Sarah Kaiser Hyams transcribed a recording of the meeting, as well as all of the interviews subsequently conducted over the course of a year by Robert’s wife, Hannah Jopling, a PhD anthropologist. Sarah worked at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, opening up yet another new channel for information.

  The lunch marked the beginning of a long friendship and a new branch of the family tree. My mother and I were even invited to a Kaiser family reunion. We were the only link to their cousin Lifsha. Until hearing the story from my mother, they hadn’t known what happened to Lifsha and her two daughters. At the reunion, there was a blown-up photo of Lifsha playing a balalaika.

  In 2007, after considerable diplomatic and political pressure, documents held by the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, were finally made available to the public through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This included information on millions of individuals, including my parents and me. When Sarah trained on the system, she used our names for the instruction exercise and found more than thirty documents. Sarah sent me scanned copies of the yellowed file cards that tracked our movements after the war. She also spent time going through the documents with me and helping me decipher them. Some were DP-camp records of our transfers from one camp to another, as well as health and work records and some general background information on my parents’ movements during the war. The documents listed not two but now three different birthdays for me. Even though I didn’t learn much new from these documents—that third birthday seemed an innocuous mistake rather than another deception—getting them was a gift.

  The next wave of connections stemmed directly from babysitting duties. Our son Jonathan and his then-wife, Nicole, who is also a successful author, were asked to speak at international book festivals, and Bert and I were occasionally invited to come along and watch our grandson Sasha.

  Our first stop was Brazil, where there is an annual book festival in Paraty—a beautiful small colonial town on the southeastern coast, with well-preserved buildings on its pedestrian-only streets. One of the attendees handed Jonathan a business card on which he had written a note: “My family comes from Kolki.” His name was Marcos Chusyd and he lived in São Paulo. As usual, Jonathan passed the card on to me—by this point, he had moved on to his next book. I followed up, and after lots of back and forth we figured out that we were third cousins, from a branch of my mother’s father’s family that she didn’t know survived.

  From Paraty, we all went on to Rio. My mother had sent me off with contact information for Natan Kimelblat, who had come from Trochenbrod and had worked with my father in Lodz. “If you get a chance you should see him,” she had said. Her suggestions usually paid off, and in this case, at least he was easy to find. This Trochenbroder had made it big-time as a prominent businessman: One of his jewelry stores happened to be right in the lobby of our hotel, the Copacabana Palace, an iconic Rio landmark.

  With six-month-old Sasha in tow, Bert and I went into the store, and I told the staff that I wanted to leave a note for Natan. Although I was always eager to forge ties with family, I didn’t want to take away too much of our precious short time in Rio; I was mostly hoping to appease my mother by telling her that I’d tried. But the store manager seemed to sense the importance of our visit and asked us to wait while she called the main office. The next thing I knew, I was on the phone with Natan. He immediately understood who I was and said he was sending a car to pick us up. This wasn’t part of the plan, so I told him I needed to check with our family about schedules and make arrangements for Sasha. Finally, I called back and said yes.

  Later that afternoon, a car and driver pulled up to the Copacabana Palace, with Natan’s brother, Itzhak, inside. In Yiddish, he started to tell me about my father and the business they had in Lodz. Although my own Yiddish was limited, I managed to piece together what he was saying.

  As soon as we arrived in Natan’s office, he looked at our wrists and scoffed, “Schmatas!” We were wearing cheap travel watches, and the next thing we knew we had quality Natan watches strapped to our wrists, perhaps the more appropriate timepieces with which to absorb the forthcoming revelations. These brothers had lived in Lozisht and had known my father and his family, including Choma, my father’s half sister, who had gone to school with the brothers and married into the Kimelblat family. Both brothers had been part of a group of Trochenbrod partisans. They escaped the massacre in the village by hiding and then joined a Russian partisan unit in Belarus, where they carried out a number of heroic missions and were wounded. Later, they were recognized as war heroes.

  After the war, the brothers went to Lodz, where they connected with my father and for about six months were partners in the so-called delicatessen that fronted what they confirmed to have been a money-changing business. These are the same men who posed in the pictures with my father in front of the business. Whenever someone questioned my father’s right to own this business, he sent Itzhak, who now used a cane because of war injuries and had a chest full of war medals, to meet the general in charge of determining who had the right to which businesses now that most of the original owners were dead. My father figured sending a war hero was their best chance of hanging on to their establishment. Itzhak told me he asked my father what to say, and my father simply said, “You’re a smart guy—you’ll know what to say.” Whatever he said must have worked; they kept the business and the currency flowing.

  About halfway through the meeting, Natan invited his two daughters, Jane Rose and Miriam, who worked with him in the jewelry business, to come to his office to meet us. I recognized Jane Rose right away: She had been sitting directly in front of Bert and me a few days earlier at Jonathan’s presentation in Paraty, and we had even talked to each other that day, without making the connection.

  This was becoming quite the family reunion in Natan’s office, and it turned out to be the first of many such visits. On a later trip, I visited Itzhak at his apartment in Copacabana, away from the beach. Frank has visited him separately there twice, as well. Each time we spoke to the brothers, we learned a little more. It was an important lesson. You need to listen, absorb, and then find an opportunity to go back and ask more questions.

  Itzhak also sent me a copy of the book that he and Natan wrote about their partisan war efforts, for which they were fêted and given medals by the Brazilian government. Originally self-published in Portuguese, an English-language version that he sent later includes a picture of Bert and me and our children; the Kimelblats describe us as their “American family.”

  On my next trip to Rio, Miriam Kimelblat took me to see her father for what would turn out to be the last time. Gazing out onto the sea from the balcony of his expansive oceanfront condo, which was filled with pictures of his children and grandchildren, he said touchingly, “You brought Trochenbrod back to me.” He died the following year. A few years later, the business, one of the largest jewelry chains in Brazil, went into bankruptcy.

  Back in the States, I finally connected with Avrom Bendavid-Val. He wasn’t kidding when he suggested, in the message he had left me a few years earlier, that he knew the real story of Trochenbrod. Avrom, a Trochenbrod descendant, had visited for the first time in 1
997 and then returned thirteen times and counting. Now he was enlisting me to help organize a reunion of Trochenbrod descendants, to be held in April 2008 in Washington, D.C. Settling on a location was easy enough: It had to be Sixth & I, the place that I ran, with its numerous unexpected ties to Trochenbrod.

  There were close to 150 people from all over the country in attendance, including Sixth & I’s board leaders and fellow Trochenbroders Shelton Zuckerman and Bob Kogod, my three sons, my mother, my brother, my nephews, Betty Gold from Cleveland, and Trochenbrod descendants from Seattle, Chicago, New York, and lots of places in between.

  Avrom prepared a presentation of the vanished town we were there to remember. The final slide was of an empty field, faintly marked by a parallel set of trees and a tractor trail—all that was left after the Nazis killed all but a handful of Trochenbrod’s approximately five thousand Jewish inhabitants (which at this point included Jews who had gone east to escape the Nazis) and the Soviets then razed the town.

  “The first time, I have to admit, I didn’t know quite what to make of it,” Avrom said. “When I went there, I could see the traces of the main street, and I was very emotional because that’s where my father came from….I had to go back, and I had to find more.”

  By the end of the reunion, after tears and hugs, and with a few of the original Trochenbroders even connected to the gathering via telephone from senior-living facilities, there was talk of a group trip to Trochenbrod. Descendants who were now living in the United States and Israel would travel together to see for ourselves what was there and to bring memories of Trochenbrod back to life.

  Someone created a video of the U.S. gathering to share with our fellow Trochenbroders in Israel, who had been well organized for years. They even had their own building, Bet TAL: Bet means “house of”; TAL stands for “Trochenbrod and Lozisht.” They also had a website and regular gatherings, which were easy to organize given the country’s relatively small size. The foundation for Bet TAL was laid by the early Trochenbrod Zionists—Trochenbrod had been a kind of Zionist hotbed, a place where parents were eager to send their children to Palestine—and then later supplemented by a group of partisans who survived the war. The key to the community’s long-term viability was the genius of buying a piece of property in a place called Givatayim, which is close to Tel Aviv, and building a small synagogue so there would be a central place to gather. Income generated by renting out some of the extra space in the building is now used to fund gatherings and has even defrayed the cost of travel to Trochenbrod.