I Want You to Know We're Still Here

by Esther Safran Foer

  By coincidence, I was scheduled to go to Israel two weeks after the reunion, and Avrom asked if I would hand-deliver the video to an Israeli Trochenbroder. The trip was another babysitting assignment, this time to the Jerusalem International Writers Festival at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, where we all stayed and where the festival took place, overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. The location was magical; with my grandson Sasha, now two, I explored the city parks, especially the fountains, which he could run through naked.

  After we settled in, I called my Israeli Trochenbrod contacts, Chaim and Mira Binenbaum, to hand off the video. They offered to meet me where we were staying. They mentioned that they wanted to come to Jonathan’s talk but had been unable to get tickets to his presentation. I assured them that if they came, I would find a way to get them in. They arrived early that afternoon so we would have time to talk first. Chaim is the Trochenbroder, and Mira, his wife, is passionate about Trochenbrod stories and volunteers at the Yad Vashem’s research center. When they heard about my own interest, they offered to take me to meet some of the oldest Trochenbroders still alive, including a ninety-five-year-old former partisan who now lived in Haifa. Jonathan encouraged me to go, saying there was no point in waiting until my next trip to interview a ninety-five-year-old Trochenbroder. He gave me a day off from my babysitting duties.

  Mira arranged the meeting for the next day, my last full day in Israel. She and Chaim picked me up in Jerusalem, about forty-five minutes away from their home in the Judean foothills, and then drove to Haifa for our meeting, which is normally about another two hours on the main highway. What none of us realized was that this wasn’t going to be a normal day. It was May 15, and then-president George W. Bush was in town, causing traffic jams with ripple effects just about everywhere in this small country. We made it, eventually, using the Israeli mother of all navigation systems, Waze, to detour through back roads. It nevertheless took us several hours to get to the Haifa home of the spry Chaim Voitchin. It turned out he was not just any old Trochenbroder but one who had lived in Lozisht, which meant he might have known my family.

  Before we set out that morning, I’d called my cousins who lived in Haifa, Sara and Rafi Bisker, to let them know I was on my way to their city. Sara and their oldest daughter, Gili, met us at Chaim’s, where he welcomed all five of us warmly into his bright walk-up apartment. He described himself as a writer and occasional stand-up comedian.

  I asked him questions about my father, Louis, or Leibel, Safran. I showed him the maps of Trochenbrod and Lozisht, pointing out our family’s home. Even though it was near where he had lived, his face was blank. I tried again, showing him the map, pointing out where my grandmother had lived, one house away from her sister-in-law Sosel Bisker.

  He stared at the map for a minute and then something clicked. “Ah,” he said at last, “I was married to Raizel Bisker,” and then added quietly, “but no one knows.”

  We all took a moment to absorb this startling information. Were we correctly understanding that this ninety-five-year-old man was nonchalantly disclosing the existence of a wife about whom no one—or presumably no one living—knew? It wasn’t the first or last time that I heard about these other families, the secret families before the war that no one talks about, my own family included.

  There was even more to come: I asked if he had known Choma, my father’s half sister. “Ah, dus is a mynse,” he said, which translates into, “Now, that’s a story!”

  He and Choma had apparently been close friends and confidants, and he knew that she’d been romantically involved with a man who was already engaged to a girl from another shtetl. Choma got pregnant, according to Chaim, and had an abortion. Her parents then arranged to marry her off to an alter bokher—an older guy. Chaim had the whole story. Choma’s boyfriend married the other woman and eventually moved to the United States and had children.

  This was fascinating, but it made no sense. If Chaim knew Choma, how did he not know my father? Again, finally, it clicked. “You mean Leibel the Lyscheter!” he said. “He used to come visit his mother all the time.”

  I had been asking the wrong question—or at least asking my question the wrong way. In Trochenbrod, no one used last names. They all had nicknames. My father wasn’t known as Louis Safran or Leibel Safran. He was Leibel from Lysche. Leibel was his Yiddish name, and Lysche was the village that he lived in after Trochenbrod. I’d also failed to account for the fact that family life could be messy. My grandmother, by this point, was no longer Brucha Safran: She had remarried and changed her name to Kuperschmit. This meant that my father’s half sister was Choma Kuperschmit. No wonder it took a while for Chaim to understand what I was after.

  It had been a remarkable meeting. Before we left, Chaim asked for a kiss from me and my young cousin Gili. Gili and I gave him a peck on each cheek at the same time.

  After the meeting, we went back to my cousins’ ultramodern apartment on the top of Mount Carmel, overlooking Haifa Bay. Mira, absorbing all of this new information, started working the phones, calling other Trochenbroders. After some initial warm-up chitchat, she would ask whether they had known my father, Leibel from Lysche. The first few calls didn’t produce anything. Finally there was Nachman Roitenberg, who told Mira, “If I don’t know him, no one does,” the implication being that he knew everyone in the shtetl—but then, after a beat, he said, “You know, I think that Fanya Rosenblatt might know him.” Perhaps Nachman didn’t know my father, but I realized later that in a 1947 photograph of Trochenbrod survivors, he is standing right next to him.

  It was now about 8:00 P.M. We were driving back to Jerusalem from Haifa when Mira asked if she should try to reach Fanya.

  “Absolutely,” I said, despite the fact that it was getting late and I had to be at the airport at 5:00 A.M.

  “Of course!” Fanya said, when Mira reached her by cellphone. “Of course I knew Leibel from Lysche!”

  And so we detoured, this time to Bnei Brak, a center of ultraorthodoxy on the central Mediterranean coastal plain, just east of Tel Aviv. Strangely, I knew of this place because the name appears in the Haggadah, in the Passover seder. It is where Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Akiva, and Rabbi Tarfon discussed the Exodus all night, until their students arrived to tell them it was morning and said to them, “Rabbis, the time for reciting the morning Shema has arrived.” And now here I was, going to Bnei Brak at night to unearth whatever memory might be possible about my own family’s exodus.

  Unbelievably, hours later, Bush’s visit was still creating travel headaches. Again, Chaim used Waze and we crisscrossed our way along back roads. We drove for at least another hour before arriving at Fanya’s house, a little after 9:00 P.M.

  We were barely inside the door when she pulled me aside and asked, “How did this tragedy happen?” She was referring, of course, to my father. How she knew about his suicide, I’m not sure. We fell into each other’s arms in her tiny hallway and both cried, out of sight of Mira and Chaim. She asked me to come back and spend a few days with her in her house. How I wish I had. The next time I visited her, she was descending into Alzheimer’s.

  I remember being impressed by her; my notes describe her as a “classy lady.” She had a lovely garden out front; inside, the house was neat, and her dining room was lined with walls of books. Included in her impressive collection was a book written by Fanya’s husband, Gad Rosenblatt, who, along with our new acquaintance Chaim Voitchin in Haifa, had been one of the Trochenbrod partisan heroes. They had served in the same unit as Itzhak and Natan Kimelblat, and all had survived. Gad had just died six months earlier.

  Fanya was the first person I met who had known my father before the war, apart from his cousins. Like him, she had ties to Trochenbrod but had lived in a small village nearby, called Chetvertnia, which was right next to Lysche, where my father and his family lived. In contrast to all-Jewish Trochenbrod, there had bee
n only a handful of Jews in these villages.

  I hung on her every word. She described my father as a “chevra man,” a person who could make friends, or do business, with anyone. She pointed to her coffee table and said, “If Leibel were here, he could even make friends with the table.”

  This was definitely consistent with the father I had known—friendly and charming, despite the darkness inside. I loved hearing this, but it also made me ache. I wanted more. I wanted to excavate every detail from her that I could.

  “Can you tell me anything more about him?” I pleaded.

  “He could do anything with his hands,” she said, which was unsurprising. I knew this from my childhood, and it also made me think of our youngest son, Josh, who had inherited this trait.

  Hesitantly, I finally asked her the question I’d been carrying around with me since that day in my mother’s pink kitchen. Did she know anything about my father’s first wife and child?

  “Tzipora,” she said. “That was the name of his wife.”

  Did she know about the daughter? I was on the edge of my seat, on the verge of learning the name of my sister, at last. But it was not to be. She knew Leibel and Tzipora, she said, but she couldn’t remember anything about their child.

  * * *

  —

  The details of mass murder of the Jews in Chetvertnia has been well documented by Yahad-In Unum, an organization founded in 2004 and led by Father Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest who has devoted his life to chronicling these massacres, collecting evidence and interviewing eyewitnesses.

  Yahad estimates that between 1.5 and 2.2 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust by bullets. No one knows the exact number, and we probably never will, because there were few survivors. These numbers are based on witness interviews and forensics done at each of the mass graves. Yahad-In Unum, which means “together” and “in one” in Hebrew and in Latin, is dedicated to locating and thoroughly documenting the mass graves of Jewish victims of the Nazi mobile killing units—the Einsatzgruppen—in the former Soviet republics. Father Desbois’s work has been sanctioned by the pope, recognized and encouraged by the president of France, and supported in Europe and the United States.

  Witnesses told the Yahad team that there were about 120 Jews in the ghetto in Chetvertnia, including those from Chetvertnia, Lysche, and several other rural villages. The Germans had arrived in the village at the end of June or early July 1941 and forced the Jews to wear yellow badges, presumably Jewish stars. In December 1941, all of the Jews of Chetvertnia and those rounded up from the neighboring villages were confined to a ghetto that was behind barbed wire and were forced to do hard physical work.

  The ghetto was liquidated on October 10, 1942, two months after the Jews were murdered in Trochenbrod and Kolki. Fanya said they knew about what had happened in Trochenbrod, but they somehow thought, or at least hoped, they would be spared because they were doing forced labor, which was mostly farm work, and were in an out-of-the-way rural ghetto.

  How did my father and Fanya escape being murdered? I asked. Although I knew the answer, or at least the partial answer, I found that by asking the same question of different people, I was often able to collect new details.

  Fanya said there were only three survivors from the ghetto: my father, Srulach Zilberfarb, and Fanya. I had heard bits of the story and knew my father was with someone else, but at that time I’d never heard Srulach Zilberfarb’s name. As I knew, my father and Srulach had been on a Nazi work detail when the Jews were brought to a pit and shot. Now Fanya told me that the morning of the mass murder, her mother saw soldiers stationed outside and sensed that something bad was about to happen. She convinced Fanya to hide inside the sofa, by which she presumably meant that she buried herself under the cushions. She survived; the rest of her family, her parents and siblings, were murdered, as were my father’s wife and child and Srulach Zilberfarb’s family.

  A witness to the murders told the Yahad team that he had been nearby, with his grazing cows, when the Jews appeared in a line, their hands tied with rope. One German brought them to the pit, he said, and then made them undress completely before climbing down into the open grave, where another German shot them.

  A couple of meters from the pit was a table and chairs, and the Germans would take breaks, fortifying themselves with food and liquor for the next round of executions. Local police participated, as well. Another witness reported that, after they finished, the grave moved for days. There were some who survived, for a time, beneath the earth.

  Fanya, Leibel, and Srulach found one another a few days later and met in the dark on a bridge in Chetvertnia, late at night. Leibel told her that he and Srulach were hidden together briefly by a family that Fanya described as “not typically Ukrainian.” She wasn’t sure what happened to my father or Srulach after that. Fanya hid in the forest until a Ukrainian she knew found her a job as a housemaid. She took a false identity and worked for a German who did not know she was Jewish.

  This was the first time I had met someone who had been with my father during the war. I was overwhelmed and exhausted, and it took me a while to process what she told me. Honestly, all these years later, I’m still trying to make sense of it.

  While we were sitting in her living room, Fanya tried to find contact information for the family of Srulach Zilberfarb, with whom she was very close. His son and daughter-in-law lived in Israel, she said, along with their sons. I met them on the next trip.

  Armed with all of these important new clues, I knew that at last I had to go to Ukraine.

  But, first, I had a bit more digging to do.

  8

  More than seventy years after Trochenbrod’s destruction, its story was still being told. New bits of information continued to emerge. The fictionalized shtetl was brought to the screen in 2005 in a motion picture based on Jonathan’s book. Three years later, my friend Avrom, along with filmmaker Jeremy Goldscheider—another Trochenbrod descendant—decided to tell the real story of the shtetl in a documentary.

  Avrom and Jeremy were looking for sponsors to help fund their project. I stepped forward with a contribution and a request. I sent Avrom a copy of the picture of the family that we thought hid my father and told him the name of the village, Lysche, that I had learned from Chaim and Fanya on my recent trip to Israel. Lysche was close to Trochenbrod—or what had once been Trochenbrod—where their crew was going to be filming. I asked whether they would be willing to show the picture to local residents, to see if they could find someone who might be able to make sense of it.

  Avrom, along with his young translators, Anna Kurnyeva and Sergiy Omelchuk, and Jeremy and his film crew went to Lysche, a village that is now called Krynychne. As soon as they reached the village, they began to show the picture to the various small groups that gathered to see what was going on; a film crew descending on this remote village was hardly the norm, and they attracted a fair amount of attention.

  It didn’t take long to make a connection: An old woman with a scarf wrapped around her head took a look at the picture and recognized my father right away, telling the crowd, “That’s Davyd and Leibel.” She knew my father’s name as well as the name of the other man and the man’s daughter, Katarina. She wasn’t sure who the second woman was, but she had no doubt about the others. Then, remarkably, she told the Americans and their translator that Davyd’s grandson, whose name was Mycola, still lived in the family home, just down the road.

  Avrom, Jeremy, and their entourage headed straight to the house. Mycola, whose last name they learned was Lishcuk, and whose grandfather was Davyd Zhuvniruck, lived by himself. Although they didn’t learn much from their conversation with Mycola, they had the opportunity to look around the house and to zero in on the many photographs on display in the main room. They compared my picture to the ones on the wall and took photographs of my photo beside them. They were all convinced that this was for real,
that these were the same people.

  I started corresponding with Avrom’s translator Anna and asked her to make contact with Mycola’s sister, Nadiya, who was now the family matriarch, and his brother, Victor, a physics teacher. I had so many questions that I didn’t know where to begin. Were there more pictures? Did they have a match to the picture that I had? Who had lived in the house during the war? What did they know about my father and his family? Was there anyone still alive who had lived in the house during the war and who knew what happened?

  I learned that Nadiya’s mother, Katarina, who was in my picture, had died. Nadiya agreed to look for other photos that might exist from that time, but she wasn’t hopeful; unfortunately, she explained, she had a specific childhood memory of her mother putting a bunch of old photographs inside the drawer of a table and then setting the table on fire. This was astonishing; photos were a luxury back then, and there were very few of them. Why would she want to destroy them? I had a theory. I remembered a detail from the story my mother had told me about the man who had helped hide my father, that he had suggested, after the war, that my father return to the village to marry his daughter. Perhaps burning the photos, if this story was true, was the result of the perceived rejection.