I Want You to Know We're Still Here

by Esther Safran Foer

  Shortly after Avrom returned, he came over to my house to discuss the trip. Both he and Anna were convinced they had located the descendants, and he wanted to personally present the findings. We looked at the photos on a big television screen. The resemblance was certainly impressive, but I nevertheless remained skeptical. As Anna put it, they were 90 percent certain, but that last 10 percent was up to me.

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile, I was hearing details about the forthcoming Bet TAL trip to Ukraine. I knew that I had to get on the plane and confirm that final 10 percent myself.

  Once the trip became a reality, Bert and I started to look at logistics. He understood, perhaps better than me, that I would need emotional support. He offered to accompany me, but he felt the trip would be more meaningful if I shared it with one of our sons—it was, of course, their story, as well.

  I learned years later that all three of my boys were concerned about how I would handle the trip, fearful that I might be slammed by some sort of emotional tsunami. Frank volunteered right away, and he was the perfect companion. As a journalist, he knew the trip would be interesting, but on a personal level, although he might not have realized it then, he was also searching—for his family’s history and for the grandfather he had never known.

  Frank was, at the time, the editor of The New Republic, and he had recently written the book How Soccer Explains the World. Naturally, he was going to do his own research before embarking. He began contacting scholars at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He also reached out to Timothy Snyder, a prominent historian and author who teaches at Yale, to get more information on the obscure villages of Lysche, where my father and his family had lived, and Chetvertnia, the ghetto where my half sibling was murdered.

  I began to do my own reporting, as well, some of it formal, some of it impromptu—such as the time our friends Jonathan Cuneo and his wife, Mara Liasson, a political reporter for National Public Radio, were visiting. We spoke as their son played on our floor, digging into our stash of toys. Jon is an antitrust lawyer who had worked with Bert, and he’d recently been the lead counsel on a case involving what was known as “the Hungarian Gold Train.” This concerned a train that had been stopped in Austria by Americans in 1945. It was en route to Berlin, and turned out to contain stolen Jewish property ranging from paintings and jewelry to rugs and various valuable personal items—virtually none of which was returned to the families. Jon had won restitution for the Holocaust survivors from the U.S. government. Because of his recent involvement in the subject, he was intrigued by my family history, and he told me stories about his own parents, who had both worked in intelligence activity during World War II—his mother for the British and his father for the United States.

  I showed Jon the photographs I had received from Anna in Ukraine to get his opinion on whether he thought there was a match. He suggested I get a professional investigator to take a look and recommended contacting the Academy Group, which was made up of former FBI agents, people with whom he had worked. What a great idea, I thought. Why mess around with my own amateur sleuthing when I could go to the FBI?

  I put in a call the next morning. The receptionist transferred me to Peter Smerick, who had spent more than twenty-five years at the agency as one of the FBI’s four experts in forensic photography and criminal profiling. After I explained my story, former agent Smerick informed me that he charged $250 an hour and I would probably be wasting my money because it was unlikely that he could tell me anything definitive based on what little I had. I was undeterred. If I was about to go all the way to Ukraine, I could take my chances on a trip to Manassas, Virginia, to see what I could learn from a former FBI forensic-photography expert. I felt the money would be well spent.

  On Friday, June 26, about six weeks before my trip, I took the day off from work and drove about an hour to the Academy Group. Peter showed me around his office, which was furnished with framed awards and newspaper clippings of major investigations he had handled. He had profiled David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and had testified before Congress about that. He had been involved in the case that inspired the movie The Silence of the Lambs. He seemed particularly proud of “the Freckle Case,” in which he identified a murderer who had been on the loose for eighteen years by mapping the moles and freckles on the perpetrator’s hands. Smerick told me he was of Ukrainian descent, so he was sympathetic to my mission of finding this Ukrainian hero who had saved a Jew during the war. We spent an hour together, comparing the pictures Anna had copied from the house in Krynychne, and the picture that my mother had given me.

  We used a crosshair magnifier and a measuring stick to compare distances between facial features. We measured distances between eyes, ears, lips, noses, and earlobes, which Smerick said can be unique identifiers. After close examination, he identified specific features of the rescuer in my picture: He had short eyebrows, elongated ears, and unusual eyeballs.

  So, what did we have? He said that he couldn’t honestly conclude that the people in both pictures were the same. I was disappointed, hoping for a positive confirmation so I could resolve my mystery. There was a dramatic pause, and then the former FBI agent added that he also couldn’t say that they weren’t the same people.

  Knowing I was soon going to Ukraine, he gave me advice on what to look for when I got there. I should try to look at originals of the photos and hopefully compare more pictures that the family had. He urged me to try to do some of the same measurement exercises we had performed in his office on the original photos, and he showed me how to do this without his equipment. I should try to assess the angle at which the picture was taken, for example, because that impacts facial features. He told me to ask where and why various photos were taken. And, most important, he said, if I couldn’t get a perfect identification of the faces, would be to look at the clothing people wore in the photographs. My picture had been taken in Ukraine, presumably in the early 1940s, a time and place when people didn’t have large wardrobes. People likely had a set of special clothes that they wore for important occasions, including having family photos taken, he said, so this would be another thing to compare.

  Frank asked his colleague Leon Wieseltier, an author who was, at the time, literary editor of The New Republic, to meet with us before the trip. Leon, also the child of Holocaust survivors, had recently been on his own Ukraine trip. He tried to manage our expectations, telling us that all he’d hoped for, and ultimately all he really got, was the opportunity to walk the roads and breathe the air of his ancestral shtetls. In the end, he said, that was enough. But he did mention a detail that stuck with me: He had brought with him a copy of his book Kaddish and left it behind, explaining to his befuddled guide that he wanted to leave a piece of himself in this place where his family had come from.

  During a dinner at around the same time, I wound up in conversation with an old friend, Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s former national security adviser. I told him I was going to the Ukraine and he startled me by saying, “No, you’re not.”

  He went on to explain that I was going to Ukraine, not to the Ukraine. The country had been at one time the Ukrainian Republic of the Soviet Union, which, translated, means Borderlands. The country did not want to be referred to as the borderland. This was useful advice. I suppose you might say that I had the national security adviser involved, as well as the FBI.

  * * *

  —

  I had collected a lot of useful background material as well as good advice, but I wasn’t quite ready yet. In addition to the photographs, I needed good maps. I remembered that on our visit to Ambassador Phil Kaiser’s apartment in 2005, I had spotted a framed old map of Kolki in the hallway. It was so detailed that you could literally see every house, as well as the river and the handful of streets, and it brought the place alive for me. Phil told me that his sister-in-law had copied it from a map she’d seen at the Library
of Congress. Now I asked to borrow it so that I could make my own copy.

  When Jonathan had gone off to Ukraine in 1998, I went to a map store, an establishment that has since been driven out of business by the Internet and the advent of navigation systems. I had purchased a few maps and circled the two shtetls he was going to visit, Kolki and Trochenbrod.

  Now, roughly a decade later, the map store was gone, and so instead I was off to the Map Room of the Library of Congress in the Madison Building, armed not only with the various names of the shtetls I had known about in 1998 but also with new, key information about additional shtetls I had identified in my research.

  As with everything about this subject, the more I learned, the more complicated the story became. When Jonathan took his trip, we had all been surprised that he was going to Ukraine rather than to Poland, which is where my mother had reported her family lived. That said, she never thought of herself as a Pole. It had been confusing at the time, but now I understood why. This is a part of the world that changed hands eight times between 1914 and 1945: It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then Russia, Austria, western Ukraine, Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany, the Soviet Union again—and now it was Ukraine. My parents’ neighbors had been Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, mixed with the various occupiers, including Russians and Germans. The shtetl names had changed, too, depending on the occupier. I needed all of this information as I searched for maps. My father had grown up in Trochenbrod, but the shtetl had also been called Zofjówka in Polish, Sofiyevka in Russian, and Trokhymbrid in Ukrainian. For my mother’s town, the name changed only slightly from occupier to occupier and resident to resident. Her town is Kolki in both Russian and Polish, and in Yiddish and German it’s Kolk.

  Even without these challenges, one could spend a lifetime burrowing in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress; there are more than 5,000,000 maps, 80,000 atlases, and thousands of other items including globes and plastic relief materials. I spent hours doing computer searches and going through the old-fashioned file card catalogs and was able to find and print dozens of maps of the region from the various occupiers, including Poland, Austria-Hungary, and even Germany, with all of them marked in the appropriate languages.

  In order to ensure I had the right places, I plugged in the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates. It was fascinating to be able to track the growth of the shtetls over the years and to see the changes made by the various occupiers at the same time that the geography remained largely the same. I loved studying the maps and copied as many as possible during the hours that I was there.

  The two most important maps that I found didn’t come from the Library of Congress or the Internet but had been handmade by people who lived in these shtetls. One was created by survivors of Trochenbrod. Sometime after their arrival in Israel and before their memories began to deteriorate, Trochenbrod survivors gathered in a room of their beloved Bet TAL, in Givatayim, in suburban Tel Aviv. They sat in the room arguing about who had lived where on the long straight road through Trochenbrod that veered off to form Lozisht. After a day of heated arguments, they finally agreed on a map showing where they and all of their neighbors lived, which was ultimately printed, with each resident’s name in both Hebrew and English.

  The second map is one that I drew with my mother to try to figure out where our family had lived and to record the names of the neighbors and the location of the river and the market, in hopes that it would help me navigate Kolki when I arrived. My mother had never learned to drive and didn’t have the best sense of direction, so I wasn’t sure how helpful our hand-drawn map would be, but it was still infused with the sort of detail that no one else could provide.

  A month before leaving for Ukraine, Bert and I were in Paris, and I made an appointment with Father Patrick Desbois, the founder and head of Yahad-In Unum, whose headquarters were in the city.

  Yahad-In Unum’s offices were, at the time of my visit, in an unmarked building on a major street in Paris. They have since moved just outside Paris, for security reasons.

  Bert and I sat with Father Desbois for about an hour, talking mostly about how to plan my upcoming trip to Ukraine. His advice was priceless: He told me to be relaxed and to keep my questions simple, to ask people to focus on stories about life in the village and about their families. Otherwise, he warned, they might be on guard, worried that I had some other objective, like reclaiming family property that had been lost during the war. He also suggested that we return and interview people a second time, that in his experience people often remembered new things the next day. And he warned me, ominously, that Lutsk, the city where my parents had met and where my hotel was located, was the most anti-Semitic part of the country—“two hundred percent anti-Semitic,” in his colorful words. He offered to put me in touch with his translator and his bodyguard, which I considered, but it turned out that his contacts there spoke better French than English. Besides, I already had Anna Kurnyeva lined up, and she was invested in my story and had even arranged for her father to be our driver. Ultimately, I decided against hiring a bodyguard. Father Desbois was well known for his work, and he was a controversial figure in Ukraine. I figured that no one would know, or particularly care, who I was.

  There was one other important bit of preparation before buying airline tickets and embarking on this trip: I had to find a way to tell my mother. Ukraine was where all of her family was killed by the Nazis, while neighbors watched and sometimes helped. She had no desire to ever return and couldn’t understand why anyone else would want to visit. Although we hadn’t told her about Jonathan’s trip until he was safely home, it would be more difficult for me to simply disappear for ten days. Plus, I didn’t want to lie to her.

  My concerns about her reaction were not overblown. “How can you do this to me?” she screamed.

  I tried to reassure her by explaining that I wasn’t going alone, that Frank was coming with me, but this only compounded her horror. “You’re taking your son! He has babies!”

  Once she realized I wasn’t going to back down, she tried another tactic. She urged me to take a good book and stay in my hotel room.

  “There is nothing to see there,” she said.

  I thought this was going to be her last word on the subject, but she wasn’t quite done. When she finally accepted that I was going, she advised me to stay with the group. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said.

  9

  Frank and I had cleared our schedules, given a commitment to the Bet TAL group, and done our homework. Still I kept stalling; I couldn’t bring myself to buy our tickets, even though I knew that the longer I waited, the more I would pay.

  I was anxious about this trip, even after telling my mother that I was going. In my world of secrets and things unsaid, I was probably also anxious about what else I might find.

  In addition to all of this, I am a nervous flier. The choices for airlines that flew into Lviv were limited; I’d never heard of most of the carriers and I was determined to avoid Aeroflot, which I’d flown in the late 1980s out of Leningrad/St. Petersburg. While I obviously lived to tell the story, the bolts meant to secure my seat to the floor of the plane had come loose, and I could feel myself rattling around as we flew.

  After researching options, the best choice seemed to be an August 12 Lufthansa flight from Dulles, with a layover in Munich the next day. Now that we had an itinerary for our journey and had learned what we could about the history and geography of these shtetls in Ukraine, it was time to get down to basics: what to actually bring. I tried to pack light, even though I was advised to take extra items, such as toilet paper, soap, and flip-flops for the shower, all of which proved unnecessary. My one luxury—apart from a bunch of granola bars stuffed into my bag—was bringing my own pillow. Whatever else happened, I wanted to be able to sleep well.

  Then there was the question of gifts. I wanted to bring something to the family we woul
d be meeting, the one in the photograph. Some suggested I just bring cash, which I did, but that didn’t strike me as appropriate. I wanted to give them something tangible—but what? One friend suggested serving utensils, something attractive yet practical that could be used regularly at meals and would remind them of our connection. This struck me as a good idea; I began looking in department stores and on the Internet and finally located some Ralph Lauren pieces that I liked. There was an appealing symbolism: Ralph Lauren is the son of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants, not to mention an American success story, a man who even designed uniforms for the U.S. Olympic team.

  Spoons were meaningful to me for another, more personal reason, as well.

  When Sadie, my first grandchild and my mother’s first great-grandchild, was born, we talked about what my mother should give her. My mother, a woman who took a pair of scissors and a winter coat with her in the middle of the summer when she fled her shtetl, is above all practical. Her first thought was to give a gift of money, to start saving for the baby’s future. I suggested there would be plenty of opportunities to help financially and that she instead find something more meaningful. Together we decided on one of the silver spoons my parents had brought from Germany, a gift rich in both personal and historical terms.

  We put one of the silver spoons into a shadow box, along with a picture of me with my parents and a handwritten note from my mother that read: “I brought this silver spoon with me from Europe and am giving it to you, Sadie, with the hope that you will always have a silver spoon in your mouth.”

  This is a gift she repeated for her eldest grandson, Sasha, as well. While the Ralph Lauren serving spoons were not themselves imbued with this bit of history, they were nonetheless a gift that for me had deep meaning.