I Want You to Know We're Still Here

by Esther Safran Foer

  I also remembered what Leon Wieseltier had told us, about leaving behind a piece of himself in the shtetl in the form of his book Kaddish. I thought about this for a while and decided to bring a batch of our Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) cards. I’d been sending these cards since 1990, inspired by a stranger who offered to take a picture of the five of us when we were dressed up and en route to a wedding at the Mayflower Hotel. I turned that photo into a Rosh Hashanah card and began a tradition going on thirty years, which now includes spouses and grandchildren, with the occasional Photoshop intervention required to remove someone who doesn’t belong in the picture. I love looking back at the cards, which chart our family’s growth.

  I remained incredibly nervous as we flew. It was an overnight flight to Munich, which at least meant I passed much of the time asleep. The rest was spent talking to Frank about what we might expect to find. I had brought a list of places, which we reviewed together, explaining the various names of each shtetl and what we knew of their significance to our family story. We were going to join up with the Bet TAL group in a few days, but we also had our own agenda, which included a visit to my mother’s shtetl in Kolki and then meeting the family who had saved my father. Or we hoped it was the family, anyway.

  We also discussed a document I had brought outlining how to have someone officially declared a “Righteous Gentile,” a designation given to non-Jews who put their own lives at risk in order to help save Jews during the Holocaust. These names are entered into a database at Yad Vashem, where a field of trees has been planted in their honor. Assuming this was the family, I wanted to ensure they received this designation.

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  I couldn’t help but note the irony that we were flying back to our ancestral home on a German carrier—that in fact I had chosen this airline for safety reasons—when it was the Germans who had killed almost all of my family. It also struck me as symbolic that our first stop was Munich, even though we were only transferring flights there: Among the photos I’d packed for this trip was one of a 1947 reunion of Trochenbrod survivors, taken just southwest of this city, at the Foehrenwald Displaced-Persons Camp. My father stands in the center of the photo, wearing his suit and tie. He is between Nachman Roitenberg, whom I met in Israel, and my father’s cousin Itzhak Gornstein, who later moved to California and became Izzy Horn.

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  We landed on time in Munich after a smooth flight, but already there was a potential glitch. Our connecting flight to Lviv did not initially appear to be listed on the departure board, and our query was met with confusion by the clerk at the Lufthansa customer-service desk.

  “You mean Tel Aviv?”

  “No, Lviv,” Frank explained. When we showed her the itinerary, she grew puzzled and said she didn’t even know that Lufthansa flew there. After a bit of back and forth, we all realized that the city was listed on the departure screen as “Lemberg.”

  In all of my copious research, I had momentarily forgotten about the various historical names of cities and hadn’t accounted for this particular modern-day twist. Lviv has had many different names in the last century, and in the Munich airport, in 2009, it was listed as Lemberg, which is how it was known during the German occupation in World War II and during most of the nineteenth century, when it was on the eastern outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  From my window as we were coming into Lviv, I snapped pictures of what looked like serene, lush green farm fields. It was easy to see why Ukraine was often called Europe’s “breadbasket” and to forget that it has also been called “the blood lands.”

  The moment we landed in Lviv after the brief, ninety-minute flight, it was evident that we were far from home. In contrast to the spectacularly modern, chaotic airport from which we had departed in Washington, this terminal, with its turrets and wood paneling, looked like it came from another time. Ours was the only plane on the runway, and uniformed soldiers, in formation on the tarmac, awaited our arrival. It was a clear sign that a journey into western Ukraine, even to one of its largest cities, required a trip back to the nineteenth century.

  We were questioned individually about the contents of our luggage. The official questioning me asked how much cash I had on hand. I told him I had two hundred dollars, which was definitely not true, but I had read that was the limit I was allowed to bring. “Only two hundred dollars?” he’d asked. Nervously, I responded, “Do I need more?”

  Somehow or other and to our great relief, we made it past customs and found our translator, Anna, and her father, Ivan, waiting for us. They had traveled two and a half hours to pick us up, and now they would take us back to Lutsk, which would be home base.

  The highway from Lviv had almost no signs and was riddled with potholes. Cars traveled slowly, in part because many were Soviet-era, but also because the police were always lurking, looking to extract a bribe from someone traveling a kilometer too fast—something we got to see firsthand when Ivan was stopped midway on our journey and had to pay up. I was actually grateful to be moving slowly. It gave us plenty of time to gaze at the perfectly preserved landscape—carts with horses, women selling apples by the road, cows roaming next to bus stops. There was not a hint of globalization, although over the next few days I would begin to see the subtle ways in which the world had in fact encroached.

  We had not yet met in person, but Anna and I had been corresponding for well over a year in preparation for this trip. She had spent two summers studying at a school near Panama City, Florida, and her English was good, although she sometimes spoke too quickly for me to understand. She struck me as very businesslike and credible, not prone to sentimentality. As we drove, Frank, ever the historian and journalist, began asking her basic questions to do with the history of the region, but she claimed to know nothing about the past, particularly the past when our family lived in this area.

  Whether this was true or she was avoiding potential minefields, she was nevertheless well prepared. She had spent a year working on what she referred to as “the case” and had arranged for us to meet the family in their ancestral village. The entire clan was planning to come, including Mycola— who lived there—and Nadiya, the eldest daughter, who had so far proven to be the most helpful of the bunch, and Victor, the other brother. Anna had been calling Nadiya about once a week, she told us, to coordinate the logistics of this meeting.

  Anna told us that the family was “a little embarrassed” by our interest in them and worried that they might say the wrong thing. Nadiya had said, “I wasn’t the one who saved their father. Why should they want to see me?” Anna described them as “simple” people who were “not at all spoiled.”

  She reminded us that she was “ninety percent convinced that they are the family.” “When you go into their house and see the photos,” she said, “there’s not much room for doubt.” As had been my posture from the start, I very much wanted to believe her, but I was going to hang on to my skepticism until I could see for myself.

  “Why are you only ninety percent sure?” Frank asked her.

  “Because this is your judgment and you have to see for yourself,” she said. “The last ten percent is up to you.”

  Ivan, a wiry man of about fifty, worked as an engineer for a local gas company and spoke no English. He seemed as obsessed with our trip as his daughter was and constantly asked her to translate. According to Anna, he had a copy of Jonathan’s book; his best friend had given it to him, having found and purchased the only two remaining copies in the Lutsk bookstore. They had just downloaded the movie version, too—the first hint of the sort of postmodernity we would see on this trip, a stark contrast to the ancient landscape.

  Frank asked Anna to tell me what she really thought about the book. “It’s interesting,” was all she said. That’s a response I got frequently, even in the United States and Israel.<
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  “You can be honest,” Frank told her. “You won’t hurt our feelings.” She hesitated for a moment, then replied that the book, and the way in which it intertwined real names and places with imagined ones, confused people. But she was nevertheless glad that it had brought attention to what she referred to as “the Problem.” This is the phrase that she went on to use on several occasions in reference to the Holocaust. Apparently, not many people in these parts were aware of the magnitude of what happened to Jews living in western Ukraine during the war. It wasn’t taught in school and it wasn’t discussed.

  Our first stop was Lutsk, a fairly sizable city of roughly 200,000, where we would stay in the Hotel Ukraina. It was well located, right near the center of town, and looked like something out of the 1950s, with an avocado-and-gold color scheme, but the rooms were large and clean, which came as a relief. It had been a long couple of days, between the pretravel anxiety and the long journey, and I pulled out my pillow, hoping to rest before dinner. But almost as soon as I lay down, someone began loudly banging on the door.

  Apparently, there had been a mistake and I’d been put in the wrong room; this one was more expensive than what I had booked and prepaid. I was too exhausted to contemplate packing up again and relocating, so I told them I’d stay put and they could bill me the difference. This was easier said than done, I learned. I needed to settle up immediately. Down to the lobby I went, credit card in hand.

  Dinner was its own challenge. Neither Frank nor I keep strictly kosher, but we both avoid pork and shellfish. The pork aversion is something my mother instilled in me. It wasn’t just the meat itself she was worried about—everything was cooked in lard. One of her repeated admonishments, along with her suggestion that I stay in my hotel room and read, was: “Don’t eat anything they give you. Bring your own food.”

  Our first dinner in Lutsk was at a traditional Ukrainian restaurant with Anna, Ivan, Avrom Bendavid-Val, and his wife, Leah, who had arrived early to do advance preparations for the Trochenbroder group.

  Frank and I scanned the menu and finally both chose what seemed the safest option, a soup called Vegetable Harmony. After a taste, we exchanged wary glances. There were vegetables, all right, but they were rather unharmoniously afloat in what was almost certainly pork stock. We tried to make light of this by saying we weren’t hungry after a couple of polite spoonfuls, but there was no way to avoid upsetting our hosts.

  As the rest of the group ate, a three-piece Ukrainian band dressed in embroidered outfits regaled us with nostalgic folk songs about the wonders of this part of the country.

  Over dinner I braved the question that, even as a rational person with a strong grasp of history, still concerned me. I was also thinking about Father Desbois’s warning that this part of Ukraine was “two hundred percent anti-Semitic.” Were we, as Jews, really safe here? I asked. I explained that some American Jews remained fearful of Ukrainians, that they believed they had helped kill their families, that I had been warned this was one of the most anti-Semitic regions in the country. Frank looked at me, rather alarmed, and later told me it was as though I had just thrown a grenade onto the table. Fortunately, the Ukrainians were fascinated by this perception and less upset than I might have predicted. They assured us that we were safe in Lutsk.

  We went to bed hungry that night, our bit of soup supplemented by only a couple of granola bars. Fortunately, there would be no more Vegetable Harmony soup for us: Frank and I found a cozy little pizza restaurant in the center of Lutsk, in a place called Rynok Square, where we ate virtually every night that we were on our own. We told ourselves that the pizza didn’t contain lard and chose not to explore this theory too closely.

  Once the Trochenbroders arrived, we felt less conspicuous in our eating habits; many of them shared our dislike for pork, and the hotel seemed prepared to accommodate. On the portion of the trip when we were alone, without the Trochenbroders, lunch was generally taken care of by Anna, who continued to amaze. She quickly came to understand our dietary restrictions and prepared picnic lunches of hard-boiled eggs and fresh vegetables, for which we were enormously grateful.

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  Our days in Ukraine were divided into four segments. Frank and I had timed our trip to coincide with the arrival of our fellow Israeli and American Trochenbroders, and with them we would visit the shtetl, or, rather, what was left of the place. On our own, we planned to explore Kolki and Lysche and to meet the family we hoped was the one who hid my father during the war. Then, finally, we would have a couple of days on our own in Lviv, where we could enjoy the comforts of a nice hotel and decompress before heading home.

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  While Frank and I flew in through Lviv, most of the other Trochenbroders, from both the United States and Israel, flew in to Kiev and met us in Lutsk. One evening, when Frank and I returned from our intimate meal at what we now thought of as our pizza joint, the woman at the front desk of the hotel informed us that a busload of Israelis, accompanied by some Americans, had just arrived from Kiev. She didn’t really need to tell us this: They were hard to miss. Seated in the Hotel Ukraina dining room, they were talking at Tel Aviv decibels. It felt as though the Israel Defense Forces had just descended to protect us. Even if they were a noisy bunch, it was comforting to be surrounded by our fellow landsmen, and besides, I was eager to reconnect with Mira and Chaim Binenbaum, whom I’d first met in August 2008, when I brought them the material from our U.S. Trochenbrod gathering and when they guided me from one Trochenbrod survivor to another to learn about my father. Throughout, they had been my touchstone with the Israeli Trochenbroders. Mira and I immediately sat down on the sofa right by the large front window in the Ukraina Hotel lobby to catch up. I told her about all of my new information, which was largely the result of the clues we had picked up when she and Chaim were driving me around Israel the previous year. Based on the discovery that my father had been in Lysche, I’d been able to get Anna and Sergiy to go to the village and find someone who could identify my father and two of the other people in my tattered old picture. I told her how I had continued to work survivor and Holocaust databases but had found no new clues, even knowing the village and that my father’s wife’s name was Tzipora.

  Mira, an expert at these databases, pulled out her computer and tried to figure out other ways to approach the search. So far, I’d been looking through Trochenbrod, Lysche, and Chetvertnia listings. I’d been searching for the names Tzipora, Cipora, or Zipora, and for Safrans. Mostly I was looking for baby Safran.

  Frank and Mira huddled together on the sofa as Mira played around with different keywords, until she seemed to find something. Excited, they called me over. She had not found a Tzipora but rather a “Tzipa Kuperschmit”—murdered in 1942 in Zofjówka. We realized that this might actually be her: Survivors call the shtetl Trochenbrod, but it was also known as Zofjówka, Sofiova, Trochimbrod, and several other variations, depending on whether you were talking to a Jew, a Russian, a Pole, or a Ukrainian. Tzipa is, of course, a nickname for Tzipora. But, more important, Kuperschmit was the name of my father’s mother, Brucha, after she remarried to Baruch Kuperschmit.

  Even more surprising, Mira found that Tzipa’s entry listed her husband: Leibel. Leibel Kuperschmit. The listing said that he, too, had been murdered in 1942. This seemed to be my father and his wife, but my father was definitely not killed in 1942, although Tzipa and their daughter were. There was no listing for their daughter. And, according to everything we now knew, they hadn’t been killed in Trochenbrod or Zofjówka. Digging deeper, we found that the testimonial page had been submitted in 1999 by Noam Rosenblatt, son of Gad and Fanya Rosenblatt, forty-five years after my father killed himself in Washington, D.C.

  This made no sense. I could only surmise that there was an attempt to be all-inclusive—that even though Leibel and Tzipa technically lived in another village, they were considered Trochenbrod
ers. But why was my father’s name on the list—especially given that in 1947 he stood literally in the middle of the picture of Trochenbrod survivors at their reunion at the Foehrenwald Displaced-Persons Camp? Clearly he had still been alive. And when I visited Fanya Rosenblatt, Gad’s wife and Noam’s mother, in 2008, she knew my father had killed himself in the United States. Perhaps Gad, who had died about six months earlier, didn’t know?

  Frank offered a more poignant theory: “Maybe, because of how he died, they still considered him one of the martyrs of the Holocaust.”

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  These somber thoughts were quickly set aside as the head of the Bet TAL group, Moti Litvak, rushed over to Frank and said excitedly, “So you’re the hero of Trochenbrod?” He was of course assuming Frank was Jonathan and was referring to Everything Is Illuminated, which was in large part responsible for everyone being here. Frank explained that he was Jonathan’s brother, and an author himself. Moti seemed unimpressed. “Okay,” he said, “so you’re the brother of the hero of Trochenbrod!”

  This was only the beginning of endless comments and questions to do with the book and the movie. We were asked repeatedly, “Why isn’t Jonathan here?”

  Everyone had something to say about the book. One of our Ukrainian guides asked me to tell Jonathan that, next time, he should tell the true story of Trochenbrod. A South American on the trip complained that when he went to a bookstore to purchase a travel guide that included Trochenbrod, he was informed that Trochenbrod was a fictional place created in a novel written by an American.

  The confluence of three cultures—Israeli, American, and Ukrainian, with a few South Americans thrown in—produced a fair amount of comedy and tension over the next three days. Our Trochenbrod cousins were warm and entertaining. The shtetl must have been filled with wise guys. Many of them were funny; many more of them thought they were funny.