He led us through a backyard, over a fence, into another backyard, and then through crops and over heaps of dung. Another couple of villagers appeared, kindly handing us pears they’d just picked. Our entourage continued to grow, all of them debating which Jew had lived in which house. They had all been children during the war, which meant their memories were imprecise. Despite their desire to help, this was all beginning to feel rather hopeless. And yet memories were being jogged, and suddenly someone said, “There was a flour mill here…this is where the Roismans lived.”
This was pay dirt. Roisman was the married name of my mother’s aunt, whose maiden name was Bronstein. She was my grandfather’s sister, who had lived in the same house as my mother’s grandparents—which is to say, this was my great-grandparents’ house. These villagers, who were children at the time of the war, didn’t remember the oldest generation in the house; they remembered the next generation who lived there—my mother’s Aunt Sosel, her husband, Shlomo, and their four children, Shmuel, Maya, Moshe, and Chia. I have one picture of my Great-Aunt Sosel and her family, but I didn’t think to bring it. This was clearly the same house my mother talked about all the time. It was one of the biggest houses in Kolki—the first one to have electricity, and even a piano. This was the house that my Aunt Pesha would run to on Friday afternoon to bring challah my grandmother Esther had baked for Lifsha and her family, who also lived in the house. I was standing on the very spot where my great-grandparents had lived, along with their extended family.
“This old guy didn’t want to leave his house when the Germans came,” someone said, pointing to the house. They seemed to be referring, of course, to my Great-Grandfather Nissan. “He told them, ‘I’m not going with you,’ so they shot him on the spot.” Now we knew why my mother’s grandfather had never been in the ghetto.
This discovery gave us renewed energy. Someone suggested we go down another street, where other Jews had lived. One thing led to another; the name Chaitchick came up, and we wound up being led down a street called Chaitchick, which was another name on my mother’s map—she had lived across the street from them. Her Aunt Ethel had married one of the Chaitchicks. This meant that my mother’s house—or, at least, the site of what had once been her house—had to be here.
We then learned of an interesting glitch from one of our impromptu guides: When Kolki had been rebuilt after the war, apparently everything was scrambled, put back together again on a slightly different grid. Even the Styr River, the once timeless navigational guide, had been dammed and redirected by the Soviets. It was impossible for anyone to get their bearings.
That’s when yet another old man appeared on the scene. His name was Ivan—we now had two Ivans and two Annas in our group. Coincidentally, this Ivan had been recommended as a source by Anna the Translator’s cousin, with the caveat that he had difficulty hearing and we would have to shout to be heard. He was here to check out the commotion, and to set us right.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” he explained. “The Chaitchick house was on a different corner of Chaitchick Street. It’s over there.”
He was certain, he told us. The house across the street had belonged to a woman who lived there with her two daughters. One of these daughters, he said, had mysteriously disappeared just as the Germans entered town. This same daughter reappeared after the war for one night and then left again. He had heard this story as a boy. And he was, unbeknownst to him, describing my mother, her mother, and her sister, Pesha.
I could barely breathe, staring at what I now knew to be the exact spot where my mother had grown up.
We followed him to the Chaitchick house on a different corner of Chaitchick Street and entered through a gate across the road to what must have been my mother’s old yard. He rattled the door of the house that now stood there, and when no one answered, we walked around to the backyard. We took it all in for a moment, including the satellite dish on the roof. Suddenly a young man emerged, looking at us suspiciously; moments later, his wife and baby appeared beside him. He was clearly not happy to have these foreign strangers standing in his yard, and I got the sense, as we’d been warned, that he was suspicious of us, that perhaps he thought we’d come to reclaim our land. With an eye toward defusing the situation, I began to play with the chubby, adorable baby, and I asked if I could take her picture. After a time, he could see that we came in peace, and he began to soften.
My mother used to tell me stories about how her house had led to the Styr River, so we all walked down to the riverbank to see for ourselves. I thought about the man in the canoe, the dentist who had called on her a couple of times—the character who appeared in her stories more frequently than perhaps she realized. The river was also the place where the Jews would go to clean their dishes before Passover, in preparation for the seder. The place where, on Shabbat, families would stroll along its banks.
The Soviets may have reengineered the river, but its serenity remained unchanged. Ducks swam in formation; a boy cast a fishing line; canoes still lined the banks.
Frank said it was here that, for the first time, he could envision his grandmother leading a happy life, a “normal life.” It was peaceful and oddly beautiful and not difficult to imagine my mother here, a teenager with boyfriends.
I wanted to linger for a while, but by this point we had become quite the spectacle, and Frank and I decided it would be best to return on another day, when we could walk in Kolki alone. We needed time to just absorb this place, to breathe and let our imaginations roam.
* * *
—
That night, we went to Shabbat services in Lutsk. Coincidentally, the man who ran the shul was the grandchild of Trochenbrod survivor Evgenia Potash, who was with us on our trip to Trochenbrod. Evgenia had married a Christian Ukrainian partisan and stayed in Lutsk. Now her grandson not only led the small community of Jews but was about to leave to study in Israel for a year. Nobody in the service spoke either Yiddish or English. They probably wanted to be warm to us, but I got the sense that Ukrainian Jews, who were mostly transplants from Russia, had a natural suspicion of outsiders encroaching on their religious observances. Perhaps this was because the congregants were mostly women, and they had come of age before the fall of the Soviet Union, when a service like this would have been verboten.
They sang with real passion, accompanied by a taped recording of Shabbat melodies. The fact that they probably all came to religious observance late in life made it all the more stirring. We tried to be inconspicuous, sitting in the back of the room by ourselves, and we left quietly after the service. Even if we had not been able to communicate with anyone, we were still glad to have celebrated Shabbat in Lutsk, the city where my parents met after the war.
* * *
—
The next day we wanted to return to Kolki without the entourage. We asked Anna and Ivan to deposit us on the old Jewish main street in Kolki—a place memorialized in a 1937 photo of my grandmother, Aunt Lifsha, Great-Aunt Sosel, and Great-Aunt Necha, who had been visiting from St. Louis. They were arm in arm, laughing gaily, looking very stylish, dressed for the Sabbath in their high heels and dresses. It was somewhat hard to imagine them walking these streets looking so fashionable, given the current desolation of the place.
I wondered what might have been had the Jews remained. How would the place have changed? Would it have developed differently? More rapidly? Or would it have been just the same? What becomes of a community when it loses an entire group that had once been integral to the population? Or, as in any rural area in any country, would those with ambition have fled to the big city, or even abroad to the United States and Brazil, as some of my family did in the early 1900s?
We went back to the fallow field where my great-grandparents’ house once stood, now covered in rich black manure. Although all of the houses around it had been rebuilt, their lot remained empty. I paced from one end of the field to the other, tryi
ng to imagine their house and their life. I’d always had the narrative, but this was the first time that I had the setting; now I could actually locate the street my Aunt Pesha had walked as a teenager when she visited my Aunt Lifsha and her family, carrying freshly baked challah. I could almost hear the music coming from the piano and smell the challah.
Less happily, I could now see Pesha running down the same street, pressing on my mother the pair of shoes she was wearing.
Frank and I walked for a while, until we crossed a bridge over a marsh and made our way to the place where my mother’s house once stood. I snapped dozens of pictures, even though I felt awkward fetishizing a building that she’d never occupied and that now belonged to someone else, with no connection to our story. Still, this was where she had grown up.
For a few minutes, Frank and I said nothing to each other. There wasn’t much to say: There was an almost spiritual quality to this trip, a suspension of reality. Sometimes we felt bad for not feeling worse. There was a lot to process, and some of it was going to take a while to sink in.
Then we walked down to the river again, to take it in one last time. I scooped some sand and a few small shells from the shore to take home in my Ziploc bag.
* * *
—
The next morning we made another visit to Anna the Teacher. She had insisted that we come back the next day. The prospect of our return had clearly produced a flurry of work. She had moved her sofa to a new spot and hung tapestries. She had also apparently just milked the cow. She wanted to serve us fresh, warm, unpasteurized Kolki milk, which she brought to us in a jug, pantomiming how she had squeezed the udders. In addition to milk, she brought a bowl of cheese curds, sugar, and two jars of sour cream to demonstrate how to make cottage cheese. She then retrieved yet another bowl, this one containing dozens of small potato pancakes, which she slathered with the freshly made sour cream.
Don’t eat anything they give you.
Truly there was no polite way out of this one. Anna the Teacher had clearly put a lot of effort into preparing this feast, and Anna the Translator was telling us what we already knew, that we would disappoint our host if we didn’t eat—even though we couldn’t help but notice that neither Anna nor her father partook.
Somehow, we managed to consume the meal, which Ivan captured, for better or worse, on video. After this generous display of food, Anna the Teacher began to ply us with gifts. First, a colorful, handmade crochet doily. I said it was beautiful—which it was—and marveled at her handiwork. She then grabbed a bag that she had sewn and insisted I take it. I tried to find the right balance between complimenting her and not encouraging her to present us with more gifts, but I was clearly failing. Next, she took off her homemade ruffled apron and shoved that into the bag, too. She then went to her garden and retrieved tomatoes and peppers, which she added to our stash.
* * *
—
Our next stop was the remote village of Kolikovich, the town where my Grandmother Esther, my Great-Aunt Jean, Great-Uncle Jose, and their siblings were born. Kolikovich was really a dorf. It was, quite literally, at the end of the road—a bumpy, unpaved road at that. Behind the village was nothing but forest. My mother had told us not to bother going there: “It’s such a nothing place,” she’d said. And she was right. This nothing place didn’t even have a sign. But that was beside the point. This was the site of more stories for me, and very vivid ones.
There was the story of Uncle Jose—or Itzhak the Shoeless, as he’d apparently been known around here—who had left for Brazil while still in his teens to meet up with his older brother, Solomon. Jose, as he was called in Brazil, ultimately became a major coffee grower and was on the board of the largest bank in South America—coming from this “nothing place.” He was the fourth of my great-grandmother’s children to leave. She’d been so despondent that she apparently ran after the wagon that carried him away. It was hard to imagine this nothing place containing a personality the size of Aunt Jean or Itzhak/Jose. Frank and I mused about what it must be like to leave a spot such as this, at the end of the road, at the end of the world. How could you even begin to imagine what life must be like elsewhere, in places like Lutsk or São Paulo or Washington, D.C.?
On our way out of town, Ivan stopped the car and sprang out. We watched for a moment, confused, as he grabbed a rock and used it to write “Kolikovich” in the dirt. He had made us a sign against which to pose, and he snapped our picture for posterity.
Outside Kolki, Ivan made an unexpected detour, one that startled us at first: He headed back into the forest, not far from the mass grave. Ivan, it turned out, was a forager, and he wanted us to see the impressive variety of wild berries and mushrooms in these parts. Drying and exporting mushrooms had been my grandfather’s trade, as well. It was the business that made it possible for him to have that big house in Kolki, the one with a piano and electricity, and the reason he traveled back and forth to the United States.
Much had changed in Kolki. The Jews were gone. The river had switched course. Satellite dishes adorned the roofs. And yet the place was, in more ways than not, largely untouched. The constancy of mushrooms, at least, was a strange comfort.
11
We were on to the most anticipated part of the trip—to Lysche, or Krynychne, as it was now called, where we would meet the grandchildren of Davyd Zhuvniruck, the man who may have hidden my father during the war.
Anna briefed us about the family. Some of this we already knew: The ancestral house in Lysche, also known as Lyszceze, and now called Krynychne, belonged to the middle grandchild, Mycola. Nadiya, a nurse, was the eldest child and the one who had organized today’s events. One of her children was a computer programmer in Lutsk. The youngest brother, Victor, was a physics teacher, who unexpectedly had to work that day, so he’d dispatched his wife and two daughters instead.
It was easy to simply fold this information into the itinerary: Today we would rise, eat breakfast, take a road trip, and meet the family. But when I stepped back to think about it, what lay ahead was surreal. Assuming that the last 10 percent added up, that this was really the family that hid my father—well, I’d been quite literally dreaming of this day much of my adult life.
* * *
—
After a drive of about one hour, Anna called Nadiya to let her know we were nearby. The entire family poured out of the house to greet us on the road. When we hugged Nadiya and Mycola, they embraced us for an extra beat or two, or so it seemed—we were so primed to find deep meaning in every gesture and in every word, we probably needed to calm down and take a few deep breaths.
Nadiya was sixty years old, a slim and stylish woman dressed in gray slacks and a gray turtleneck sweater with her hair pulled tightly into a bun. She was not entirely what I’d expected to find in this desolate town. The first thing she did was lead us to the field in back of the house, shooing away a dog, weaving through roaming poultry, and crossing over weedy mounds that once nurtured potatoes. She had grown up here, the place where Mycola still lived. She wanted to show us where their family house had stood during the war, which was about one hundred feet behind the current house and farther back from the dirt road, where it would have been easier to hide someone.
There was nothing there now. According to Nadiya, the pear tree in the yard was the only thing that remained from before the war. The Jews were all gone—murdered or, in a few rare instances, escaped, and their houses destroyed. A few dozen houses lined each side of the road, and behind them were fields that bled into the forest. But that was about it. This pear tree in the yard appeared to be the only survivor, and it continued, with a ripe symbolism, to bear fruit.
I may have gone a bit overboard with the metaphor, but to me this pear tree symbolized life, and more life. Trees regenerate. They are sometimes capable of growth even after decimation, as was the case with this tree. Everything around it had burned, but there it was,
still: the roots, the trunk, the leaves, the fruit, and even the shade.
I imagined my father and his family eating pears from this tree, and that naturally led me to pull out a Ziploc and stuff it with leaves. I also took a possibly excessive number of photographs, including one of us with our Ukrainian hosts posing in front of the tree. They all watched, smiling politely, surely wondering why this crazy American woman was so obsessed with a tree.
After the photo session, we headed to the house and entered through the back door. I felt as though I had fallen into some time-bending wormhole. The first thing I saw was an old-fashioned woodburning stove. It looked similar to the one my mother had described from her house, yet tinier and even more antiquated than she’d been able to convey, with a brick oven built into the wall just above it.
Sepia and black-and-white photos lined the walls of the living room, many of them hung weirdly close to the ceiling. Nadiya had to step onto a chair to reach one of Davyd and his wife, Yaryna, and we all crowded in for a closer look. I noticed that he was wearing a necktie, and I remembered what the FBI agent had told me about paying close attention to possible similarities in clothing. I asked Nadiya about the tie, and she told me that the picture was a “cut and paste,” which was to say the pre-Photoshop way of transposing her grandfather’s head onto the shoulders from a different photograph. “He never wore neckties,” she explained. Then she went on to casually mention that he liked to wear shirts with two buttons at the top. “My grandmother and then my mother made the shirts for him,” she added.
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