Nadiya took the photo that I had brought of my father and Davyd and studied it for a moment, then said, “This is the type of shirt that I remember well. This is the type that he liked to wear that my mother made.” Then Nadiya pulled out another photo of her grandfather, with her and one of her brothers—Davyd was wearing the Nehru-like high-collar shirt with buttons. This is exactly what the FBI agent told me: These people didn’t have large wardrobes and had likely worn the same thing in pictures.
Could this be real? Could this really be the family we were searching for? I stopped and held my breath, not knowing what to say, wanting to be convinced but somehow still not allowing myself to be 100 percent certain.
After we looked at the photographs, Nadiya insisted that we all take a seat, even though Mycola was eager to fetch an old woman who lived down the street; she had known his grandfather, and he believed she might be able to help us piece things together. But Nadiya was clearly the one in charge, and she talked right over him. Spunky and straightforward, with a loud, gravelly voice, she provided us with tantalizing snippets of memory from her childhood. I was so eager to hear all of this that I imagined stuffing everything she said into a Ziploc, lining up her words on my mantelpiece at home.
I asked Nadiya to tell us about her grandfather Davyd. She said he never talked much and that he said very little about this period of his life, but she was able to provide some raw facts. He was born in 1900 and died in 1978. He’d been a religious man, a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox church, and on the rare occasions that a priest couldn’t make it to the village, he’d step in. She said his grammar was excellent, and, unlike many others in town, he could read and write. He had cows and horses and owned fields across the street from the house. She said that he never drank, never smoked, and never argued. When he did something, he insisted that it be done right.
He had four children, two of whom were still alive but not living locally. One of his daughters had become a judge. He was evidently buried nearby, and I wish I had thought to visit his grave.
* * *
—
There were several stories that had clearly stuck with Nadiya since childhood. On one occasion, she explained, her Uncle Feder was visiting his parents and siblings. Nadiya was about ten years old, and she’d been hiding, eavesdropping on the conversation. She overheard Feder recall how lucky they’d been when German invaders burst into the house and failed to notice the man they were hiding behind the door. “The whole family could have been killed,” she remembered her uncle saying. According to my mother, who I suppose had heard this story from my father, these children would take turns playing outside, watching the house to alert the family if the Germans were approaching.
Nadiya also elaborated on a cryptic comment she’d overheard about how her mother should have married Leibel. When she was in seventh grade, her family had just started building a house, she said, and finances were tight. One day, the kids wanted candy, and her mother pressed their father for a little money. Their father was drunk and became extremely surly. “You should have married Leibel if you wanted to be rich,” he told her. Nadiya hadn’t known what that was about, but she assumed that Leibel was her mother’s ex-boyfriend.
This was definitely adding up: I’d already heard from my mother that after the war, Davyd had gone to Lutsk to find Leibel and that he’d urged him to come back to the village and marry his daughter Katarina.
I could have stopped here and drawn my conclusions, but I pressed a bit further. The ultimate proof that this was the family would be to find a copy of the same picture that I had brought. Surely, they, too, had this photograph of my father with Davyd and Katarina. But Nadiya said these were all the pictures they had. She told us the story about her mother putting a bunch of photographs inside the drawer of an old wooden table and setting it on fire, which we had heard before, from Anna. It seemed my last 10 percent proof might have gone up in flames years ago.
We asked more questions about the house, prompting Nadiya to describe the layout of their original house. She explained how easy it would have been for Leibel to sneak out through the back door and hide in the hay in the barn. I asked her to draw a floor plan in my notebook, which she did, and agreed it would have been ideal for hiding someone.
Mycola mentioned the old lady again, suggesting she might be able to shed additional light on this. When he got no response from his sister, he decided to just go out and fetch her himself.
Meanwhile, Nadiya asked us a simple question that went straight to the heart of the matter: “Why are you here?”
Why were we there? Of course, we knew the answer—we wanted to see where our family had come from and to find the family that had saved my father—but, also, what were we really hoping to find?
We replied that we knew little about Leibel and hoped to fill in this hole in our family knowledge. History is part luck, part contingency, we said: It was our luck that Leibel turned to their family for help, because it is the contingent fact without which we wouldn’t exist. Nadiya got this.
Her understanding seemed to stop, however, when in my excitement I started to tell her about Jonathan’s book, going all the way back to how it had begun as a senior thesis at Princeton University. They were unfazed as I continued, explaining that a version of their life story had been turned into a movie. I didn’t even get much of a rise when I said that the movie starred a guy from The Lord of the Rings.
They were not impressed by this Hollywood connection, but they were intrigued by the family New Year’s card that I showed them, the same one that we had buried in all of the mass graves. Nadiya asked me to annotate it carefully—she wanted to know who everyone was, both their names and their relations to the rest of the family. I got the sense that they would keep that card for the rest of their lives, that it wouldn’t be set on fire inside a desk drawer.
Now that I was feeling this deep connection, I perhaps too boldly jumped to the subject of having their grandfather declared a Righteous Gentile at Yad Vashem. Excitedly, I explained that they might even get an expenses-paid trip to Israel to attend the ceremony. I clarified that this wouldn’t be a religious ceremony—it was entirely about preserving and honoring history. Nadiya appeared completely uninterested. “We are simple people,” she said. “We’ve never been abroad. It would be too much for us. But if you want to do something, go ahead. It’s up to you.”
I could see that in my enthusiasm, I had rushed this idea; it was too much to suggest on this occasion.
* * *
—
Shortly after Nadiya left the room to prepare lunch, Mycola returned with the old lady, whose name was Anna Gorynovich. This new Anna—we now had met three Annas—was surprisingly large, with thick hands and fingers that were twisted from age, or from arthritis, or from years of hard work. She wore a scarf around her head and had no teeth. With each sentence, it seemed she was expending what little remained of her dwindling lung capacity.
Anna the Old Lady, as she came to be known in our Anna-filled lexicon, looked at the picture and instantly identified Davyd and Leibel. She looked at us in confusion, until Mycola explained who we were. Her reaction was immediate. She came right over to Frank and put her hand to his brow and told him that he had many of his grandfather’s features. This was not the first time we’d heard this—the same thing had happened in Brazil, when Itzhak had felt Frank’s eyebrows and said they reminded him of Leibel’s. Anna then picked up the photograph that I’d brought and said that the woman in the front row was indeed Nadiya’s and Mycola’s mother, Katarina. She wasn’t sure who the second woman in the photo was.
I leaned over to Frank and asked him whether he was convinced we’d found “the family.”
“One hundred and ten percent,” he whispered.
* * *
—
Anna began to recount some of the history, which I recorded in a notebook. She told us t
hat Leibel had been Davyd’s neighbor. In fact, we were sitting on the very spot where Leibel’s house once stood. His living room had been right here, right where we were now sitting. Then she described the details of the house: It was made of white wood, with walls of clay. The roof wasn’t thatched, like most, but made of metal material. And she said that the windows were long, not square. It was amazing to me that she could remember so many specific details. Here I was, in the very space where my father and his family lived, able to visualize it.
Anna the Old Lady went on to tell us that Jews and Christians got along well in this small town. Her own father, she said, had even spoken some Yiddish. Without prompting, she began to tell us about religious life in the village. There was a house where Jews would pray every Saturday, on Shabbat. When the rabbi came, he arrived on a fine horse. During the week, the men wrapped their arms with leather straps, presumably tefillin (phylacteries).
There were personal details, too. She told us that my father’s wife’s name was Tzipa, or Tzipora, and that she was an excellent seamstress. That’s exactly what Fanya Rosenblatt, who lived nearby, had told me the previous year in Israel. Tzipora was known for her elaborately embroidered designs. Leibel, she said, owned a shop and traveled around the area, selling and buying merchandise.
Then she offered a piece of information that didn’t match up to the history that I thought I knew. She told us that Leibel’s father had been called Yosso Voskoboy. The first part of his name sounded sort of right—we knew he was Yosef. We were confused by Voskoboy, but it was apparently a nickname with an obscure origin: If kids didn’t know how to solve a problem in school, Yosso Voskoboy would come and help them, which was to say he was smart. Sure, we’d happily claim the smart part, but, still, something wasn’t lining up. I’d always thought my father’s mother, Brucha, was a widow who had lived in Trochenbrod, then later remarried and had another child, Choma—my father’s half sister. I was so excited by all of the other revelations, however, that I decided to overlook this one anomalous bit, that my grandfather had still been alive in the village. As I continued to think about it, only one answer made sense.
Several years later, when Frank was in Rio, I asked him to meet again with Itzhak Kimelblat. I wanted to ask him if it was possible that my grandparents had divorced, which was the only logical explanation. Itzhak told Frank that my guess was right. My grandmother Brucha had divorced Yosef and later married Baruch Kuperschmit, the guy with the brick factory who was deaf and had come from a big Trochenbrod family. I suppose it shouldn’t have been surprising that life was complicated, even back then.
Anna went on to tell us about how the Germans had kept Jews in the ghetto in Chetvertnia well after they had already killed most of the Jews of Kolki and Trochenbrod. It was such a small town off the main road that they could have easily missed it, but of course we knew they didn’t. At first, she said, the Germans rounded up the Jews and sent them in trucks to a ghetto in the small town nearby called Chetvertnia. According to Anna, the Jews were ordered to put yellow circles on their backs, presumably with the Star of David, as had happened in other ghettos. Apparently, this ghetto had allowed parents to leave their children while they searched for food.
This area was so remote and small that when I went to the Holocaust Museum library to get information on the ghetto in Chetvertnia, I was told that there was no ghetto in Chetvertnia. But obviously I knew there had been one; Fanya Rosenblatt had told me about it. Also, before our trip, Frank had called Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian, who was an expert on Ukraine. He told Frank that the ghetto and killing in Chetvertnia was so obscure that he knew of only one person who had talked about it—Fanya. He pointed Frank to Fanya’s testimonial, which I had not only read but heard the details of, from her personally, more than once.
Anna even knew the story of how my father had escaped the massacre in the ghetto, while the rest of his family had not. This, too, matched up with what Fanya had told me: that Leibel and his friend, Srulach Zilberfarb, had been sent by the Nazis to glaze windows at a train station in another town. She told me that my father was very capable and could do anything with his hands. I knew the other part of the story already: That he and Srulach had come back only to learn that everyone had been killed. That he had considered turning himself in, thinking that he’d rather be killed than live without his wife and child, but had decided, instead, to hide for a day or two. Much of the rest, of course, we don’t know—and there is no one to tell us.
* * *
—
What Anna did say is that Davyd had remained silent and calm when the Germans came. And that at some point someone in town spotted Leibel in the house, but no one blew his cover.
Anna told us that she once saw Leibel out in the open after the war ended, when he came out of hiding. She watched him unearth a sewing machine that he’d buried in the ground, then enter his house and retrieve a basket of gold from under a floorboard beneath the kitchen table. I wondered what she was referring to, exactly, this basket of gold. Was this a Jewish stereotype, this assumption that even in a tiny village in rural Ukraine, Jews were hiding baskets of gold? Or did she simply mean he’d buried some money? Possibly even in a basket. I didn’t want to probe this further. There were more important things we wanted to know from Anna.
Frank finally asked the big question: “We’d heard that Leibel and Tzipora had a baby,” he said.
Anna the Old Lady replied without hesitating: “She wasn’t a baby,” she said. “She was a little girl, about five or six. She had long black hair and liked to play with a ball in the field.”
This was stunning. Frank kept going, asking the question to which I thought I’d never have an answer. Frank asked if she knew the name of Leibel’s daughter. “Of course,” she said, looking straight at me. “Your sister’s name was Asya.”
The room was silent. I couldn’t catch my breath. Now I had my sister’s name, something to document her short life. A person named Asya Safran had once existed. I could imagine her outside in these fields, her long dark hair swaying as she ran for a ball.
When I returned home, I could enter her name into the Yad Vashem database, along with Tzipa and Leibel Kuperschmit. I added Asya Safran and her mother, Tzipora Safran.
Now I could also add her to the family tree.
* * *
—
After this revelation, there wasn’t much more to say for a long while. Nadiya had prepared a vegetarian lunch for us, an enormous spread with delicious cheese dumplings, much of which she had carried with her on her long bus ride to the village. Apparently, she had spent the previous day, along with her sister-in-law and nieces, cooking and cleaning in preparation for our arrival. Anna the Old Lady, along with Anna the Translator and Ivan the Driver, joined us at the table. A bottle of vodka appeared. Ukrainian tradition has it that you fill your glass three times, for three toasts. I am a virtual nondrinker but was definitely feeling celebratory as well as grateful, and I went for all three toasts. It was quite the feast; one of Nadiya’s nieces had baked a four-layer cake, teeming with cherries and candied fruits, and by the end of the meal I was not only sated but a little lit.
After lunch, gifts were produced. Mycola presented Frank with a bottle of his home-brewed vodka, and Nadiya and her sister-in-law, Svetlana, gave us hand-embroidered tablecloths. I felt more than slightly ridiculous as I handed over our store-bought Ralph Lauren serving spoons, and it seemed not the right moment to try to explain the sentiment behind what now struck me as a lame gift. I was just grateful that I had at least brought a piece of jewelry for Nadiya. I considered giving a gift of cash, but it seemed awkward and insensitive to monetize this relationship.
After the gift exchange, we went for a walk down Krynychne Street. I tried to imagine myself strolling down this road with my father, right after the Shabbat meal, with a full belly and a slight vodka buzz and nowhere else in the world to go. Alas, the
re really was no place else to go—the walk was brief, because the town was small. When we reached the last house, we turned around and walked back. And then we said our farewells.
I found myself crying, and then Frank began to cry, too. Then Nadiya cried—or at least I thought she might have been crying. Frank and Mycola shared a tight embrace.
“If your family ever needs anything, just ask us. We are forever in your debt,” Frank said, before we turned to leave.
* * *
—
Our next stop was Chetvertnia, the site of the memorial for the mass grave. Now that we had a name, I wanted to say Kaddish for my sister, Asya, and for her mother.
It was only about three miles away, but the road was especially bad, and Ivan had to concentrate hard as he drove. The village looked similar to all of the others we had seen, but when we crossed a bridge, I realized this was the place Fanya had told me about—it was where my father would have likely gone to meet the two other ghetto survivors late at night, to coordinate and strategize and commiserate after learning everyone else had been murdered.
We came to a pond with reeds and an open field and then saw steps leading to the memorial. Ivan rushed ahead to clear the site for us, but there wasn’t much he could do—the place was really a mess, much more so than some of the other memorials. He and Anna were clearly ashamed by how poorly it had been kept up. The tile was corroded, and there was a broken vodka bottle on the first step, a smashed Yizkor candle on the third. It was easy to imagine the entire memorial disappearing someday, swallowed by trash and choked by weeds.
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