We took another New Year’s card and inserted it into a crack between bricks. We were overwhelmed with conflicting emotions. This site was sacred, deeply moving, and also completely depressing.
* * *
—
Chetvertnia had been liquidated on October 10, 1942, I later learned from Father Desbois, who had gone with his Yahad-In Unum team in May 2012 to investigate and document the mass grave in that village. Somewhere between 100 and 120 Jews had been murdered there, not just from Chetvertnia but from the neighboring villages of Suisk, Lukow, Hodomicze, Slawatycze, and Lysche, including my sister, Asya, and her mother, Tzipora. The Germans rounded up the Jews from these villages sometime in 1941. At first, they were allowed to live in their own houses; then they were sent to a ghetto—a jammed building in Chetvertnia with a single outhouse. Jews were made to wear distinctive yellow stars on their chests and backs and were forced to work, mostly doing agricultural labor.
The Yahad team, which interviewed a witness to the murders, reported that the Jews were tied to one another, hand to hand, then led in columns to a pit that was already dug. The pit was square and near a lake. The Jews had to undress, climb down, and lie facedown on the ground. I had heard this before, of course, but now I had names to add to the terror: I could imagine my sister, Asya, with her long dark hair, holding her mother’s hand.
The Germans went into the pit and shot each row of Jews, then went back to retrieve the next group. The witness reported that one Jewish man tried to escape and was killed, his body brought back by a policeman and put in the pit. Another Jew who ran away was killed on the spot and buried next to the river. Their clothes were given to villagers, and whatever was not taken was buried.
The Yahad report also says that twenty years after the shootings, the bodies of the Jews were dug up, the bones put into coffins, and reburied over a period of two days. The new burial site was supposedly where the monument was built. It reads: TO THE JEWS KILLED ON OCTOBER 10, 1942, BY GERMAN FASCISTS OF CHETVERTNIA AND SURROUNDING VILLAGES.
Our group was silent as we passed back through Krynychne. Along the way, we saw a group of women walking and realized it was Nadiya, her sister-in-law, and her nieces. They were just beginning their four-mile walk back to the bus stop—a journey that would then be followed by about two hours on the bus. We told them to hop in the van.
12
Frank and I had made our own arrangements for the next couple of days. We headed to Lviv for a bit, where we wandered the city, taking in the historic sites, observing, on the doorways, the empty holes where mezuzahs had once been. We had a chance to decompress and to absorb what we’d seen and heard. Over dinner and tea at cafés, we talked and analyzed what we had been through together. We shared an incredible experience. For Frank, that was not only a search for his grandfather’s story: He told me over dinner in Lviv that the most important part of the trip for him was getting closer to me, understanding me better, and that the trip helped him fill an emotional void that he didn’t even know he had.
We had moments of levity, as well, including a bit of shopping. At an outdoor market, I found a disturbing set of matryoshka. They were not the typical sorts of dolls, where one woman nests inside another, but rather ones that featured replicas of what were meant to be Jews. One little Jew inside another. Apparently, these were meant to be placed beside doorways in the hope that it would encourage money to flow in. It was about as anti-Semitic as one can get, but I had to have one anyway.
Bert met us at Dulles, along with Frank’s wife, Abby, and his two daughters, Sadie and Theo. My mother was there, too, and she was beaming; I can still see the look on her face. Everyone was relieved to have us back, and it was good to be home. I was overwhelmed, exhausted, and emotionally drained. Part of me was back in Ukraine, some five thousand miles away, in these largely vanished villages that had loomed so large in the backdrop of my life, nearly all-consuming at times.
It is where both of my parents’ stories began, and I was eager to recount our travels and share pictures with my mother, but as with so many other conversations to do with the past, her interest was tentative. She was curious but she also wanted to forget. She would look at the pictures for a few minutes and then push them away. This scene repeated itself over and over again.
I also didn’t want to burden her with too many details of the part of the journey that had to do with my father’s first family. It was his story that had always been part mystery. On this trip, finally, I had made headway in unraveling his secrets.
I confess I hadn’t been to my father’s grave site in years, but after that trip I paid a visit to Beth Shalom Cemetery in Capitol Heights, Maryland, where incongruous tombstones fill its hilly landscape, making the place strangely beautiful, more old Europe than suburban Maryland. My father’s grave is off to the side, in the last row, in a special section reserved for deaths that are counter to the values of this Orthodox Jewish community. It made his grave easy to find as I walked along the fence at the end of the cemetery.
I needed to tell my father about the trip, that I had walked in his footsteps on the dirt roads that weave through Trochenbrod and Lysche, that I saw the pear tree in his backyard. I wanted him to know that I sat in a house now located on the same plot where his once stood, where he lived with his family, and that I came to understand, at least a little, why life was so hard for him. That I had said Kaddish for the life, and the people, he had lost. That I had mourned the things he had never spoken of to me.
I also wanted to tell him about his five beautiful grandsons and his great-grandchildren. I wanted him to know how well things turned out, despite everything that came before.
I brought rocks I had picked up in Lysche, the village where he had lived prior to the war, and some dirt from the mass graves in Chetvertnia and Trochenbrod, where I had finally learned of his secrets—or maybe they weren’t secrets at all so much as a piece of his life he had found impossible to share.
To my surprise, there were already two large stones sitting atop his grave. I looked at the nearby graves, walking row by row, to see if others had stones left as reminders of a visit. None of them did. I looked at other relatives’ grave sites around the cemetery and, again, nothing. Bewildered, I snapped a picture on my phone and left the reminders from my recent trip next to the large stones already there.
I called my brother, then my mother, and my sons, to see if they had been to the cemetery. None of them had visited the grave site in years. My mother couldn’t imagine who would have left stones there. This was fifty-five years after his death. There were very few people still alive who had known my father.
Jonathan proposed two options: set up a camera to see who visited the grave site next or live with the mystery. I went with the mystery.
Although I have spent a lifetime piecing together our family’s fractured history, I have also learned that not every story needs a neat end, that there are times when it’s okay to let the imagination fill in the gaps.
* * *
—
In October 2011, two years and two months after our trip, I received an email from Sergiy, Avrom’s friend and one of our guides in Trochenbrod. He was eager to tell me that on a visit to Trochenbrod with other people, he had spotted the family photograph that Frank and I buried at the site of one of the memorials. Whoever found it had placed it on top of the monument, secured by two stones. Two months after his email, we heard from Anna the Translator, who also reported seeing our family photograph sprouting from the earth. This time it had been placed inside a protective plastic bag—a Ziploc, no doubt. Our photos had survived two harsh Ukraine winters and were still mostly intact. It was remarkable and yet unremarkable—the regeneration metaphor too obvious to parse.
More surprising, perhaps, is the way the connections we made on that trip continue to be part of our lives. I often wonder what my father would make of Lesia Lishcuk, the great-gran
ddaughter of his rescuer, Davyd, sleeping in the guest room of our house. A student at the University of Kiev, she has kept in touch, and a few years after we first met at her Uncle Mycola’s house in Ukraine, she came to the United States to spend part of the summer working in Wisconsin, after which she spent a week with us.
She still signs some of her emails “from your Ukrainian family,” and I reciprocate by ending mine with “from your American family.” She keeps me up to date on family happenings, including new births and, sadly, the death of her Uncle Mycola.
Seventy years after Lesia’s great-grandfather hid my father, I took her to meet my mother, who later had to admit, “There were some good Ukrainians.”
We had dinner with Frank, his wife, Abby, and their daughters. On her last night in D.C., Lesia wanted to cook us a Ukrainian dinner. I reminded her that the meal needed to be vegetarian, which was not a problem for her—she made us borscht and potato latkes, although she called these foods by different names. It was amazing to consider that our families may have eaten the same food together around a table in Lysche.
In May 2014, after the unrest in Ukraine and the takeover of Independence Square in Kiev, Frank was part of a group that organized a conference called “Ukraine: Thinking Together”; the members included Timothy Snyder from Yale, France’s Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Poland’s Adam Michnik. I wrote to tell Lesia, who enthusiastically registered for the conference and spent time with Frank, including a visit to Babi Yar, where she had never been. Frank was on a panel entitled “Can memory save us from history? Can history save us from memory?” He said when he looked out at the audience and saw Lesia, he knew that he had to talk about the relationship between her family and ours and how during the darkest moments of history there were extraordinary acts of bravery. When Tim Snyder, who was moderating the panel, learned that Lesia was there, he summoned her to the stage, to loud applause.
Afterward, Lesia wrote to tell me how meaningful it was for her to be part of the conference and how touched she was by the recognition, but said, “The applause was not for me; it was for Davyd, my great-grandfather.”
13
“We make Judaism tangible” is the tagline of MI POLIN, a Warsaw Judaica company founded in 2014 by Helena Czernek, a young designer, and Aleksander Prugar, a photojournalist. One of the projects they have undertaken involves scouring Poland, where more than 3.5 million Jews lived before the war, to find, on the doorposts of once-Jewish homes, traces of mezuzahs such as the ones Frank and I had seen in Lviv. A mezuzah is a decorative case with a piece of parchment inside including verses from the Torah. But each mezuzah contains more than just a bit of scripture—it embodies the story of a given house and of the family that lived there.
Touching it, they suggest, activates a link between past and present. And Czernek and Prugar do more than just channel these memories; they create, from the absence, a new presence, which is to say they actually cast in bronze a mezuzah from impressions on doorposts where the objects no longer exist.
In Trochenbrod, there are no houses left, there was no indentation in a doorpost for a casting. The artists instead found the oldest tree, a tree that is burned on the inside but is still alive.
This spoke to me. For much of my adult life I have been haunted by the presence of absence. I gave a cast made from the tree to each of my children, and one hangs on a doorpost in my house.
* * *
—
There is a famous poem by the late Israeli poet Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky: “Unto Every Person There Is a Name.” We read it at the mass graves in Trochenbrod.
It’s a poem that has become a song that has become a ceremony. For nearly thirty years now, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, names of Holocaust victims are read aloud as a way of perpetuating the memory of the more than six million murdered Jews. Of restoring to them identity and dignity. “Unto every person there is a name,” the poem begins. “Bestowed on him by God and given to him by his parents.”
It’s an impossible task, to recite all of these names, because for many of those killed, there were no survivors to remember who is gone.
For years, before our trip to Ukraine, I was obsessed with the question of how to remember my sister. Once I learned of her existence, I couldn’t possibly forget her, but without a name, an age, or a physical description, I had no idea what it was I was meant to remember. I couldn’t name any of my children for her or fill out a page of testimony for Holocaust victims. I couldn’t create a record of any sort that spoke of her existence.
It weighed on me enough that I sought out the advice of one of the rabbis at our synagogue. How do I remember when I have nothing to remember? There was no easy answer. But one idea that emerged from our conversation was to find an object or piece of art that I could imbue with the memory of my sister, that would make me think of her when I saw it. I tucked the thought away. It seemed a good idea, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it in practical terms.
A few months later one of my Israeli cousins, Shlomo Bisker, the son of my father’s first cousin Shmuel, came for a visit with his family. They brought as a gift a lithograph by an Israeli artist; it was a picture of two girls, almost identical, wearing similar green dresses. They both have very large eyes, and they are looking out a window. One of the girls is running her fingers through a string of beads.
The artist, Yosl Bergner, is known for his allegorical work about wars, secrets, and darkness. I knew instantly this was the object that would remind me of my sister. I hung it in the dining room, across from where I usually sit, so that it would be frequently in my line of sight. For the time being, that piece of art symbolized the sister I didn’t know anything about.
At the core of Judaism is the sanctification and affirmation of life. We remember, not just for the past but for the sake of the future, which speaks to the Ashkenazi tradition of naming children for those in the family who are no longer alive.
I don’t remember saying my father’s name out loud after he died. I probably didn’t dare for fear of upsetting my mother, or maybe for fear of upsetting myself, or for fear of what I might learn.
Among the many barriers my children have helped me break down is the one about reclaiming my father’s name.
Our oldest son, Franklin Louis Foer, is named for Bert’s mother, Frances, who had died only months before his birth, but his middle name, Louis, is for my father. My oldest nephew is Benjamin Louis Safran. Both of our two other sons have Safran as a middle name, as does our granddaughter Theodora Safran Foer. Our first grandson, Sasha Isaiah Foer, carries my father’s name in Hebrew—Aryeh, which means “lion.” Our youngest grandson is Leo Wolf; Leo also means lion, and in Hebrew he, too, is Aryeh. The name—Leib in Yiddish, Louis in English, and Aryeh in Hebrew—lives on in two of my father’s grandsons and two of his great-grandsons, which means that his name, in one form or another, is spoken in our family virtually every day.
Leo was born on October 8, 2012. He is the son of Josh and his wife, Dinah, and the first grandchild to be born after we returned from Ukraine.
This is what Josh said at Leo’s bris:
Leo, my beautiful Leo Aryeh Zev. I want to tell you about my grandfather Louis, Aryeh, the man whose name you will carry with you. I want to tell you about where he came from, which is also—I pray you will never forget—part of where you come from, as well.
Grandpa Louis lived in a tiny Ukrainian shtetl called Lysche, a village of perhaps a few dozen families with just one small street. It was a town so insignificant and isolated that it could have easily been overlooked by the Nazis. But it was not.
Along with the Jews of several nearby villages, Grandpa Louis, his wife, and their six-year-old daughter, Asya, your grandmother’s half sister, were rounded up in trucks and sent to a ghetto in Chetvertnia. Grandpa Louis was known for his skill with his hands and was sometimes sent by the Nazis on work de
tails outside of the ghetto. One day, he was returning from one of those details, fixing windows outside of town, when he received word that the ghetto had been liquidated—every last Jewish man, woman, and child had been murdered, their bodies disposed of in a mass grave. Like Job, he had lost everything: a village, a family, a daughter, a universe.
He fled into the forest and ultimately found refuge hiding in the barn of a Righteous Gentile, Davyd Zhuvniruck, whose family my mother and Frank were able to meet when they returned to Ukraine three years ago.
After the war, Louis dug up his sewing machine, and some buried gold, and started the impossible task of stitching together a new life. He made his way to Lutsk, where he met our bubbe, and then to Lodz, where my mom—your grandmother—was born. The new family escaped across the border into Germany in the false bed of a truck. My mom, a mere baby, was gagged to prevent her cries from revealing their hiding spot.
They made their way to a displaced-persons camp near Kassel, where Louis became a community leader known for his shrewd dealings in the black market.
Those who knew Louis tell of his winning personality. He was likable and got along with everybody—the kind of guy who could become friends with a table, as one survivor told my mother and brother Frank. He was, by all accounts, a loving father who doted on my Uncle Julian and my mom. But he was also frenetic. Even in America, he had never been able to stop running. He would buy a small grocery store, then sell it and buy another, only to turn around and sell it again. He couldn’t rest. In 1954, just a few years after immigrating to America, he became ill and died. The war that he just barely survived had essentially destroyed him. He is enshrined today among the martyrs in the Yizkor book of Trochenbrod and Lozisht, one of the last victims of Hitler’s Holocaust. He never had the opportunity to savor the freedom into which you, Leo, are being born, or to watch his children grow into great success, or to have the ultimate blessing of holding his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But his memory will live on in you, Leo Aryeh Zev, and we pray his strength will be your strength. His warmth will be your warmth. His intelligence, your intelligence. Grandpa Louis, may your soul find rest. And may your name be a blessing for this child.
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