Eventually little stories are offered. She tells us her father hid two Jewish girls for two nights "in a barrel of small grains". Her father attacked a German officer who was beating a young man. "He smacked this German soldier in his face, even drawing out one of his teeth," Krys translates. "The German went crazy and my father quickly ran away and hid in our home. But Germans ran after him. They wanted to search our house, so my mum sat on the floor on the place where there was a trapdoor to the cellar where my father was hiding, and pretended to be sick. She told them she suffered from typhus. They were always in fear of typhus."
We don't talk about anti-Semitism in Poland today but it becomes clear not everyone appreciates Grażyna's inclusion of Jewish history in the local record. "Someone came with one old sneaker shoe and offered it to her. 'Look, Grazinka, this is a shoe some Jewish gentleman wore,'" Krys says. "It was to ridicule her. Peasant-minded people are not enough understanding."
Not enough understanding: no Jews came back here to live after the war, Grażyna says, but survivors and their children visit. "They want to see." She loads us down with publications about Żelechów and some traditional cut-paper patterns she makes in her spare time. We visit the memorial chamber she has created. It is full of artefacts of old Żelechów, and photographs of the synagogue, and of smiling Jewish girls at the local school before the war. When it's time to go we try to give her a koha, a contribution towards her work, but she won't hear of it. This is her gift to survivors, their children, the truth.
WE ARE TREKKING into the forest in Okrzei, less than half an hour from Żelechów, when the panic kicks in. Poland has begun to feel less like a charnel house, a place where my family's degenerate DNA was hunted, but here we are once again in that by now familiar locale the middle of nowhere, following three Polish men we scarcely know to the scene of another mass murder.
We are in the company of Urek, a local man who has kindly driven us, total strangers, from his farmhouse as far as his vehicle can go and is now walking with us into the forest. It's mid-summer. He lights a cigarette, smokes it down, and chucks the smouldering end into the brittle vegetation underfoot. He lights another. The forest looks tinder dry. We are going to die here.
This is near the end of a day that has got completely out of hand, even by our standards. After leaving Grażyna's house, Chris told Krys we'd like to see some forest if possible, so we can visualise the sort of place where my father might have hidden. Krys has taken up the challenge with gusto. We have documentation that my father was liberated in the Lublin area so he has made some calls and we have headed here, twenty-six kilometres south-west of Łuków
There is no forest in sight. We stop at a wedding venue in the countryside. It is named Dwór Sienkiewicz after Okrzei's famous son Henryk Sienkiewicz, a writer and Nobel Laureate who in 1896 wrote the popular historical epic Quo Vadis. Later I will Google the book and find a description that says there is not a single friendly reference to the Jews anywhere in the novel. "What is worse, nearly every mention of them is tied to some ugly rumour or malicious deed." I am not surprised to read that Sienkiewicz "merely followed the received opinions of his day".
While Krys goes inside the venue to make enquiries, we sit in the car for what seems long enough for three Polish weddings. It's early evening already. We have to be up at three the next morning to fly to London.
"You'll have to tell him we need to go back to Warsaw," Chris says.
"I can't!" I wail.
Eventually we troop inside, where Krys has baled up the receptionist. She's told him there is a memorial to murdered Jews in the forest but she doesn't know exactly where. These things are seldom signposted. Trapped behind her desk, she rolls her eyes as he makes her go through her contact book. Poles seem willing to engage in complicated interactions like this with strangers.
She makes a couple of calls, is at a loss. It seems hopeless. I take Krys aside and say we really need to get back. He turns and gives me a hard look. "Do you want to find it or don't you?" Resistance is futile. We will be late back to Warsaw that night.
The receptionist finally rings a schoolteacher, who proffers the name of a man on whose land the monument may be. The man's not home but his wife says he won't be long. To the relief of the receptionist, we turn and bolt out the door to drive to his farm.
IN THE FOREST THE ONLY SOUNDS are the calling of birds and the crunch of our footsteps. In a sunlit clearing there is a headstone organised by the Lasting Memory Foundation. It sits over an indentation in the ground. There is a hole made by an animal on one side. Perhaps a fox has made this place its home. This is where thirteen Jews died when Germans found their bunker and threw in grenades. A box underground: is this the sort of place where my father hid?
There are only three names on the stone: Chana Besser, Mosze Besser and Rywka Milbrot, women from nearby villages. The Lasting Memory Foundation lists among others murdered here two brothers, Maks and Sergej, from Żelechów, and two twelve-year-old boys, Moszek and Dawidek. The "ek" is an affectionate Polish diminutive: Little Dawid; Little Mosze.
On the day the stone was dedicated a doctor from Prague, name unknown, was also remembered. He had escaped from Treblinka after an uprising there in August 1943. Of the 300 prisoners who managed to get away, 200 were hunted down by German SS, police and military units. 'The doctor saved a Jew from another group who were hiding nearby by amputating the man's severely injured hand. The patient was Wacław Iglicki, who had jumped from a train.
Memorial stone erected at the site of an underground bunker by the Lasting Memory Foundation in the forest at Okrzei, near Zelechów. Here thirteen Jews in hiding were discovered and killed by German grenades.
Iglicki had ended up in the forest with a partisan unit. His account, on the website of Centropa, a non-profit Jewish historical institute, offers some insight into what happened to people like my father. "Before we got to ... Siedlce, because that's more or less where I jumped out of the train, there were many dead people underneath me already ... My friend Mendel ... jumped out first, then I after him. But I didn't find him because the train was moving so I might have been a few kilometres away from him already. The direction I wanted to take was this: go towards my place of birth. So I walked towards Żelechów"
The crowded ghetto where you wake up and the person next to you is dead. The airless cattle car where you have to stand on the dead. The box in the ground where you can't lie down. From September 1939 until July 1944 my father fought to live in a world with literally no room for a Jew.
As Urek speaks the unresolved tensions of Poland's Holocaust history play out again. I wonder if his family knew at the time that Jews were hiding on their land. "He knows some stories," Krys says, "that his grandfather was ordered to deliver Germans to this area but nothing came out of it. Logically he's convinced they must have known, but he doesn't know the right story behind [the Germans] finding this place."
Urek was happy about the bunker monument but his encounter with the foundation hadn't gone well. The president was Zbigniew Nizinsky, a non-Jewish Pole dedicated to finding the unmarked graves of murdered Jews and Poles. It seems Urek was told that when the Germans came to the site of the bunker their pathfinder was a Pole.
Telling the story, Urek fires off a burst of angry Polish. Krys translates. "He questioned: Did this man, the pathfinder, have a name written on his forehead?" The question of who might have led the Nazis to the bunker hangs in the air.
When I return home I read online a story of a similar bunker in Okrzei on the land of a farmer. The farmer knew he was hiding Jews. His son led the Germans to the place and they killed them all.
Nizinsky visited many families in Okrzei to try and find the location of bunkers like this. "Nobody knew. Nobody could locate the place." Nobody knew: the silence in Poland can be deafening. "It took Mr Nizinsky several visits and he finally got to me and I was able to take him here," Urek says.
"Nie, nie nie," he says when Janek asks if the site was ever excavated.
Excavation was not unusual. People would come with metal detectors, looking for guns or gold. But according to Urek the bodies of the people murdered here—the Czech doctor, Moszek, Dawidek and the others—remain undisturbed. The Foundation for Lasting Memory reports on the ceremony that was held to dedicate the stone to them: "The rabbi and the priest prayed together, breaking the utter silence of the forest."
Urek tells Krys he's heard the bunker actually hid fifteen Jews. Two escaped the grenades. This is enough to convince Krys that my father could have been one of the fifteen. "You know what? Maybe it happened that he went to arrange for provisions when the attack took place and that's what saved him."
"Imagination," Janek says quietly, with a wink.
"I know," I say. But I'd love to believe it. All I know is what those who met him when he came back from the war said: that he had lived in a forest in a box under the ground. "The ceiling was low, so that once inside one couldn't stand up," one survivor of life in a bunker recalled. "The roof was made of wood, covered with branches and sand. We also had a stove made of bricks, and a concealed door..."
When Dad once made us a play house it had walls, a door and a window, but disappointingly no roof. That was so it didn't kill the grass, he said. Maybe he didn't want us to even play at living in a box. In Fugitives of the Forest, the author Allan Levine records a scene witnessed by Jewish partisans coming out of the Rudniki Forest in Lithuania behind the Red Army. A woman who had been hiding in a small cave in the ruins of the Vilna Ghetto emerged with her young daughter in her arms. The child, who had been quiet, finally spoke. "May one cry now, Mother?" she said.
I hug Krys and tell him he was right to push the woman at the wedding venue for information, right to get us to this powerful uneasy place. In my search for my father, I tell him, I sometimes haven't pushed hard enough. "You have to put aside your sensitivity when it comes to extending a little bit of push," Krys advises. I promise to extend more push.
Urek has another story. In one corner of the bunker, he says, there was a tree with a Star of David on the trunk. He cut it down two or three years before the monument was unveiled. "Why?" I ask Krys. "Because it was completely dried out," he translates. "It was a strange tree. It was of solid size but after the war it didn't develop. It kept drying, drying, drying until it finally died." Maybe it was just a coincidence that the tree refused to grow, Krys explains, "but Urek saw this Star of David with his own eyes."
We stand staring at the indentation in the ground, a home to some animal, a mass grave. There's a point in The Pianist when the building in which Władysław Szpilman is hiding catches fire. To go out is to be caught and sent to Treblinka. Szpilman decides to take an overdose of sleeping pills so he won't be conscious when he burns. Somehow he wakes up still alive and feels not disappointment but joy, a "boundless, animal lust for life at any price".
My father must have felt like that when he jumped and didn't get shot, when he could emerge from his bunker in broad daylight, when he could breathe free again. Perhaps that's why he came to his Aunt Sabina's in Brooklyn smiling, with his guitar, full of life.
PART IV
CHAPTER 20
A mitzvah
Family and friends present at the burial: none.
Brockville, November 30, 1970
WE DECIDE WE PROBABLY WON’T say Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer. My cousin Linda has suggested it, and its ancient Aramaic cadences sound beautiful: Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba/ b’al’ma di v’ra khir’utei... But there is the translation: "Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world / which He has created according to His will." My father didn’t believe in any of that.
First things first: more phone calls at dawn, asking questions you could not have anticipated ever having to ask, such as whether it is possible to replace a grim, wrongly spelled pauper’s plaque in a Catholic cemetery in Ontario with something more... Jewish?
Dale Trickey thinks that will be fine. We can have a small upright headstone. On top of the cost of the stone, there’s a small fee for the City of Brockville and an even smaller one for the St Francis Xavier Cemetery. When I ask him to recommend someone in Brockville to organise the stone, Dale seems reluctant. It turns out there are two options. One of the companies is run by Tammie Trickey but he is hesitant to recommend his wife.
I fire off an email to Tammie. It’s the beginning of a correspondence marked by a singular sunniness, given the subject matter. "All is good on this end. Stone has been ordered. Hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!" And, when the time comes to send drawings of the finished design, "Sorry, I thought I attached the corrected version," she writes. "Lol I see I did not. I have now!"
We need some lols. The wording on the headstone has presented challenges. Group emails fly between my brother, my sister, me and our children. The third generation, relatively free from all the unpacked baggage of the second, and fierce champions of the grandfather they never knew, make sure we get it right. Something in Hebrew, says Nicola. A Star of David, says everyone.
Chris points out we should have proper dates, not just 1910–1970. My father’s birthday: May 16, the same as my sister. The day he died: November 26, four days before he was buried on my birthday.
Should we say "Loved husband of Patricia"? They were never, in the end, divorced. "You know your Mum and I ... don’t wish to hurt anyone," Stew had written from Japan. My mother had told me, in tears, that she had never stopped loving my father. She makes it on to the stone. Not in a shack on Milford Beach but in a cemetery in Brockville, Dad has finally pulled us all together again.
I want to mention on the headstone that he was in the Warsaw Ghetto and survived the Holocaust. Jeff says there should be some indication he had a life after that.
There are two choices of size. "The taller one leaves room for more great-grandchildren, which is good. No pressure, cousins and siblings," writes my son Ben, who has produced three.
We agree all my father’s descendants must be listed. I ask my stepson Ben if he would like to be included. "I would be honoured," he says. Twelve and counting. Sometimes just a list of names can feel like a victory.
The design we’re sent looks fine except for two small but crucial spelling mistakes: "granfather" and "Holcaust". I begin to appreciate the terrible potential for cock-ups implicit in the expression "set in stone".
I confess to a Jewish friend that I have become obsessed with this quest, these journeys, this headstone, all too late. "Don’t sell it short," he says. "You are all doing a mitzvah."
So we are doing a good deed. The unveiling is planned for June 19, 2016. Not everyone can make the trip, including our sons Ben and Ben, my sister’s son Karl, and Nicola, who was with us when we found the grave in 2015. Cousin Joe is too ill to travel from Pennsylvania.
That still leaves thirteen. Jerry, Jill and the dogs will come up from New Jersey. Jerry will have competed in a five-kilometre race at the Transplant Games at Cleveland Clinic two days before. "It was eighty-five degrees, humid, with a twenty-miles-per-hour headwind," Jill emails after the race. He placed second in his age group.
Linda will come up from New York. Her daughter Mollie, who will be in New Zealand on a post-graduation visit, will travel with Ros, Chris and me from Auckland.
Jeff and his wife Maureen have just moved to Guelph, Ontario, where Jeff is dean of a large veterinary college. They have ended up in a new home only four hours’ drive from our father’s grave and have visited it again since we went for the first time in 2015. He saw so little of his father as a child. Now he is close. For the unveiling, he will pick up the New Zealand contingent from Toronto’s Pearson Airport. His daughter Jocelyn and her boyfriend Blair will drive up from New York State, where Jocelyn’s working as the newest vet in the family. Our daughter Monika and her boyfriend Sean will already have flown in from London. It’s a transcontinental logistical nightmare. "Anything is possible," Jeff says.
We end up, many of us dazed and jetlagged, at
the Super 8 Motel in Brockville. It’s hot. There’s a pool; water always helps. The headstone gathering is the following morning. There’s a feeling of mounting pressure—some final reckoning approaching, like a rogue weather system. Chris thinks we should go to the cemetery and check that everything is in order with the headstone. No, no, I say. I can’t bear to look. What if something has gone wrong? Something does go wrong. There’s an argument in a liquor store with my sister. Long-simmering tensions erupt over the legacy of the past. I remember my father and Uncle Sy yelling in the library. I fear we have made a scene.
We go out to dinner. I resist a powerful urge to drink too much. This sort of thing can’t be done hung over. It was never going to be easy. Through grappling with these tensions over the family history and dynamics I have learned that children in a family can have entirely different experiences. I have realised that not everything I thought I knew was true. There is always more than one story and I can only tell my version. You can search forever and never fully know what happened. The dead are entitled to keep their secrets.
Eva Hoffman, a psychologist and the child of survivors, in her book After Such Knowledge describes trauma as "suffering in excess of what the psyche can absorb". The pain is so intense it can arrest time, "freeze it at the moment of violence or threat... In a sense such memories are not memories at all, since their content has not been relegated to the past."
This helps explain why children of survivors experience our parents’ stories, their memories, with such visceral immediacy. These are not memories in the normal sense but invitations into a still unreeling present. My father occasionally gave me a glimpse into a world so livid and clamouring that for years it made the one I inhabited seem unreal.
Driving to Treblinka Page 21