“One day I went to visit Mom while she was in the hospital,” Theresa would say much later, “and she was having a more lucid day than usual so I took her outside for a walk. Suddenly she ran away from me and hid under a tree. When I caught up to her I asked what she was doing. She said that she’d seen Satan, that ‘the Devil’s over there!’
“I looked where she was pointing and a man was standing there. He looked like Charles.”
I was working at home one afternoon when my aunt called to inform me that Charles had digitized the story he’d forced me to write about his time in Russia during the Second World War and uploaded it to several online websites dealing with the Holocaust. I told her I didn’t care what he did with something I’d written forty years earlier at his behest. Later, driven by perverse curiosity, I did a Google search that led to the sites where “The Vacation I Am Trying to Forget”* had been uploaded and which, as of 2019, can still be found online. The document was every bit as wretched and overwritten as when I’d first typed it back in high school. I was about to click away when I came to the section about the massacre at Vishnevo. Some sections had been updated, but the crucial parts remained intact.
I saw around 60 or 70 people standing in formation in the yard, some were fully dressed others had only pants. German SS and the police surrounded them. I could not get into the yard because of the activity that was taking place, so I waited across the street. After a few minutes, around twenty five more Jews carrying shovels and surrounded by guards marched up from the Ghetto and stopped on Vilna St. about fifty feet past the Gmina. The SS gave the order to move out and they marched out towards the street and made a right turn, joining the others wondering what was going on. So I followed behind at a distance. They marched past the Orthodox Church then made a right turn on the road where the Jewish cemetery was located.
I cut across the field and hid in an old first world war bunker across from the cemetery and waited. When the Jews arrived a few minutes later the Gestapo and police prodded the Jews towards the hole that had been dug previously. There were shouts, I could not hear very well what was being said, but I assume that they were ordered to line up in front of the holes. Some moved very slowly and reluctantly. Others were shoved towards the hole. A signal was given. The guns fired loudly piercing the still air. The prisoners slowly slumped and fell into the open holes.
From the bunker where I was hiding I could plainly see that some were still alive but already they had a crew ready to cover them up with dirt to smother and die.
The document also contained his account of the day that Sophia was warned by neighbors to leave the area or risk being killed as collaborators: “The Partisans felt that my mother was a collaborator because she worked at the station cooking for the Germans.” Even as a kid I never understood this part. Plenty of innocent civilians—Jews and Gentiles alike—were forced by the Germans to work at factories and farms but weren’t considered collaborators because saying no usually ended in being shot. Collaborators chose to work with the Nazis of their own free will. Why would Charles’s family be considered collaborators if they had no other choice?
Then I remembered my father’s description of the young Jewish girls who worked for Sophia as little more than slave labor. Not with her, for her, implying that she was in charge. And there was the matter of the German uniform made for Charles by the soldiers he considered his friends. He’d kept that uniform in pristine condition for the rest of his life, despite telling the rest of the family that he had destroyed it, a clear indication that it held great significance for him.
What if the threat from partisans wasn’t based on a misunderstanding? What if they were collaborators? There’s nothing like parading around in your own custom-made Nazi uniform to give the locals the impression that you just might be on the wrong side of history. It would also explain why my grandmother became nervous whenever anyone talked about their relationship with the Germans who ran the train station, insisting that they had only casual contact with them, and no contact of any kind with the SS officers who regularly came through on their way to eliminate “undesirables.” She always characterized their condition as one of subservience, doing hard labor under difficult circumstances, and said they were never allowed to stray far from the station. To hear her tell it they were little more than prisoners, dressed and fed poorly.
But that description contradicted the photos that had been on display in her house all the years I was growing up, pictures that showed my grandmother wearing expensive clothes and shoes, walking arm in arm with German officers as they shopped together. Had I spent so much time ignoring her photos and shrugging off my father’s old stories that I hadn’t paid proper attention to what was right in front of me the whole time?
The key part that remained unchanged between the two versions of my father’s story was his statement that he watched the Jews being killed as he “hid in an old first world war bunker.”
“From the bunker where I was hiding I could plainly see . . .”
We had always accepted his story because we didn’t know any better. But now the story had been posted to websites by and for people who had been there at the time, and their recollections were quite different, including a description of the massacre written by a survivor named Shlomo Elishkevich, reprinted in part below.
During that month the Germans killed people almost every day. One day they gathered thirty-eight Jews and brought them to the Jewish Cemetery. Among them there were Yaacov-Hirsh Elishkevich and his son Avraham Binyamin, Hirshe Rogovin, Ayzik Rogovin and others. The Germans forced them to dig a big trench. When they finished digging, they were shoved into the trench and were gunned down by the Germans with a machine gun. The machine gun stood near the cemetery on a hill which was located on top of a German bunker left over from WWI. Then the victims were covered over with the ground. Gentile witnesses told that for up to three days following the slaughter the ground covering the mass grave moved, as some of the victims were still alive.
This was the line that brought a chill to my blood:
The machine gun stood near the cemetery on a hill which was located on top of a German bunker left over from WWI.
As I scrolled down I found a post my father had written arguing with that description: “The other inaccurate writing was that the Jewish people that died at the cemetery in Vishnevo were killed by a machine gun on top of a 1st world war bunker. That is not true. From where the bunker was it would be impossible to carry that out. All the action was conducted at the cemetery and I was watching all this from the bunker on that day.”
Another web page contained notes from my father that he accidentally posted publicly in reply to private emails he had apparently received from other survivors.* One such reply was written to a woman named Dvora Helberg, who said that “all of the victims were Jews and were murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators.” (Emphasis mine.) Though I do not have her note to my father, I can only assume that during their exchange she, too, mentioned the machine-gun nest atop the World War I memorial, because in response my father wrote:
What I do remember and it’s stuck in my mind and will be there forever of people being butchered at the cemetery while I watched it from the ww1 German bunker across from the cemetery. There was no machine gun on top of the bunker, only wide eyed me.
My father said there was no machine gun on the World War I memorial bunker.
But multiple survivors insisted just as adamantly that there was a machine gun there, and that it had fired into the crowd of Jews.
My father had said that he and his family were suspected of being collaborators.
The survivors said the victims were murdered by the Nazis “and their local collaborators.”
By his own words, both in the document and directly via his online responses, my father—a suspected collaborator—had placed himself squarely on that memorial bunker as the massacre was taking place. The same bunker that others confirmed as the source of the machine-gun
fire.
Those statements seemed like a contradiction. But what if they weren’t?
What if they were both correct?
What if the survivors were telling the truth when they said the machine-gun fire came from a World War I bunker, and my father was telling the truth when he said that he watched the massacre from that same bunker, carefully omitting the fact that he had been a part of it?
Charles was able to make that omission work when he told us the story because there was no one to contradict him. But he couldn’t do the same with survivors who had personally witnessed the massacre and, much to his inconvenience, lived to tell about it.
I went back to the sites in question to see if there was any more information to be found, only to discover that my father had blipped off all of them, never to return. Perhaps he thought that deleting his account would also delete his messages, but they remained and, as of this writing, are still online.
Without hard evidence it would be pointless to confront my father about my suspicions. There was only one person who could tell me the truth about what really happened that day. Someone who had hinted for years that she knew something ominous about my father, information she used repeatedly to punish him into silence with one word: Vishnevo!
There are things I know about your father I can only tell to a dog.
I wanted to gather more information before calling my aunt, but there was little more to be found online and she was in failing health; there was danger in waiting too long. So in the fall of 2008, I called her at her home in Paterson. We talked for a few minutes about nothing in particular, then I steeled myself for what was to come. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, shoot,” she said, and laughed. “Why so formal all of a sudden? Don’t forget I used to change your diapers when you were a baby, so there’s nothing about you that I haven’t seen.” For reasons I’ll never understand she always took great pleasure in reminding me of that.
“I want to ask you about Vishnevo.”
The other end of the phone went silent. I could hear her breathing, the tension palpable. “Uh-huh,” she said at last, her voice flat, volunteering nothing.
“Were you there the day of the massacre?”
“No,” she said firmly. “I was with Mama at the train station. You have to remember I was still recovering from polio. Walking anywhere was hard, and the roads were terrible, so I stayed close to home.”
“But my father was there that day.”
“Uh-huh.” Again, noncommittal. “Joey, why are you asking me about things that happened over fifty years ago? Where’s all this going?”
I realized that as long as she thought she had room to maneuver, she would never give up the truth. My only choice was to bluff. I told her what I’d dug up online and said that I’d found other, definitive sources indicating that my father had been involved in the massacre.
“Before I decide what to do about this,” I said, “I want to hear what you have to say.” I left the what to do about this part deliberately vague, letting her mind flit from the possibility of private confrontation to the risk of public exposure.
The silence on the phone lingered. At any moment I expected her to hang up. Come on, I thought, just this once, please, just this once.
Then I heard her exhale, a resigned sigh exorcising decades of secrets. “You have to understand we never talked about this to anybody outside the family. I told Ted a little, but even he never knew the whole story, not him, not Frank, nobody.
“If I tell you, I want you to promise you won’t use this or tell anyone what I said as long as I’m alive, okay? I don’t want that son of a bitch coming after me, I have enough troubles of my own. Say you promise and I’ll believe you.”
“I promise. I just want to know the truth as you saw it, that’s all.”
She took a long breath, then slowly began talking. It should be noted that while some of what follows was described in previous chapters for purposes of continuity in the storytelling, this was the first time I was hearing most of it.
She started by describing their flight to the train station after the blitzkrieg and Sophia’s affair with some of the officers, one of whom considered Charles a potential stepson. In keeping with the tradition of the Hitler Youth, he began to educate Charles in all matters Nazi.
“The SS were always hanging around the station,” she said. “Some of them were posted nearby, and there were always more going and coming on the trains. Mama cooked for the soldiers who worked there, and sometimes, you know, she did more for them, not because she had to, but because she liked to. They’d bring her gifts, take her on trips, and buy her expensive clothes. She practically ran that place, and when the work got to be too much, she had them bring Jewish girls to work for her. She used to love pushing them around and making them work while she sat with the soldiers, drinking and laughing.
“Your father loved the uniforms, the guns, and the way the Nazis could push people around. He used to follow them around all day. They practically adopted him. They let him run errands, even made that ridiculous uniform for him. He used to wear it all the time, even when we were alone upstairs at the station, just staring at himself in the mirror with that swastika. Then he started tagging along when they went on patrol at night. He’d carry water, food; whatever they needed him to do, he did it.
“One morning he ran upstairs to where we lived above the station and told me that while he was out with the soldiers they came across a bunch of Jews on the road. The soldiers wanted to know where they were going and started beating them when they didn’t answer fast enough. They used rubber pipes or hoses, something like that, and your father jumped right into it, beating them just as hard as the soldiers. It was exciting, he loved it. After that he joined up whenever a patrol went looking for Jews or anyone else they could beat up.”
With those words I finally understood why my father used to go out at night with friends to beat up any “queers” they found on the street: he was reliving those experiences, just as he did the afternoon he forced me to put on his uniform.
With all that as context, she came to the day of the incident.
“A bunch of soldiers and SS came on the train, more than usual. They picked up some of the soldiers who were already there and started loading everybody into trucks, heading to Vishnevo. They said something big was going to happen. Charlie practically begged them to let him come along. They said yes, so he jumped in and they drove off.
“When they came back, he told me the SS and the soldiers had started pulling people out of their houses, making them dig their own graves, then shooting them. Then they set up a machine-gun nest on a World War I bunker and started firing into the crowd, and your father . . .”
She hesitated. I closed my eyes, silently urging her to keep going.
Her voice went low and soft. “At first he stood with the soldiers as they fired the machine gun, feeding bullets. He said it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Then one of the soldiers said, ‘You want to do it?’
“And he did.
“They let him take over the machine gun for a while and he just started shooting people, killing them, one after another, like it was a game. When one of the SS officers came toward them, the soldiers took the machine gun back because they were afraid of getting in trouble.
“He said it was the most amazing thing he’d ever done, and he couldn’t wait to do it again.”
“And did he? Do it again?”
She paused. I could feel her weighing her answer. “Why?” she asked at last, a certain canniness in her voice. “Is there anything else, anything specific you wanted to ask me about?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t have anything else because I hadn’t considered the possibility that there might be anything else.
“Then no, he didn’t do it again,” she said, in a tone of voice that suggested just the opposite. It was her way of saying I’m tired of talking about this, so unless you’ve got something, unless you know something,
I’m not going to volunteer.*
“How much did Sophia know about all this?”
“All of it,” she said. “Why do you think she was so afraid of anyone looking too close at our history? Don’t forget, back then there were Nazi hunters everywhere looking for collaborators.”
Then she said she had to go to a dinner at the church and hung up.
I sat without moving for what felt like a very long time. It was dark when I looked up again.
A cold knot formed in my stomach. My father was a murderer.
My father was a war criminal.
With that realization, all the pieces of my family’s history that had never made sense began to line up like dominoes. Whatever the real cause of my step-grandfather’s death, natural or unnatural, he’d allegedly told Sophia that he’d been a collaborator, which may have prompted her to assist with his demise. Why would Sophia be worried about people poking into Walter’s past unless she was afraid that she might be compromised in the process? That same fear was almost certainly what prompted Theresa to interrogate Ted’s brother Frank about his father’s activities during the war, looking for anything that might harm them from that side of the family.
And there was my father’s itinerant lifestyle to consider. Twenty-one moves in eighteen years. Maybe the reason behind those moves was just what it seemed, getting out of town to stay ahead of bill collectors. But what if it wasn’t the only reason? Did my father keep moving to make things harder for anyone who might be looking for him? Then there was the matter of the aliases, using Stark for business papers, apartment rentals, and anything else that might leave a paper trail. My school records were always under Straczynski, but nobody was looking for twelve-year-old collaborators.
The whispered conversations, veiled hints of some terrible scandal, outbursts of violence, the German uniform, my grandmother’s paranoia, my father’s rabid anti-Semitism, and his penchant for beating “inferiors” . . . suddenly it all made sense.
Becoming Superman Page 38