A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir

by Lev Golinkin

  There was one piece of information at my disposal: my father remembered the old refugee who first told us of Eva mentioning that the mysterious “crazy woman who gives away perfectly good clothes” was originally from northern Europe. Dad had no idea why the old timer knew that or whether it was even accurate, but it was all I had. I really wanted to find Madame Eva—her charity had affected me deeply, laying the foundation for my own volunteerism and inspiring (during my service trip to Tijuana) the first hesitant steps toward acknowledging my past. Originally from northern Europe—as the trip loomed closer, the wispy little rumor came to dominate my thoughts. For weeks, I poked at it in my mind until one night, after feeling particularly saucy, I pulled out an atlas and e-mailed the Vienna embassies of every Western country north of Austria:

  Dear Embassy Staff:

  I am looking for a woman whose first name is Eva (I do not know her last name), who may or may not be from your country, and who distributed free clothes in Vienna seventeen years ago. If you happen to know her, please contact me.

  “You can be sure they’ll have their top staffers working on it,” quipped Jeff, the team’s blunt voice of reality, and I had to agree; immediately after hitting “send” I could almost hear the echo of eleven embassy clerks clicking “delete” at the other end of the line.

  The morning Team Lev was shipping out for Austria, I was dashing around between last-minute errands when I got a call from Kyle, who’d been assigned to monitor my e-mail account for any straggling messages from Europe. “You’re not gonna believe this,” my friend exclaimed. “You should probably send them a thank-you card, or a danke card, or whatever they call it.”

  “Send who a danke card?”

  “Finland, man!” said Kyle. “Good ol’ Finland came through for you.”

  “Dear Mr. Golinkin: it is not a usual policy to disclose contact details, but we are familiar with the individual you are talking about, we have established communication with her, and obtained permission to share her information. She is most interested in speaking with you,” went the e-mail, ending with a line I will never forget: “We thank you for allowing the Finnish embassy of Vienna to be of service to you in this matter.”

  I made the call as soon as we hit the tarmac.

  Madame Eva’s backstory was both simple and moving. She, like many I had encountered on my journey, was not a professional humanitarian; in fact, she hadn’t engaged in full-scale philanthropy prior to 1986. The seeds for her actions, however, had been planted much earlier, in the aftermath of World War II, when the world first opened its eyes to the horrors of Hitler’s empire. Rumors of the Holocaust had been spreading through Europe for years, but for years they’d been dismissed as dramatic exaggeration or outright propaganda. Humanity had never been confronted with such diligent, mechanized slaughter, and many couldn’t conceive the extent of the carnage until after the war, when the camps were liberated and the photographers walked through the ashes.

  At the time, Madame Eva was just Eva, the young daughter of a Helsinki pastor, but she remembered the night she sat in her parents’ safe Nordic living room and learned of the Final Solution. A suffocating helplessness washed over the little girl. She felt the unfairness, the acute, absolute, and overwhelming unfairness that can only be experienced by a child, the notion that millions of people had perished and millions more were suffering, and there was nothing she could do to help. On that night in a remote Finnish apartment, little Eva made a silent promise to herself and to the Jews: if the Jewish people ever needed her in the future, she would not idly stand by.

  The skinny girl from Helsinki grew up, became a journalist, traveled widely. Hers was a familiar face in the social circles of Austria, Italy, Switzerland, and her native Finland. Decades flowed by, life happened, career happened, one marriage and two children happened, until one autumn evening in the mid-1980s, as “We Are the World” was topping international charts and acid-washed denim hijacked fashion sense, Madame Eva Huber-Huber first noticed the shivering individuals ghosting by on the streets of Vienna. This time, she wasn’t helpless.

  Eva began simply, soliciting donations, which allowed her to open a distribution center at the house on Schüttelstrasse. Advertising was unnecessary—Gorbachev’s reforms were rapidly taking effect, and more and more Jews braved the emigration process. Old refugees told new arrivals, and shortly after the first wary migrant ambled away from the house with the red door, clutching his new duds and shaking his head in disbelief, word spread, and soon Eva needed help. Friends across Europe provided clothing and served as regional collection hubs. The Schüttelstrasse center expanded into a headquarters and a dormitory. Helsinki churches and youth groups allowed Eva to tap into a network of Finnish teenagers, such as the ones who had assisted my family, girls with an eye for fashion and a mind for community service. Donations, as well as funds from Madame Eva herself, supplied money needed to transport and house the volunteers, who were recruited to serve in Vienna for two to four weeks. The Cold War was hurtling to a close, the Soviet Union kept shaking and groaning and spewing out more refugees, the Schüttelstrasse house started operating day and night, and an organization named Hilfe und Hoffnung (Help and Hope) emerged into being.

  While doing my research I had erroneously assumed that Madame Eva had wrapped up her charity work with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc; in truth, the house with the red door was only the beginning. Since the refugees no longer came to Austria, Eva had realigned the group and went mobile. In 1990, a transit camp sprang up in Budapest. Aid caravans embarked for the town of Oradea in the wake of the Romanian Revolution. Shortly afterward, the Balkan conflicts devolved into outright ethnic cleansing; by the time the Yugoslav Wars were over, twenty-six separate Hilfe und Hoffnung aid missions had snaked out across war zones in Belgrade and Sarajevo. The convoys were serenaded by gunfire and mortar explosions, and at one point Eva was forced to do some quick talking as a militiaman threatened her life at gunpoint. But with the increased danger came increased opportunity to help those in peril: back when migrants still flocked to Vienna, Hilfe und Hoffnung had assisted 60,000 people; in the first two years of the Eastern European convoys, that number ballooned to 212,000, and it has only risen since.

  Madame Eva couldn’t stop the Holocaust. She wasn’t able to reverse the past, erase the terror, give the survivors back their lives and their lost. She couldn’t undo the damage of diligent Soviet persecution or tackle the Communist colossus. But she could do something—she could give out clothes on the streets of Eastern Europe, bestowing a quarter million people with a basic human need—and she did it very well. This staggering success had not gone unnoticed, and in 2006 the Austrian secretary of state awarded Madame Eva the Gold Medal of the Republic, one of the highest civilian honors of the Austrian government.

  Eva was on a fund-raising trip in Italy during my visit to Vienna, but after we spoke she connected me with Hannu Ylilato, the Finn responsible for organizing Hilfe und Hoffnung’s latest service trip, which was set to begin in a week. Hannu scooped me up from my hotel and drove us over to the Schüttelstrasse house, which now serves exclusively as a supply post. Pallets laden with furniture, baby carriages, and crates of supplies waited to be loaded, and boxes bulging with clothes, books, toys, and Torahs were already packed. While gaping around the main room I almost tripped over a pile of menorahs near the doorway. “These just arrived out of Belgium,” Hannu apologized; “the trip is very shortly, so I left them out to save time with storage.”

  “You didn’t show me the whole house,” I said as Hannu began to lock up. “There’s another room, over there somewhere … it’s a small room, but it has a large window that faces the canal.”

  Hannu gave me a strange look, then silently took out his keys, walked across the hall, and wheeled aside a pair of clothing racks and a large black screen leaning against a corner. Inside the little room hidden by the screen, we edged past plastic crates plastered with medical symbols. “I hold the medical supplies here—t
hey are the most expensive and most hard to replace. No one has broken in, but I want to be careful,” my guide explained as he flung aside a thick wool blanket to unveil the window behind it.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” I said. “That’s the room. The window’s not as big as I remembered it, but that’s probably because I grew up since then.”

  Hannu was staring at me.

  “You were here when?”

  “Seventeen years ago.”

  “And of what age were you?”

  “Ten.”

  “And how is it you remember this one room?”

  “It’s a very important room, Hannu.” I smiled. “It’s where they kept the children’s jackets.”

  Hannu unzipped his backpack and fished out a camera. “I think we’d better take a picture of you for Eva,” he said.

  “How’d the date go?” Jeff glanced up from his bed when I returned to our hotel room. “Was he cute? Did he drive a nice car?” I’d grown used to overcoming my fears, but the anticipation of meeting people and groups that had succored my family still left me “giddy as a shy lass on prom night,” according to Jeff’s unsolicited description.

  “It was good,” I replied. “I got good info, plus I got to come back as an adult and say thank you, which doesn’t happen too often with these groups.

  “And yes, douchebag, he has a very nice Audi.”

  * * *

  “How is it you remember this one room?” Hannu had asked, and I smiled because the first thing that went through my head was How could I not? I understood Hannu’s incredulous question, and it was a valid reaction from his point of view. The Finn was a volunteer—a veteran volunteer, but a volunteer nonetheless. “How could you expect a man who is warm to understand one who is cold?” said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and as much as I wish it were otherwise, perhaps Solzhenitsyn is right. I wouldn’t expect Hannu to recall a minor detail from a specific service trip many years back, no more than I can remember the structural layout of every house I built with Habitat for Humanity. I’d be shocked if the original owner of the black bomber jacket was able to recollect stopping by a clothing drive with his parents when he was ten years old. All those experiences come from one side of an invisible divide, where a coat is just a coat, and a house a house, and when one’s world is full of coats and houses, they recede into memory. But how could I forget scrambling out of that pile of clothing, the thrill of golden zippers flashing down my jacket, warmth and dignity snuggling up to me, the shiny black window pane standing witness to a wish granted and a need fulfilled? How could I forget listening to the brutal Vienna wind as it howled down the Danube, rendered impotent by Eva’s kindness? Everything’s magnified on the other side of the divide.

  I’ve been fortunate enough to reach a point where a new piece of clothing no longer elicits such a fierce response, but whenever I think of Eva’s jacket, a different kind of joy surges through me. I look back and see my childhood, the result not just of the dark streets of Kharkov, but of the combined efforts of thousands of protestors, dozens of human rights workers, politicians, philanthropists, activists, and everyday people. I’ve been lucky to meet a few of them; most I will never know. Some devoted their careers to the struggle; many had done nothing more than sign a petition, or mail a check, or process paperwork, or drop off a jacket. Small deeds that wound their way through the world to become a part of me and shape me in ways unexpected and unknown. And now that I’m on the other side, I look out and rejoice in my ability to transform a can of soup into dinner or a ten-dollar bill into hope. Crackling around me I can feel the invisible strings connecting me to people I will never meet, and I know I can help another human being feel appreciated, important, worthy. As much as I’m still a work in progress, I have no doubt about the power of the seeds I can plant.

  I pray that I plant my seeds well.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  New York: Michele Rubin and Brianne Johnson of Writers House, who believed in this book. Robert Bloom of Doubleday is an incredible editor who pushed, prodded, challenged, and encouraged me to bring the manuscript to a new level. Amir Shaviv of Joint started out as an interviewee, became a character, then an advisor and a friend. Many thanks to Valery Bazarov of HIAS; Carolyn Starman Hessel of the Jewish Book Council; Sandra Cahn, Kaylie Jones, and David and Alice Caputo.

  New Jersey: Mike, Anastasia, and Dar Vanderbeck; Tricia Elliott; Sabrina Spector at Cherry Hill Katz Center (the best damn marketing and publicity guru you can imagine); Rabbi Eric Wisnia; Rev. Barbara Heck and Rabbi Esther Reed, who shared this project with their students at Rutgers; Cynthia Cherrey, Rabbi Julie Roth, John Kolligian, Stan Katz, and Nino Zchomelidse at Princeton; Elizabeth Cappelluti Sheehy; Sauté Dean; Congressman Chris Smith; Drew Wintringham; Steve Lafferty; Ryan Kotarski; Zack Kiensicki; Chris Stibol and Laura Burns; John Walsh; Dan Swango; Brian Patterson; Kati McMahon; Jamie Baglivi; Kevin Higgins; the Bond family; Delia Hegarty; Stephanie McArthur; and the lovely Tony and Judy Covington. A special note goes to Kara Kiensicki and Allison Gilchrist, who made absolutely no discernible contribution to this project yet loudly insisted on being included; their years of whining have paid off.

  Boston: I am extraordinarily fortunate to have the friendship and guidance of Boston College Jesuits: William Leahy, SJ; William Neenan, SJ; John Paris, SJ; and Donald MacMillan, SJ. Additional BC advice and support came from David Quigley, Paul Christensen, Joy Haywood Moore, David Hadly, Ben Birnbaum, and Cathryn Woodruff. Hugh Truslow assisted with research into early Soviet culture. Many thanks to Rich Masotta, Doug Most, and Dante Ramos at The Boston Globe.

  Indiana: Michael and Linda Forman, Rabbi Gedalyah and Marilyn Engel, the Zimmerman family, the Lillianfeld family, John Norberg, Pastor Charles Hackett, and David Smith of the Journal & Courier.

  Austria: the beautiful Eva Huber-Huber, Hannu and Anna Ylilato, Peter and Gabi, Otto and Agnes Binder, Ottilie and Amadea Gabmann, Oswald Prager, Traude Litzka, and the Finland Embassy of Vienna.

  Here, there, and everywhere: the wonderful Nancy DeJoy; Rita and Ben Grace; Roberta Spivak and Bill Gotthelf; Karen Petrone; William Husband (who knows pretty much everything about the USSR); Barbara Engel; Sister Barbara Reid, OP; Judy Holmes; Jennifer Keup, Tim Delaney; Kim Frankwick; Katinka Bellomo; Petra Seibert; Rachel Schnold at Beit Hatfutsot; and Nick McIlwain, producer for The Preston & Steve Show at 93.3 WMMR.

  One of the biggest encouragements for a first-time writer is the support of an established writer. I was lucky to have Roya Hakakian, Chuck Hogan, Mike Christian, Steven Hart, Nicholas Lemann, Lee Kravitz, Bruce Feiler, Nathan Bransford, Noah Charney, Bob Woodruff, Brian Sloan, and Joel Chasnoff.

  Readers: Bridgett Ross (who provided invaluable detailed feedback and question ideas), Lynne Hamilton, Claire LaZebnik, Liz and Alex Castro, Katie Abrahamsen Borer, Ed Baruch, Keri Badach, Keith Bush, and Diane Fowler.

  Team Lev: the red phones, the true believers, the ones who spent years enduring my whining, plotting, and endless problem solving. Mom and Dad, Chris Edenfield, Kyle Bond, Peddie School headmaster emeritus John Green, Helene Stapinski, Michael Casey, Peter Lovenheim, and AJ Jacobs—I hope you enjoyed being a part of this as much as I enjoyed siphoning off your time, energy, emotions, connections, and, in my parents’ case, money. Special thanks go to the four people this book is dedicated to: Jeff Vernon for harassing me into becoming a writer; Bettie Witherspoon for her compassion; Amanda Porter for her wisdom; and Dr. Vernon for teaching me how to get shit done.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lev Golinkin came to the United States as a child refugee from the former Soviet Union. He is a graduate of Boston College and lives in New Jersey.

 

 

 
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