The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  Some of the Poles from Smolskie were outraged enough by this hoax that they drove into Kreskol and began telling us to our faces how dishonest and treacherous they thought we were.

  “You Jews never change, do you?” one wobbly, middle-aged man who had been deep in his cups slurred to Reb Zelig Minkin. “Always figuring out some new way to pick a pocket. It’s pure horseshit.”

  And with that, this sinewy, mustached fellow proceeded to spit on the elderly Reb Minkin’s coat, and kick dirt at him—much to the shock of everybody who witnessed it.

  The next morning, a swastika was discovered painted in red on one of the houses next to the words “Jews out!”

  A few days after the swastika appeared, and its meaning fully explained (nobody appreciated just how deep an insult it was, at first), another swastika appeared, this time on Sokolow’s shul. And it was also accompanied by the words “Go back to Israel”—but this time, the words were written in Yiddish.

  While we might have guessed where this second missile came from, the Poles did not. At least not initially. And the one good thing that came from this whole sordid episode was that the Poles were suddenly filled with a bit more trepidation as they hurtled their accusations of fraud against us.

  Our prime tormentor in the Sejm was a fellow named Henryk Szymanski, who constantly stood before his colleagues demanding more audits and investigations into our history, and demanding that the state be paid back every grosz of taxpayer money if we could not prove our origins. But now he prefaced each attack with these words: “We all condemn the defilement of the synagogue in Kreskol on July twenty-second.”

  The heads of several international Jewish organizations rose to our defense, and even planned trips to Kreskol to meet with Rabbi Sokolow; the prime minister’s office sent a letter expressing his regret on behalf of fellow Poles everywhere.

  Only the instigator of all our problems, Dr. Berlinsky, remained unmoved.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if they did it to themselves,” Dr. Berlinsky pronounced when a reporter asked him about it. “After all, the second message was, if I read correctly, in Yiddish. That leads me to believe it was some joker in the town.”

  After he made this prognostication, the fiendish Henryk Szymanski revised his previous condemnation of the attacks on us, now demanding that the culprits be uncovered and their ringleaders carted off to jail for fraud, vandalism, violations of article 13 of the Polish constitution, and articles 196, 256, and 257 of the criminal code. (Those who knew the honorable Mr. Szymanski’s political history found this j’accuse laughable, given that the last four violations concerned hate speech and membership in a fascist party, and Mr. Szymanski had been a member of the Polska Partia Narodowa* a few years earlier.)

  We read reports in the Crier that the Sejm and the senate had launched official investigations, wherein all those who had played a role in our rediscovery were hauled before investigators and asked what they had seen and when.

  Rajmund Sikorski was the first witness to be called, and as precise and composed as he seemed in every interaction he had with us, he seemed different when the klieg lights were shone on him.

  “I should say from the start that my only interest in Kreskol was as the liaison between Szyszki and the village—nothing more,” Sikorski said. “I never sought this assignment. It came to me from my boss, Mika Pawlowska, and I merely followed her instructions in trying to integrate the town into the region.”

  When asked flatly if he believed that Kreskol’s story was genuine, he refused to take a stand. “That’s not my place,” he replied. “I am not a historian, a sociologist, a geologist, or anyone else that could form an expert opinion. I am a bureaucrat.”

  Even in the final moments of his testimony, when Sikorski was asked if he had anything left to add, he used the opportunity to make his own little dig against our town. “From the very beginning, they’ve been extremely difficult to work with.”

  Rabbi Sokolow was summoned to Warsaw and, through a translator, answered the committee’s many questions—reiterating that we had simply had no dealings with any other town over the past decades. He was versed enough in the history of our village to explain the origins of the rift that had taken place more than a century ago and why our fellow Jews took pains to avoid us.

  The more preening members of the investigative committee tried to trip him up. “Kreskol no doubt has a Bible in its synagogue, no?” asked one fellow. “Where would you have gotten such a book if you hadn’t seen any other town in a hundred years? Did Kreskol have its own printing press?”

  “The Torah isn’t written on paper,” the Rabbi replied. “It’s written on sheepskin.”

  The committee members looked skeptical.

  “You’re trying to tell me there was never one single slip of paper in Kreskol before three years ago—not one? Everything was written on sheepskin?”

  “No, no,” Sokolow continued in Yiddish. “I didn’t say that. But you asked about the Torah. There are books in the library. They’ve been passed down for many years. Nobody buys new books. There are no booksellers in Kreskol. I’m no expert, but from what I understand, merchants once drove through Kreskol with their wagons and they’d sell books, but this stopped after the rift between Kreskol and the other villages.” (Sokolow failed to mention that Leonid Spektor bought books from the gypsies, but he was probably unacquainted with this fact.)

  This prompted the investigators to drive out to Kreskol that afternoon and impound three books from the library at random, which were taken to a laboratory to verify their age. All three were judged to be more than 130—and less than 180—years old.

  Next, several psychiatrists from Our Lady of Mercy were questioned as to how they could possibly have gone from seeing an obvious fraud before their eyes into believing in it.

  Doctors Antoni Polus and Ignacy Meslowski said the kindest words they could about the mental patient who had appeared in their hospital claiming to be from this legendary shtetl in the forest.

  “There is no question that the young man who reached out from Kreskol was sincere in his beliefs,” said Dr. Meslowski.

  “Is it possible that he was manipulated by others into believing all this business about Kreskol’s history?” asked one of the committee members.

  “I suppose it’s possible,” said Dr. Meslowski. “But there are a few things to consider. First, he didn’t know much about the history of Kreskol. He only knew it as the place where he had grown up. He knew its customs and ways, but he didn’t know its story. Second, whatever manipulation might have been going on would have been going on throughout Mr. Lewinkopf’s whole life. If Kreskol is a fake, whoever engineered this fraud did it twenty years ago or more.”

  Until the final day of scheduled testimony, it looked very much like the investigation would have found little to challenge in Kreskol’s purported authenticity. Not that the investigators didn’t still have their suspicions, but the evidence pointed to a village that had at the very minimum collected quite a number of artifacts to tell its tale convincingly. No ringleader could be unmasked with a motive for perpetuating the hoax. And as Rajmund Sikorski and Rabbi Sokolow pointed out in their testimony, there were many hundreds of Kreskolites who shunned the trappings of modernity and yearned for their past anonymity—which seemed to undermine the idea that this had all been a ruse to generate tourism.

  After Dr. Polus had testified, the lead investigator remarked to a reporter: “There will likely be no consequences for Kreskol.”

  Not even Yankel Lewinkopf was expected to appear. “What’s the point of going out and finding this young man?” asked Dr. Meslowski when the committee asked about Yankel’s possible whereabouts. “He’s not going to tell you anything different than you’re hearing from me. Or anyone else.” The committee was inclined to agree.

  On the final scheduled day of hearings, there were only two witnesses. The abbot of the monastery a few miles from Kreskol, whose testimony (that the abbey had been entirely una
ware of Kreskol’s presence for hundreds of years) confirmed very little, and Dr. Bartek Krol.

  Dr. Krol showed up at the hearing with his hair neatly combed and his goatee groomed, wearing a black Ermenegildo Zegna suit and silver Rolex, looking the very portrait of sleekness and professionalism.

  By that point in the hearings, the only press in the room were the Polish newspapers and two from Israel; after an initial burst of interest in Dr. Berlinsky’s accusations, the rest of the international press had grown weary of the story.

  “I do not know whether Mr. Lewinkopf was truthful or deceptive,” Dr. Krol said before the committee, reading from three typed pieces of paper prepared for the morning. “But I do know that he had a vested interest in feeding his doctors more and more of these stories about Kreskol—because they kept spending more and more money on him every time he did.”

  The moment Dr. Krol uttered these words the hearing was interesting again.

  17

  Reparation

  It is with some regret that I must conjure, again, the unfortunate Yankel Lewinkopf.

  I did not see him myself, but those who did a few days later say that he walked slowly into the committee chamber, not like a spry twenty-four-year-old, but a man whose body has been flayed by the punishments of time.

  It was not just the heaviness of his movements or the circles under his eyes that made him appear different. His shoulders were still muscular, but he looked thicker than the lithe, slender teenager who had been originally sent out of Kreskol. His beard was gone, and his hairline had ever so slightly receded. He was dressed in a pair of tan corduroy trousers and a button-down black-and-white checkered shirt.

  He didn’t speak at first, but when he did, his accent was discernable only to those who were listening for it. If you had asked Poles, they might have guessed that he was from the boondocks, or possibly one of Poland’s eastern neighbors, but few would have supposed that his first language was Yiddish. He resembled—as everyone agreed—a gentile.

  An officer huddled next to Yankel’s side, suggesting he might make a dash for freedom if not actively patrolled. But the guard was the only one who would get close to him. The rest of the Poles looked fearful; like he carried a contagion that would cause all manner of bodily harm. Yes, it would seem that one and all had decided before he sat down that Yankel Lewinkopf was guilty of something. (I suppose they believed he had, at the very least, committed some form of dishonesty. But I cannot speak for them.)

  However, I am getting slightly ahead of the story here. Dr. Krol’s testimony had not ended with that first set of fateful words. He had more.

  “Again, I must state for the record, I say this only as someone who worked in the hospital and looked at the audit for the various departments the summer that Mr. Lewinkopf was being treated,” Dr. Krol pointed out. “But I will also say—and I don’t know where these rumors got started—that there was other talk about Mr. Lewinkopf and specific demands he had made of the psych ward.”

  “Like what?” asked Szymanski, who was so surprised by his good fortune that he couldn’t even summon the wit and heavy-handed sarcasm that won him his political career.

  “For one thing, I had heard that he had made a reparations request.”

  The room turned into pandemonium. When another questioner asked Dr. Krol where he had heard such a wild story, Dr. Krol answered with a shrug. “It was a long time ago—I don’t remember where I first heard the rumor, but it was all over the hospital. Ask anybody who was working at the hospital at the time and they’ll back me up.”

  Since the beginning of Kreskol’s rediscovery, the word “reparations” had largely been unspoken in public—but many Poles spoke it to their most trusted friends and family when no one else was listening. These conversations were always muted; as if the speakers knew there was something slightly obscene in making an accusation against so abused a people before any proof of a crime had been presented. But it was nonetheless something on many a Pole’s mind.

  Enough of this worry had seeped into the collective mood that on the anniversary of our rediscovery two years earlier Gazeta Polska published an editorial under the headline “What Does Kreskol Want from Us?”

  Ever since World War II ended nearly every Pole expected to one day hear a knock on the door with an ancient Jew on the doorstep brandishing a deed to the property. Or, if not a deed, the tormented memory of what had happened to them and their home—and whether this came with or without documentation was beside the point. It drove millions of Poles to apoplexy.

  However, the idea that the Jews would come into their windfall not by coming right out and demanding a specific plot of land or specific sum of money, but would take advantage of the Polish government’s guilt to cheat the country out of millions in tax benefits by forming a fake village . . . Well, that was too unlikely to be believed, until it appeared to be happening before their eyes!

  At least this was the theory that a member of Szymanski’s staff leaked to Fakt. “Yes,” the unnamed source told the newspaper. “The Jews got their reparations. And we were fool enough to give it to them without a fight.”

  The day after Dr. Krol’s testimony, other members of the hospital staff were summoned to the committee and they, too, admitted that they had heard the rumor that Yankel Lewinkopf had asked about reparations.

  This was countered by Wojciech Kowalski, the head of the hospital, who appeared before the committee and said that Yankel Lewinkopf had never asked for any reparations of any kind whatsoever—but by that point it hardly mattered.

  “Do you mean to say that you heard none of the rumors that the rest of the staff heard?” asked Szymanski—with the suggestion in his tone that Kowalski would be an imbecile for having missed such important news.

  “Yes, I heard some things,” Kowalski admitted.

  “Ah!”

  “But these were just rumors. It had no basis in reality.”

  “How do you really know this?” Szymanski asked. “Have you read all of Mr. Lewinkopf’s psychiatric evaluations?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  Kowalski was no stranger to official proceedings; in his professional career he had advised local and national political panels all the time. And he was not easily confounded by having a spotlight thrown on him. “Because, sir,” he replied evenly, “when such an outlandish accusation arises any responsible administrator would look into it. As I did. I questioned the psychiatric staff about this matter and they denied that Mr. Lewinkopf had ever made such a request. Why would my staff lie to me?”

  Szymanski was equally unrattled.

  “I’ve heard that certain members of the staff developed some affection for Mr. Lewinkopf,” Szymanski said. “Perhaps they were seeking to protect him from himself?”

  “Preposterous.”

  But even Dr. Kowalski’s authoritative dismissals could not spare poor Yankel Lewinkopf. His future was written on the witness chair.

  And in describing the somewhat shabby figure Yankel cut when he appeared before the committee, I must go back a bit farther and tell you a little of how he had spent the last two years.

  The afternoon at the bazaar had, as I already said, ended with Pesha Rosenthal being carted away in shackles—and Yankel making a desperate attempt to find her.

  He begged anyone he passed in the street to point him to the nearest police station. It was a similar task to the one he had performed the previous year in Smolskie, with much worse results—he now frightened people away, not with his appearance, but with the tears streaming down his cheeks and the look of desperation in his eye. (One woman he approached threatened to call the cops if he didn’t steer clear, and when Yankel said, “That’s exactly who I’m looking for!” she failed to make good on her threat and merely strode away.)

  It was hours before he came upon a police station, but when he asked the booking officer if Pesha had come through, his curt response was: “We don’t have any Pesha Rosenthals—or
any Peshas at all.”

  Yankel considered this for a moment.

  “What about a Teresa? Have there been any Teresas booked today?”

  There was, in fact, a Teresa in the holding cell, but it was not Pesha.

  Still, the booking officer took enough pity on Yankel that he called over to a nearby police house and asked if they had booked a Pesha Rosenthal over the course of the afternoon.

  “There’s a woman who won’t give her name,” the officer said, writing down the address for Yankel. “And she doesn’t speak Polish. That might be your girlfriend.”

  An hour or so later, Pesha and Yankel were reunited, but the affection Yankel had seen in Pesha’s eyes earlier that morning had been supplanted by rage. He had expected they would speak of what kind of trouble she was in; what their next steps should be to secure her freedom; what the ultimate consequences of her actions would be (depending on whether her victim had been seriously hurt or not)—but none of those things were on Pesha’s mind. The one and only thing she wanted to discuss was the apparent rivalry between her and her victim.

  “We’re both adults, Yankel,” Pesha said after the guard had moved beyond earshot. “I know there was something between the two of you. Who is she?”

  Of course, many millions of men throughout human history have had to decide on a few seconds’ notice between providing their lover with an unbearable truth or a merciful falsehood. A few will stumble between the choice and offer a slightly less-damning half-truth. Perhaps if Yankel had more time to properly consider his options he would have come down firmly on one extreme or the other. However, this did not happen.

  “Yes, I knew her,” Yankel admitted. “But it was well before I knew you were in Warsaw.”

  “How did you know her?”

  “She’s a prostitute.”

  The moment the words had left his mouth Yankel realized that he had chosen poorly. Pesha had sensed intimacy, but she hadn’t fully realized the extent of it. From the astounded expression on her face, she had clearly hoped that Yankel would answer her falsely.