In a postscript to the letter, an oddly well-mannered coda that reminded me of his Old Country background, he asked to “remember me to your husband. I assume he is the same young gentleman I met at Melanie’s concert in East Brunswick some years ago.” He also sent “a big kiss to your little Rebecca Leigh.”
Stephanie by this time had been missing for almost three months, and you could see that he was struggling with how to frame her fate—Is she alive, in the present tense? Dead, in the past?— as he talked about my own young daughter:
“When the time comes, I would love to teach her violin. Or better yet, if we find Stephanie, she would teach Rebecca via ‘Suzuki’ method. Steph (was) is a brilliant teacher!”
The letter was signed, with quotation marks carefully marked around his name: “Love, ‘Mr. K.’ ”
As it turned out, TV producers and journalists did care about the case of the missing violinist. Several of the true-crime shows featured her story, resulting in hundreds of tips but no solid leads. As summer turned to fall and fall slipped into winter, Stephanie still hadn’t surfaced. Mr. K drained his savings, posting a reward of $5,000, then $10,000. Three months passed, then four. Then five.
In early December, the New York Times piece appeared. I read the paper religiously early each morning, checking up on the competition. Even so, when I first glanced at the piece, I had no idea it was about Mr. K. The headline is what flummoxed me. I assumed it was referring to some other person, not the music teacher I had known for my whole life. Here’s what it said:
“One More Blow to the Heart for Survivor of Nazi Terror.”
Up until that moment, when the headline slammed me in the face, I never would have put Mr. K and “Survivor of Nazi Terror” in the same sentence. Sure, I knew he was Ukrainian and had immigrated to America sometime after the war. My music friends and I first trembled, then, as we got older and braver, laughed at his mangled English, his references to “cheeken plocking” and girls “vacuuming you hair.”
But in all the years I knew him, Mr. K never talked about the war. I guess if I had thought about it at all, I would have assumed he was a kid at the time, far removed from the action. World War II was something I studied in school and read about in books, but never with a spark of recognition that would link that awful history to him.
Growing up, around the corner from my house was a street called Schindler Court, built by a local developer, a Jewish Holocaust survivor rescued during the war by Oskar Schindler. In eighth grade, every student had to bring in a signed permission slip to watch a gruesome documentary that included footage of Hitler’s wartime atrocities. In the cafeteria beforehand, there were anticipatory whispers about the horrors that that film would unveil: firing squads, bodies being bulldozed into ditches, and emaciated prisoners with no shoes and bloodied feet being forced on death marches through the snow.
But I didn’t connect that to Mr. K. We students never wondered what had happened to our own music teacher back in the Old Country. Or what stories he would have had to tell, if only we had asked.
If the headline threw me, the lead of the story seemed even more foreign. It talked about how as a young boy Mr. K had been “snatched” from his family and “shipped to Germany” as a laborer. It described how he “walked down a rubble-strewn Munich street past a bombed house. Strangely, one window was not shattered. The boy peered in. Then, he walked on. A scream. The window flew open. There stood his mother, now a refugee herself.”
This was the story Mr. K had never told.
It came out in bits and pieces, as if he had great difficulty allowing himself to travel back to that time. At first, in the Times interview, he parted only with a few anecdotes, like the one about his mother on that shattered Munich street. But in the months after Stephanie went missing, the memories flowed a bit more, then came back in a flood, in reminiscences and poems that he began writing down in his native Ukrainian. Still, it wouldn’t be until later that I was finally able to piece together the whole of our teacher’s story, with the help of translators and documents and his childhood friends. That’s when I finally understood how he himself learned the lessons he would pass on to his students.
Mr. K acknowledged, to himself at least, how painful it was to confront his past. “Having survived two wars and great tragedies in life, I learned to neutralize my emotions,” he wrote in Ukrainian after Stephanie disappeared. “Such strict discipline was indispensable to maintain my physical and intellectual existence. Circumstances have forced me to learn self-mastery!”
Those circumstances were something I couldn’t have imagined when I was sixteen years old. Back then, I was whining about Mr. K and worrying about getting invited to a party on a Saturday night. By the time Mr. K was sixteen, he had different concerns: He had been shot at, stabbed, and starved. He had fled his home twice. His country had been occupied by three different powers, and both his father and his stepfather had been imprisoned. He had joined the Ukrainian underground army. He had almost died violently. It says something about the boy’s life that things first started looking up when he landed in a rat-infested former concentration camp outside of Munich.
Jarema, as his mother named him, started out life as a coddled only child. He was born in 1928 in western Ukraine—that is, his family referred to it as Ukraine, though by then the country didn’t officially exist. It had been split in half after World War I, with Poland claiming the west where he lived and the Soviet Union controlling the east.
A sensitive boy, Jarema loved poetry and Ukrainian folk songs. He inherited his artistic bent from his father, a teacher and painter who once spent an entire week making a costume for his son for a children’s ball. But Jarema could be stubborn, too. He inherited that quality from his mother. Once, he went to the town square with his grandfather, a priest who lived on a nearby farm. As they made their way on the cobblestone streets slick with rain and manure, past horse-drawn carts and merchants hawking live goats, Jarema threw a tantrum in front of a toy-seller’s stall, pummeling the old man with his little fists until he bought his grandson a carved wooden horse.
“Dziadzio [Grandfather], buy me a horse!” he cried.
“You already have many horses at home.”
“I must have one more!”
Grandfather shook his head.
“Then I will park myself here until you buy it for me!”
Jarema thought himself fortunate to have such a happy childhood. But it was over by the time he turned four years old.
That year, the killing began. In Soviet Ukraine to the east, millions of people were starving to death as Stalin’s government collectivized farms, confiscating crops and grain. Entire villages were wiped out; adults dropped dead in the streets, distended-bellied children at their school desks. The Holodomor, it was called in Ukrainian: killing by hunger. Jarema knew of a boy his age who disappeared, supposedly eaten by his own family. Ultimately, twenty-five hundred people in Soviet Ukraine would be convicted of cannibalism. The Soviet regime put up posters warning: TO EAT YOUR OWN CHILDREN IS A BARBARIAN ACT.
Jarema’s parents were Ukrainian Nationalists, a group whose leaders tried, unsuccessfully, to expose the mass starvation. They paid the price. Jarema’s father was arrested and jailed as a political prisoner. Later, he died under murky circumstances. On occasion, Jarema spoke of seeing him shot by the Russians on the family’s doorstep. He was devastated.
His mother told him to pull himself together. Discipline yourself, she said. She was a hard woman—and practical. “If the Communists hadn’t killed him, the vodka would have” was her assessment. She remarried another activist, a man who had disdain for his gentle stepson and beat him.
Worse was yet to come. When war broke out in 1939, Jarema found himself surrounded by bloodshed, violence, and betrayal, as his country was occupied by Russia, then Germany, then Russia again. Each time another army invaded, the Ukrainians were treated as chits for the victors. They were hanged or shot in the streets, shipped to concentrati
on camps or forced into labor. Neighbors turned on each other; the Jewish population was decimated. Ten million Ukrainians would die during the war, a quarter of the population. By some estimates, more Ukrainians died than any other nationality.
Late one night, Jerema’s mother pulled him from bed. She took him to the river, where she paid a smuggler to take them across the border to Poland. But before they could get across, Soviet soldiers gave chase. On the banks of the opposite shore, the smuggler quickly shooed them into a fishing cabin, where Jarema fell, exhausted, into a bunk. A bullet whistled through the window and lodged in the wall inches above his head. He was eleven years old.
Despite the violence at home, Jarema and his mother eventually returned. Like other Ukrainians, they hoped that life would improve under the Germans, who held out the promise of in de pendence. They were wrong. The Nazis considered Ukrainians to be untermenschen—literally meaning subhuman, their lives worthless, fit only for labor and servitude.
So at fifteen years old, Jarema joined the Ukrainian guerrilla army, opposing both occupiers. He was put to use as an ammunitions courier. One afternoon, he was transporting a knapsack of grenades when his train was searched by German soldiers. The soldiers moved down the aisles, ripping open valises and inspecting packages. A soldier approached Jarema and kicked at his bag. With relief, Jarema saw the soldier move on to the next passenger.
Jarema’s mother, whose ferocious will seemed to be a match for any invading army, managed to keep her son in school at first. On his way home one afternoon, he heard something that stopped him cold: the sound of a violin. He was transfixed. The music wafted through an open window and to the street below where he stood, motionless. Inside, a German soldier—one of the occupying forces—was practicing.
The music transported Jarema. It took him away from the war, away from the death surrounding him, away from the uncertainty that was his future. It opened up, instead, a world suffused with beauty. The music filled him with so much joy that it pushed out the darkness. Jarema yearned to play the instrument, too. It was a revelation, these melodies that lifted him up and chased the demons away. It was an escape. It sparked in him an almost spiritual belief in the power of music to heal.
“I want to learn the violin,” he told his mother.
“You will,” she said. “We will get you lessons.”
She was never able to deliver.
One day, the window was closed. There was no music. There never would be again. The soldier was gone; to another posting or to his death, Jarema would never know for sure.
As fierce as Jarema’s mother was, even she couldn’t hold their family together. By 1943, the depleted German Reich was shipping off thousands of Ukrainians a day to work in German factories and farms, packing them into locked cattle cars without food or water. Jarema’s parents were among them.
Jarema, on his own at fifteen years old, joined thousands of other Ukrainians who were fleeing west, abandoning houses and schools, as the Soviet army advanced again in the spring of 1944. The Ukrainians escaped by train or cart, on horseback or on foot. Every day was a battle to survive—and for Jarema, a fight to finish the school year. He found his way to a hastily set up gymnasium staffed by fleeing teachers, about fifty miles to the west, where he lived with a dozen other boys and managed to complete the equivalent of his sophomore year in high school. Even with chaos reigning around them, his bunkmate Ihor Hayda would recall him as “a romantic. He was a poet. He liked girls.”
But the boys weren’t safe there, either. German soldiers commandeered the school one day, rounding up Jarema and his classmates and dispatching them to a youth antiaircraft artillery unit as auxiliary “volunteers.” Almost immediately, the boys were assigned to be human decoys, ordered to man lights at a fake artillery factory at night to attract Allied bombs. The bombs were supposed to target them instead of the real factory, blacked out several miles away. The boys were being given a death sentence.
“We were sitting ducks, so the bombs [could] fall on us,” Ihor recalled. But at least the fake factory was near orchards, which meant the boys could get food: “For us, compared to what happened later, it was a paradise. It’s all relative.”
The boys survived, only to be transferred to Linz, Austria, where a massive armaments factory was under attack from Allied bombs. They were ordered to clear the rubble. The war was in its final months by then, and food was scarce. The winter was brutally cold. Jarema and Ihor shared a triple-decker bunk in a flimsy wooden barracks, where they talked at night as they tried to distract each other from the freezing winds. Jarema was starving and exhausted, his worn clothing woefully inadequate. He contracted pneumonia.
Remarkably, he was able to escape again—once more with the help of his mother, who managed to track him down. During that vicious winter of 1944–1945, he landed in a military hospital, near death from the pneumonia. One day, his mother marched in with a bribe for the guard and a purse full of clothes. When she left the hospital, she was accompanied by her pale, ill son, dressed as a local schoolboy.
“He had an extremely good mother. She followed him, no matter where he went,” Ihor said. “She devoted her life to taking care of him. She risked her life. He was like the only precious thing she had.”
Missiles were raining down as Jarema and his mother left the hospital and joined thousands of other refugees trying to flee. Fighting the crowds at the Salzburg train station, his ever-resourceful mother muscled her way to a guard in front and flashed papers to prove their right to transport. The guard had no way of knowing the papers, written in Ukrainian, were actually her son’s report card. After the train pulled away, the station was bombed. The crowds still left on the platform perished.
Mother and son were separated again in the chaos. By the time they found each other, on that shattered street in Munich, the war had ended. By then, the city was decimated; it had been bombed sixty-six times during the last two years of fighting. But again, their reunion was short-lived. While his mother tried to find a job, he found his way, alone, to a refugee camp outside of the city.
He was skeletal and infested with lice when he arrived at the Karlsfeld camp. The place was grim. Until just a few months before, it had housed forced laborers who worked at a BMW plant. The wooden barracks were surrounded by barbed wire and teeming with rats. Families were housed together, separated by U.S. Army blankets hung from the rafters. The families were small, so small, and broken: a married couple who had watched their children die in a bombing; nearby, an orphaned teenage girl whose family had been murdered. Some survivors were missing limbs. All were malnourished. Tuberculosis was a constant threat. They tried to regain their strength, eating meager relief-package meals of Spam and dried peas.
Almost as if in recognition of the devastation, it rained all the time that summer. In winter, some children had no coats or shoes. If you looked into the refugees’ faces, you saw confusion and despair. You’d hear people screaming late at night, woken up by nightmares. But the camp offered a roof over Jarema’s head, food—and a high school, where he completed his junior year. “In school, we had nothing,” one of his classmates, Olga Sawchuk, recalled. “A lot of people had no coats. Some of us had no pencils. We had no books, we had no heat in the classrooms. Until this day I think about those teachers, and I admire them.”
Relief workers considered Karlsfeld’s conditions so inhumane that it was closed within a year. Jarema, along with other schoolchildren, was transferred to another refugee camp, this one in Berchtesgaden, a bucolic haven in the Bavarian Alps. As the train pulled into the scenic mountain town, the crisp air infiltrating the cabins and sunlight streaming over snow-topped mountains, the students stared in awe and disbelief. It was as if, one of them told me years later, they had been transferred to heaven.
Jarema would lead a scout troop at Berchtesgaden, and write poetry again, and eye pretty girls with his friends—including Ihor, who made it there as well. Most of all, he climbed mountains. He scrambled across mounta
in paths and up the highest peaks, reveling in the freedom of the sky and the trees and the great cliffs around him that made him feel as if he were soaring through the air, like a bird. He loved those mountains and the exhilaration that he felt every time he climbed higher and higher, with no one shooting from below. In the mountains, there was no looking back. Only looking forward.
At Berchtesgaden, Jarema revived, though he didn’t fully recover. He would never again eat rare meat; even a hint of pink reminded him of the bloodied corpses he saw during the war. He would never sit with his back to a door, either. He always had to sit with a view of the entire room, to make sure no one could sneak up on him and surprise him with an attack.
Still, he and the other Ukrainian children at Berchtesgaden would look on their time there as the happiest in their young lives. Jarema finished high school with highest honors. He became a scout leader, experiencing “my first opportunity at teaching, and became seriously interested in educating young people,” he later wrote in Ukrainian. “I felt great satisfaction when my small scouts chased me, shouting, ‘Brother Jarema!’ Later, it changed to, ‘Mr. K, what’s up?’ Another language, but carrying the same sentiment, same responsibility, same obligations, and same pitfalls… Teachers have a unique opportunity to build a better world.”
On December 9, 1946, Jarema finally rejoined his mother, this time for good, aboard the SS Marine Marlin, bound for America, to stay with relatives in New Jersey. He still didn’t speak English. He never had learned to play the violin. The war had stolen his childhood. His dreams of a life in music had been shattered. But he had survived. In the years to come, he would almost never speak of that time in his life during the war. “I did not want… to look into the eyes of the might-have-been dreams and past youth,” he wrote in Ukrainian decades later. “I decided that it is dangerous to release such intense feelings. They need to be kept prisoner behind the strong walls of the past.”
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