by Mark Kurzem
Without the name of my father’s family or a village to go on, how would I ever uncover the truth of these memories or give him back his original identity?
I lived in a university town populated with some of the world’s finest scholars. It was only natural, then, that I begin my search for the meaning of Koidanov and Panok in Oxford. Through academic contacts, I was put in touch with a number of Holocaust historians.
Their responses disappointed me: most of the experts were unwilling to listen to my father’s story with an open mind—their reservations stemmed from the fact that his recollections were too vague and anecdotal. I was surprised by this: I thought my father’s recollections had been quite sharp for a young child. And I considered anecdotes important to our understanding of the Holocaust. Because most survivors had been significantly older than my father at the time of the Holocaust, their stories contained more objective signposts, most notably the central symbol of the Holocaust: the concentration camp. My father’s story had no such icon. I didn’t think this would matter, but I was to realize soon enough my naïveté would be evident.
Three professors were intrigued enough to fit me into their busy schedules, and I set up appointments to meet one of them in London and the other two in Oxford. In advance of our meetings, I sent each one an outline of my father’s story. As it turned out, all three took a depressingly skeptical stance toward my father’s story. Professor M., a distinguished historian at Oxford, delivered the most vehement critique.
Our meeting took place in his office in one of Oxford’s most prestigious colleges. He welcomed me warmly. Within moments of shaking my hand, he told me that he had conducted more than three decades of extensive research into the Holocaust, adding that he was a man who had heard many incredible stories of survival. My father’s story, he said, was the most incredible.
I noted some reticence in his voice, but I put it out of my mind as he ushered me graciously into his room. He poured me a cup of coffee and offered me a comfortable armchair, while he sat behind his desk.
I began to describe my father’s story in closer detail. He did not interrupt me, but occasionally nodded his head or smiled thinly in response to something I said. When I had finished speaking, he began to cross-examine me about details of the story. At the end of our lengthy exchange, he took a gulp of his cold coffee and then offered me his opinion. He had heard of neither Koidanov nor Panok and was unable to place them as the names of persons or locations.
I was prepared at that moment to let the matter rest. He had not been able to help me. However, before I could even thank him, he raised a finger to interrupt me.
“I cannot deny the story outright,” he said. “The broad canvas of your father’s story may be true, but not in all of its details. Some of them are so fantastic as to be improbable.”
I was flabbergasted.
“Which ones exactly?” I asked.
It seemed that he had prepared for our discussion. He rested his elbows on the desk and began to tap his fingertips gently together. He consulted a sheet of paper. As I waited for him to speak, I found myself distracted by the sight of his delicately manicured fingernails.
“What bothers me most of all,” he said, “is your father’s claims about the manner in which he survived. No child of five could have survived under such conditions—alone in a forest during a northern Europe winter. Even soldiers and partisans found it hard to withstand the freezing conditions and depredations of the situation.
“And over and above that,” he continued, “why would these Nazis—any Nazis—keep a Jewish boy alive? What possible advantage would it have had for them?”
I explained to him again that as far as I knew only Jekabs Kulis, and nobody else, had known my father was Jewish, and he alone had instructed my father to keep his Jewish identity hidden. It had involved no great conspiracy of silence among a number of men. But the professor found this explanation hard to accept.
“There was no way that your father would’ve been able to keep it secret,” he said irritably. “Somebody would have caught your father out at some stage. And apart from that, no child of that age could be capable of such vigilance in protecting himself. It would have required a superhuman effort, not only physically: the mental strain would’ve been unbearable.
“What also creates doubt in my mind is your father’s account of his escape from his village. To be frank with you, it would have been absolutely impossible for his mother to have known what was going to happen to her family the following morning,” he said. “From the chronology you have conveyed to me, I am certain that the extermination must have happened sometime in perhaps autumn or early winter 1941. Given my knowledge of history, it is likely to have taken place somewhere in Russia.
“Now here is the difficulty I have with the incident. You have heard of the Wannsee Conference, I take it?”
I nodded.
“The Wannsee Conference took place in January 1942 and is held to be the time when the program and methods for the mass extermination of the Jews became systematized.
“Prior to that was a period that I call the proto-Holocaust, when the Nazis experimented with a variety of methods of extermination. At that time they began to clear out the Jewish communities in the villages of eastern Europe. They did this to make way for the deportation and temporary resettlement of western European Jews there. The Nazis moved swiftly from village to village in units known as Einsatzgruppen, or extermination squads, German-led but manned mainly by Baltic volunteer forces, police brigades and the like, carrying out Aktionen, as they called their ruthless work.
“The Jewish population in the villages would have been largely unsuspecting about their imminent fate. There are two key things here. Firstly, the communication between villages for the most part would have been poor, so it was highly unlikely that the Jews in these villages knew about presence of the Einsatzgruppen until they were literally upon them. The second thing is that the Jews from these villages had a long history of being subject to pogroms, in which the men and boys may have been killed, but not the women and children. There was no way they, including your father’s mother—a simple peasant woman, according to your father—would have any inkling that a new imperative for extermination that required the liquidation of all the Jewish men, women, and children in her village had come into existence.”
I didn’t know how to respond to his assertion. Professor M. was a world-renowned expert in the field. Yet I could not believe that my father was lying about what he remembered. Certainly my father was a great storyteller. The tales of his adventures in the Australian outback and elsewhere had always been slightly embellished—even as a child I’d sensed this—but the raw pain and grief I had witnessed on my father’s face were another matter. Unlike the voluble and masterful raconteur I knew, he had struggled with every syllable as he endeavored to give life to his experiences.
I’d been absorbed in my reflections and was brought back to the present by a tapping sound. The professor was impatiently drumming his fingers on his blotter. It occurred to me that he’d grown bored with the discussion—or worse, he didn’t believe entirely my father’s version of events at all. He looked at his watch.
“I am sorry to have to say this to you, young man,” he said, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture, “but it’s altogether too implausible.”
My suspicions had been correct. “Are you saying that my father is lying?” I blurted out. For a moment, he was taken aback and looked worried. Then he regained his composure.
Perhaps he thought better of what he’d just said, because suddenly he adopted a more conciliatory tone and suggested that we move to one of the college’s common rooms. I agreed readily. I wanted to be on more neutral ground.
It was late afternoon and the darkened common room was deserted. The professor discreetly closed the heavy wooden door behind us as we entered, thereby softening the sounds of the outside world. We made ourselves comfortable in deep leather armchairs that faced each
other. A mood of calmness and civility prevailed. I waited for the professor to speak.
“Please let me give you some advice,” he said. This time there was a note of sympathy in his tone. “I do not necessarily deny that an extermination took place,” the professor continued from where he had left off. “But I cannot accept that events unfolded as your father has described them. In essence, that is my problem with the entire story. He must have embellished it.”
“It’s not clear to me why he, or anybody, would embellish such a litany of horror,” I said, trying to remain even-tempered. “What purpose would it serve? What do you think actually happened, then?”
“Only your father knows. It is highly likely that somewhere inside himself, your father feels guilty about his own survival, however it may have occurred, so he has dramatized it to make it seem more out of his own control. For example, what child would have the wherewithal to escape in the way that he claims he did—and the personal resources to survive in the forest for such a long time? The wolves at night, the corpses in the forest, tying himself in the trees, caught by the woodsman! It has all the trappings of a fairy tale told to exaggerate his own innocence.”
“You’re not serious!” I said angrily.
The professor held up his hand to indicate that he had not finished what he wanted to say. “And this question of how he was found,” he said. “Perhaps he volunteered to go with the soldiers in order to save himself…”
My sense of outrage was almost palpable. My heart was beating so loudly in my ears that I could barely hear my own response.
“Of course he wanted to live. Who wouldn’t?” I raised my voice. “But that didn’t mean that he made a conscious free choice to join the soldiers. What child of five volunteers for anything?”
The professor indicated with both hands that I should quiet down. I looked around me and noticed a member of the staff tidying newspapers in the far corner of the room.
“Yes, perhaps ‘volunteer’ is too strong a word,” the professor said, trying to sound reasonable, but I had no time for his semantics.
“You are wrong,” I said. “Nobody in their right mind could concoct even a single moment of what my father has been through.”
The professor remained silent for several moments, perhaps to let my anger settle. “Perhaps you’ve hit the nail on the head,” he said slowly, as if testing the water.
I gave him a look of incomprehension.
“Perhaps your father is not in his right mind,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I believe that your father may be suffering from a form of false-memory syndrome that causes him to exaggerate the story that he has thus far told.
“I’m not saying that he’s lying intentionally. It’s more complicated than that. Your father has chosen to speak for whatever reason, and he is driven by an urge to make sense of the story as he tells anybody who will listen. I’ve seen this with other survivors. They have to find a way to describe the indescribable.
“Especially child survivors have to make sense of an arbitrary adult world in which they had no grasp of why they survived. And, as I said before, because they feel guilt about their survival, they believe there is an incriminating truth about themselves that they cannot see, but which, nonetheless, they feel that they must hide. They exaggerate the details of their story, because they cannot face the truth about themselves even when no such truth exists. So it is with your father.
“Have you noticed,” the professor continued, “how your father describes himself in the story? He is the cute mascot at the center of the Latvians’ world—”
“I don’t think he has concocted that,” I cut in. “They protected him and showered him with love and attention. And I assume you have looked at the photographs and newspaper articles I sent you in which he was featured. And what about the film he remembers starring in? He was a hero to them. My father did not overestimate his importance to the Latvians.”
“True,” the professor agreed. “But guilt causes complex contradictions in the survivor. Your father also portrays himself, and wants others to see him, as the hapless victim of all the attention showered on him in that crazed adult world. He wants us all to believe that everything that happened to him was fate and beyond his control. Nothing of his survival was due to his own cunning or wits.”
“No!” I protested. “My father would be the very first to admit that he used all his cunning to survive—in the forest and to conceal his Jewishness from his captors and adopted family. He had to, in order to survive!”
And then, dishearteningly, the discussion changed direction.
“It’s a complicated matter, this survivor business,” the professor reiterated. “It’s rife with contradictions. This denial of involvement in one’s own fate is a retrospective survival tactic by the survivor, not to save his body but rather his moral conscience. The fantastical elements of his story distract us from the most important question…” The professor paused midsentence. His eyes would not meet mine. Then he spoke. “Complicity,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.
“My father was complicit in nothing,” I responded firmly. “What on earth can a child of that age be complicit in?”
The professor pursed his lips but remained silent, staring at me intently.
The implication was that a young boy was capable of conscious moral decisions, and my father had somehow been a willing participant in his terrible fate. Now he was trying to cover up his part in the war by manipulating the truth about his role. He was refusing to face up to his complicity.
I needed time to digest this. In a half-absent state, I repeated to the professor that he was wrong.
In response he removed a piece of paper from the pocket of his jacket and offered it to me. He had jotted down a number.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t be offended,” he said. “It’s the telephone number of a friend of mine. Your father should speak with her. She’s a psychiatrist, an expert in victims of war crimes and violence.”
“And how might she help him?” I asked with some sarcasm. “Therapy? Analysis?”
“You must not blame your father, Mark,” he insisted, misreading the look of irritation on my face. “Your father is sick, and he’s not responsible for that,” he said with deliberation. “He was made sick, traumatized by what happened to him, and is now trapped by the workings of the subconscious of a terrified child. This has been the only way for him to handle what happened to him.”
He paused briefly to gather momentum. “Ultimately, your father is trying to distract us from the most important question,” he said gravely.
I didn’t believe that there was much point in continuing the discussion. I had come in search of basic information and had been subjected to a barrage of criticism and doubt about my father’s story. I knew that I would not be able to convince him otherwise. I’d had enough, so I rose to leave, hoping that he would take the hint, but the professor was determined to have the final word.
“Did your father,” he said from his comfortable armchair, “kill Jews?” For just a moment, an almost indiscernible smile of satisfaction crossed his face.
I froze to the spot, not because of the professor’s smugness, but because the same question had crossed my mind.
“No,” I answered firmly.
Our good-byes were terse. I thanked the professor, and he told me to take care of myself, as if warning me further against my father. I made my way along a maze of passageways until I finally reached the main quadrangle of the college. From there, I easily found my way out through the gates and onto Oxford’s bustling High Street.
Stunned, I hunched my shoulders, feeling diminished somehow by the buildings towering above me as I began to weave my way back to my digs on the other side of town. As I walked I thought about Benjamin Wilkomirski, the key figure in a recent literary scandal.
I was only vaguely aware of the Wilkomirski fraud. When Fragments, the memoir of his childhood during the Holocaust, had first been p
ublished, one couldn’t help but notice the lavish praise heaped upon it from all quarters. It was considered nothing short of a masterpiece of Holocaust literature. Many had proclaimed Wilkomirski the iconic survivor—the innocent child who had miraculously survived the concentration camps.
When the memoir was exposed as a fraud—Wilkomirski was not Jewish, and, having grown up in Switzerland, he had no experience of the Holocaust—the establishment conceded that they had been deceived by the unsignposted memories and impressions described unanchored by historical fact in Fragments. It had made them wary of future impostors.
In our discussion, the professor had stated that my father suffered from a surfeit of unsignposted memories. “Your father’s story is highly dramatic and fantastical in nature,” he had said, “but we cannot verify it. Children’s memories are unreliable. They often distort things.” He went on to draw a connection between Wilkomirski and my father: “With Wilkomirski, the world has made the error of accepting his story without any anchors, and Wilkomirski has turned out to be an impostor. You should be wary…”
He had not bothered to complete his sentence, but his insinuation was clear: he had put my father in the same boat as Wilkomirski. But this was unjust. Despite what he’d endured, my father did have verifiable memories, especially after he was taken to Riga by Sergeant Kulis: in particular there were the newspaper clippings and other documents that he had removed from their hiding place inside his case. And my father had mentioned a propaganda film about himself made by the Nazis.
The professor’s words challenged me to verify my father’s story. I knew that I would have to find this film, even a scrap of its footage, if it still existed. Its discovery would put the veracity of my father’s story on firmer ground.
Eventually I came to my front door. But I didn’t reach for my key. I decided instead to head for Port Meadow, an expanse of commons near my home. As I made my way there along the narrow canal path, I sensed more than ever that my father and I were on our own. Another door had closed in our faces.