Esfir Is Alive

by Andrea Simon

  My fantasies grew wilder. Like my mother having conversations with my dead grandfather and father when she was so disturbed in the ghetto, I talked to Velvel as if we were swimming in the river; I ate a stack of potato pancakes that my mother had cooked just for me. I observed my sister Drora get married; her little girl followed me around the orchards. I kissed a handsome and learned man who had chosen me out of all the girls in my high school.

  It was a mistake, I knew, to encourage such thoughts. Time passed, at least. I could fool myself in my daydreams. At night, though, I awakened with nightmares of blood and death.

  There, in the convent, I stayed. The Red Army liberated Kobrin on July 20, 1944.

  Thirty-Six

  I WOUND UP in a DP camp in Germany because I had no place to go. I was still searching for information, and I was trying to get into Palestine. I had already scrutinized every list from every refugee and relief organization. I combed lists of forced laborers. I checked marriage, death, and birth records. Any piece of paper with a name on it, I saw. Any person with the remotest link to my region, I spoke to.

  Shortly after Liberation in August of 1944, when I was fourteen, I went back to my house in Kobrin. It was occupied by a Russian family who wouldn’t let me inside. I went to my friend Gittel’s house and it was the same story. Officials said it was still too soon; the war wasn’t over yet. It was impossible to predict who was alive, who would return.

  I repeated my quest again in May of 1946. Now from the DP camp, it was an exhausting and difficult journey. The roads were filled with throngs of people—Jews, Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians, Germans, and Ukrainians—most of whom were returning to their homes, looking for relatives, or just wandering from place to place. They walked with their bundles or picked up whatever transport they could find, often gathering at the bombed-out railway stations not only for rides but for information on lost family members, relief organization, or political-group activity.

  On the road, I met a Polish man and his young daughter, and we hitchhiked with an army truck and then with a farmer on a horse-drawn cart to Berlin in the Soviet Zone. From there, we traveled as a family; it was easier for all of us and this guaranteed that the drunk Russian soldiers would leave me alone at night. There were numerous stops for long periods—one for nearly a day—and border checks. At a five-hour stop, I bought nine ice cream cones as there was nothing else sold by the vendors who hung around the station. My mouth was frozen in vanilla sweetness, but I didn’t get sick.

  We changed trains a few times and stopped at Poznań, Łódź, and Warsaw, where the man and his daughter departed. The little girl, who was about four, hugged me and wouldn’t leave my side. Finally, her father yanked her by the collar and patted me on the head, wishing me luck. I never found out their last names.

  I had little money and, like most people, had no ticket. But it didn’t matter because there was often no conductor. When there was, I had to ride on the train roof or in open boxcars. For the longest stretch to Brest, however, I was lucky and found a seat by squeezing in with a white-haired Ukrainian woman who shared her hunk of bread and Swiss cheese. She didn’t say, but I suspected that she was Jewish as I heard her utter a few oys. Most of us travelers didn’t reveal our background; it was better that way.

  I arrived in Kobrin almost three days after I left the DP camp. From the train station, I walked. It was a beautiful spring day. Green and tranquil. No sign of war.

  As I turned a corner, crossed a street, memories flooded me. I felt Rivke’s warm and plump hand as we went to the butcher’s; I imagined tagging after Drora as she hurried to her very “important” job as a delivery girl for my father; I saw my mother good-naturedly bargaining with the peddler who parked his wagon of pots and pans at the corner of my street.

  My heart pounded as if this were my last minute on earth. I recognized the streets before I saw the street signs. I passed the Mukhavets River. The shops, the schools, the synagogues of my youth—squashed in burned rubble.

  Only ten minutes to my house. I was the only person visible. I felt like I was going to my surprise birthday party. Any second, my friends and relatives, hunched together, would spring up and shout, “Surprise!”

  But there was no one.

  On Ratner Street, there were only two homes standing. In one, the windows had no glass except for jagged edges around the periphery; the front door was a rectangular dark hole; and the exterior painting peeled to reveal slivered and withered wood. The other house seemed intact. On closer inspection, I noticed that the windowpanes were made of paper; the front door was crisscrossed by large metal beams; and the brown grass was strewn with broken bottles, ripped and yellowed newspapers, and rusted food tins. Russian soldiers sat on the ravaged steps of a bombed-out temple and smoked.

  At a community relations office, I met partisans waiting to cross the border. They told me of a Ukrainian soldier who caught thirty young Jewish girls hiding and shot them to death. I didn’t want to hear the story but I asked if they knew the girls’ names. For this, they said, there was no list.

  I made it to Pinsker Street. The old cemetery was now a market. Gravestones lay flat on top of others, forming an odd, step-like backdrop to the scattered sellers sitting on wood stools in front of browned vegetables and rotted fruit sprawled on dirty blankets. In a macabre game of tag, disheveled children were running in and out of the graves, hitting each other with the stones that should have remained as visitors’ markers.

  The door to my house was ajar. I had been expecting Russians or by now Belorussians or Poles to be living there. I also expected that the house itself could have been destroyed or uninhabitable. I didn’t expect what I found: It had been converted to a Russian army facility. I stepped inside and the Russian guards eyed me suspiciously.

  “I used to live here,” I said. “This is my house.”

  “Not anymore,” one of the soldiers answered warily as if I was going to stake my claim right on his desk.

  “Please,” I begged. “I am not here to retake my house. I just want to look around, please.”

  The solider relaxed and waved me away as if to say, “Do what you want but do it quietly and quickly.”

  I ran through the rooms, winding in and out of army supplies, and found none of our furniture, none of our belongings. I raced up the stairs to the attic, remembering that my sister Rivke and I stuffed strips of photos between cracks on the sloped wooden beams. With the soot and cobwebs, I assumed this area had not been frequented. I ran my fingers in and around every crack and crevice. Nothing. In the cellar, I searched for the pieces of my dear friend Ida’s letter that I had hidden between stones. Nothing.

  Surely, with all my mother’s recipes, surely for a person who was an expert at making something from nothing, there would be pots, pans, a dishtowel, a scrap of paper with a note from her perfectly neat and tight handwriting. But the only thing I spotted was the swirly moving motion of a rat diving into the open wire of a trash basket jammed with paper bags.

  In a frenzy, I practically galloped to Gittel’s, to Khane’s, to all my friends and relatives. I went to their shops, their offices. I passed the empty lot where the yeshiva had been, the place where my grandfather had worked. I could hear his voice whispering in Yiddish to passersby, “Fardrey zikh dayn eygenem kop vestu meynen s’iz mayner!”

  Wherever I went, the place had been demolished, closed, or occupied by Russians or Ukrainians. At my uncle Sam’s Russian-occupied house, I leaned against the outside wall, my hands clutching jutting stones. The trees swayed; people across the street moved in slow motion. I was going to faint. I put my head down and felt dribble on my lips. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. It was smeared with blood.

  Where was everyone I knew and loved? Could all of them have disappeared as if they never were?

  These houses had once been occupied by Jewish families. On this street, there had been a mikve, on that, a yeshiva, on the other, a kosher butcher. All trace of Jewish life had vanished.
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  I had one last stop. I went to the ghetto and found the room in the apartment, our final family living space. It was one of the few houses left standing, though it was deserted. I could see the entire space in one sweep of my head. My doll, Miriam, was not there, where I had left her.

  Thirty-Seven

  IN AUGUST 1946, I repeated my trek, only this time I got a ride with a relief organization truck to the border where I took the train to Brest, though I may as well have stayed in Kobrin. There was little difference, except the devastation was on a larger scale. I had thought it was bad that my house was an army facility, but Aunt Perl’s was not only a place for supplies and official business, it was the headquarters of the highest-ranking officers. What had happened to the Soviet ideal of shared wealth? I didn’t bother going inside.

  As I was rounding a corner aimlessly, my body veered in a familiar direction. Suddenly, I was in front of Ania’s house. The windows were fogged with dust, the paint stripped to the original wood, the steps dislocated and cracked. What tipped me off was a square patch of grass near the front of the house. Unlike the rest of the area, this spot had been weeded and trimmed. Tiny daisies poked out.

  I went to knock on the door, but it opened with just my weight leaning against it. And here was my miracle of all my miracles. Cradling a newborn was my dear, dear friend Ania. She shrieked, not because she recognized me, but because my unexpected entrance startled her. Before she could question me, I screamed, “Ania, Ania!”

  We hadn’t seen each other since my last days in Brest, in the winter of 1940 when we were only ten. I would have recognized Ania’s silky black hair and freckled nose anywhere. Me, I didn’t look like myself or even an older version. My blond hair was long and straggly, my blue eyes dulled by sorrow, my erect posture hunched.

  “Ania,” I repeated, “it’s me, Esfir.”

  “No, no, no.”

  This was all she could say, shaking her head from side to side. Was she going to throw me out? Would she, like the Polish woman, Berta, that I had met after Brona Gora, hand me to the police? Anything could happen to a person over six years.

  Ania placed the baby on the couch and dove into me, holding me and weeping. “Esfir, Esfir, my beloved sister, Esfir. It’s you, it’s you.”

  We clasped each other as tightly as any two people could, leaned backward for a quick study to make sure each was real, and closed up again.

  The baby cried and we broke apart. Ania lifted the baby and rocked it. She said it was a girl named Irenka.

  I pointed and nodded. “Yours?” My eyebrows lifted incredulously, although it was not an unusal condition for a girl of sixteen.

  She shook her head. “No, she’s my brother Piotr’s daughter. I take care of her mostly. Her mother was killed.”

  She announced this like she was reporting the weather. I didn’t question her further. I had plenty of experience with that kind of reporting.

  We didn’t want to be away from each other for a second, not even to go to the bathroom. She cut my hair, lovingly sponge-bathed my entire body, forced food down my throat. She wasn’t satisfied until I looked more like the girl she remembered.

  On the third day, she got up her nerve to ask about my experiences. I told her that I had given my testimony to the Soviet State Commission after Liberation. This had been extremely taxing. They grilled me as if I were a colossal liar, and, when they began to believe me, as if I were an otherworldly freak. Others also asked to interview me. I refused. I gave the facts once and that was all I could do.

  Ania could never be unrelenting or critical, I assured her. I just couldn’t handle her emotional reaction. I think she understood and didn’t press me.

  Though I was reluctant to talk, I was desperate to hear. Ania was happy to supply whatever information she could. She told me that her father, who worked in a dismal and overcrowded factory, had died of typhus. Two of her brothers were killed. Piotr was in the army. Her mother worked all day cleaning homes. Ania took care of the house and the baby. Sometimes, she helped her mother when she could take the baby along.

  Ania was even more beautiful than I remembered, but there was flatness to her voice, a sadness that shadowed her old buoyancy. She didn’t have to say that she had suffered, too.

  While we drank glasses of tea, she told me what she had learned about the fate of Kobrin’s Jews. On the day that we from Ghetto B were rounded up, the Jews in Ghetto A were tortured and many were murdered. Then very early on Oct. 14, 1942, Ghetto A was surrounded. The gates opened. Nazis shouted, “Get out!” They shot running women with children. Ania heard that one woman was cut into pieces in front of her children. Some young adults threw themselves into wells. Out of about five hundred who fled the ghetto—several betrayed by Polish and Ukrainian peasants—more than one hundred escaped to the forest and joined the partisans. Many more were shot on the road.

  October 15th was the final annihilation of the ghetto. The Germans broke down doors, combed through attics and basements, dug through bunkers. Anyone found, including children and the sick, were shot. When there was not a Jewish soul left, looters descended and took everything they could find. All in all, Ania’s friend, a policeman, told her in secret that the Kobrin region lost from ten to twelve thousand Jews during the war.

  WE DIDN’T SPEAK again for hours. I lay in bed and Ania went about her chores. Later that evening, she called me into the kitchen. She took a deep breath. I knew she was saving something big to tell me, something personal that would be hard to hear.

  Mr. Kozak, she was very sorry to say, was also dead. He had been a real hero. He stayed around as long as he could to protect Perl’s house. Then he moved in with his original family and hid two Jews in the cellar. He was caught and everyone, including his wife, was killed. His children had grown up and were on their own. Who knows? Probably, they were dead, too.

  I was holding it in, holding it in. I had to ask but I knew the answer. Here it was, “Ania, please tell me. Do you know anything about the Tarbut school girls?”

  “I don’t know what is true. But this is what I heard. Freyde and her brother Yossel joined the partisans and were killed. Liba and Fanny and their family were sent to Treblinka where they probably perished in the gas chambers. Rachel, I don’t know. It could be that she survived. I asked the droshky drivers and they said that Rachel and her father probably went into hiding. But, Esfir, my dear, when you don’t hear about a person, it usually means the worst.”

  I nodded, speechless for a long time. Then, I continued my quest. “Do you know anything about Mendel Feigen, you know, Ida’s teacher at the Tarbut?”

  “Yes, I remember him. He was shot early in the war, before the ghetto. At a work detail.”

  No mention of Ida and the Midlers. Ania must have been trying to prepare me. But, then I had reasoned, how would she know what happened to them all the way in Volchin? It was different for the other girls; they either lived nearer to Brest or had close family ties there.

  ANIA CHECKED ON the baby in the bedroom. When she returned, all color drained from her face. I didn’t want to know, but I had to hear.

  “Esfir, this is going to be hard. Do you remember that Ida’s sister Sala had a Belorussian schoolmate named Anna Gagarina?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She came to Brest once to see Ida. The only reason I remember her was that Ida emphasized that Sala had so many friends, including Belorussians. And then Anna went in my room and she and Ida shut me out of their conversation.”

  I was relaxing a bit, thinking that Ania was going to tell me that this Anna Gagarina was also dead.

  “This woman,” Ania said, “went to Perl’s. The Russians had directed her to me because I told them if anyone comes to Perl’s house looking for anyone at all, they must contact me. So Anna came to my house. I asked her about the Midlers and this is what she told me.”

  I listened but focused on the words. “No one knows for certain . . . . The Midlers could be alive . . . . Yes, it is possible they are also livi
ng in a DP camp . . . . Maybe they made it to Brooklyn in America. There may be such cases.”

  I refused to believe anything bad since there was no proof, but that’s the way it was then. There was no proof that my mother, my sister Rivke, my grandparents, Perl, Khane, and the rest of my family were annihilated at Brona Gora. I was on the train with some of them; the others, I assumed were in another car. I had survived; maybe others had. But as Ania said to me several times during my visit with her, “You would know by now.”

  Though Anna couldn’t swear to the Midlers’ fate, she did have something definite to add, something extremely disturbing. The Jews of Volchin, like all the villages, towns, and cities in western Belorussia, were not immune to the 1942 massacres. Theirs happened on September 22. On that day, the village Jews were led to an open pit in a former sand quarry at the edge of town, forced to undress—their belongings left for others—shoved to the edge of the pit, and shot. The total killed: 497. These were not all the Jews from Volchin. Many had already been killed or left the village. Of the Volchin Jews, so far none had returned except for Hanna Kremer, Sala’s best friend, who had escaped to eastern Russia, having suffered greatly.

  Along with the Jews shot in the Volchin massacre was a group from a nearby village, Chernavchich, Rachel’s hometown. Anna Gagarina didn’t think Rachel was among the executed. I then remembered the drosky drivers who thought Rachel and her father had been in hiding. How anyone knew anything, I couldn’t say.

  I braced myself and shut my eyes as if I would then be unable see what only words could describe.

  “Esfir, Anna was very certain of one thing,” Ania said, gently.

  “What?”

  “Anna was sure that the Midlers were not killed in Volchin.”

  “This is wonderful news. I am not surprised. They were in good shape and may have been able to escape somewhere. There were locals who saved Jews.”