The Promise of Provence (Love in Provence Book 1)

by Patricia Sands

  “Actually the town is now part of the Ukraine,” he explained as he showed Katherine the file he had compiled on her mother’s family history. “I’ve got some of Grandad’s and Uncle Jozsef’s information as well, but what I really want to find is the grave of the man who betrayed Grandad’s father. I want to see if the rat poison worked!”

  Katherine grimaced. “I can’t believe my parents did that! It was a shock to read about it.”

  “Different times, different circumstances. They were my age. When I put myself in their position, I would have done something too,” Andrew exclaimed. “I’m determined to find that guy’s gravestone.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Katherine cautioned. “It’s been a long time, and there will be few people left who even remember those days. I suspect the war years will not be a popular topic there.”

  “I understand, Aunt Kat. There’s just something fulfilling about someone from our family actually going there and seeing the town, feeling the history. It’s like I have to do it. I want to add my experience to the story your mother left for us. After all, if she hadn’t written that story for you, we wouldn’t know any of this, because my granddad and your father said nothing about it. Nothing!”

  “You’re right. It’s a terrible shame to lose these stories forever. Even though they are full of tragedy, they’re so important. I’m so proud of you for doing this. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, Andrew, and I’ve decided I’m going to go with you.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Never more. I checked to make certain I don’t need a special visa, and it all sounds quite simple. The only warning I read was not to try to drive across the border, because they won’t let rental cars in, and the lineup may be horrendous to make other arrangements.”

  “I read that too,” Andrew agreed.

  “Give me your flight information and I’ll book my ticket. It’s a go.”

  Andrew gave his aunt a very long hug. “You are something else.”

  “So I’m discovering,” she said, chuckling. “I don’t plan to stay long but, like you, I feel the need now to discover where Mom and Dad came from. You are making this happen, though. Your mother and I vaguely talked about doing this after we read Anyu’s story, and we decided there would be too much sadness. I’m still a bit afraid of that, but if you are brave enough to do it, so will I be.”

  They spent three full days hiking the sentiers along the coast with their bathing suits in their backpacks. Beginning early before the heat reached its peak, they visited beaches that were new to Katherine as well.

  “I can see why you love it here,” he told her.

  “And I love that you are finding all these amazing beaches! This is the best I’ve been to.”

  Plage Mala. Tucked into a cove at the foot of towering cliffs, the turquoise water shimmered in the sunlight. Public and private beaches staked out their spots. The vibe was young and hip, and it looked as though you needed to get there early to score a good spot.

  Looking around, though, Katherine noted there were plenty of people her age in spite of the energy.

  “Young and hip can be a state of mind, y’know,” Andrew told her as he lifted his beer to toast her. “Don’t forget that, my favorite aunt.”

  Katherine laughed loudly. “And your only aunt!”

  Philippe joined them for dinner one night, and Nick took Andrew on the boat for an afternoon of scuba and windsurfing. Both men drove them to the airport for their afternoon flight to Budapest, wishing them luck and giving strict instructions to keep in touch.

  46

  Arriving in Budapest, Katherine and Andrew checked into a hotel near the train station. Venturing out, they discovered they had time to catch the last circuit of the city tour bus.

  “It’s more beautiful than I expected,” Katherine commented. “Somehow I expected it to be darker and less inviting.”

  By the time the tour was over, their stomachs were grumbling and they asked the driver to recommend the best place to eat Weiner schnitzel and spaetzle.

  “It has to be that,” said Andrew, “and we will see how it compares to your mom’s!”

  The following morning they were on a train to their destination.

  “Aunt Kat, I still can’t believe you are here with me. This is so awesome!”

  “Well, you were awesome for making this happen in the first place. Now we will have each other to hang onto when things get emotional—and I have no doubt they will.”

  The train rolled through unremarkable flat countryside, and from time to time Katherine struggled to banish macabre haunting thoughts. Images from Schindler’s List and other movies about the Holocaust invaded her mind, and there were moments she squeezed her eyes tightly shut in an attempt to block them.

  The few villages they glimpsed appeared poor and lightly populated, and to their amazement, most of the plowing and field work was being done by people rather than machines. Romani families traveling with ramshackle horse-drawn wooden carriages were as common as cars in some areas.

  “It feels like we’re doing some serious time travel backward,” Andrew commented.

  He had booked rooms at the Hotel Imperial. Recommended as the best accommodation in town, its name hardly reflected the interior. Tiny beds and worn carpets did nothing to warm up the stark effects of their adjoining rooms. Poor lighting and terribly outdated bathrooms added to the dismal ambiance.

  A guide had been booked to meet them the following morning, so after a short walk around the drab neighborhood, they chose pierogies and salad for dinner at a nearby restaurant.

  “Mmmm-mm! Bingo! We got lucky here,” Andrew exclaimed as he loaded his fork. “These are delicious!”

  Katherine nodded, her mouth full.

  It was apparent that North American tourists were a rarity in the area.

  “You are here to find the roots?” the jovial waitress inquired, leaning in conspiratorially and lowering her voice. “That is reason most English here.”

  “We are Canadians,” Andrew replied, “and yes, we are looking for our family’s history here.”

  “You have guide?” she whispered.

  Andrew nodded and told her the guide’s name.

  “Very good! You must be careful, but I know this man is good one,” she assured them.

  At 8:00 a.m., after Andrew and Katherine both admitted to a fitful sleep on the thin, hard mattresses, they met Benedek in the lobby. A tall, frail-looking man with a weathered face, he still farmed a small garden while his sons had taken over growing crops and raising poultry. To supplement their meager income, he had been acting as a guide for the past few years.

  In broken English, he explained that for a long time only the relatives of missing people came here, in the hopes of discovering some information or possibly retrieving family property. Now a younger generation was coming, searching for their roots or bringing grandparents one last time.

  “I am eighty-two. I was young man during war, but I remember. I wish not.”

  Benedek told them he lived in a neighboring village and really did not know anyone from this town until long after the war. This news dashed Andrew’s hope for the possibility that the guide would introduce them to some people who knew his family. Since his father and uncle had not been Jewish, he had considered the possibility.

  When they arrived at the town hall, housed in one of the few surviving historic buildings, Katherine commented on the stark interior. Benedek explained how poverty stricken the populace was after the war and how every bit of decoration had been removed from such buildings, to be used to fuel fires or as building materials.

  “Beauty was not important then. Communists frowned on excess.”

  With the names and dates they had, Benedek looked through records to see where Elisabeth’s family had lived.

  “That street was Juden. It was ghetto. All gone now.”

  He described how the ghetto area had been bulldozed in the 1950s as the town attempted to wipe
out reminders of the terrible crimes of the Nazi regime. New, wider streets and a simple green park replaced it.

  They had more luck with the home and plumbing store taken over by the father of Jozsef and his brother, Andrew’s namesake.

  The building that housed the business was still there and in commercial use, but the spacious apartments above it that had been their home were now open warehouse space. Life had always been simple there, and the apartment had never been richly appointed. Anything of value had been stripped out by the Russians in the months after they liberated the area.

  The setting of the town was peaceful, on the banks of a wide river, overlooked by a hilltop castle, with rolling hills on the horizon. Katherine tried to imagine the happy youthful days her mother had described before all hell broke loose. She was struggling.

  The original eighteenth-century Jewish cemetery had been desecrated by the Nazis, they were told, reduced to a shambles with the headstones used for filling potholes and road repairs. The few postwar graves had eventually been transferred to a new location, along with a portion of the original wall that was set with broken pieces of ancient headstones and tablets that had slowly been retrieved.

  Cows grazed across the overgrown area of the original burying ground. In one corner, inexplicably, the remains of an entrance gate stood intact as a ghostly reminder.

  A commemorative plaque at the new cemetery and another on a building that once housed a former synagogue spoke to the memory of those who perished. Hardly enough to begin to honor the thousands murdered from this small town alone.

  Benedek led them next to the main village cemetery on the other side of town. Andrew gave him the name for which they were searching, and after several minutes he located a number of headstones. An elderly woman—stooped but sturdy, with a kerchief tied securely around her head—raked around the graves. She appeared puzzled as the visitors approached. Benedek spoke briefly to her and then listened at length, as the woman apparently had a lot to say. He informed Andrew that these particular graves belonged to her family going back many generations.

  Beckoning them to follow, the woman stopped and pointed to one aged and cracked headstone. It was the name they sought. The year of his death conformed to the year Elisabeth had indicated they left the town.

  When Benedek asked, at Andrew’s request, if the woman had known the man, her animated response went on for several minutes with much head shaking from both.

  Benedek translated. She had not. She was a baby during the war, but he was her great-uncle and known in the family history as a man much vilified.

  When Benedek paused, the woman poked his arm and spoke some more, in disgust, before ending with a cackling laugh.

  The translation was rough, the sentiment clear. “He was bully, mean. He brought shame to family during war. He was fat pig. He was eat favorite palachinta. He choked and died. That is family legend.”

  Andrew barely suppressed his grin and moved to knuckle-bump his aunt. Katherine, appearing momentarily horrified, smiled weakly.

  They visited the new synagogue built on the site of the original main shul. Somehow the current efforts Benedek described to encourage a Jewish return to the area felt wrong to Katherine. She couldn’t get past the pain.

  Everywhere she saw what once had been: lines of Jews, yellow stars on their clothes; German soldiers on street corners yelling insults as their dogs snarled and lunged; the fenced ghetto with sunken faces staring out; bodies hanging in the square; young and old being herded onto cattle cars; steam rising from train engines, slowly leaving town, as others arrived with empty cars. The visual was relentless.

  As the day passed, she became increasingly morose.

  “Andrew, I feel such a burden of sadness. Every time we cross the railroad tracks, I get chills and feel nauseous. I’m seeing things that aren’t there, but I know only too well that they were. I think I’m going to have to leave tomorrow.”

  Putting his arm around her shoulder, he empathized. “I’m feeling a lot of strong emotions too. Anger, for sure, and frustration. But I’ll be here for a while and will find a way to process it somehow. I’m glad I’m staying, even though I can’t explain why right now.”

  “I think your mom and I were right when we felt there was no point in coming here only to feel sadness. Sometimes you simply can’t go back in life; you need to move on. That was always a message our parents imparted to us, and only now do I feel a sense of that.”

  “But these stories need to be told,” Andrew stated emphatically.

  “Absolutely, and in a manner that helps us understand and accept each other. To be honest, I sometimes wonder if the world really learned from this tragedy. We hear the words ‘never again,’ and yet we see genocide happening repeatedly . . . oh man, I’m getting depressed.”

  Andrew gave her a gentle hug. “Let’s pack this in.”

  After paying Benedek—who was confused at the brevity of their tour but immensely grateful for being paid in full anyway—Andrew said he would be in touch another day.

  “I thought I saw a decent restaurant by the river. Let’s go . . . you look like you could use a stiff drink!” he said to his aunt.

  Later in the afternoon, they bumped a short distance out of town in a taxi, along a road in terrible disrepair. The farming co-op where Andrew would be spending several weeks consisted of an expansive collection of fairly new buildings. Staffed by an international team, the British farm manager introduced them to a few colleagues who showed them around and spoke of the experimental work being undertaken. The hope was to revive and improve the long-established agriculture of the area.

  Andrew’s quarters were spartan, but several of the staff assured him that mattresses had been shipped over from England so at least the beds were comfortable.

  “There is still a shortage of basic comforts in the small towns of these countries. You’re going to find this an enlightening experience in that regard,” Andrew was cautioned. “But the crew here is great, and the local people truly are warm and welcoming, although that’s not always evident at first.”

  Andrew and Katherine were invited to join the staff for dinner after their tour; the cook appeared to be a magician in the kitchen.

  “Andrew, I guarantee you’re going to pack on a few pounds while you are here, even though we’ll keep working you hard,” the manager warned him. “Gaspar, our cook, is a priceless asset, and all the ingredients used are from our fields and livestock.”

  Andrew laughed. “Somehow I didn’t anticipate finding gourmet dining here. Got that right!”

  That evening, attempting to make themselves comfortable in Kat’s hotel room, Andrew and Kat sat on the floor on extra pillows scoffed from a linen closet down the hall after a little reconnoitering.

  They spoke more of the positive experience Andrew was about to have at the co-op and less about how they had reacted to the tour of the town.

  Katherine wanted to be strong in front of her nephew. Andrew feared he could not adequately comfort his aunt.

  Still later, alone in bed as sleep eluded her, tears fell—for her parents, for their parents, for the children, for every persecuted person during those terrible, unfathomable times.

  She thought about her mother’s beautiful carpet. For the first time she felt a true understanding of the emotional connection that must have passed through Elisabeth’s fingers to and from the threads.

  As they parted at the train station the following morning, Andrew thanked her for coming with him. “It meant a lot to me to have you here. I’m sorry it was so painful for you.”

  Katherine nodded. “It’s far worse than I considered it might be, but in retrospect I think I will see it was the right thing, even this brief a visit. Most important, it was so meaningful being with you. I’ve never really given it much thought, but here with you I’ve felt how life really does go on, through you kids. My generation did that for our parents, and now you are surviving and living for those who did not. Maybe your generatio
n will do a better job than ours.”

  They hugged each other tightly before she stepped up into the train to leave behind the horror of what once had been.

  47

  Katherine texted Bernadette from Budapest and was happy to find her waiting when the early evening flight arrived.

  In her typically inquisitive manner, the flamboyant chauffeur peppered Katherine with questions about her trip, interrupting with some highly unflattering remarks about the problem of immigrants from Eastern Europe. “. . . in my ’umble opinion,” she said.

  “This EU is for les oiseaux,” she said. “It has caused nothing but mal de vie for la France!”

  Katherine remarked how friendly and helpful she had found the people she encountered on her short trip.

  “That’s because the nice ones are staying there! But I did know a very handsome man from Poland once.” She went on to relate an amusing story about a brief interlude she had shared with this fellow.

  By the time they arrived at the house, Bernadette had caused Katherine to laugh out loud several times. She was appreciative of having her heavy mood lifted as she walked into the cozy familiarity this home away from home offered.

  Opening the doors and shutters on each floor, she breathed in the soothing salt air before pouring a pastis and wandering out to the roof terrace.

  Scraping a chair lightly on the tiles as she pulled it over, she sat down and placed her feet on the wrought-iron railing of the deck. Heaving an enormous sigh, she leaned back, taking in the star-filled evening sky.

  Her thoughts returned to the previous forty-eight hours and all she had seen and felt, knowing it would take a very long time to process it all, if indeed she ever could. She wondered how her mother would have reacted to the trip after all the years of protecting her daughter from the horrendous details.

  At least she would finally have known their palachinta plan worked.

  Tears came again. She longed to go home and press her hands and face to her mother’s carpet as she had watched Elisabeth do so often. Now she understood.