Those Who Are Saved

by Alexis Landau

  “It’s a wedding.” Annie wiped a stray hair from her face. “Many are getting married and starting new lives.” She smiled, her strong white teeth flashing. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Sasha nodded, unconvinced.

  Annie led him through the camp with crisp authority, nodding and waving to every teacher, doctor, and fellow relief worker who passed by them. She emphasized that none of these facilities—the schoolhouse, the maternity ward, the blacksmith workshop, the houses of worship, the day cares, the printing presses—would have been remotely possible without such generous donations from the JDC.

  She gave Sasha an encouraging look. “American Jews, like us, have been reaching across the ocean to help.” And then, remembering the entire reason why he was here, she added, “Gussie informed me of your daughter’s age and last known whereabouts. There’s the Central Tracing Agency, but it’s extremely understaffed and takes months. Public radio broadcasts and newspapers contain lists of survivors and their whereabouts, but in your case, it’s quite difficult as she was so young and most likely given another name and an entirely new identity. We’ll visit the schoolhouse and the kindergarten, which is where your daughter would most likely be, but of course there are many orphanages and children’s homes and foster homes and other—”

  “I know,” Sasha interrupted, not bothering to correct her that he wasn’t Lucie’s father. Things were already complicated enough. He took from his back pocket the thin, worn photograph of Lucie that Vera had left in her desk drawer. “Here,” he said, giving it to Annie. She studied it for a moment and then brightly looked up at him. “Okay. Let’s go see.”

  A few pregnant women strolled past, kerchiefs covering their hair, conversing in Russian. Across the way, men plastered posters on the side of a brick building that read: We demand to open the gates of Palestine. Eretz Israel for the people of Israel!

  A mother with two gaunt children hurried by. They wore heavy overcoats in the strong sun.

  Annie took a breath and began describing the difficulty of placing the orphaned children that were arriving in droves to the camp. “Do the children return to surviving relatives? Or should they be housed with foster families, to remain in their native countries? Or should we send the children to Palestine for a collective education with all the other displaced children? And then there’s the question of how to define a child . . .” She stopped and crunched down on an apple. “Anyone under the age of seventeen is considered a child, but the DPs constantly lie about their age.”

  “Why?”

  Annie waved around her clipboard as if the Messiah himself had given it to her. “It’s very frustrating. We never know a person’s real age—they adjust on purpose. For example, because children are often sent to Palestine first, even men with beards claim they are fourteen. Yesterday, a thirty-five-year-old woman proclaimed she was sixteen. When a colleague of mine doubted it, do you know what she said?” Annie asked incredulously. “‘After all I suffered in the camp, how can you wonder why I look older than my years?’”

  “And what about the children? Why do they lie about their age?” Sasha considered if Lucie would do this.

  “They lie because they don’t want to be repatriated back to their countries. For instance, why would you want to go back to Poland or Czechoslovakia when you could immigrate to America?”

  “Little golden America,” Sasha murmured, taking in the cloudless sky.

  Annie finished the apple and tossed the core into the dust. “Let’s go see the schoolhouse.”

  * * *

  • • •

  On the way there, they passed a barefoot kid riding a bike who gave them a toothless grin before pedaling away, his skeletal legs working hard, his suspenders on backwards, crisscrossing his spindly chest. Elderly men in black overcoats conferred over newspapers printed in Hebrew. Sounds of carpentry reverberated throughout the camp, and Annie proudly explained that the DPs were learning useful occupations for Palestine. When they wandered down a narrower road, away from the central activity of the camp, the paths grew shadowy and small, and Sasha felt as if he were intruding on private domestic scenes. A woman bent over a large pail, peeling potatoes, while two babies cried on a pallet in the grass. She yelled at them harshly in Polish and then went back to peeling.

  Outside of the maternity ward, two mothers relaxed on a bench in the sun. They held up their babies, turning the infants toward each other while making cooing noises, encouraging the babies to mimic them, while the babies stared at each other with dark, unblinking eyes.

  And then the jolt of rounding the corner where a little boy showed off the tattooed numerals on his forearm to a group of other boys. He stopped mid-sentence and gave Sasha a shrewd look that captured, in a flash, the man he would become: suspicious and defensive, grasping after any pleasure, no matter how small and hard-won. Annie pretended not to see him, as though his very presence undermined the project of rehabilitation in which she so ardently believed.

  Walking away, Sasha noticed the scabs on the boy’s knees and the children’s general state of neglect. As though reading his mind, Annie said that when the children first arrived here, they had pieces of cardboard tied to their feet. Like wolves, they traveled in packs. “We called them wolf children.” Then she motioned to an open field on the other side of the schoolhouse, where teenage boys played soccer, yelling in a mixture of German, Polish, and Russian. “The fresh air is good for them.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Along the perimeter of the field, the openings of pup tents flapped in the wind, revealing families huddled over tea and makeshift fires, and Sasha recalled the pup tent he had shared in a small Sicilian town, overseeing a German POW camp.

  * * *

  • • •

  When they arrived at the school, a teacher led a line of small children out of a clapboard house into an adjoining garden, where she would teach them about transplanting seedlings. “Hopefully, within the next year, all of these children will immigrate to Palestine,” Annie said.

  * * *

  • • •

  Inside the schoolhouse, Annie explained how different classrooms separated the children by age. The canary yellow walls smelled of fresh paint, and along with the sound of children repeating phrases in unison, their voices strong and forceful, a sense of industry and cheer permeated the place.

  Annie led Sasha into each classroom, quietly opening the door while Sasha scanned the rows of children, their small round faces turned to the blackboard, where the teacher pointed to Hebrew words with a long pointed stick. For a moment, the smell of chalk and disinfectant and the panic of not understanding the lesson brought him back to that noisy restless classroom on the Lower East Side, with its smudged walls and the wooden desks carved with obscenities. He understood no English, and in those first weeks, the boys’ jeering freckled faces, with their salami sandwiches and bitten-down nails, felt foreign and threatening. On the playground, they used to rub their elbows into his head, searching for horns. The teacher sharply yelled at Sasha to pay attention, but his head hurt from their pointy elbows, and from all the new words that made him feel as if he were drowning in a bottomless pool.

  Leading him out of the class, Annie whispered that the children were learning Hebrew for Palestine.

  “Don’t they already know Yiddish?”

  She stiffened and said that was a bastardized language, a remnant of the shtetl, the pogroms, the massacres.

  When he pushed through the door, his mother’s constant refrain came back to him: Yiddish at home, with the family. Outside, English and only English. Learn it better than an American if you want to be American.

  Annie closed the classroom door behind her and leaned against it for a minute. The hallway was uncharacteristically quiet and still.

  She looked at him apologetically.

  Sasha’s shoulders sank. “I guess that’s it then.”
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  * * *

  • • •

  They walked back toward the camp entrance, and Sasha asked if the children remembered anything from before.

  “Most of them, especially the younger ones, don’t. They wouldn’t recognize their own parents if they saw them on the street.” And then she added that it was really best for the children, to finally have a national homeland. “If the war has taught us anything, it’s that without a nation to call our own, we are nothing. Even in America, the Jews could be driven out.” She stopped to catch her breath, giving Sasha an admonishing look. “The same thing could happen over there, you know.”

  He was about to argue with her, but then she motioned to a run-down brick building and announced it was the library.

  He didn’t care.

  He saw only dirt and loneliness.

  Teenage boys ran past them, yelling in Russian, one of them carrying something bundled under his arm, while the others looked on covetously.

  Watching them run, he knew that the next camp, and then the next, would yield nothing. Annie’s voice became a distant echo while she wondered if he had been to the camp in Brochard; it was bigger, the child could be there.

  Sasha stared at an old man reciting his prayers, clutching the fence post. He heard crying babies, and a loudspeaker barking, from some far corner of the camp, directions in Russian, German, Polish, and French. Nearing the exit gate, he almost felt as though he would start sprinting.

  “But as I said, there’s been trouble getting some of the children back.”

  He took out a cigarette and fished around for his matches, and she gave him a disapproving look, but he needed it badly. Lighting it, he added, “Sure, you can’t track down every single kid.” He kicked at a few pebbles embedded in the dirt.

  Annie shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s the Catholic Church. They have such a hold over these children who they hid during the war, oftentimes they don’t want to return them to their Jewish families. Or to any type of Jewish organization. Can you imagine? Especially if the children have been baptized, the church believes that these children belong to them now. That they are responsible for their souls.” Her gaze shifted beyond the gate, settling on the empty road ahead.

  Unsteadily, he ran a hand through his hair, her words spinning through his head, the surroundings altering slightly, as though he had been here before, a warm close recognition pounding through him: the woman’s dark laugh on the other side of the rotting fence, the way the noonday light slanted across Annie’s cheek, and then he pictured Mother Superior’s face, from St. Denis. Her hardness under feigned welcome, protesting too much, and the sharp glance she gave the other nun, a glance that demanded silence, obedience. And the young nun, weepy when they left, clinging to Vera’s arm on the convent steps. He distinctly heard her high thin voice, as though she stood before him now: Have you checked the Hotel Lutetia?

  How would she know about the Hotel Lutetia? A simple nun, in rural southwestern France. Unless she had gone there. With information about a missing child, or to find a missing child.

  Annie turned toward him. “Mr. Rabinovitch, are you all right? You look pale.”

  He flung his arms around her and lifted her up, laughing while he did it, and she started to laugh too, staring down at him, her cheeks flushed, blonde wispy hairs haloing her face.

  “I think I just figured something out. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Annie wouldn’t let him borrow a JDC truck unless she came with him, saying that its use must be authorized and entered into a notebook, which she continued to explain as he drove them to the Hotel Lutetia in the center of Paris, about forty minutes away from the DP camp.

  In the lobby, massive lines formed in front of each desk. Against the walls, people sat, staring into space, playing cards, picking at their nails. He walked up to the front of one line, pushing aside a man with a thick mustache who looked surprised but didn’t say anything. The bureaucrat behind the desk, a tired woman in her late fifties, shook her head and said in French that he must go to the back of the line, gesturing angrily at all the people.

  He put both hands down on her desk and leaned forward. “I need to see the log that you keep here.”

  Annie raised her penciled eyebrows, and Sasha motioned for her to come over, explaining to her what he needed. “They must have some record of who has come here, searching for displaced persons. Otherwise, what function does this place have?” His voice suddenly sounded very loud to him, overly confident and commanding, but Annie agreed and spoke to the woman in French.

  The woman slowly got up from the desk and went over to talk to someone else behind another desk, motioning to Sasha and Annie. The other man nodded and stood up, disappearing behind a partition. A few minutes later, he brought out a large black leather book. He carried it with two hands and laid it on his desk.

  Sasha went over to him, feeling as though everyone watched now: the DPs in line, the tired woman who didn’t want to help, and the Red Cross nurses, busy with incoming patients, paused.

  Aware of Annie breathing nervously by his side, he started reading the dates and names in each ruled column, beginning in April of 1945, when the first deportees arrived here, the cursive slanting across the page, the saturated blue ink staining the yellowed pages. He lost track a few times, and he went back. There were so many names. He moved to the side of the desk so that the man could help others while he kept reading. April: nothing. May: nothing. He started to doubt that the nun had been here. June, with so many more wobbly signatures: many of the names French, some Russian and Polish ones too. He paused on June 11, 1945: Sister Helene Bisset of Convent St. Denis, with girl, age 9, Lucie, in search of any living relatives.

  He read it again, his chest pounding, both disbelieving and believing. All else dissolved into the background: the man speaking across the desk with his pungent halitosis, a woman shrieking in the doorway over a lost purse, sirens blaring down the street, the hiss of the chandeliers above him.

  The reality of Lucie’s existence was here, just under his fingertip, in blue ink, screaming to be seen.

  He told Annie to ask the bureaucrat to telephone the convent, to contact Sister Helene. The man consulted a fat telephone book, and after several minutes of muttering under his breath and scrutinizing the fine print, he dialed a number.

  It was Friday, late afternoon. Sasha pictured the convent’s stone walls, the surrounding rosemary hedges, the sky blue door, the distinct crunch of pebbles underfoot.

  The telephone, on the other end of the line, rang and rang.

  He could hear it from across the desk.

  The man frowned, on the verge of hanging up, until a woman’s voice finally answered and he began rolling out a long preliminary good afternoon, “I hope you are well,” and finally asking to speak to Sister Helene.

  He paused, and nodded to them.

  Then he cupped the receiver with his other hand and whispered to Sasha in halting English: “Sister Helene is no longer with the Sisters.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head and said something in French, and then turned back to Sasha and Annie, saying, in a mixture of English and French, that Sister Helene had left the convent quite recently.

  Sasha gripped the edge of the desk. “Where did she go?”

  The man held up a finger and then, after relaying something in a cursory tone, wrote down an address on a slip of paper and slid it across the desk to Sasha.

  * * *

  • • •

  After the hotel, he said goodbye to Annie and went to Sister Helene’s address on the outskirts of Paris, but no one was at home. Waiting on the street, he leaned against the wall, read the paper, watched the afternoon turn into evening, smoking cigarette after cigarette, uninterested in the rail-thin prostitutes who told him their price and asked for a
cigarette in the same breath. He gave them cigarettes and some spare change.

  Finally, he went back to Vera’s apartment and found a telephone number that corresponded to the address through the operator, and planned to ring in the morning. Maybe she would be home then. His head felt heavy, the adrenaline of the day draining from him, bit by bit. He lay down on the bed, turning his face toward the open window, the pillowcase cool against his cheek, his mind crowded and harried, thoughts racing as to why Sister Helene had left the convent, and if she knew where Lucie was, or if she had only been with Lucie for a short interval before handing her over to someone else.

  The sound of thunder gathered in the distance. When he closed his eyes, images of the DP camp rushed into the room’s stillness: abandoned children, old men in heavy overcoats, the boy with the faded blue numbers along his forearm. Witnessing the war’s aftermath was so much worse than fighting in it, with its rapid violence, beginning and ending with shocking speed: a parenthesis of experience.

  The images tumbled into a nightmare, the first one he’d had since last summer, when he was freshly home from the war. The boy with the tattooed numerals tugged at Sasha’s sleeve, demanding to know where his parents were, growing more and more agitated that Sasha didn’t know. To escape the boy, Sasha ran up endless paths, leading to decrepit barracks and makeshift huts. He started sweating, nauseated by the mazelike lanes, certain he’d gotten to the center of the DP camp, only to discover it wasn’t the center: more clusters of roaming people appeared, and he found himself in the middle of a parade. Young men held up banners with Hebrew lettering, demanding a Jewish state. An older man shuffled along with the crowd and said something in German to Sasha, staring at him with a pale, stricken face.