When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (13 page)
Before the death camps were set up, I learn, German mobile killing units, the
einsatzgruppen,
did much of the Jew killing. The firing squads made victims dig their own graves before they were shot. In one grainy thirty-second loop of footage that shows continuously on a TV monitor, Jewish prisoners are unloaded from a truck in front of a large group of spectators, some of whom are smoking and chatting. The Jews, confused and unresisting, are herded into a large shallow pit and gunned down by a firing squad. A pet dog, frightened by the gunfire, runs through the frame and is comforted by its owner. I watch it again and again, the same grainy loop — genocide’s
Groundhog Day.
The Jews are unloaded from a truck. The audience smokes and chats. The rifles fire. The Jews fall dead in a heap. The little dog bolts. Its owner gathers it into his arms and comforts it.
I have heard about Auschwitz and Belsen, but here, I learn the names of the rest of the Polish camps: Che?mno, Be?z?ec, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Treblinka.
On the museum wall dedicated to these death factories are some magnified quotes from the diaries of inmates. One is written from Treblinka:
We secretly placed in the walls of the graves whole skeletons and we wrote on scraps of paper what the Germans were doing at Treblinka. We put the scraps of paper into bottles which we placed next to the skeletons. Our intention was that if one day someone looked for traces of the Nazis’ crimes, they could indeed be found.
The writer’s name is Goldfarb, Abraham Goldfarb.
G
OLDFARB’S SECRET MESSAGE
in a bottle feels like a personal rebuke. Even as he faced death, he reached out to speak to future generations. I phone my mother and ask her whether we might now discuss my father’s family history.
“In fact, he’s been working on a letter to you,” she says.
Soon, a letter does arrive from my father. Only it’s not a letter as such. It’s a family tree, meticulously plotted in his draftsman’s hand on sheets of graph paper taped together. They fold out like an expanding concertina — an intricate origami of our origin. It goes back five generations, and many of the names have footnote numbers by them, fourteen footnotes in all. I notice that he has referred to himself cryptically, by the initials of his assumed name,
GG
— George Godwin — and has deliberately omitted his birth date. Footnote number eight is marked next to his name. But the footnotes themselves are not enclosed.
They arrive a few weeks later, mailed only after I have confirmed receipt of the family tree, so that it cannot be deciphered on its own, if intercepted. Footnote eight, after my father,
GG
, reads simply, “You can work that out yourself.” Even now, in his moment of candor, he cannot bring himself to use his original name. It goes against all that he has struggled to hide for half a century, his self-imposed witness protection program. On the same line as his, he has used his sister’s real name, her only name,
Halina Goldfarb.
The twelve-year-old girl in the daisy chain headband, suppressing a grin.
Next to her name he has written: “Born 1926. d. H. X.”
His footnotes explain the code.
d = died
H = Holocaust
X = extinction of branch of family
I count the symbols. Of the twenty-four family members in Poland at the time, sixteen were killed in the Holocaust, including his mother and sister.
The footnotes are accompanied by some terse instructions. It seems that my father does not really want to discuss his former self with me. What he wants is for me to initiate a Red Cross tracing inquiry for his sister, Halina, and his mother, Janina.
I write to the American Red Cross, and I get a reply from their Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center. It says that hundreds of thousands of names of victims imprisoned by the Third Reich have recently come to light in newly acquired documents, which has greatly expanded their ability to trace missing relatives. Enclosed are two Tracing Inquiry forms. I fill them out, such as I can from the bare bones my father has sent me.
Name:
Halina Jadwiga Goldfarb
Occupation:
schoolgirl
Address:
No. 5 Kredytowa Street, Warsaw
Nationality:
Polish
Religion:
Jewish
Under “
Last Contact With Sought Person,
” I write: “Disappeared from a Warsaw Street in 1942/43.”
That’s all my father has written.
I go back and review the form and realize I have missed the first line. At the very top it says: “
Sought person is my
. . .” and I write: “Aunt.”
And then I turn to the next form and write: “Grandmother.”
Only then does it really sink in. This is not just my father’s history; this is my family too; these
are
my people. Just as Abraham Goldfarb had intended, this Holocaust is reaching forward in time to snag me with its icy claw, to confound me with its counsel of despair. But still I want to resist this inherited burden. My father’s antique associations have nothing to do with my life. These are not my fights. That was there, then. This is here, now.
I used to think that we white Africans were hard to sympathize with because we were that least defensible of constituencies, the unwronged. Now I am having thrust upon me the poisoned chalice of historic victimhood. But notwithstanding Abraham Goldfarb’s hidden bottle, the hemlock of the Holocaust is not something I wish to drink.
I know that Jews call the Holocaust the Shoah, which in Hebrew means “catastrophe.” I dimly recall reading Anne Frank’s diary as a child. I once read Primo Levi’s account of Auschwitz; I saw
Schindler’s List.
I studied the Nuremberg trials in history. But it really wasn’t something I had dwelled on in any detail.
Holocaust.
Holo caustum.
From eight years of schoolboy Latin I knew it meant “whole burned.” Burned whole. Even the phoenix of Zionism that rose from those ashes — the muscular sabras trying to reestablish a home in an unforgiving land surrounded by hostile Arabs — resonated too closely with my white African narrative. The parallels with South Africa in particular seemed uncanny. Israelis were building barriers to separate themselves from those who threatened them, just as white Africans had tried to do. Both had created odd-shaped, artificial homelands, isolated dust bowls for those they had displaced, and said to Palestinians or to blacks: live there and rule yourselves, you are no longer a subject people.
The Red Cross writes back to acknowledge my tracing requests, saying that it will take at least a year for them to be processed. And a few days later, our second son, Hugo, is born. We give him George as a second name. George, after my father. George, which is English for Jerzy. I phone my parents to give them news of their new grandchild. My father comes on the line, and we talk of the baby for a while, and then I tell him that I’ve sent off his tracing inquiry to the Red Cross. It is the first time we have ever referred directly to his real past.
There is a pause on the line, and then he says gruffly, “Thanks.”
“Do you think you could tell me more . . . more about, it all?”
“Well, Pete,” he says, his voice now flat and guarded. “I’ll try. What do you want to know?”
I struggle to keep the exasperation out of my voice.
“What do I want to know? Who you are, Dad? I want to know who you are.”
And so, as an old man now, my father tries to reintroduce himself to his own son, finally acknowledging his real identity, hidden from the world for half a century. Eventually, I receive an e-mail from him. It is headed “My Life History: Part One — Childhood.” My mother says he has been working on it for months, sitting at the computer for hours at a time, staring at the screen between little bursts of two-fingered typing, while she pads in and out with trays of coffee and sandwiches.
“It is so hard, Pete, after all this time,” he says. “I find it quite amazing how little I remember.”
It is as if my father has made so few forays into the hidden landscape of his past that the neural pathways leading to these memories are choked with foliage, just as a footpath in Africa disappears soon after the people stop walking there. His e-mails read like reports from an archaeological dig: little random shards of a reconstructed life, the barest facts, shorn of their emotional context.
He is finally trying to discard a mask, and yet it seems that when he peels it off he cannot easily access what’s underneath. The mask, the superimposed visage that he has shown the world, this concocted exterior, has become his only reality. It is more than just a mask; it is a suit of armor that hasn’t been shed for so long it has fused onto the milky body within, the body it was fabricated to protect.
He has thought and thought about it, sitting in front of that computer screen in his room in Africa, looking out onto the gaudy tropical garden and bright African birds, but not seeing any of it, trying instead to see into the heart of a Polish boy in Warsaw a lifetime ago. Trying to reimagine who he once had been. And, in time, a few iconic moments emerge from the penumbra like tiny points of light in a wide dome of darkness, beams of a far-off search party coming to rescue him from a cliff face of autobiographical amnesia.
1924
K
AZIMIERZ
J
ERZY
G
OLDFARB
is born in 1924 in apartment fourteen at 5 Kredytowa Street next to the Hunt Club in central Warsaw. He weighs only three-and-a-half pounds — about half a normal baby’s weight — and is initially kept in cotton wool in a cigar box on the study desk. Everyone calls him Kazio.
My father has even found two photographs of the address, one as it was in 1939 and one now. He has translated the caption from Polish: “A wonderful building on the corner of Kredytowa Street and Dabrowski Place was lowered after the war, and the majority of interesting architectural details were removed.”
There are shops underneath, he remembers. On one side, a barbershop, run by Mr. Majewski. Every day, when his father, Maurycy, finishes his breakfast, Mr. Majewski comes up with his little leather case and shaves him with a straight razor at the dining table.
Maurycy is a shipping agent, and his father before him had been a wine taster. Kazio remembers being beaten by his father only once, when he left a hairbrush — bristles up — on his chair, and Maurycy sat on it.
His mother, Janina, makes cherry schnapps. Her maiden name is Parnas, and though she no longer practices, she is one of the first women in Poland to qualify as a lawyer. Her father is an optician who has a shop called Iris in which he also sells electrical gadgets; the whole ceiling is hung with glowing chandeliers.
Around the corner on Jasna (Bright) Street is a nightclub, with a black doorman — the only black person Kazio ever sees in Poland. And, nearby, an open-air café run by Philips, the radio manufacturers, with colored bulbs hanging from the trees, and loudspeakers playing music in the summer. He remembers going to sleep, serenaded by Chopin’s polonaises and mazurkas, waltzes and nocturnes.
There is a live-in cook, a washerwoman who comes twice a week, and a succession of maids, country girls. He has a steel bed, which, he is assured, is the same model used in army officer training schools. There is a desk, rather like a school desk, with a top hinged in front. All his furniture is painted in royal blue with the edges in red.
On top of the cupboard stands an 8mm film projector and an 8mm cine camera. Photography is his passion. He is allowed to use his mother’s folding camera, covered in tooled gray leather, and then he graduates to a black enamel Kodak Bantam Special with a chrome finish and an F2 lens.
He plays with his sister in Saski (Saxon) Gardens, near their grandmother’s flat. When they are still small, he sits on a little seat fixed to his sister’s carriage, facing the nanny. Later on he plays in the park with his friends, Jurek Bregman and Wacek Binental.
Their favorite game at home is Operations. He is always the surgeon. Anne, his cousin, is his assistant, and his sister is the patient’s mother. Her job is to cry. The patient is one of her dolls.
He remembers a fancy-dress party. He is dressed as a lancer. He wears long slate blue breeches with red stripes down the sides, a tunic with crimson piping and white buttons, a lancer’s czapka and a real saber. The outfit is based on a carefully studied picture of a Polish officer in a book of French military uniforms during the Napoleonic Wars — Poles served in the French army. His sister is dressed as Marie Antoinette in a long white dress. She has long curls and a little white bonnet.
When Maurycy’s business is in trouble, during the Great Depression, he withdraws all the savings out of Kazio’s savings account and empties his piggy bank. But the economy recovers, and their wealth is soon restored.
He remembers his nursery school teacher, Miss Bronia Dekler, a large elderly spinster who teaches him to write, and the day that he is finally allowed to graduate from pencil to pen. He remembers going to the collegium by streetcar, and being the teacher’s pet; being given as a present a book by Jan Korczak, about the boy-King Matt, hunting in a forest. He remembers his school uniform, a double-breasted navy blue suit and a soft square cap. And on his sleeve a badge, in the form of a shield, with the number of the school, 89, in blue for the lower years, red for the upper.
He remembers taking his camera to school, taking photographs in the classroom, and producing an album of photographs with a double page for each subject and captions in cardboard lettering, which he shows the teachers on the last day of term.
His two best friends at school are Jasio (Jan) Matecki and Genio (Eugene) Moszkowski. Jasio’s father is a doctor, specializing in psychoanalysis, who has corresponded with Sigmund Freud. Genio’s father is a lawyer. The three of them found a make-believe aircraft manufacturing company, called MGM after their surnames, and they take long walks in the evenings and discuss world affairs.
During their summer vacations, they go into the forest to try smoking, and as soon as they light up, a forest ranger appears and scolds them for causing a fire hazard.
His first vacation, he thinks, is to Copoty, better known by its German name Zopot, which is part of the Gdažsk (Danzig) free city. Wacek Binental is there too. He remembers subsequent summer vacations in rented gingerbread villas, fifteen miles from Warsaw by a narrow-gauge railway, in a spa called Konstancin, or, next door to it, Skolimov. A small river flows through the spas, with a few sandy beaches. The one near Konstancin is next to a wooden railway bridge, from which you can dive into the river. He loves to kayak there. His favorite is No. 4, a single-seater painted red and white. And later they go to Orlowo, between the new Polish port of Gdynia and Gdažnsk. And on his return, his parents take their vacation, alone. Two weeks on the French Riviera, every year.
When he is twelve they go on a cruise to the Norwegian fjords on a brand-new Polish passenger ship, the fourteen thousand–ton
Pi?sudski,
which has just been built in Italy. He sits at the bar drinking fresh orange juice. They go as far north as Tromsø, where he refuses to go to bed until the sun sets, well after midnight.
The summers of 1937 and 1938 he remembers spending in the Swiss Alps, at La Clarière, “École pour Jeunes Garçons” (which the young John Kerry was later to attend), learning French and climbing in the mountains. And during the summer of 1937 his parents also take him with them to Paris to the World’s Fair. He remembers riding in a Citroën taxi specially modified to run on a battery. One of his father’s business contacts invites them to dinner at a cordon bleu restaurant and brings along his son, my father’s age, who wears a dinner jacket. Kazio is humiliated because he has on a brown suit with plus fours.
He remembers winter vacations in Otwock or Srodborow, and in Zakopane, at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, part of the Carpathian range, where he learns to ski.
T
HE
G
OLDFARB FAMILY
is nonobservant. Kazio cannot speak Yiddish, has never been inside a synagogue, considers himself a Jewish Pole not a Polish Jew. And yet he is aware of the steady drumbeat of anti-Semitism. Aware how carefully his father avoids ostentation, for fear of exciting envy, eschewing a car even when they can clearly afford one. He recalls a law being passed that requires the owners to put their full names on their shopfronts, so Jewish merchants can be identified and boycotted. He remembers an elderly German woman in Berlin who, discovering he is Jewish, begins harassing him, saying Jews should not be allowed in Germany. His host, a family friend, turns on the woman. “Don’t you know the Führer wants to promote tourism?” she says.
Although most “educated” people in Poland can speak French and German, and the elderly also speak Russian, compulsory during the Russian occupation, English is an almost completely unknown tongue in the 1930s. But Maurycy, a great admirer of Churchill, says it will be the language of the future. So Kazio begins attending evening classes at the language college, when he is thirteen. He is the youngest student. Mrs. McAvoy, a middle-aged English lady, is the teacher, and everyone assumes her husband to be a member of the British Secret Service.
Lessons begin with the singing of current English popular numbers, and he remembers belting out the “Lambeth Walk,” where the chorus “Oi!” has to be shouted loudly. They use Eckersley’s
Essential English
textbook, and read “The Selfish Giant,” by Oscar Wilde, and practice conversation, and within ten months he thinks that he can make himself understood in English.
After a lot of discussion with his parents, he writes to the
Daily Mail
in London asking them to recommend places where he might study English for the summer. The Goldfarbs choose Greenhayes, in St. Leonard’s-on-Sea, East Sussex, where Mr. V. S. Ward, MA (Cantab), and his wife run a residential English-for-foreigners course. Kazio sets off for England in late June 1939.
Later, he will wonder whether the whole thing was a ploy to get him out of the country, in expectation of what was to happen three months later, but he has no inkling of it at the time. He sails on an old twelve-berth steamer called the SS
Baltrover,
sharing a cabin with three men on their way to America. None of them can speak any English, and they ask him to arrange for warm water to shave. But when he asks the steward for “varim vater,” his Polish accent is so thick that the steward cannot understand him.
The
Baltrover
docks just below Tower Bridge. He has been sent written instructions to take a taxi to Charing X, and a train from there to St. Leonard’s.
“Sharing Ex, Sharing Ex,” he says to the driver, who has no idea what he is talking about until Kazio shows him the note.
“Oh, Charing
Cross,
” the driver says. “Why didn’t you say so?”
And Kazio realizes that perhaps his English is not so good after all.
There are few other guests at Greenhayes, the residential-hotel-cum-language school. They include a Dutch girl, related to the owners, and a middle-aged Frenchman, M. Askenazi, who spends all his summer vacations there. Vincent Ward, a retired schoolteacher, spends a couple hours a day with Kazio, improving his English, and slowly my father’s Polish accent fades.
By the middle of August 1939, it begins to look as if a war is coming to Europe. Hitler has already occupied Czechoslovakia and clearly has designs on Poland. Kazio wants to move up his return to Warsaw, but Vincent Ward says that is not necessary. Later, he suspects that his father has contacted Ward and told him not to let Kazio leave. The Germans invade Poland on September 1 (the Soviets invade from the east, part of the secret pact with Hitler to partition the country), and on the following Sunday, September 3, Chamberlain, the British prime minister, hitherto bent on appeasement, finally declares war on Germany. That morning the first air-raid warning sounds in St. Leonard’s.
A
FTER THAT, HE
remembers, everything changes. All the other guests at the Wards’ leave except for M. Askenazi, who stays on a while, making blackout screens on wooden frames for all the windows. Vincent Ward becomes an air-raid warden, going around the area shouting at people who expose any lights. Peggy, their grown-up daughter, comes home from Canada to be with her parents when they are bombed. All cars are fitted with covers for their headlights, and driving after dark becomes dangerous. Everyone is issued a gas mask, to be carried in a cardboard box that hangs from a piece of string from one’s shoulder, and an identity card. My father still remembers his number: EIBL 134-3.
Kazio is stranded. He knows no one but the Wards. He has left Poland expecting to be gone for only seven weeks. Now the summer is over, and the new school year has begun. Vincent Ward enrolls him at King’s College, a private school down the road. It is named not after the monarch, but after Lieutenant Colonel Wally King, the headmaster and owner, whose military rank is in fact in the cadet corps. There are only four teachers for two hundred boys, mostly sons of local shop owners and tradesmen. Wally doesn’t really know what to do with this stranded Pole from a different educational system, but Kazio stays there until the following summer. He receives very occasional letters from his parents, smuggled out via Sweden, not saying much, but reassuring him that they are well, they are alive.
In Britain men are drafted and children are evacuated from major towns into the countryside, complete with their schools and teachers.
In April 1940, Hitler launches his Blitzkrieg, starting with Denmark and Norway. Weeks later the German army attacks the Low Countries and then pushes south into France. And by the end of May, the remains of the British Expeditionary Force are chased to the channel ports, mainly Dunkirk, and are being evacuated back to England. In England, the panic starts in earnest; an invasion is expected daily. Something has to be done and done quickly. Local Defense Volunteers, later called the Home Guard, and consisting mostly of elderly men armed only with sticks and pikes, begin to patrol, looking for Germans. And the next thing that comes to somebody’s hare brain, my father says, is to get rid of all the foreigners living in possible German landing areas. There is no time to see if they are likely enemy sympathizers, and Kazio, like everybody else without a British passport, is ordered out of St. Leonard’s. He has one small suitcase of clothes and a few books, his camera, a bicycle, and ten pounds. He is still a boy. He is in a foreign country. And now he is on his own.