I Want You to Know We're Still Here

by Esther Safran Foer

  We then climbed back into our wagon. This time, Avrom rode with us. When we passed through the Yaromel forest, he informed us that we were following the same path the Jews of Trochenbrod had taken when the Germans loaded them into trucks. He knew this from his interviews with Christian villagers.

  The Jews arrived at this spot and saw a big pit in the ground, Avrom told us. We knew this story already, of course, and yet with each recounting, history was turning into memory, and memory into history.

  They were ordered to remove their clothes and jewelry. The rabbi of Trochenbrod told his flock that they could follow these orders, and he began to disrobe. He was shot before he could finish undressing. The Nazis then ordered the Jews to line up in rows of seven, turn around, and face the pit, where they were shot in the back. As this process was repeated, many made a run for the forest; others went berserk watching. Whether running or standing frozen, screaming, they were all gunned down. When that pit was full, the Nazis moved the remaining Jews to a second site in the forest. These two pits were the sites of the other two memorials. Frank and I buried our family card at each one. We wanted our ancestors to know we were still here.

  * * *

  —

  There was yet another plaque to be reinstalled, this one at the third memorial on our journey.

  Here, Shmuel Potash’s young Israeli granddaughters set out candles to form a Star of David. A cantor from Washington had brought a guitar, and he played a song he’d written about Trochenbrod. By the time he was finished, even the Israelis, who we thought of as being thick-skinned and tough, were weeping. I was very emotional, too, thinking about my Grandmother Brucha and my Aunt Choma, who might have been murdered on this very spot. A brother and sister from Argentina who had made aliyah to Israel sang a beautiful song written by a Ukrainian-born Israeli poet, about how “everyone has a name,” as the wind blew through the forest and the sun began to fade.

  We then sang another round of “Hatikvah,” then “Am Yisrael Chai,” which translates to “the nation of Israel lives.” On this day and in this place, these songs seemed especially meaningful. Despite what had happened here, we lived on as Jews, and as Trochenbroders.

  Rejuvenated by these songs, we walked one hundred yards deeper into the woods, past the swelling crowd of Ukrainians that had been following us all day, curious. The next memorial we came upon was also in disrepair, but we didn’t have the means to restore it. Shmuel Potash entered the site and instructed his grandchildren to gather around him. His sister, who had survived the massacre, later told him that this was the very spot where his family had been murdered. He wept as he spoke, while a fellow Israeli recited Kaddish. The rest of us hovered nearby, not sure what to say. The sun was beginning to set, and horse-drawn carriages don’t have headlights. Finally, the tour leaders insisted that we move along.

  After we left the memorial, still in the barren fields of Trochenbrod, a friend of Ivan’s was unexpectedly waiting to greet us. He was a tall, thin man, carrying a Russian translation of Everything Is Illuminated, one of the two that he had found in the Lutsk bookstore. He was waiting for Frank and me to autograph it. Strange but also oddly fitting. We visited with him for a while and talked about the book.

  As we were getting ready to move on, I remembered that we had forgotten to bury our New Year’s card at the last grave site. Frank and I doubled back to the mass grave, alone. We were in the middle of the forest, where it was cool and quiet. We noticed a crack in the foot of the memorial and decided to stuff the glossy evidence of our family’s persistence inside the stone.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning we assembled as a group outside the Hotel Ukraina for a commemorative photograph—our own version of the 1947 photo of Trochenbrod survivors. We all hugged, exchanged contact information, and the buses took off.

  10

  Frank and I were now on our own, about to embark on the next part of our journey, to Kolki and Lysche.

  Frank suggested that each morning before setting off we should meet in his room and he’d interview me, using the new Flip Video camera I had purchased for the trip. We had no particular agenda for these interviews; they just seemed a good way to create a raw transcript of our experience and to capture the minutiae, such as my on-camera announcement that I wanted to change clothes before leaving for Kolki—my mother’s shtetl. I’m hardly a fashionista, and in fact I had packed only a couple of pairs of jeans and a handful of shirts, but I didn’t feel appropriately dressed for this important occasion. I was going to be with my grandmother Esther, in this place I’d been hearing about my entire life. I don’t actually believe I can commune with the dead—or that they can see what I am wearing—but I had heard so much about Esther from my mother and from my grandmother’s sisters, Chia and Jean, that I felt deeply connected to her. My grandmother was murdered holding her grandchildren. She died having no idea that one of her daughters, my mother, survived and that there were now numerous generations of descendants. I often wished I could tell her how life turned out for us, and today I would have that opportunity. It was an occasion that at least merited a nicer T-shirt.

  * * *

  —

  Kolki is about thirty miles northeast of Lutsk, along a two-lane road mined with potholes. There are almost no private cars outside Lutsk, only a few trucks, buses, old bicycles, and horse-drawn wagons. The terrain is flat and lush, with farm animals that appear to be roaming freely. If you squint and ignore the poor road conditions, it’s possible to imagine you are driving through the American Midwest.

  Frank and I were just trying to take it all in, not sure what, exactly, we were looking for. I had brought the map my mother had helped re-create, marking the streets where she and her family had lived and the names and houses of other residents. In addition, Anna had, by a stroke of good luck, cousins who lived there and had agreed to be our emissaries.

  We also had the name of the Christian family who had provided food and shelter for my mother when she returned after the war, when she learned that her family had been massacred. The Christian family that had offered her food, which she’d refused even though she was hungry: If nothing matters, then there is nothing to save. The simple act of faith that had become part of our family legend.

  We were also looking for the remains of a small vegetable oil factory near the river, which had been the backyard of the home where she had lived with her mother and her sister, Pesha. We knew the house itself was gone—my mother had discovered this when she’d returned in 1944 to find only the metallic foundations of the oil factory and to see someone walking on the other side of the street in a dress that had belonged to her older half sister, Lifsha.

  * * *

  —

  From what we knew of Kolki, it appeared to be remarkably unchanged. There was still no indoor plumbing, and the houses were similar in style to how they had appeared in my mother’s day, from what I could see and what I knew from the descriptions she had given in the audiotaped interviews. The same breeds of livestock still lived next to the houses, lending the whiff of manure. Everything appeared much as my mother had described: the same swampy paths, the same horse-drawn tractors. This was an illusion, of course. It’s not as though the place had been untouched. During the war, the entire village had been torched, first the Jewish part, then the rest. The only house that remained was owned by a German family. Then the entire village had been rebuilt in much the same style as before the war.

  Frank said it was as though Ukraine was collapsed in time, that what had happened seventy years earlier could have happened yesterday—or today.

  * * *

  —

  Anna’s young cousin decided that it would be best to begin our inquiries by visiting with his high school teacher Anna Gaponjuck. He wanted to make the introduction himself, before heading off to work, so our first stop—after pausing to take a photograph by the town sig
n—was to pick him up and drive to his teacher’s house.

  The knock on the door was answered by a woman in her seventies. I’m not sure what I expected, but I couldn’t have anticipated Anna, a charming live wire in a leopard-print dress, with hair pulled into a neat bun. She gave us a warm welcome, plying us with candy that a friend had recently brought from St. Petersburg. The place was a bit chaotic, strewn with papers and boxes as well as lots of small handmade rugs and doilies.

  She knew what we were after and didn’t waste any time:

  “I remember seeing blood on the ground,” she told us. She’d been only five when the massacre occurred, and her story unfolded in haunting fragments. She recalled that her father had been ordered to transport clothing back from the freshly dug massive grave site. After doing it once, he refused to continue. “My mother went to the Ukrainian policeman and pleaded, ‘I’m pregnant and about to give birth. Don’t send him back.’ ”

  She also remembered seeing a man run from the site, and he then hid in their bushes. “Because we had eight children and we were afraid to get killed, we didn’t let him stay long,” she explained.

  As she spoke, her husband, who was rail-thin, entered the room and, squatting against the wall, offered his own memories. “I saw a Jew throw salt in the eyes of soldiers and try to run from them,” he said. “It didn’t work.” I had heard this same story from my mother years before.

  Anna the Teacher spoke in such a rapid-fire manner that even Anna the Translator, who spoke very quickly herself, couldn’t make sense of everything she said. But we were able to get the gist of her story.

  When the Germans torched her family’s house, she said, she and her family fled to the forest and lived in a bunker for six months, right next to the Jewish mass grave.

  After we spoke for a while, absorbing these stories, I showed them some of the photographs that I’d brought. I had photographs of my mother, her parents and grandparents, and hoped that someone would recognize them. She didn’t recognize anyone but suggested we talk to the older people who lived across the road.

  We agreed, and we all walked across the street and knocked on the door. We were greeted by an elderly couple. The man was missing a couple of fingers on one hand, was unshaven, and had no control of his drooping tongue. His wife, who was blind, wore a scarf tightly tied around her head. The house was a mess: The front room was lined with chairs that appeared to have been salvaged from an auditorium.

  There was something horribly depressing and uncomfortable about this, but we were here and perhaps they could help. I recited some of the names that I remembered my mother mentioning, as well as ones that appeared on our homemade map. Their faces were blank until I landed on the name Averbuch, who my mother told me had been the town photographer. This rang a bell, and the man retrieved an old photo album and began to flip through it. He couldn’t find this Averbuch person, but the old photos stirred up other memories, though nothing especially useful for us. He’d been twenty years old in 1941, he told us, and he claimed to have been out of town during the massacre. He would have been about the same age as my mother and may have even gone to school with her. No matter what we asked, he insisted he didn’t remember anything, that he hadn’t even been in Kolki at the time.

  Anna the Teacher sensed this encounter wasn’t going especially well and announced, diplomatically, that it was time to leave. We were now going to visit the mass grave, she said, as if she had just checked the itinerary and we had slipped off schedule. We were happy to let her guide us, even though this was not part of the plan. But she seemed genuinely interested in our search and committed to getting us results.

  We went back to her house, and she asked us to wait while she changed out of the leopard-print dress and into something more somber, which she accessorized with a large straw hat. This visit to the mass grave was clearly, for her as well as for us, a serious and important affair. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her applying lipstick. She then went into her yard and cut flowers, which she wrapped in a sheet of cellophane and tied with a ribbon.

  We all climbed into Ivan’s van and off we went, although where, exactly, we were headed we didn’t quite know, other than that we needed to drive disconcertingly deep into the forest—the same forest my mother and Sura were afraid to walk through to say Kaddish. We were basically in the same boat Jonathan had been in eleven years before; he had told us that no one in Kolki knew where the mass grave was, until someone remembered the people who had come to dig for gold teeth—a disturbing thought in its own right, never mind the coda that once they were in the forest, he’d feared they’d never find their way out.

  Anna the Teacher didn’t know where to begin, either. Anna the Translator had been there once before, when she was doing advance work for our trip; she’d found the grave site and had sent me a photograph, but she now couldn’t remember the way. As we drove around, we found a villager and asked him for directions. Like nearly everyone we encountered, he was curious about what a couple of Americans were doing in Kolki and wanted to be part of the adventure. He was determined to show us the way and, rather than explain, he climbed into the van. Our growing entourage now included this helpful villager, Anna the Teacher, Anna the Translator, Ivan the Driver, Frank, and me. The villager seemed to actually know the way, directing us past a herd of cows, then into the forest and off the dirt road onto a path, until we found the spot.

  The memorial, erected by some Kolki survivors, was a black slab of stone on a moss-and-weed-covered mound, beneath which lay several thousand bodies. The ground was covered with soft clay, which the villager explained was meant to help prevent the spread of infection from the bodies beneath. At the base of the stone, someone had left plastic flowers, which were now covered with cobwebs.

  Anna the Teacher was the first to approach. She set down her freshly cut flowers and began to pull the weeds. She was clearly embarrassed by the poor upkeep. “I will call the town council,” she announced. “The condition of this site is a scandal.” She was then joined by the rest of our group, and someone translated the inscription, which turned out to be somewhat uninspired. It simply explained that “four thousand brave Soviet Jews” had been killed.

  Here I was at last, standing on the grave of my grandmother, my great-grandmother, aunts, cousins, and countless other murdered members of my family. The Ukrainians kindly backed away, giving us space, but what we wanted was a bit of real privacy for this moment. Frank and I walked around to the other side of the monument, where the slab provided a partial shield. I took out a kippah, a traditional head covering worn during prayer, for Frank; a copy of the Kaddish, the memorial prayer; and one of our Rosh Hashanah family photo cards. I handed the card to Frank, and he tried to find a crack in the surface so he could stuff the photo inside, as we had done at the memorials in Trochenbrod. When that didn’t work, we put the card on the ground and covered it with earth. I then placed a large stone on the base of the grave, which is an old Jewish tradition: Flowers on graves fade, whereas stones represent the permanence of memory. We recited Kaddish in this sacred place and began to weep.

  The moment was surreal. This was the place I saw when I bolted awake at night, imagining my grandmother and great-grandmother holding my cousins in their arms, standing by the pit, waiting to be shot. As my feet sank into the soft clay, I imagined myself moving closer to their bodies. I tried not to think about how deep into the forest we were, about the grave robbers Jonathan had mentioned, about the story we had just heard from Anna the Teacher involving snipers who had perched in the trees, taking aim at would-be escapees. About the descriptions I’d heard from Father Desbois, about how the ground had continued to move for several days after the executions.

  Frank told me later that he will never forget being in the dark, peaceful forest, where he said he could feel the ghosts hiding behind the trees.

  It was a place of unimaginable horror, but now it w
as strangely tranquil. Trees had grown on top of the graves, and, in contrast to the noisy village clamor, the sounds of cars and barking dogs, here there was silence.

  I imagined my family—not only their deaths but also the lives they had led in this very same town:

  On the Sabbath, there was chicken, beef sometimes, turkey maybe twice a year for the big holidays….Schmaltz was a big thing…they used to beg the butcher should give them a little bit of fat.

  Being here made it so much more real. How I wished they could see all the good that came later: the births, bar mitzvahs, the graduations and weddings, the great- and great-great grandchildren.

  I scooped some dirt and pine cones into my Ziploc bag and filled it to the brim. We then pulled ourselves together and made our way back to the van.

  “That must be hard. I’m so sorry,” Anna the Translator said. “What happened to you people was horrible.” The ride back from the mass grave was respectfully silent, for which we were grateful.

  * * *

  —

  After we dropped off the villager, Anna the Teacher resumed her role as guide. She seemed determined to help us find something.

  She took us to some of the oldest houses in town. These had not been Jewish houses, and while interesting to see, a tour of historic homes was not really what we were after. But, as I was learning, often you don’t know what you are looking for until you find it.

  Once again, a local man emerged from his small wooden house, curious to know who we were. We showed him the photos of my mother, of my grandparents, of my aunts, and of my cousins, to no avail. We had just begun to walk away when we heard him say the name “Spitz,” pointing to the house on the corner. Spitz was a name that my mother had mentioned as being a neighbor of her grandparents, and it was one of the names on the map that my mother and I had drawn together. We asked if the man remembered anyone named Bronstein, which was the surname of my mother’s grandparents, my great-grandparents, who lived near Spitz. They had some sort of mill in their backyard, I told him. Although he didn’t recognize the name, he remembered there had been a mill down the street from the Spitz home.