We Were the Lucky Ones

by Georgia Hunter

  It’s after midnight. They are sprawled around the living room, draped over chairs, stretched out across the floor. The children are asleep. Louis Armstrong’s ‘Shine’ floats from the record player.

  Addy sits beside Caroline on the couch. Her head is propped against a back cushion, her eyes closed. ‘You are a saint,’ Addy whispers, interlacing his fingers with hers, and Caroline smiles, her eyes still closed. Not only had she orchestrated the call to the States to reach Jakob – the whole family had piled into the neighbour’s living room to voice their hellos – she’d also proven a courteous, patient host, catering in her calm, quiet manner to the boisterous polyglots who’d swarmed her small home. There must have been three languages spoken at any given moment throughout the evening – Polish, Portuguese, and Yiddish – not one of them English. But if Caroline was at all fazed, she never let on.

  Caroline opens her eyes, turns her head to meet Addy’s gaze. Her voice is soft, sincere. ‘You have a beautiful family,’ she says.

  Addy squeezes her hand and leans back to rest his own head against the couch cushion, tapping his toe gently to the music.

  Just because I always wear a smile

  Like to dress up in the latest style

  ’Cause I’m glad I’m livin’

  I take these troubles all with a smile

  Addy hums the tune, wishing the night would never end.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When I was growing up, my grandfather Eddy (the Addy Kurc of my story) was, for all I could tell, American through and through. He was a successful businessman. His English, to my ear, was perfect. He lived in a big, modern house up the road from ours, with floor-to-ceiling picture windows, a porch perfect for entertaining, and a Ford in the driveway. I thought little of the fact that the only children’s songs he ever taught me were in French, that ketchup (un produit chimique, as he called it) was strictly banned from his pantry, or that he’d made half of the things in his home himself (the contraption that dangled his soap by a magnet over the bathroom sink to keep it dry; the clay busts of his children in the stairwell; the cedar sauna in his basement; the living room drapes, woven on his handmade loom). I found it curious when he’d say things like ‘Don’t parachute on your peas’ at the dinner table (What did that even mean?), and mildly annoying when he’d pretend not to hear me if I answered one of his questions with a ‘yeah’ or ‘uh-huh’ – ‘yes’ was the only affirmative answer that met his grammatical standards. Looking back, I suppose others might have labelled these habits as unusual. But I, an only child with a single living grandfather, knew nothing different. Just as I was deaf to the slight inflection my mother now tells me he carried in his English diction, I was blind to his quirks. I loved my Papa dearly; he simply was who he was.

  Of course, there were things about my grandfather that impressed me greatly. His music, to start. I’d never met a person as devoted to his art. His shelves overflowed with 33-rpm records, alphabetically arranged by composer, and with books of repertory for the piano. There was always music playing in his home – jazz, blues, classical, sometimes an album of his own. Often I would arrive to find him at the keys of his Steinway, a no. 2 pencil tucked behind his ear as he plotted melodies for a new composition, which he’d practise and tweak and practise some more until he was happy with it. Every now and then he would ask me to sit beside him as he played, and my heart would race as I’d watch him closely, waiting for the subtle nod that meant it was time to flip to the next page of his sheet music. ‘Merci, Georgie,’ he’d say as we reached the end of the piece, and I’d beam up at him, proud to have been helpful. On most days, once my grandfather was finished with his own work, he would ask if I’d like a lesson, and I would always say yes – not because I shared his affinity for the piano (I was never very good at it), but because I knew how happy it made him to teach me. He’d pull a beginner’s book from the shelf and I would rest my fingers tentatively on the keys, feeling the warmth of his thigh against mine, and I would try my hardest not to make any mistakes as he walked me patiently through a few bars of the theme to Haydn’s ‘Surprise Symphony’. I wanted badly to impress him.

  Along with my grandfather’s musical prowess, his ability to speak seven languages left me in awe. I attributed his fluency to the fact that he had offices around the world and family in Brazil and in France, although the only relative of his generation that I knew by name was Halina, a sister with whom he was especially close. She visited a few times, from São Paulo, and occasionally a cousin my age would come from Paris to stay with us for a few weeks in the summertime to learn English. Everyone in his family, it seemed, had to speak at least two languages.

  What I didn’t know about my grandfather when I was a kid was that he was born in Poland, in a town once home to more than 30,000 Jews; that his birth name wasn’t actually Eddy (as he later renamed himself) but Adolf, though when he was growing up everyone called him Addy. I didn’t know he was the middle of five children, or that he spent nearly a decade of his life not knowing whether his family had survived the war, or whether they’d perished in concentration camps or been among the thousands executed in the ghettos of Poland.

  My grandfather didn’t keep these truths from me intentionally – they were simply pieces of a former life he’d chosen to leave behind. In America he had reinvented himself, devoting his considerable energy and creativity entirely to the present and future. He was not one to dwell on the past, and I never thought to ask him about it.

  My grandfather died of Parkinson’s disease in 1993, when I was fourteen. A year later, a high school English teacher assigned our class an ‘I-Search’ project intended to teach us research skills while we dug up pieces of our ancestral pasts. With my grandfather’s memory so fresh, I decided to sit down for an interview with my grandmother, Caroline, his wife of nearly fifty years, to learn more about his story.

  It was during this interview that I first learnt of Radom, although at the time I had no concept of how significant this place once was to my grandfather, or how important it would become to me – so much so that twenty years later, I would be drawn to visit the city, to walk the cobblestone streets, imagining what it might have been like to grow up there. My grandmother pointed to Radom on a map, and I wondered aloud whether, after the war, my grandfather ever returned to his old hometown. No, my grandmother said. Eddy never had any interest in going back. She went on to explain that Eddy was lucky enough to be living in France when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and that he was the only member of his family to escape from Europe at the start of the war. She told me he was once engaged to a Czech woman he met aboard a ship called the Alsina; that she herself first laid eyes on him in Rio de Janeiro, at a party in Ipanema; that their first child, Kathleen, was born in Rio just a few days before he reunited with his family – parents and siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins he hadn’t seen or heard from for nearly a decade. Somehow, they’d all miraculously survived a war that annihilated over ninety per cent of Poland’s Jews and (I would later discover) all but about 300 of the 30,000 Jews from Radom.

  Once his family was settled in Brazil, my grandmother explained, she and my grandfather moved to the United States, where my mother, Isabelle, and my uncle Tim were born. My grandfather didn’t waste any time in changing his name from Adolf Kurc (pronounced ‘Koortz’ in Polish) to Eddy Courts or in taking the oath of American citizenship. It was a new chapter for him, my grandmother said. When I asked if he maintained any of his customs from the Old World, she nodded. He barely spoke of his Jewish upbringing, and no one knew he was born in Poland – but he had his ways about him. Just as the piano was an integral part of his own upbringing, my grandfather insisted that his children practise an instrument every day. Conversation at the dinner table had to be in French. He made espresso long before most of his neighbours had ever heard of it, and he loved haggling with the open-air vendors at Boston’s Haymarket Square (from which he would often return with a paper-wrapped beef tongue, insisting that it
was a delicacy). The only candy he allowed in the house was dark chocolate, brought back from his travels to Switzerland.

  My interview with my grandmother left my head spinning. It was as if a veil had been lifted, and I could see my grandfather clearly for the first time. Those oddities, those traits that I’d chalked up as quirks – many of them, I realised, could be attributed to his European roots. The interview also sparked an array of questions. What happened to his parents? His siblings? How did they survive the war? I pressed my grandmother for details, but she was able to share only a few sparse facts about her in-laws. I met his family after the war, she said. They hardly spoke of their experiences. At home, I asked my mother to tell me all that she knew. Did Papa ever talk to you about growing up in Radom? Did he tell you about the war? The answer was always no.

  And then in the summer of 2000, a few weeks after I’d graduated from college, my mother offered to host a Kurc family gathering at our house on Martha’s Vineyard. Her cousins agreed – they didn’t see each other nearly enough, and many of their children had never even met. It was time for a reunion. As soon as the idea was seeded, the cousins (there are ten in all) began arranging their travel, and when July rolled around, family flew in from Miami, Oakland, Seattle, and Chicago, and from as far away as Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Tel Aviv. With children and spouses included, we numbered thirty-two in total.

  Each night of our reunion, my mother’s generation, along with my grandmother, would gather on the back porch after dinner and talk. Most nights I’d hang out with my cousins, draped over the living room sofas, comparing hobbies and tastes in music and movies. (How was it that my Brazilian and French cousins knew American pop culture better than I did?) On the last evening, however, I wandered outside, settled down on a picnic bench next to my aunt Kath, and listened.

  My mother’s cousins conversed with a sense of ease, despite their distinctly different upbringings and native tongues and the fact that many hadn’t seen each other in decades. There was laughter, a song – a Polish lullaby that Ricardo and his younger sister Anna recalled from their childhoods, taught to them by their grandparents, they said – a joke, more laughter, a toast to my grandmother, the lone representative of my grandfather’s generation. Languages often alternated mid sentence between English, French, and Portuguese; it was all I could do to keep up. But I managed, and when conversation shifted to my grandfather and then to the war, I leant in.

  My grandmother’s eyes brightened as she recounted meeting my grandfather for the first time in Rio. It took me years to learn Portuguese, she said. Eddy learnt English in weeks. She spoke of how obsessed my grandfather was with American idioms and how she didn’t have the heart to correct him when he botched one in conversation. My aunt Kath shook her head as she recalled my grandfather’s habit of showering in his undergarments – a means of bathing and laundering his clothes simultaneously when he was on the road; he would do just about anything, she said, in the name of efficiency. My uncle Tim remembered how my grandfather would embarrass him when he was a kid by striking up conversations with everyone, from waiters to passersby on the street. He could talk to anyone, he said, and the others laughed, nodded, and from the way their eyes shined I could tell how adored my grandfather was by his nieces and nephews.

  I laughed along with the others, wishing I’d known my grandfather as a young man, and then grew quiet when a Brazilian cousin, Józef, began telling stories of his father – my grandfather’s older brother. Genek and his wife, Herta, I learnt, had been exiled during the war to a Siberian gulag. Goose bumps sprang to my arms as Józef told of how he was born in the barracks, in the thick of winter, how it was so cold his eyes would freeze shut at night and his mother would use the warmth of her breast milk each morning to gently pry them open.

  Hearing this, it was all I could do not to shout, She what? But as shocking as the revelation was, others soon followed, each somehow as astounding as the last. There was the story of Halina’s hike over the Austrian Alps – while pregnant; of a forbidden wedding in a blacked-out house; of false IDs and a last-ditch attempt to disguise a circumcision; of a daring breakout from a ghetto; of a harrowing escape from a killing field. My first thought was, why am I just learning these things now? And then: someone needs to write these stories down.

  At the time, I had no idea that someone would be me. I didn’t go to bed that night thinking I should write a book about my family history. I was twenty-one, with a freshly minted degree under my arm, focused on finding a job, an apartment, my place in the ‘real world.’ Nearly a decade would pass before I’d set off for Europe with a digital voice recorder and an empty notebook to begin interviewing relatives about the family’s experiences during the war. What I fell asleep with that evening was a stirring sensation in my gut. I was inspired. Intrigued. I had a boatload of questions, and I craved answers.

  I have no idea what time it was when we all finally meandered back to our rooms from the porch – I just recall that it was Felicia, the oldest of my mother’s cousins, who was the last to speak. She was a bit more reserved than the others, I’d noticed. While her cousins were gregarious and uninhibited, Felicia was serious, guarded. When she spoke, there was sadness in her eyes. I’d learnt that night that she was a year old at the start of the war, eight at its end. Her memory was still sharp, it seemed, but sharing her experiences made her uneasy. It would be years before I would gently uncover her story, but I remember thinking that whatever memories she harboured must have been painful.

  ‘Our family,’ Felicia said in her thick French accent, her tone sober, ‘we shouldn’t have survived. Not so many of us, at least.’ She paused, listening to the breeze rattling the leaves in the scrub oak trees beside the house. The rest of us were silent. I held my breath, waiting for her to go on, to offer up some sort of explanation. Felicia sighed and brought a hand to the place on her neck where her skin was still pockmarked, I would later learn, by a near-fatal case of scurvy she’d contracted during the war. ‘It’s a miracle in many ways,’ she finally said, looking out toward the tree line. ‘We were the lucky ones.’

  These words would stay with me until the burn to understand how, exactly, my relatives could have defied such odds finally overcame me and I couldn’t help but start digging for answers. We Were the Lucky Ones is the story of my family’s survival.

  SINCE THEN

  By the time I walked the streets of Radom while writing this book, the Kurcs’ hometown had been rebuilt and felt friendly, quaint; but knowing what I now know about its devastating Holocaust history, it comes as no surprise that at war’s end, returning to Poland, for my relatives, was never a consideration. Below is a brief explanation of where the Kurcs decided to settle once they made it safely to the shores of the Americas. (Note that I’ve used Bella’s real name, Maryla, here. I changed it in the book as I felt Maryla was too close phonetically to Mila and could be confusing to readers.)

  ‘Home’ for the Kurcs after the war became Brazil, the United States, and later France. The family kept in close contact, mostly by letter, and visited each other whenever they could, often for Passover.

  Mila and Selim remained in Rio de Janeiro, where Felicia attended medical school. Upon graduating, she met a Frenchman and a few years later moved to Paris to start a family. After Selim passed away, Mila followed her daughter to France. Today, Mila’s grandson lives in her old home in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, just blocks from Felicia and her husband, Louis, whose elegant apartment looks out on the Eiffel Tower. Mila kept in close touch with the nun who took Felicia in during the war. In 1985, thanks to Mila’s nomination, Sister Zygmunta was honoured posthumously as a Righteous Among the Nations.

  Halina and Adam put down roots in São Paulo, where Ricardo’s sister, Anna, was born in 1948. They shared a house with Nechuma and Sol, and Genek and Herta lived close by with their two sons, Józef and Michel. To repay Herr Den for saving her life during the war, Halina sent regular checks to him in Vienna. She and Adam never told th
eir firstborn of his real birthday; Ricardo was in his forties and living in Miami when he discovered that he was born on Italian soil and not in Brazil as his birth certificate indicated.

  In the States, Jakob and Maryla landed in Skokie, Illinois, where Victor’s younger brother, Gary, was born and where Jakob (Jack, to his American friends and relatives) kept up his career in photography. They remained close with Addy (who changed his name to Eddy) and Caroline, who settled in 1947 in Massachusetts, where Kathleen’s sister (my mother), Isabelle, and their brother, Timothy, were born. Eddy travelled often to visit the family in Illinois, Brazil, and France, and continued to make music; he produced a number of recordings, both popular and classical, composing up until his death.

  As of 2017, Nechuma and Sol’s grandchildren, along with their spouses and progeny, number more than one hundred. We are scattered now throughout Brazil, the United States, France, Switzerland, and Israel; our family reunions are truly global affairs. Among us are pianists, violinists, cellists, and flautists; engineers, architects, lawyers, doctors, and bankers; carpenters, motorcyclists, filmmakers, and photographers; naval officers, event planners, restaurateurs, DJs, teachers, entrepreneurs, and writers. When we come together our gatherings are loud and chaotic. There are few of us who look the same or dress the same or even grew up speaking the same languages. But there is a shared sense of gratitude, for the simple fact that we are together. There is love. And always, there is music.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book began as a simple promise to record my family’s story, something I needed to do for myself, for the Kurcs, for my son, and for his children and their great-grandchildren and so on – I had little concept, however, of what exactly the project would entail, or of just how many people I would rely upon for help along the way.