by Pam Jenoff
“Excuse me...” The young woman’s voice, tugging and insistent, pulls me from my thoughts. I blink my eyes and look up. “May I come in?”
“Please.” I step back. “Herbata? I mean, would you like some tea?” A mention of Biekowice and the old ways begin to creep back into my blood.
“No, thank you.” She sits, perching on the edge of the chair I’ve indicated. Her hands dance around each other, reminding me of the restlessness I have long since abandoned. “Mrs....”
“You can call me Helen.”
Her eyes widen. “Did you say Helen? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I thought...”
“You thought that I was Ruth.” And that Helena was dead. “I’m not.” I hear the brusqueness in my own tone. “You still haven’t told me who you are.”
“I’m sorry. My name is Rabbi Farber.” She says this as though she hopes the title will convey a sense of trustworthiness, but it comes out sounding stiff and silly. I process the information: a female rabbi. Once I would not have believed it, but I have seen enough in my years that few things surprise me anymore. “Elizabeth Farber. I’d like to talk to you about your hometown of Biekowice.”
I should be surprised at this unexpected visitor, asking about a place I’ve not seen in more than half a century. But in some sense this is a visit for which I have waited my entire life. “That was our village, yes.”
“Not far from your house there was a small church, more of a chapel, really. Are you familiar with it?”
“That’s where Sam...” I hesitate, not sure whether to speak of such things, even after all of these years. “It was in the forest. It wasn’t really part of our property.”
“No, but you were the landowners of record closest to it.”
“Why are you asking about all of this?”
“There’s some development going on in the area,” the woman explains vaguely. Does she think I will not understand the details? “Near the chapel site.”
Now it is my turn to be surprised and I do not bother to mask it. “It’s still there?” The woman shakes her head. “Oh.” I don’t know what I expected. A simple wood structure—there had not been much left but the walls seventy years ago. In my mind it was ageless; I can see every cracked windowpane and rotting floorboard like it was yesterday. But there was no reason to think it had actually withstood the test of time.
“I’m afraid the chapel burned down some time ago.”
I push down the pain, reminding myself that I should not care, that it was never the chapel that mattered. But I cannot help but grieve for the sweetest place I ever laid my head, a bed of leaves with a canopy of stars above. “So you know it?” she prompts gently.
“That’s where Sam hid after his plane crashed. I found him in the woods and helped him to the chapel. He stayed there while his leg healed and we fell in love.”
“But...” Her forehead wrinkles in confusion. “Maybe you could start at the beginning.”
“Maybe you could tell me why you’re asking in the first place.”
“Some bones were found at a development site close to where the chapel had been. Bones are a big concern in Poland because so many Jewish cemeteries were destroyed and are unmarked. The Orthodox rabbis worry that there may have been a cemetery there, or that the bones may have been Jewish. I’m here to ask you.”
“There was no cemetery there.” She exhales visibly. “Whether the bones were Jewish is more complicated.” I take a deep breath. “I was born Helena Nowak. I had a twin, Ruth, who I think you expected to find here, as well as three younger siblings. We were raising them at our cottage in Biekowice after our parents died.” I swallow. “The bones...they’re male, aren’t they?” I know the answer without looking up to see her nod.
“Yes, they were on the thin side so at first we thought female. But forensic tests confirmed it.”
“Michal...”
“Michal,” she repeats, the name unfamiliar on her tongue. Even if she had researched the history of what had happened in Biekowice, there was no reason she would have heard of him.
“My little brother. He was twelve. Sam had arranged for our escape. He was an American paratrooper, you see. But as we were about to leave for the border, Michal disappeared. We thought he went to the city to save our mother in the hospital. We had not told him she had already died. Ruth went to find him. It began to snow and he must have taken shelter in the chapel.”
The woman’s eyes dart back and forth as she tries to grasp the enormity of my tale. Finally, she says, “That would be consistent with what we found. Some bones of an adolescent male that showed signs of being at the chapel at the time it burned down.”
It is as if someone had punched me in the stomach. Michal is dead. Remorse, unbridled by the years, washes over me. We had tried to spare the younger children the worst by not telling them about our mother’s death. But in the end the belief that she was still alive sent Michal into the woods after her, making our escape together impossible. “I had told him about the chapel once and he must have taken shelter there.” An image forms in my mind. I see Michal opening the grate of the woodstove to stoke the fire, transfixed by the orange flames. Lulled by the heat, his eyes grew heavy. Just a small rest, he must have told himself, to give him strength for the rest of the journey. Or perhaps he knew that we would come looking for him and thought one of us would be there soon.
In my heart I had known—if he were alive, he would have come to me, found me and the others somehow. But I had been able to construct a fantasy world where he had grown to a man, had a family and children, a life. Now he was gone. I see his body lying on the cold ground of that Małopolska hill, a bed of pine needles beneath him, vacant eyes staring up at the sky.
“One can learn so much from bones. The age of a person at time of death, and often the gender, though that proved to be wrong here. We can learn about the position which the person was in, and that can often tell us much about how he or she died.” But not the things I really want to know, like why he had gone to the chapel and for how long he had waited, why Ruth did not reach him in time. Those are secrets for the bones to keep.
“There were a few other items found, like fragments of a cup.” Buried things that could survive so much longer than humans.
“We couldn’t find Michal,” I continue, forcing my voice to remain even. “Ruth insisted on going after him. It should have been me. I was the stronger one. But I went with Sam to take the other children to the train station. We made plans to meet there. But Ruth and Michal never arrived. I wanted to go back for them, but Sam wouldn’t hear of it. He put me and the children on the train and he went back to look for them, even though he had been shot as we escaped.”
“He never found either of them?”
“No. I later learned that Ruth was arrested and sent to Auschwitz.” I imagine now the Germans drawn to the woods by the fire at the chapel, happening upon Ruth, who was going in the same direction. I wipe my eyes as I think of my twin sister, the sacrifices she had made. “The Germans thought it was me because she was carrying my transit pass when she was arrested.”
She nods. “That’s why I expected to find Ruth here, not you.”
“Yes.” I had not corrected the records. The comingling of our names, my living as Ruth, seemed fitting. Part of me had died there with her, and part of her lived on in me still.
“What happened then?”
“We made it to the border.”
“It must have been hard living all of these years without him,” she says. “Sam, I mean.”
“All of these years? My Sam died last spring...”
Her jaw drops slightly. A Jewish soldier wounded and alone in the occupied Polish countryside. The odds of survival were nonexistent. I had thought so, too, when he pushed me on the train that morning and ran off to find my brother and sister, stil
l bleeding from his wound. I was sure I would never see him again. But he had survived—and he had found me.
One June day some four years later there was a knock on the door of the Lower East Side boardinghouse where Dorie, Karolina and I shared a room. “Hello,” Sam said, and there was a moment’s shyness, meeting as strangers in the unfamiliar setting. He extended a hand. “May I have this dance?” I stared at him in wonder—his survival was nothing short of a miracle.
Then Dorie appeared behind me. “Sam!” she cried, wrapping herself around his legs, and just like that, we were a family.
“Lena, wait, I need to give you this.” He held a box in his cracked hands.
“Oh!” I gasped as I opened it, tears springing to my eyes at the familiar blue. It was Ruth’s cape, or rather a portion of it—the hood and a bit of the shoulders. I closed my eyes and tried to block out the visions of what might have caused Ruth to be separated from her beloved cape, or the garment to be torn into pieces so violently. “I went back to get them, just like I promised. Oh, Lena,” he said, breaking down as all of the tears he had hidden for so long rushed forth. “I’m so sorry. I told you I would...”
“And you did,” I replied, offering the absolution that would never be quite enough. He reached out to touch my face, and I fell into his arms, as if we were back in the chapel once more. I kissed him, not caring that Dorie was watching or that we were on the steps of the boardinghouse or what people might think. “Thank you,” I added, clutching the cape. “For bringing this back to me.” I took a deep breath, then grasped his hand to lead him to shelter once more.
“Sam came to me after the war,” I told Rabbi Farber. “Only later was he able to tell me the whole story of how he tracked Ruth to the camps and learned of her death there.” Nothing I had experienced before—not losing my mother or father—had prepared me for the fact that Ruth was gone. Now hearing what I have always known about Michal, the scar is ripped open again. Had Sam known about the chapel burning and tried to spare me further pain?
“I was in Poland researching and I found this.” Rabbi Farber pulls out a copy of a black-and-white photograph. “They wouldn’t let me take the original.” A bald woman in a striped uniform stares back at me. “Is that her?”
I sink to the ground. The woman in the photo is skeletal, but eyes a mirror image of my own stare back. It is the notion of my sister’s locks, her pride and joy, shorn to the scalp that brings me to my knees. I take the picture, clutch it to my chest.
Rabbi Farber helps me to a chair. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”
“Why are we here, if not to cry for those who have gone?” I look at the photograph once more, my own name penciled beneath. “You’ve heard of how amputees sometimes have phantom pains where their missing limbs once were?” She nods. “That’s me. It is as if Ruth has been here with me this entire time, talking, living. I still turn to her to tell her things, almost every day.” Ruth had been with me since my first breath and, somehow, I assumed she would be there until my last. “We never knew about Michal, though, until now.”
“Of course, we don’t know for sure. If you’d like to be more certain, there are DNA tests.”
“It’s him. I’m sure of it.” Tears stream down my face now. “Oh, my sweet Michal.”
I will have to tell the others, Karolina and Dorie. Of course, to them our brother is just a shadowy image. When we first left Biekowice they asked for Ruth and Michal incessantly. But a child’s mind is mercifully short of memory and as we had escaped, finally landing in New York, the excitement and new unfamiliar sights that assaulted the senses pushed their pain away until the questions came only once every few days, then weeks and months between. When they were old enough I’d sat them down and told them the truth about a brother and a sister and parents they had never really known, and they’d listened gravely but their concern had been more for my tears than any real sense of sadness. Our family had become the stuff of once upon a time, bedtime lore or a fantasy world that had not truly existed.
“I’m so sorry,” Rabbi Farber says again.
“It’s all right. I knew when we couldn’t find Ruth that something had happened. My other two sisters survived. Dorie is a doctor now. She lives about fifteen minutes from here with her family and I see them almost every week. And my baby sister, Karolina—Kari, she’s called now—is a grandmother of five.” We are generations because of Sam’s heroism.
“And Sam?”
“A heart attack, two years ago. But we had a wonderful life for many years.” I worried that Sam would never find us. “I don’t think he ever forgave himself, though, for not being able to save the others—or find out what happened to Michal. Years later we checked the records in Poland, Tel Aviv, even Moscow after the wall came down. It became something of a fixation for Sam. He said it was about genealogy, constructing his family tree. But I knew that a boy from Chicago had no real cause to be poking around in all those archives. You see, Rabbi—”
“Elizabeth, please call me Elizabeth.”
I continue. “Elizabeth, he was doing it for me, trying to find the truth. We knew it was virtually impossible that Michal had survived. He was only twelve. Still, he was a strong boy and so smart and resourceful, so part of me always hoped... Well, never mind. He’s at peace now.” But the questions still haunt me. Had Michal been cold? Had he suffered?
“Did you have children of your own?” she asks, her voice round with kindness as she tries to change the subject.
“Not biologically.” The doctors had never been able to find anything wrong. My body, they suggested, was just too ravaged from the starvation and other hardships, to prove hospitable. But I knew that the reason ran deeper: after all I had seen, how could I bring a child into the world and live with the cold terror of knowing I might not live long enough to protect it?
“Of course, there was Max.” I gesture proudly to the photograph on the windowsill of the tall, slight man, now graying himself. Elizabeth cocks her head, not understanding. In my mind’s eye, I see Sam as he appeared on my doorstep that day so long ago. After Sam gave me the box with the scrap of Ruth’s cape, I started to lead him inside.
But Sam pulled back. “Lena, wait.” I noticed then a child of nearly four, undersized from malnourishment, clutching to his leg. I looked up at Sam questioningly. Had he rescued a child, brought him here for us? Then the child looked up at me with eyes as familiar as my own. “I don’t understand...” Sam’s face broke then with more pain than I had seen or known possible. “Ruth,” he whispered, and I knew then that, although my sister was dead, Sam had returned and against all odds found this child with her perfect blue eyes that would carry her legacy.
“Sam brought Max home from the war.” Holding tight to this piece of my sister, I saw birth and death like bookends then. The child did not have Ruth’s auburn hair, though. His was black, and something about the too-close eyes was also familiar. Staring at the child, I understood then that Sam’s commitment came from a deeper place. “Max was Sam’s child with my sister and he rescued the baby from the camps.” Rabbi Farber’s eyes widen. “Sam slept with my sister.” It is the first time I have shared this with anyone.
“I was angry at Ruth for a very long time for trying to take that one thing from me. I wanted to see her again to ask her why but I never got that chance. But in the end she was gone and I forgave her. It was my fault, you see. My secret of sheltering Sam poisoned things between us and caused all the rest to happen.” I should have known what Ruth was facing, how Sam’s presence would have threatened her. And then later, there were signs of what had happened, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. “I was angry at Ruth and I let her go up the hill when I was the stronger one.” We all paid the price for my lies.
“No amount of strength could have saved her or Michal,” Elizabeth interjects gently.
“No, of course not. But I should have been the
one who died at the chapel. Or maybe, if we had stayed...” Perhaps there was a chance. In my mind, there has always been part of me still living in the cottage with my brother and sisters, all of us together. I clear my throat, eager to change the subject. “You mentioned some development by the chapel.”
“Yes, a resort with a golf course.” She watches me expectantly, wondering if I will object to such a trivial use of the grounds.
For a moment, I am saddened, thinking of the rugged landscape being hewn down and smoothed to look like everywhere else. Then I shrug. It is not mine to worry about anymore. “Something nice for the people in the region. There’s been so much suffering. And maybe it will bring some people to visit. It really is a lovely area.”
“Have you ever been back?”
I shake my head. “There’s nothing left there for me.”
“But your family was—”
“No.” I can hear the stubbornness in my own voice, still there after so many years.
“Anyway,” Elizabeth says smoothly, “we were trying to figure out the identity of the bones to see if they are Jewish and whether they can be moved so the development can proceed.”
“They’re Jewish,” I reply firmly.
“But I don’t understand. If the bones were your brother’s, then how could they possibly be? The provincial records...”
Would have given no indication that we were Jewish, I finish silently. “You see, shortly before we fled Poland, we learned that my mother’s mother had been Jewish. So that meant...”
“That you were Jewish, too,” Elizabeth finishes for me.
“I didn’t find out until partway through the war,” I say. “So once we knew, things were even more dangerous.” I smile slightly. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“I’m not. In a country where Jews and Poles lived side by side families mingled, secrets were kept. Many Poles have some Jewish blood.”
“To their chagrin.”
“Perhaps. But things are changing there, slowly.” I do not answer. I want to believe that people get better. But some memories are ingrained too deep. “And lots of Jewish identities are being discovered every day, even in places like Kraków. There are young Jews in the synagogue now.” One synagogue, where there once would have been a dozen. “There’s a Jewish community center and a cultural festival.” Places I once thought gone forever breathing with new life. I wonder, though, whether those who once walked the streets would have been happy about the revival or thought it a mockery?
