A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir

by Lev Golinkin

  I was desperate to be warm. Life in the city was less sedentary than at Binder’s in Nondorf. It required walking, which I used to love—before my rabbit fur coat had disintegrated. My only other jacket was too small, and I was constantly contorting my hands into the tiny pockets that hovered around my rib cage. It was a purely symbolic gesture, anyway, since the jacket was designed for light autumn strolls, not life in the February wind tunnels of Vienna.

  I didn’t want toys, or food, or a home, or anything like that: I wanted to walk outside without shivering. That was everything. Madame Eva’s house, the house full of clothes, beckoned. The closer we got, the stronger the urges rang, and the more I couldn’t stop myself from hoping. Get warm, get warm, walk around, be warm, go anywhere, play outside, be warm. I shoved the thoughts aside and concentrated on counting the street numbers passing by in the twilight.

  * * *

  The house blended in with the rest of the massive stone façades. A huge metal gate opened into a drafty tunnel leading away from the canal. On one side of the tunnel, recessed into the concrete and barely visible in the fading light, was the door. Thick layers of maroon paint covered all but a small yellowing sign: EVA. We shuffled our feet in front of the sign, wondering how exactly individuals asking for free clothes should introduce themselves. I tried hiding in my usual spot behind Dad’s leg, but I was almost ten and couldn’t quite pull it off.

  “What if it’s the wrong house?” Mom whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Dad said.

  “What if we need documents?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe they make you sign a paper saying you’ll pay them.”

  Dad rang the doorbell and the questions died down.

  A young woman peeked out and escorted us into a small vestibule. She spoke in a calm stream of English. “They will help us shortly,” Dad said. “They are helping another family right now, and they only work with one family at a time.” I craned my neck, listening for what the other family sounded like, but heard nothing except the rustle of Mom’s renewed questions.

  After a few minutes, the young woman led us past several doors, through a modest kitchen, and into an enormous wooden room. Blouses, pants, shirts, sweaters swung from racks and huddled together on the floor. Several more women, all young, thin, and blond, guided Mom and Lina to different sections of the room. I tagged along with Dad and watched him try on black shoes to replace his worn-out ones. Mom and Lina were sorting through blouses, with attendants advising them on sizes and styles. The girls smoothly navigated the piles of clothing with a sincere desire to find exactly what their “customers” wanted. It felt like shopping in a store but without a register waiting by the exit.

  Dad found shoes he liked, carefully tucked the old ones under his arm, and was walking around getting acquainted with the new pair when suddenly I felt someone touch my shoulder. It was a different woman, very young, no more than seventeen. She pointed to a door recessed in the far corner, approached it, and waited, her face calm and expressionless. Mom was busy and Dad didn’t appear concerned, and so I followed her into the small room on the other side.

  I froze and stared at the pile of children’s jackets. A thrill rushed over me, washing away everything else from my mind. Here it was; here was warmth. I rifled through the heap, searching, grasping, trying one on, then the next, and then I found it: a padded black bomber jacket with golden zippers that flashed down the wool lining and across two outside pockets. I scrambled out of the pile. In front of me was a window that faced the canal. It was already dark outside and the unlit water transformed the glass into an enormous jet-black mirror. I took in my jacket, marveling at the fit and its absolute, undeniable coolness. The left arm had a tiny zippered pocket on the elbow. I had no idea what it was for or what I would put in it, but I loved it, because somehow it was that extra zipper that made everything authentic, made me believe that I was cool and tough, like a real pilot. The wind shifted direction, flinging itself against the windowpane. Listening to it, I squeezed the chest and arms of my jacket and knew that warmth was all around me, inside and out.

  Suddenly I was aware of the girl behind me, her image captured in the blackness of the window. Her hands were resting at her sides, her blond hair falling on her black blouse. She was smiling. She had one of those faces that was subtly lit by a smile. Panic poured over me, bringing me back to my senses. Is she laughing at me? People don’t give out clothes. What if she takes the jacket away? I shrank inward, spun around, and shot her a glance full of hatred. I wasn’t going to let some girl amuse herself by staring at a refugee kid dancing around like a crazed marionette. I reverted to what I was: a migrant, a thing in a room full of things.

  The smile vanished. For a split second she looked surprised, and then her face cleared, assuming the same emotionless mask she had worn before. I followed her out to the main room, jacket zipped all the way up, fists clenched, face twisted into the meanest, nastiest grimace I could assemble. Mom crouched down, hugging me and feeling my jacket. I begged her to leave. I told her I had a headache.

  A BLEAK, MAN-MADE HORIZON

  Oberösterreich (Upper Austria), April 1990

  Upstream from Vienna, the Danube takes a sharp westward turn, meanders through the vineyards of Lower Austria, flows past Dürnstein Castle, where Richard the Lionheart was held captive on his way back from the Crusades, and winds around the industrial city of Linz before heading up to its source in the Black Forest in Germany. Right near Linz, where the water marks the boundary between the provinces of Upper and Lower Austria, the E55 Autobahn runs across the river, offering two options to the passing tourist. If the traveler remains on the Danube’s north bank, he will soon hit a small market town called Mauthausen; if he crosses the river, he will arrive at place called Sankt Florian. Both towns contain eponymous, albeit very different landmarks. Mauthausen houses the Mauthausen-Gusen complex, once a dreaded concentration camp, today a monument to Nazi atrocities, preserved for the world, and Austria, to remember. Sankt Florian is home to the famed St. Florian’s priory, devoted to the patron saint of firefighters.

  It was during a sunny April Saturday on the E55 Autobahn that Peter offered Dad a choice: visit Mauthausen or Sankt Florian. Dad chose the camp. My father’s always been eerily drawn to the Nazis. Maybe it was because his earliest memories were of escaping the German invasion of the Ukraine and spending the next several years huddling in a hole (literally) in the Ural Mountains, precisely to escape winding up in such a place.* A similar fascination seemed to hold sway over Peter, who had set a course for Mauthausen long before asking Dad’s opinion.

  We veered off the highway and drove past a small town with little houses with red roofs that looked just like the hundreds of other towns nestled within the valleys of Lower Austria. The road swished around a bend, left the cottages behind, cut across a patch of forest, and ambled through a field, terminating in front of a series of elongated buildings separated from the field by a dull gray wall that stretched far to the left and right like a bleak, man-made horizon. There was no beauty to the endless rectangle, only functional, harsh geometry, and the crudeness of it jarred the eye. It had neither the opulence of Vienna nor the quaintness of the countryside, and one was tempted to think that the ugly gray compound was misplaced, meant perhaps to be a communal apartment complex in Poland, or an industrial warehouse in Vladivostok, not a concentration camp in the sleepy hills of Oberösterreich. But Mauthausen was in Austria; it had been constructed, staffed, and operated by Austrians, and neither the magic of the countryside nor the majesty of Vienna could budge it from its home.

  I didn’t require the customary briefings given by rabbis and schoolteachers to children visiting the National Holocaust Museum or viewing Schindler’s List. I didn’t need to travel to Austria to walk through a Nazi killing ground; I’d played in one every day back in Kharkov. The war was the War, not just to doddering old soldiers, but to my parents, my neighbors, to the crumbling mortar holes
on our balcony wall and monuments to the fallen throughout the city. Every family, Russian and Jewish, had at least one ghost relative who either perished or vanished in the War (Uncle Yasha was mine; he vanished). Neither I nor any other child in the Ukraine could escape learning about the Nazis.

  I didn’t feel much. It was a rather nondescript place, and I really remember only the Stairs of Death and the gas chamber. Mauthausen was initially slated to be a labor camp: “the Stairs of Death” was the name given to a steep, rail-less staircase embedded into the stone quarry deep inside the complex. The inmates were forced to haul giant slabs of rock up the 186 stairs, and every day malnourished bodies plummeted to the bottom. That was part of the quarry’s design, harnessing gravity to weed out the exhausted.

  As the war unfolded, Mauthausen’s mission shifted from death by labor to a purer, more streamlined extermination. The camp’s gas chamber was a large, tiled room, outfitted much like old showers in high school gyms. The walls were covered with little slashes haphazardly scattered throughout the room. At first I thought the marks were a natural part of the material, but upon closer examination I realized they were grooves, hundreds of tiny grooves etched deep into the dirty yellow tile. I pointed them out to Dad, who consulted a nearby curator and then explained that the grooves had not been there when the place was built. They were added later, by the dead, who had clawed at solid tile with their fingernails, leaving their last and only mark on Mauthausen. I traced the nearest groove with my finger, trying to estimate how many emaciated hands it took to carve it. After a while I decided it was better to pretend that the grooves had been there in the beginning, artistically added by the Nazis.

  We walked out of the grayness and back to the jeep, welcomed by the blinding sunshine and the bright green field. Peter, who had not entered the compound, looked more tense than normal. Something in his eyes filled me with dread. I was fine with Mauthausen. The dead didn’t bother me, especially not dead Jews, but looking at Peter I suddenly sensed it, the feeling of being stuck in a movable trap that goes wherever you do. Peter was a demigod—he did what he wanted, went where he wanted, didn’t hide or apologize, and wasn’t afraid, not even of policemen. Yet there it was, like an echo or a nasty memory, the same thing that lived in our old apartment, in Oleg’s mirror, in the hallways of Kharkov’s School Number Three. I feared it above everything else, feared it so much I never mentioned it to Dad or anyone, and to meet it again in Austria, especially in Peter, was unsettling.

  “Do you think it is possible for the Jewish people to ever forgive the Austrian people?” Peter asked Dad as the concrete horizon dwindled behind us. Mom was quiet and Lina was crying; Dad made soothing English noises and I said nothing. I respected Peter’s incredible knowledge, which was why his question struck me as thoroughly dumb. From the day my family came to Nondorf I could walk out of a room without being afraid, which was unlike anything I’d experienced before. I’d take Austrians over Russians and Ukrainians any day. We were right across the Danube from Sankt Florian and Peter asserted we still had time for a quick tour, but my parents insisted on returning to the villa. I assumed Peter would simply veto the adults like he always did, but this one time the baron yielded and we began the quiet ride back to Vienna. The adults were silent for their own reasons. I sulked because I wanted to go with Peter to his favorite monastery, and eventually I would get a chance to do so, but not for another seventeen years.

  Late that evening, after Lina and Grandma were asleep, as I lay on the cot sandwiched between my father’s back and the pillow, I overheard Dad whisper to Mom about Peter. Peter’s father was a mid-level Nazi officer who was captured by the Allies at the end of the war and spared the noose only in deference to his noble bloodline. The man was quietly tossed in prison, which left Peter, who was still a boy, in the care of his grandfather. The grandfather (the one who had been the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the United States) reared Peter to be a Western-minded, democratic thinker. By the time Peter’s father had served out his prison term and met his teenage son, the two were worse than strangers. “Vorwærts in Treu und Wahrheit” (“Forward, Faithful, and True”) read the motto emblazoned on the family coat-of-arms, and the old baron did not disappoint. Unlike many ex-Nazis who repudiated their past (or at least had the decency to keep quiet about it), Peter’s father remained staunchly loyal to the Führer. He was unrepentant, a man defeated but not deterred, and he loathed his son with bitterness at once ideological and personal. Peter did not lie when he introduced himself as a forester—a forester he was, living with his father in service of his estate, tending the thousands of acres of pine trees that were their hereditary source of income.

  Peter attempted to carve out an identity of his own. The man started a family, which left him with two children whom he adored. He defended a doctorate degree in forestry, wrote a thesis on the heritage of local castles, dug into the history of his ancestors and Niederösterreich, grasping for something redeeming about his family and homeland. He collected antiques, traveling to all those exotic locales he told my dad about … but no matter where he turned, he still felt his father’s past. When Peter heard about the Soviet Jews at nearby Binder’s he decided to drive over and take a look. Doubtless he was intrigued by the fire sale of antiques, but why he spent so much time with my family, we aren’t sure. Maybe he intended to pay back some Jews for his father, or maybe he wanted to pay back his father by helping some Jews. Perhaps he just wished to enjoy a few day trips with people who wouldn’t judge him. It could’ve been any of those, or all, or none; Peter was never an easy man to read. In any case, a bond formed between us and for one reason or another, the baron-forester kept returning to our room.

  * * *

  * Dad and his family were evacuated to Nizhny Tagil and put up in a zemlyanka (“earth thingy” in Russian)—dig a hole large enough for cots and a fire pit, throw earth and tarps over the hole (for camouflage in case of air raids), leave an opening for entry and a smaller one for smoke ventilation, and you’re home.

  NINETEEN MILLION IN THE HOLE

  New York, N.Y., May 1990

  At times, Amir Shaviv, the Joint worker who had met Rabbi Adolf Shayevich in Romania, felt as if the flurry of activity at Joint’s Manhattan headquarters could rival that of the New York Stock Exchange. International phone lines from the Vienna and Rome field bureaus rang nonstop, fund-raisers cajoled sponsors and benefactors, and interns scurried between offices as the creaking of fax machines noisily announced new problems and fresh developments. There were plenty of both. Shaviv’s premonitions from his 1988 trip to Bucharest had materialized into reality: Gorbachev’s reforms were rapidly gaining momentum, and Jews were fleeing Eastern Europe in droves. By the late spring of 1990, the wave of refugees had broken through.

  Unlike the émigrés of the 1970s who had embarked for America with relatives and addresses in mind, many of the current migrants had neither. They had left because they felt compelled to leave, and they had no fixed destination other than a resounding “not the USSR.” They knew to come to Vienna, and so to Vienna they came, by the trainload, by the hour, bringing with them an explosion of questions. HIAS was overseeing the resettlement process, but the sustenance of displaced Jews on foreign soil was Joint’s responsibility (and has been since its inception in 1914, when the group began aiding impoverished Jews in the Ottoman Empire). And since Joint operated the camps, it fell to them to deal with the ground issues. Who’s supplying the food? What about transportation, medicine, beds? How do we process them? Refugees come with bags, not CVs. Many (including my family) didn’t even possess birth certificates, for those had been seized and burned at the Soviet border. So who is a criminal? Who is a real criminal, not someone saddled with bogus charges such as “participation in subversive Zionist machinations”? Who is a danger to himself? To others? Who knows?

  All this demanded a rapid escalation of capital and personnel, and there was no time for a fund-raising campaign. Joint reacted by tapping into its budge
t, diverting all resources and incurring what would eventually become a $19 million deficit, which is an astounding number for an institution that relies on public donations rather than a fixed stipend.

  * * *

  I first learned of this when I sat down with Amir Shaviv in New York in 2006. On my way to the interview, I couldn’t help but note certain similarities between Joint’s U.S. headquarters and its high-security Vienna bureau, to which my family had gone for stipends during our emigration. Both places were difficult to find: the Vienna office had been completely unmarked, and although the New York headquarters was in a Manhattan skyscraper, I was unable to locate a physical address until Shaviv provided me with one two days prior to our meeting. Downstairs, the lobby was similar to that of many skyscrapers, with a security desk, visitor passes, and turnstiles, but once I stepped out of the elevator onto Joint’s floor I was immediately faced with the familiar bulletproof glass and buzz-door. The one welcome difference was the elderly secretary behind the glass, who was a far cry from the grim, Uzitoting guards of Vienna. I even managed to elicit a smile out of her, and if Granny was packing heat, at least it wasn’t overt.