Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  Decades later, Victorian parents mounted images of deceased children on matchboxes with “lovely little scrolls” and snippets of hair. Charles Darwin kept objects that had belonged to his daughter Anna, as well as her writings, in a box that he built. The English widower John Horsley said he felt better when he wrote about the four sons and daughter he had lost to illness. The American Henry Bowditch, father of a soldier who died in Virginia in 1863, recovered his son’s body and then compiled memorial volumes and scrapbooks about his life. This is not how men were expected to grieve. Bowditch understood this, but he maintained his course. “The labor was a sweet one,” he wrote. “It took me out of myself.”

  And the Englishwoman Janet Trevelyan—she wrote everything she could recall about her son Theo after his death in 1911: “I know that as we get further from the pain of these last days the pure joy and beauty of his little life will shine out more and more and will be like a light in our hearts to illuminate the rest of our way.”

  My investigations of the past were in character: as a historian, this is what I had done every day for years. Uncovering such narratives, memorials, and poems came instinctively, proof that some part of my professional self remained intact.

  But there was nothing scholarly about this exploration, no questions to resolve about grief across the centuries. Historians are wary of their biases and tend to keep their emotions and proclivities at a remove from their research. I now found this impossible. It was companionship I sought. I wanted to know these men and women who, as Horsley put it, kept “the uncertainty of this life ever in view.” They inhabited a realm of pure emotion and allowed me to join them, to mourn in their company whenever I so desired.

  W. E. B. Du Bois had faced uncharted expanses upon burying his son, in 1899. “It seemed a ghostly unreal day—the wraith of life,” he wrote. “We seemed to rumble down an unknown street.” Granville Stanley Hall, the American founder of gerontology in the nineteenth century, felt that the death of his daughter by gas asphyxiation was “the greatest bereavement of my life—such a one, indeed, as rarely falls to the lot of man.” Hall was forty-four, but this great fatigue, as he called it, made him feel much older. I rumbled down unknown streets with Du Bois and Hall, prey to a great fatigue that made me feel as old as they had.

  Except for those Hugo poems, I did not tell Alison of my explorations. I did not require her presence alongside men and women with whom I could commune day and night, all of us part of a community that remained perpetually accessible.

  —

  This quest also took me to World War II, with its untold number of dead children. For Jewish parents in Nazi-occupied Europe, the loss of a child was both swallowed up and magnified by the attack upon entire communities. The Polish shoemaker Simon Powsinoga withstood one form of degradation after another in the Warsaw Ghetto, but not the death of his only son. “Two days ago I was still a human being,…I could support my own family and even help others,” he said in the midst of the war. “I just don’t care now. I don’t have Mates, what’s the point of living?”

  This despair provided little succor, but there was no way around World War II in my family. My childhood in Brussels had been colored by the story of my maternal grandparents as a young couple during the war. I had always viewed Zosia and Jules as embodiments of History. When I was a child, their everyday lives seemed normal enough. They dressed in the morning and ate breakfast as I did; they walked on the same sidewalks; they gossiped and quarreled and laughed like everyone else. But they had experienced something I had not; their proximity to danger and death had made them different kinds of people.

  Zosia had grown up in an affluent Jewish family in Warsaw. Her father, a silk merchant whose business took him to France and Belgium, was sufficiently lucid about the rise of anti-Semitism to move his wife and children to Brussels in 1932. It was there that Zosia met Jules, a diamond trader who would see action as a Belgian conscript in 1940 and then spend a year in Germany as a prisoner of war. They married in March 1942, and left for Southern France two months later. The French collaborationist regime in Vichy, and especially the Italian troops that controlled the city of Nice, seemed more forgiving than the Nazis who occupied Belgium. After an epic journey by train, bus, and foot, my grandparents arrived in Nice and registered as foreigners with the French police. Afterward, they rented an apartment and plotted their next step. My grandmother was pregnant.

  When Owen died, Jules was long dead and Zosia in the throes of dementia. And yet one of the first things I did, without awareness, was to summon them to my side. I did so on the river, when I recited the Shema in their company, and back home, when I returned to their wartime story. Although my grandparents had been dehumanized and persecuted, although our experiences were by no means similar, we could now enter a different realm of existence and encounter together shock and sorrow, and perhaps resilience. There was empathy, too. My grandparents knew too much about human frailty and the contingency of everyday life to ask me the kinds of questions I was asking myself, such as, How could you have allowed this to happen? How could you have let Owen go?

  —

  The accident changed something else in the way I saw my grandparents. After all, they had survived the war with their infant daughter—my mother.

  Shortly after arriving in Nice, they were arrested by the French police and sent to the detention camp of Rivesaltes, near the Pyrenees mountains. They were unlikely to remain there for long. With the Germans about to take possession of Rivesaltes from the French, prisoners were being transferred to other camps or deported to Auschwitz. Zosia wrote to an official whom she had met at the Nice police station and asked him to intervene. He did. My grandparents were freed in November 1942. They returned to Nice, where my mother was born a month later.

  The official, Charles, remained present in their lives. He warned them about imminent arrests and helped them find an apartment. He also introduced them to his wife, Annie. The two couples sometimes socialized, strolling together in public parks and posing for snapshots. In one photograph, Annie and Charles cozy up with Zosia on a bench, like long-lost cousins. In another, Annie cradles the swaddled baby in her arms. The child remains at the center of things. Annie and Charles kept her for several months in the fall of 1943, when massive roundups of Jews forced my grandparents into hiding. My mother’s first name, Francine, serves as a tangible reminder of this time and place—France and Nice intermingled. Her middle name is her godmother’s: Annie.

  Why had Charles helped this couple while, I assumed (rightly or not), stamping papers and contributing to the bureaucratic machine of identification, surveillance, and deportation? After the war, my grandmother made allowances and expressed gratitude for the man who had saved their lives, but never spoke much about his wife despite the risks she had taken. While my grandparents often vacationed in Nice, they only introduced my mother to her godparents twice, once when she was five and once when she was seventeen, in 1959.

  It may be impossible to know what transpired among the four of them, but this did not stop me from conjuring up scenarios after Owen’s death: a social divide, infidelity or attraction, shame, jealousy, competing affections for the baby. At some point, it dawned on me that my grandparents might have kept a distance from a couple who reminded them of their interrupted youth and a truth that is not always easy to accept: how much we owe to others when our life veers out of control.

  My mother could not understand why I asked her for more information about her parents and the war. It’s a simple story, she said, and she may have been right. But I saw complicated and perhaps conflicted human beings whose behavior transcended the binary categories—in this case rescue and collaboration, justice and ingratitude—with which we all too often make sense of the world. Ultimately, it was impossible to determine what a savior looked like, or who exactly had saved whom.

  Zosia seemed to understand these ambiguities. “Things are never entirely positive,” she once told me regarding Charles, “and the
y are never entirely negative either.” In this respect as well, my grandparents—the grandparents I imagined—provided solace and companionship. Together, we could escape the expectations of others and absolute conceptions of virtuous behavior.

  —

  But for how long? When Zosia recalled her wartime years, she described Jules’s forays into the black market. On some days, he would return with bananas for the baby, and only for the baby because that is all they had. She also depicted herself as an ingenious woman who made her own luck, took risks, and never allowed fear to hold her back. She had reached out to Charles as he sat behind his desk; later, she had written him from Rivesaltes. Someone had saved my grandparents, but according to this family story, they, too, had saved themselves and their daughter.

  So, the three of us did not inhabit the same realm, after all. My grandparents were not only rescuees, but also rescuers and parents who had fulfilled their responsibilities. Luck had played its part, but this was not the main takeaway. Their story could not be mine.

  —

  During a trip to Brussels a few months after the accident, I paid a visit to my grandmother’s first cousin Ginette. She was the only surviving relative who might know something about these wartime events. Ginette’s father and Zosia’s had been brothers and business partners in Belgium before the war, although Zosia’s alone managed to bring his family out of Warsaw. When war broke out, Ginette found herself in the ghetto with her mother, her polio-stricken sister, and her husband. The mother and sister were shot on the spot; the husband perished later. Ginette was deported to the concentration camp of Majdanek in central Poland and then to an ammunition plant and from there to Bergen-Belsen in Germany. She worked in the latrines and somehow survived detention and typhus. “One gets used to anything,” she once told my mother. After the war, she settled in Brussels and married an Auschwitz survivor.

  Ginette was impeccably dressed the day I came by. Everything was impeccable in her apartment: the rows of books, the coffee she served, the paintings full of melancholy. She listened as I told her about Charles and Annie but had nothing to impart because she had never heard about them. It was not a question of memory: even at eighty-three, hers remained sharp. After the war, she said, all surviving Jews felt that they had suffered in exceptional ways. What others had withstood proved irrelevant. As for non-Jews, they were so caught up in their own hardships—lost youth, hunger, cold, deprivation—that they deemed all wartime suffering equivalent. Everyone had gone through bad times. Why should your hardship take precedence over mine? Zosia must have encountered the same responses, Ginette said. This would explain why she had never brought up Charles and Annie.

  I thought of another possibility: Zosia may not have known how to speak about such things with a cousin who had survived Nazi extermination camps. I once heard Zosia say that deportees (such as Ginette) had done what they had to do in order to survive. It was impossible to know what had happened in those camps, she said. Her remark did not strike me as free of judgment.

  As she refilled our cups, Ginette asked me to share anything I might uncover about this official. She seemed to mean it, although I could not really tell. But it no longer mattered because my thoughts were now floating between Zosia and Owen, between Owen and the Warsaw Ghetto, between Owen and Ginette after Bergen-Belsen. If I had paid Ginette a visit, it was also to encounter a person who had endured something I could not imagine and to learn something about corners of human experience that resist understanding.

  I wanted to ask Ginette about life with dead siblings and dead parents and dead children. But she had not mentioned Owen when I arrived, and after an hour she still had not uttered his name. She talked at length about her dog’s health, but not a word about Owen. The longer we spoke, the more difficult it became to think of anything but this silence. As I said, her memory was sharp.

  When the sun began to set, Ginette walked me to the door. As she took my coat out of the closet, her dog sniffed my shoes. Ginette explained that the animal was distressed because her longtime caretaker, an illegal immigrant, had been expelled from Belgium.

  “Your dog senses things,” I said. “She can tell that I am distressed as well.”

  Ginette looked at me in surprise. “You’re distressed as well?”

  My final attempt to secure something from Ginette had fallen flat. Her silence could not be an oversight; it was too glaring given the circumstances. I could only make sense of it in relation to her silence about her wartime ordeal. As far as I knew, she rarely talked about that period, perhaps because it would overwhelm her or because she had come to see her experience as nontransferable. Since she did not offer lessons, I told myself that she may have been teaching by example. The only thing to do was to watch her imprint order upon her life, master her emotions, and carry on without her sister, mother, and first husband—and no doubt with them as well, even if, like Owen, they had to remain in the background. Ginette was a concentration camp survivor; she bore the loss of these people and others—the entire world of her youth—but she was also a mother, a businesswoman, and a voracious reader whose shelves were stacked with novels by authors of all nationalities. Literature retains faith in life and humanity; it remains open to the varieties of human experience.

  I clung to this lesson about the living and the dead after my visit. But I also knew how much I craved guidance of any sort. Like Ginette, I would have to find a way on my own.

  Henry: Where did this happen?

  We had booked a trip on the Green without knowing anything about the river—its name, its topography, the path it cut across Utah and Colorado, or even the nature of its rapids. The outfitters’ brochure had advertised the vacation as family fun for first-time rafters and children, a bonding experience. This seemed ideal for novices like us. Having signed up for a journey into a foreign, antediluvian landscape, we did not need to know more about the waterway or the region. I already spent so much of my professional life immersed in research that I resisted reading up beforehand. Doing so would have spoiled the inherent strangeness of the place.

  Had I consulted but one book or website, though, I would have learned that the rapids on which we ended up had a dramatic history. Over the past two centuries, Native American tribes, trappers, explorers, dam engineers, river runners, and kayakers have come together in these waters. I know this because, not long after the accident, I began collecting information on the Green. What started as an episodic probe rapidly turned into an all-consuming inquiry. I downloaded articles, mined databases, called the Utah Bureau of Land Management, and pored over expedition reports, travel accounts, and geological surveys. In the tent, I had felt nothing but hatred toward that river. Afterward, I could not let go. The Green and its history beckoned with irresistible force.

  I never gave my name when making these calls, and never told my friends what I was doing with my time. Local experts, I feared, might scorn the New York City father who had lost his son in rapids he did not master. Friends might ask innocuous but unanswerable questions about what I expected to uncover. It was difficult to tell anyone—including Julian and Alison, who said she had left the river behind—that I hoped to understand how we had found ourselves in that precise spot. A natural and human history might just explain what had been possible and what had not been on that day. Each new detail, each precedent, each anecdote might just draw me closer to the truth of a river that, like the other protagonists in this story, was not evil but could not be fully innocent either.

  —

  The Green River has not always held that name. The Crow tribes who inhabited its headwaters in Wyoming called it Prairie Hen River. The Ute and Snakes referred to it as Bitterroot. In the late eighteenth century, Spanish explorers called its lower reach Rio Verde, perhaps because of the moss and lichen and brush reflected on the surface. The first person to call it Green River (in English, this time) was reportedly a beaver trapper named William Ashley, in 1825. The name stuck. Washington Irving depicted the Green as a �
�mere mountain torrent, dashing northward over crag and precipice, in a succession of cascades.” Nothing about its color: it is the force of the current that matters.

  The Green surges from Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, flows through sagebrush flats, veers east to avert the Uinta range, skims the edge of Colorado, slopes southwest, and finally plunges 450 miles across Utah, all the way to Cataract Canyon, where it throws itself into the Colorado River. After entering Utah, it winds through the Browns Park wetlands, a bird sanctuary that was once inhabited by Ute and Shoshoni tribes as well as cattlemen, homesteaders, stockmen, rustlers, cattle thieves, and outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was a good place in which to live and hide.

  Afterward, the Green enters Dinosaur National Monument, 200,000 acres of wilderness that Woodrow Wilson incorporated into the National Park System in 1915. Here, the river squeezes into a canyon that seems to have sprouted out of nowhere. This is a land of red Precambrian rock formations and grottoes. John Wesley Powell, the explorer who led the first expedition down the river in 1869, wrote that “the vermilion gleams and roseate hues, blending with the green and gray tints, are slowly changing to somber brown.” While facing the cliffs and the narrow channel ahead, one member of his party suggested they name the canyon Lodore, after an English poem that speaks of water “rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing.”

  As his expedition approached Lodore, Powell wrote: “Now it is a dark portal to a region of gloom—the gateway through which we are to enter on our voyage of exploration tomorrow. What shall we find?”