My father was a country boy, a farmer’s child in a family of ten siblings. His father had fields of rye and wheat, and also orchard after orchard of cherries, pears, and apples. During the first winter of the first Soviet occupation, the coldest winter on record, the fruit trees all froze up and died. The years of Soviet occupation were hard, with the threats of deportation, collectivization, and starvation always hovering. My father continued to go to school and was now taught by Soviets. His schoolbooks were taken away one morning when the teachers realized the books contained photos of politicians, generals, and marshals who had since been executed by Stalin and removed from official Soviet history. The students spent fewer days in the classroom and more days engaged in hard labor, moving stones for roads and hauling lumber.
I remember that when I was still very young, my father often told me about when he saw his first airplane. It was a beautiful Sunday in June 1941, and my father lay out in a meadow, gazing up into the sky and daydreaming. All of a sudden he heard a roar. He sat up in disbelief as a silver plane screeched across the blue beyond. I was much older when my father explained to me that it was a German plane, and that the Germans were invading Belarus. The Red Army scrambled, trying to get out before the Germans arrived. An old Red Army officer, quoting a Russian proverb, warned my father: “The wolf will have to pay for the sheep’s tears.” My father feared that once again the Belarusians would be the sheep. One week later the Wehrmacht arrived in the village.
A group of German officers on bicycles stopped at my grandfather’s farm. One of the bikes needed repairing, and they’d heard that my grandfather had the tools necessary to fix it. My father was one of the few in his small village who spoke German, and so his father sent him out to help the officers. He stood out in the yard handing out tools and taking parts and bolts from the Germans as they dismantled the bike. Whatever had been wrong was fixed, and the Germans began to put the bike back together. But the bolts fastening one of the pedals in place were missing. The officers began scurrying through the yard, looking everywhere for the bolts. My father followed behind them, trying to help. But the bolts just could not be found. The officers finally shrugged off the loss, and mounted their bikes. As they rode away, one of the soldiers rode off-kilter, trying to keep up on his one-pedaled bike. Later that night my father found the bolts in his pocket, where he had put them and forgotten about them. He didn’t know whether to cry at his close call with German discipline or to laugh with relief.
As we girls grew older and learned more about the war in school and in the books we read, we began to ask questions. Did you know anyone who was taken by the Germans to a concentration camp? Were you ever actually in a bombing? Did you ever see a dead person? My mother didn’t know any families who were deported. One good friend who was Jewish went into hiding and survived the war. My mother was never caught in a bombing, but a school just outside Antwerp was bombed by the Allies in 1943. The target was a car factory being used by the Luftwaffe to repair planes, but the Allies missed the factory and hit St. Lutgardis School instead. More than two hundred children were killed; only eighteen survived. I wonder if those children had worn little handkerchief packages around their necks.
When I was in law school, the movie Look and See was released in the United States. Set in Belarus during the last years of World War II, it is the most painful movie about war I have ever seen. Against a background of green fields and towering birch trees, the characters—played by Belarusian actors who look like they could be my family—suffer through hunger, fear, and torture and fight helplessly against being corralled for death marches, burnings, and killings. I cried every night for weeks afterward, thinking about that movie. When I finally flat out asked my father about what he had experienced in the war, he told me halting half stories. He just couldn’t talk about it.
It was not until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that my father began to share his stories of the war. Even then, he could not talk about his memories but instead committed them to words on paper. Working on an old typewriter that had been mine in high school, he began to type out the details of the horrors he had witnessed and heard about. He wrote about how his Jewish friends were kicked out of school once the Germans came and were made to wear yellow stars and work in the streets. Later they were taken to work camps. My father saw bodies lying on the street in a village. He saw a young man strung up to die. One day he walked past a field with a barn set at the end of the meadow. The barn was in flames and surrounded by German soldiers. Only when my father began to smell the roasting bodies did he understand that the barn was full of people, and that the doors had been barred closed against them. The smell made my father’s knees buckle, and he stumbled to the ground, trying to get away. He had been studying ancient Rome in school, and the parallels between the atrocities committed by the ancient Romans against their enemies and what he saw in his own modern country horrified him.
My father wrote about how an uncle and aunt suspected of helping out Jewish friends were arrested by the occupying Germans and executed. Another uncle, suspected of being a Communist because he had taught in a Russian school, was taken away and never seen again.
We always knew that four of my father’s ten siblings had died in World War II, but the details had been fuzzy. Only when my father began writing out his memories did we begin to learn more. My father’s brother Peter was the first to die; he died in 1939 fighting the Germans after being drafted into the Polish army. And then, after my sister died, my father wrote about the horrible night in early December 1943 when three of his siblings died. Three in one night.
My father was away at school that night, in a town twenty-six kilometers from home. His brother George was there with him, having escaped from a German transport train that was taking him west to work in a German factory. The two brothers knew that Soviet partisans were roaming the countryside, staging sabotage maneuvers and planning attacks on the German armies, but they weren’t worried. During the years of the Soviet occupation my grandfather, who owned a general store, managed to avoid deportation of the entire family to Siberia by keeping the local Russian officials well supplied with a private stock of good Polish vodka. Under the new occupation by the Germans, the family gave the Germans what they needed during the day, and the partisans came at night to take what they needed.
On that night in December, a group of partisans came to the farm, but my grandfather was away. My grandmother was there at home, sick with fever and chills. Boris, thirty-two years old, Antonina, twenty-three years old, and fifteen-year-old Sergei were also at home that night. While my grandmother rested in a room off the kitchen, Boris, Antonina, and Sergei stayed up talking.
My father doesn’t know who answered the door to the partisans. I imagine my grandmother waking in her sickbed to hear footsteps, a loud stomping of many boots over floorboards. Even the straw laid out on the floor to catch the dirt couldn’t muffle the sound of those steps. There were maybe four or five partisans in the house, all men. My grandmother heard harsh Russian voices shouting at her children. She couldn’t hear the words of Boris, Sergei, and Antonina, only the murmurings of their replies. Then she heard sounds she could not understand, not at first, not until she heard the pleading of Antonina. She heard muffled words, a supplication, then crying. She heard more sounds she could not understand. And then my grandmother heard sounds she understood too well. She heard gunshots, and the sound of weights falling heavily, one after the other, onto the floor. She heard shallow gasping, and silence. Silence and then a sudden, violent breaking of plates, chairs, glasses. Angry voices. The retreating stomps of boots going away.
My grandmother was left alone. When she came out into the kitchen, there was no sign of her children, only bloodstains on the floor amid the pieces of broken glass and ceramic and wood. She never saw her three children again. That night she walked sixteen kilometers to the police station in the next village, but no one could help her. The bodies had been taken away by the partisans and we
re never recovered.
When my sister died, my father’s repeated lamentation, “Three in one night, three in one night,” was his plea across the years to his mother. A plea of sympathy offered, a plea for help. My father just could not understand how my grandmother got through the next day, or the next, or the rest of her life after losing within minutes three entire lives of possibilities. My father couldn’t understand how he would get through another day after losing his oldest daughter, one life still so full of things to do and to know. How could her life be over? How could his go on?
I tried to find my own understanding of how my grandmother managed to get through the day after her children were murdered, and the day after and the day after. How is it that she did not go mad? Knowing my father’s story, knowing how his sister and brothers died, and how his mother, hiding in a room, had to listen to them die, unable to save them, I tried to understand the survival of those left alive. How is it that anyone can keep walking upright? How am I able to continue living, now that my sister is dead? The whole world should tremble and shake at every death, but if it did, we would never be still. The world would literally rock with death and sorrow. How is it that we hold on to the shell of the earth and of our lives, and go on?
After Anne-Marie died, sorrow became part of my life. I came slowly to realize that it was not going to go away. Sorrow is a violent smashing of reason, in that reason has no power over it. Everyone offering their palliatives—“She wouldn’t want you to be sad” or “She lived a good life”—gave me sound reasons to stop my grieving, and yet I could not. Because how can anyone not rant and rave when the horror of death slams down?
But now, in reading my books of escape, I had found another way to respond. It was not a way to rid myself of sorrow but a way to absorb it. Through memory. While memory cannot take sorrow away or bring back the dead, remembering ensures that we always have the past with us, the bad moments but also the very, very good moments of laughter shared and meals eaten together and books discussed.
Remembering people who have died also gives dignity to the dead and respect to the lives they led. In The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald traces the lives of four men forced to emigrate from Germany because of economics or war. Sebald uses artifacts such as photographs, journals, letters, and notes of his visits with families and friends to present richly detailed and personal histories of alienation and struggle. Each man and each story is very different, but they share the same loss of identity: three of the men lost their German identity through the crimes of World War II, and one man lost his identity through sublimating his will to that of his employer. All the emigrants struggled to forge a new identity in their new land, but the displacement of self was just too much. As vividly as we see these men, thanks to Sebald’s storytelling, they could not see themselves at all; they saw only ghosts, or shells, with nothing—or not enough—inside. Two finally chose suicide, another chose to annihilate himself through electroshock therapy, and a fourth is saved only by the painting he does in his studio in an abandoned warehouse, the dust of which eventually kills him with its toxicity.
The Emigrants is not a happy book, but it is a book absolutely resounding with life. If I put my finger on any page of the book, I felt the pulsing heartbeat of the lives Sebald recorded. It is the heartbeat he gave back to them, making them real for me. “Remembrance” for me means remembering someone with love or with respect. Remembrance is acknowledging that a life was lived. Sebald’s book is a remembrance of four lives.
I was in my forties, reading in my purple chair. My father was in his eighties, and my sister was in the ocean, her ashes scattered there by all of us in swimsuits under a blue sky. And only now am I grasping the importance of looking backward. Of remembrance. My father finally wrote out his memories for a reason. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth. Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.
The only balm to sorrow is memory; the only salve for the pain of losing someone to death is acknowledging the life that existed before. Remembering someone won’t literally bring them back, and for one who died too young, memories are not enough to make up for all the possibilities of life that they lost out on. But remembrance is the bones around which a body of resilience is built. I think my father found an answer to how his mother continued on, and he found a way to go on himself. He wrote a history for me to read. Stories helped him, and stories were helping me, both the stories of my father and the stories in all the books I was reading.
The truth of living is proved not by the inevitability of death but by the wonder that we lived at all. Remembering lives from the past ratifies that truth, more and more so the older we get. When I was growing up, my father told me once, “Do not look for happiness; life itself is happiness.” It took me years to understand what he meant. The value of a life lived; the sheer value of living. As I struggled with the sadness of my sister’s death, I came to see that I was facing the wrong way and looking at the end of my sister’s life and not at the duration of it. I was not giving remembrance its due. It was time to turn myself around, to look backward. By looking backward, I would be able to move forward. Time to begin a return journey to my own life, carried in part by the remembered life of my sister.
Chapter 7
Looking for the Star
“May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us, to remember wrong that has been done us?”
“Yes.”
“That we may forgive it.”
CHARLES DICKENS,
The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain
THE HOLIDAYS ARE AN EXCELLENT TIME FOR LOOKING BACKWARD. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on our golden couch (very modish in the 1960s) with my sisters beside me, while our father read to us from The Christmas Story. The Christmas Story was a book put out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1966, the text coming from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and the illustrations provided by paintings from the Met’s own collections.
My father read in a singsong voice that laid heavy then soft emphasis on the words. Looking back, I would describe his delivery as reminiscent of southern preachers I’d seen on television, but with a strong Belarusian accent.
The story my father read to us was strange and intoxicating. I was moved by its images and ideas: swaddling clothes; shepherds abiding in the field; good tidings of great joy, peace, good will toward men; and “Lo, the star, which they saw in the East.” Long before I had children of my own and experienced the rush of absolute love and faith brought by a newborn, I understood how a helpless baby lying in straw could inspire selfless and unbounded love. I could picture the poor shepherds out there alone in the dark on a cold night. Suddenly they hear music, and they look up at the starlit sky. Angels fly above them, and a huge star beckons. They are filled with certainty: life can be good, and joyful, and peaceful. Love and hope are shared and by being shared, are spread. Peace on Earth brought by a child and signaled by a star.
It all made perfect sense to me as a child of the 1960s. I would listen to the story and then go outside and look for a huge star in the night sky. I was looking for a sign that war would be over, the Vietnam War and the Cold War and all the other wars that as a child I suspected were being fought all over, far from my own backyard but in the yards of children somewhere. Looking for the star in the sky became my own private Christmas ritual, my own search for peace.
My mother found peace in the crèche scene she created every year. Along with my father’s reading and the play we girls put on every Christmas Eve, her five-story crèche was one of my favorite holiday traditions. She created her elaborate world of small figures in the built-in bookshelves that lined our fireplace in Evanston. Books would be turned on their sides to make valleys and stacked up high to make hills. My mother
would lay white cloths over the books, creating rolling landscapes in snow. Boughs cut from the Christmas tree were placed in the background. The space was now ready to be populated, and my mother would bring out her santons.
Small clay statuettes painted in bright colors, santons (originally made in Provence) represented all characters from traditional village life. Everyone was there, from the local priest wiping his forehead with a handkerchief to a woman with a basket of fruit on her head, from a young mother on her way to go shopping with a hamper on her arm to a farmer boy with a pig under one arm. There were churches set up high in the hills made from books, and farms placed in the hollows, with haystacks and farm animals. There was even a monastery, built by me during seventh-grade woodshop and peopled by reformed women of the night, still dressed in flamboyant clothes but with reverence on their painted faces.
My mother created a stream running down one hillside out of silver Christmas tree icicles, and placed a fisherman on its banks. She made a pond out of a small mirror, with geese gathered at its edge. One year Anne-Marie brought home a painted metal figure of Sonja Henie to skate across the mirror pond.
Circles of animals surrounded the nativity scene. A fox, a bear, a family of mice, a lion, all sorts of cats, a porcupine: these animals and others approached Joseph, Mary, and little baby Jesus, lying in his manger, across puffs of white linen. My grandmother gave my parents the nativity starter kit when they married. The animals and the surrounding one hundred-plus santon figurines milling happily around, above and below the happy family, had been bought over the years.
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Page 7
