By day they completed questionnaires and enrolled in English lessons and submitted themselves to certification tests so that they could prove themselves skilled at something—sewing, or typing, or factory work—anything that might convince a potential host nation that they were worthy of sponsorship, ready to contribute in any way needed. At night, they danced in folk collectives, taught their children the words to the old national anthem and organized choir recitals where the song begging the wind to carry them back to Latvia became the exiles’ new unofficial anthem.
They hacked gardens from the fields where soldiers once drilled so that they could follow along with the seasons, as they would have back home, marking each day not in the usual increments of time, but by what is growing or what is not growing or what will soon grow.
And the chemists who had fled with the contents of their laboratories unable to bear the thought of leaving their life’s work behind—Florence flasks and Bunsen burners, test tubes and crucible tongs; the librarians who arrived with armloads of their treasured first editions; the members of the national theater company who unlocked suitcases to reveal wigs and costumes; the printer who unloaded a working press—they all began to share their passions with their campmates. They published newspapers and printed books, such as the saga of Bear Slayer, his Black Knight now decidedly Russian.
The former academics re-created their lesson plans, hosting night classes for the refugees in their native languages—art history and folklore, statistics and physics—so many classes that the academics would eventually open their own university. Among the faculty of the new Baltic University, as it was called: my grandfather, the former economics professor, his old formulas awakening in him once more.
Lektor, he noted on his camp papers, wherever occupation was required, and inside the family’s small room, he took to stacking all the books he could find that might be relevant to his classes—Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Self-Administration in England and Wales, Statistics I in English, which he read with the help of a dictionary, given to him by one of the British officers who were running the camp.
Before long, he was named Chair of Economic Theory, and the family was walled in on all sides—as they ate, or as the adults made love with their hands over each other’s mouths so the children wouldn’t hear, or as they fought, or told the children not to fight—by books offering concrete theories as to how and why people make the choices they do.
In this way, the camp residents gave themselves jobs when there were none, but for the lecturing and the farming and the dancing and the singing, they received no salary. Occasionally there were tasks to be done around the camp for what amounted to pocket money, never much.
Still, sometimes it was enough pocket money that you might decide, maybe, today, to bake something sweet—enough money anyway, to send your boys in search of a lemon.
Lemons aren’t very sweet, said my father, once they were outside.
Let’s get candy instead, said his little brother.
No, let’s get an orange, said my father. Oranges are better.
Yes, agreed his brother, an orange will be a much better surprise than a lemon.
It was their first attempt at a present.
She did not scold them, merely set aside what she had started of the dough, then quartered the orange, and let the smell of the pith fill the room, as if this, too, could be a kind of celebration.
THERE WERE other outings:
Once, with their father, to the market just outside the camp in search of a fish that could feed all five of them.
The boys insisted on one so fresh they could see his gills still bellowing, pleading.
As they walked back to camp, the fish wrapped loosely in newspaper, the boys began to beg: Please, can we put him in the bathtub to see if he will swim?
Their father wasn’t having it. This fish was to eat.
Besides, the bathtub was not theirs to put fish in as they pleased, he told them. They shared it with all the other residents on their barracks’ floor.
They begged all the way home.
Finally, he gave in to them. But only for an hour, he said. And then it’s dinner.
But then an hour became a day and a night and another day, and soon they were all listening for the sound of approaching footsteps, then rushing ahead to slam the communal bathroom door shut, so they could scoop the fish from the bathtub and into a pail, ridding the emptied basin of his roping strands of shit, his errant scales.
All yours, they would say, trying not to slosh the water as they carried the pail back to their room.
It wasn’t long before word spread of the fish finning back and forth in the barracks bathtub. But rather than insist on its removal, everyone seemed charmed by the presence of the unlikely pet. Soon, all the bathers were transferring the fish to its pail while they washed, then sloshing him back over the lip of the tub when they’d finished.
They took to filling their bathrobe pockets with crumbs, chumming the water with bits of stale bread, encouraging the fish to rise, to mouth watery nonsense in their direction, fish-speak for good morning, or thank you, or you will find him soon, or she says she forgives you for not saying good-bye, or you will leave this place very soon, or whatever it was they imagined they needed to hear in order to get through this next day.
One of the little boys in the barracks thought he heard the fish say, Help me. I’m tired. I want to keep swimming.
So he went and found a knife and pressed the point into the fish’s back, nudging him along.
Again, the fish said. Again. Thank you. I’m so tired, I’ve forgotten how to move.
What are these marks on your back, the bathers asked, watching the fish lurch into his pail, turning like a capsized boat to show his bleached belly, taking much too long to right himself again.
I just wanted to help, the boy said, when the fish stopped moving altogether, his eyes clouded over, the color of old fat pooled in the bottom of the pan, his back stippled with gashes. He seemed so quiet. I was trying to help make sure he wasn’t dead.
MARUTA IS missing.
From these stories. From their daily lives.
When her polio infection was eventually diagnosed, she was sent to the nearest hospital, outside the camp, kept for months in the children’s ward, where, at the time, it was thought that it be would be disruptive to the young patients’ recovery and rehabilitation if their parents visited too often.
They were barred from seeing her for more than a few hours each weekend. They arranged for day passes, walked stiffly through the camp gates, past the guards, silently preparing themselves for this endless reenactment of separation, her tears, her building rage. They are losing her, even though the nurses comment on her progress. She will not look at them, tries to roll herself so that she faces the wall. As if she has decided it is somehow less painful to imagine they never came, because then, at least, she would not have to watch them leave her here, all by herself, again and again.
BACK AT the camp, they watched family after family leave.
Their number now just a few hundred refugees: the old, the broken, those whose bodies did not work in the ways a sponsoring nation tends to deem of use.
Grudgingly, the United States had begun to reconsider its earlier apprehension as to the type of persons who were inmates of the D.P. camps in Europe. And favored, in the end, were those refugees who could work as farmhands in the country’s Midwest and its South, their prospects debated in such publications as Congressional Quarterly, a kind of scouting report for refugees:
In Iowa, where the population has declined by 83,000 since 1940, a state survey showed that several thousand displaced persons could be welcomed there immediately. Kentucky is estimated to have a capacity to absorb over 5,000. In Minnesota Gov. Youngdahl’s commission, which included representatives of agriculture, labor and welfare groups, has reported that the state has places now for 8,000. A similar commission has been appoi
nted by Gov. Aandahl in North Dakota—a state in which the population has declined by 148,417 since 1940.
Such news gave them the faintest possibility of hope—and enough specific detail—that they could, at last, begin to realistically imagine alternate existences for themselves. They pulled atlases from the shelves of the camp libraries, made notes on elevation and climate, collected anecdotes from the camp’s U.S.-raised United Nations staff. And from this jumble of amateur intelligence gathering, gossip and supposition, they built their own imagined realities of resettlement, revealed to themselves their desires and fears. Maybe today they were wind-chapped and numb, disarticulating the dimpled carcasses of pullets at a poultry processing plant in northern Michigan. Or, as when rumor spread of possible spots in California, maybe the next day, they were squinting against the sun, shedding burned skin like snakes, thinning the dates from medjool palms. Iowa is about the same elevation as Latvia, they noted, and from there it was an easy walk to the cornfields, the flat, shimmering heat, like a hand pressed against the backs of their necks, the itchy perfume of hot loam and manure.
For my grandparents, it made no difference which future version of themselves they allowed themselves to hope for, or hope against. No invitations came—from Iowa, or California, or Minnesota, or anywhere else.
Another year passed. And then another.
As more and more refugees left, there was no more need for so many classes at the Baltic University and my grandfather received a letter that his services were no longer needed as a lecturer.
Maruta returned from the hospital to finally live at home again, pale and weak, and distant. And then the seizures started. As she pitched and twisted, her head ratcheting on the floor of their room, my grandmother trying to hold her, to still her, pressing Maruta to her stomach, swollen now with her own fourth child, they could feel their worry pitch and ratchet with her: what had the neighbors heard, would they tell someone, thinking perhaps that to highlight anyone else’s unfitness might raise their prospects of resettlement, should spots ever come up again?
And finally, the spots do come.
Under increasing pressure, the United States has agreed to admit 400,000 additional refugees for resettlement.
There are conditions, as outlined in official documents and debriefings by staff from the International Refugee Organization, which has been created by the United Nations to take over administration of the camps and their refugees:
To be eligible for consideration, each refugee requires a sponsor, someone stateside who will be willing to guarantee that there will be a place for the refugees to live, and that they will not take jobs from Americans. Once a sponsor is secured, the refugee must then submit to a twenty-two-step screening process, their files reviewed by the FBI, by the Counter Intelligence Corps of the U.S. Army, by the CIA, by the provost marshal general of the U.S. Army in Germany, as well as by special liaison investigators from British Intelligence. Their fingerprints will be checked against the fingerprint record center in Heidelberg, their names referenced against all the holdings of the Berlin Document Center, which houses all the Nazi files. They must sit for tests measuring physical, mental and occupational fitness.
But perhaps most critical of all: this opportunity will end in a little less than two years, on December 31, 1951. Refugees must complete all these steps within that time. Only those refugees whose applications are approved before the deadline will be eligible for this resettlement offer.
This is what the officials told them.
Here was what the refugees heard:
This is your last chance to leave.
Anything can derail an application: seizures, my grandparents note, trying to tamp down their fear. As can misbehaving children. An official complaint, no matter how small—whether for snatching an apple from one of the yards just beyond the camp, or breaking a window with a pebble cast out of boredom—could be enough, they have heard, to trigger a rejection on the grounds of moral turpitude.
To dream now was to dream only of your name pinned to the board announcing those who had reached the next stage: assignment to a refugee processing center.
This was the signal to pack whatever possessions you had accumulated—the single suit, the woven scarf, your copies of Who Is Who at the Baltic University and An Economic History of Europe Since 1750—and prepare to move to new quarters, where you will be held just long enough for officials from the IRO to monitor whether any possible illnesses incubating inside you might surface before you are scheduled to step aboard the ships or planes bound for the States.
Sometimes, when their names finally appeared, those bound for the processing centers spent a giddy last night raising black market toasts to their good fortune—to Amerika!—only to blink into morning, and despite open eyes, receive nothing in return, whatever sight they possessed, and along with it, whatever chance they had at relocation—because the country that had sponsored them did not agree to sponsor a blind person—stolen by the schnapps made in those secret stills they had spent so many years deliberately not-seeing.
Finally, the letters V-e-r-z-e-m-n-i-e-k-s arranged themselves upon the board, and the family decamped for the regional processing center in Wentorf, assigned to block 16, room 112.
Once they reached the processing center, however, things stalled. First, pertussis: the children of block 16 wheezing and whooping their way through the next six months, one after another, pausing only to retch in enamel basins when it felt as if their lungs might rip and tear. Or was it measles: my grandmother running a brush through the baby’s fever-matted hair, and there, on the scalp, a cheek, the soft side of a neck, the first inflamed splotches of red, freckling beneath the skin, then spreading.
Either way, they watched transport after transport leave without them as the baby recovered under quarantine.
And it is now, at this moment—as they remain suspended between final approval and infinite delay—the existing document trail skips. But this much remains certain: with just eight months before the deadline, after getting as close to the final stage of approval as one can get, short of stepping on the plane, they were dispatched back to their original DP camp, removed from the rosters of the processing center.
All that is left is to imagine into the void, to stitch supposition from the whisper-thin facts still threading through living memory.
Among the possible reasons they could have been sent back, their applications reset:
Perhaps, they had a different sponsor at this stage, one who ultimately backed out, who had hesitations suddenly about what would be required to take responsibility for a family of refugees.
Or perhaps, they themselves backed out, overwhelmed by doubts about where they were to be sent—Sentanobia, Mississippi?—and what they imagined they would have to do there, and so they asked for a new sponsor.
More likely:
My grandfather’s military service had given someone, some-where, one last cause for pause. Western military authorities had ruled that to have served in the Latvian Legion was not the same as to have served with the Nazi S.S. And this is what had released soldiers like my grandfather from the prison camp, and cleared his entry into the DP camp. The Nuremburg International Military Tribunal had been less clear. While the tribunal declared that the S.S. as a whole, including the Waffen S.S, the formation to which the legion had been assigned, was a criminal organization, it also did not say that this was automatic cause for a call-up on war-crimes charges. This was to be pursued and proven individually.
So ostensibly, if a person had been conscripted and had not committed any crimes, there was nothing to fear. But because there were legion members who had happily volunteered for service and who had engaged in war crimes—members of the infamous band of killers who rode the blue buses through Latvia’s countryside helping to kill Jews, for example, had been absorbed into the earliest incarnation of the legion, and went on to fight only at the eastern front, just as the conscripts did—there remained confusion and unease
about how to think of the legion.
There were rumors that applications from former legion members were being deliberately delayed. More than likely, the truth was somewhere between, as reviewers tried to make sense of what could not be reduced to a simple uncomplicated answer.
Ultimately, the U.S. Commission on Displaced Persons weighed in: all members of the legion should be considered to have been forcibly conscripted into service, and therefore, their service in it should not be grounds to deny their application.
And while it cleared the way for emigration, it also only further complicated things, forever lumping those who had most certainly committed war crimes with those who had not, so there would always be doubt about who was really who.
For three months, the family waited. My grandfather ticking and pacing, mumbling words to himself that only he could understand, rough, corrugated, the intonation implying a sentiment that fell somewhere between prayer and castigation.
And then finally, on July 5, with just five months to spare before the deadline to receive final approval, they were granted a spot in the processing center again, the chance to start the clearance phase again.
If they allowed themselves a new surge of hope, it was not much. Not more than a rap on the lintel could bear.
They had a sponsor now, and a possible destination, everything laid out in a letter my grandfather carried with him everywhere, so that he could not lose it, a letter signed by a representative of the Lutheran World Federation, informing him of the family’s assigned place of residence once they had been cleared for passage to America: the Lutheran Hospice in Tacoma, Washington.
I know from the catalog of the family’s possessions drawn up by the IRO that among my grandfather’s books was an atlas. And as the day of their scheduled departure from Germany neared, they must have sought from it a tangible form of reassurance, that each time they flipped to the page that held the location of their future home, it was still there. They sought concrete facts. Soil conditions relative to Latvia. Average winter temperatures. Until they thought they knew where they were headed. But what of the things that cannot be quantified, geographies of experience and emotions that cannot be recorded or documented, only lived, and which form our most personal maps of home? That the air tasted of wood pulp and kelped water. That they would sleep beneath the edge of the sky where the pilots from the nearby air force base pushed their jets past the speed of sound—new planes for the older boy to admire.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 17
