Waryas wasn’t challenging the existing system or forecasting the decline of the institutional model that still reigned supreme in 1950. She saw foster care as a parallel program that would complement the work of Eloise and the state hospitals. But her thesis anticipated the rise of group homes and the smaller, community-based model of mental health treatment, and it made me wonder: Would a group home have allowed Annie to thrive, to reach that independence she craved before her commitment to Eloise?
Bill Regenold researches schizophrenia at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he’s an associate professor of psychiatry, and I’ve asked him to join my informal group of experts. He’s a youthful forty-seven, with an easy smile and hair graying at the temples; his psychiatric training began after the era of huge mental hospitals was ending. Like others I’ve consulted, he sees Annie’s deformed leg and low IQ as evidence that something went wrong, during pregnancy or birth, although he doesn’t rule out the possibility of a genetic flaw. He regards her symptoms, as described in her records, as consistent with schizophrenic behavior, but without evaluating her himself, he’s reluctant to classify her initial mental illness as schizophrenia.
I point out that Annie’s commitment papers did not include a specific diagnosis, so it’s not clear when she was diagnosed as schizophrenic. “It could have been later, after she had been at Eloise a while,” I say, as we settle down at a restaurant near the hospital for a weekday lunch.
Regenold slows me down, offering a mini-seminar on what we do and don’t know about schizophrenia. “I don’t call it a disease, because we still don’t know enough about it to connect the symptoms to the cause,” he said. “Schizophrenia describes a syndrome, a collection of signs and symptoms. We’re pretty sure that genetics have something to do with it—at least, there’s a genetic predisposition. The risk in the general population is about one percent, but in identical twins, if one is schizophrenic, there’s a fifty percent chance that the other will be.”
I tell him I’ve been thinking about what might happen to Annie if she were turning twenty-one now, with the same symptoms as she had in 1940. He reframes my implied question. “Well, I think—I hope—that she would have gotten attention at a much earlier age,” he says. “We have many more tools now, and there’s more to investigate, and maybe an earlier intervention would have headed off her psychotic break at twenty-one.”
Would she have been able to live in a group home, maybe work? I ask.
“That’s hard to say, of course, but reading the reports, I kept thinking that she might have ended up at one of the community-based programs that exist now, and that she would be capable of holding some sort of job.” He suggested a couple of people who knew more about group homes and what he called “dual diagnosis” patients—those like Annie who have both mental disability and mental illness.
I ask him about the alleged sexual assault. If it occurred, could that have triggered her psychotic break?
He chooses his words carefully. “We don’t know what happened that day that Annie says she was attacked. People with mental illness and mental retardation tend to be more vulnerable to predators. She may have been assaulted, and the associated fear could have exacerbated her underlying psychotic disorder. But it’s unlikely that it would have made her chronically psychotic, if she were otherwise mentally healthy.”
I think about Annie’s fear of strangers, including Anna, who never saw Annie except in Tillie’s company. Real or not, the alleged sexual assault left its mark on Annie’s psyche; even a delusion can have serious and long-lasting consequences for someone who has converted fantasy into fact.
As we walk back to the hospital, Regenold reflects on the toll that mental illness often takes on a patient’s family. “I wonder,” he says, “if your grandmother asked Anna to drive her to Eloise because she wanted to pass the baton to another family member.”
I tell him I’m not sure what he means.
“In my experience, parents of disabled children often worry about what’s going to happen once they’re gone. They want to know that someone will keep tabs on their child. Maybe, perhaps subconsciously, that’s what your grandmother was trying to arrange.”
Regenold’s comment made sense to me. I remember what Anna had said about her first few visits to Eloise—how Tillie had appealed to her daughter; look, this is Anna, your cousin, your family. But passing the baton to Anna couldn’t work if Annie wouldn’t accept a surrogate—and from what Anna said, Annie didn’t want anything to do with her.
I could see how Annie’s rejection might have amplified Anna’s anger toward my mom, how Anna might feel that, wait, it’s not my responsibility to accompany Tillie to Eloise, I’m glad to do it, but I wouldn’t be making these pilgrimages if Beth—Tillie’s daughter and Annie’s sister—wasn’t so insistent on keeping her secret.
In my many conversations with Anna, I had chosen to maintain a professional neutrality, asking questions rather than making statements or acting as Mom’s defense lawyer. Once, however, I did suggest to Anna that there might be another way to look at the facts. “Anna,” I said, “I would never compare my mother’s life to yours. Nothing compares to the Holocaust. But if you look at the Eloise report, you might see that life for my mom was a kind of personal hell in April 1940.”
I read aloud from the Routine History, as I had done once before: “She screamed during the night, kept wanting to get up and seemed to think she would die if she stayed in bed…During the week of April 19, patient was so difficult to manage that the family couldn’t get any sleep and were all ‘going crazy.’”
I waited for a flicker of empathy, an understanding nod. But Anna merely repeated what she told me before. “It wasn’t Annie’s fault. She’s sick. She’s still family.”
Family. That’s the word that Anna kept using. “I am family,” she had fumed, when Mom had told her to stop meddling in her family’s affairs. To understand Anna’s unshakable fury toward Mom, I had to understand Anna’s family—not the one she raised in America, but the one she lost in 1942.
I had to understand what had happened in Radziwillow.
{ FIFTEEN }
The Ghosts of Radziwillow
Before the Nazi invasion: Anna Schlajn (Oliwek), age 15, 1939 (courtesy of Anna Oliwek)
I’ve never had any particular interest in writing about the Holocaust. Too painful, I suppose, and more the territory of historians than journalists.
Now, with Anna Oliwek stuck in my head, I had to confront it.
On a gray, windy day in early June, I type “Radziwillow” into the library database of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Wendy Lower, a professor at Towson University outside Baltimore and an expert on the Holocaust in Ukraine, looks over my shoulder as I begin my research into what the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators did to the Jews of Volhynia, the part of western Ukraine where Radziwillow is located.
Most of the Volhynian Jews did not die in the concentration camps of Poland. Most were taken from their towns, their streets, their homes, killed in daylight and in darkness, within earshot and, sometimes, within eyesight of their neighbors and friends. The first wave of executions came within weeks of Hitler’s troops seizing control of the region as part of Operation Barbarossa, the multi-pronged Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union launched on June 22, 1941; on July 2, Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich’s eager thirty-seven-year-old chief of security, ordered the execution of “Jews in the employment of the party apparatus and the state.”
The German Sixth Army had encountered little resistance from the isolated Soviet troops when it flashed through Volhynia on its lightning-quick journey toward the east. Residents of the region describe the Soviet withdrawal in words approaching the supernatural—vanish, disappear, evaporate, rather than retreat or depart. In truth, Red Army tank forces did mount one major counterattack on Nazi forces between Lutsk and Brody, within a few miles of Radziwillow, but after four days of the fiercest fighting to take place in Ukraine during the firs
t week of the invasion, the German panzers managed to overwhelm their well-armored Russian counterparts.
Why a fight there and nowhere else in Volhynia? It’s hard to say for sure. Perhaps the Red Army fought the battle primarily to buy time for evacuating thousands of men and shipping tons of manufacturing equipment to safety four hundred miles or more to the east. Perhaps the clash was a test of strength, and the outcome proved the difficulty of defending the land that the Soviets had claimed from Poland only two years earlier as part of an expanded Ukrainian SSR—valuable and fertile territory, but far from Moscow and the usual supply lines. Or perhaps the Soviet leadership was unprepared and quickly abandoned any notion of a full-scale attempt to hold the region. All of these interpretations can be found in the histories. Whatever the explanation, by mid-July, the Nazi forces controlled western Ukraine, and were on their way to conquering most of the vast territory between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. There was no opposing force to stop them from imposing their will and their murderous policies on the local population.
I sit at a table in the Holocaust Museum library with Shmuel Spector’s book, The Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 1941–1944, and read what happened next. Members of the Einsatzgruppen—mobile killing squads organized to carry out executions in Ukraine and elsewhere—asked local Ukrainians for the names of so-called “Soviet activists” and with the assistance of Ukrainian “auxiliary” police, scoured the towns’ homes and streets, “arresting” hundreds of Jews and others, and marching them to pre-selected sites where the Einsatzkommandos carried out their deadly mission. In Radziwillow on July 15, just seventeen days after the Nazis arrived, twenty-eight Jews were shot as “dangerous Communists” or “partisans.” Similar roundups went on throughout the region. By late August, a reported 15,000 Jews—about 6 percent of Volhynia’s Jewish population—were dead.
After the winter’s thaw made the ground soft enough to dig mass graves again, a second wave of executions commenced in the spring of 1942, first with the herding of Jews into ghettos, followed by systematic “liquidations” throughout the summer and fall. Radziwillow’s turn came on April 9, when its estimated 2,600 Jews were divided into a large ghetto for the “unfit” and a smaller one for those considered “useful.” Six weeks later, 1,500 were murdered outside town, while about 500 holding “productive worker certificates” earned a reprieve, only to be killed in a second massacre on October 5.
A very few managed to escape. Anna Oliwek—then Anna Schlajn—was one of them.
Impossible. Just impossible. That’s the word that comes to mind as I sift through the encyclopedias and histories, the memoirs and testimonies, trying to compose a few sentences to characterize Radziwillow at the dawn of World War II. The town had changed hands so many times since its early days as part of the Radziwill family’s many holdings, depending on the year and the map, that it was impossible to give a single identity to the people of Radziwillow. They were Polish, and yet they weren’t. They were Russian, but many weren’t. They were Ukrainian, except those who weren’t, especially the Jews, who weren’t Polish or Russian really, they were mostly just Jews, as if they belonged to no nation, and although more than three centuries had passed since the first Jew had appeared in Radziwillow, although the town and the Jewish community had grown up together, although those who called themselves Polish and those who called themselves Ukrainian and those who called themselves Russian could look back on times when all these people, all these religions, all these communities had lived in peace and prospered together, it was their divisions that mattered most when the Soviets, and then the Nazis, changed the map once again.
Not that a single identity would have prevented the bloodshed that followed. That’s too simple, too naive a view of European history and the Nazi phenomenon. But the absence of that identity certainly made the Nazi campaign easier. It presented the occupiers with the gift of discord, which Hitler’s architects of death exploited from the earliest days of the invasion. They preyed on the Ukrainian hatred of the Soviets, age-old antagonisms cemented during a 1919 civil war and inflamed by Stalin’s more recent misdeeds in his campaign against Ukrainian nationalism—mass deportations; the confiscation of Ukrainian property; orchestration of a famine that led to mass starvation and the death of millions; and imprisonment, torture, and murder of Ukrainian resisters as enemies of the Soviet state. At the invasion’s outset, the Germans allowed the Ukrainian nationalists to dream of another Ukrainian People’s Republic, a wisp of independence that ended when the 1920 Treaty of Warsaw returned most of Volhynia to Polish rule while Kiev and eastern Ukraine remained in Soviet hands. The Ukrainians believed that the Germans would be their friends—well, if not friends exactly, then allies, and the Jews, well, hadn’t some Jews helped the Russians, and the friend of my enemy is my enemy, and if the Nazis want a list of Jews who aided the Communists, well, we will give them a list and…
There is debate among Holocaust historians about the exact nature of the Nazis’ extermination plans for the Jews in the Soviet Union, whether Hitler had issued a specific verbal order or whether his strategists knew his wishes and needed no such instruction. There is debate, too, about whether the Nazis planned to kill all the Jews from the outset of Operation Barbarossa or whether, emboldened by early military victories at the front and the apparent willingness of Germans and non-Germans alike to wage a separate “war against the Jews” behind the lines, they then expanded their targets to include every Jewish man, woman, and child.
There is no debate that on July 31, 1941, Hermann Göering, second in command of the Third Reich, authorized Heydrich to prepare a “total solution of the Jewish question” in the territories occupied by the Nazi forces. Invading the Soviet Union was the first step in fulfilling Hitler’s dream of extending his Aryan nation all the way to Asia, but it also magnified his “Jewish question”—he could not become master of the Soviet lands without bringing five million more Jews into his Greater German empire, the so-called Grossdeutsches Reich. Exterminating that many people required an unprecedented amount of planning, logistics, and manpower at a time when the Nazi forces were already overextended and preparing for a final push to Moscow. In the months that followed, Heydrich’s SS and security police became determined to find more efficient methods of genocide than mass shootings, which not only tested the stamina and nerve of all but the most hardened killing squad members, but also required the deployment of a significant quantity of German men and ammunition needed for the fight against the Soviets.
Why did the mass shootings take place in the towns themselves, and why did they proliferate? Timing seemed to be a key factor. The death camps in Poland were not yet constructed, and the Nazis could not yet transport large numbers of prisoners on the Russian railway lines, which were of a different gauge than those in Poland and Germany. The Nazis had to seize large numbers of Russian railcars or modify the tracks, both time-consuming undertakings. So in the months before the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, when Heydrich held formal ministerial discussions of a “final solution,” the word went out to the Nazi security forces and Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics: Kill the Jews where they live.
The German army’s primary job was to win the war against the Soviets, leaving the campaign against the Jews to the security forces and local auxiliaries. On August 10, 1941, soldiers in the German Sixth Army received orders from their commander, Walter von Reichenau, forbidding them “from participating in executions as observers, except when ordered to do so by a military authority. The pictures taken of the executions referred to above must be confiscated and destroyed.” But the army’s support for the coming genocide was essential, as Reichenau and his superior, Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South, made clear in an October 12, 1941 directive, “Conduct of the Troops in the Eastern Territories,” which said, in part:
“The most essential aim of the war against the Jewish-bolshevistic system is a complete destruction of power and the elimination of Asiat
ic influence from the European culture. In this connection the troops are facing tasks which exceed the one-sided routine of soldiering. The soldier in the Eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon the German and racially related nations. Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry. The Army has to aim at another purpose, i.e. the annihilation of revolts in the hinterland, which, as experience proves, have always been caused by Jews.”
It concluded: “This is the only way to liberate the German people once and for all from the Asiatic-Jewish danger.”
She was eighteen.
Every story, even a Holocaust story, has to start somewhere, and after going over Anna’s account with her multiple times to fill in the gaps and get the chronology straight, I find myself starting with that simple fact: She was just eighteen years old when she fled Radziwillow in October 1942 with only the vaguest idea of where she was going; just eighteen years old when she walked into a Nazi occupation headquarters with little more than an improbable tale and a facility for language; just eighteen years old when she deceived the Nazis into believing—or at least accepting—her masquerade as the daughter of a German mother and Ukrainian father. Yet, within a month of escaping certain death at the hands of a Nazi-led killing squad in Radziwillow, she had secured herself a job as a translator for the Wehrmacht’s military police: a sensitive position, a position of trust, a position reserved for a member of the German Volk, the German nation.
As I examine the documents detailing her deception—including her Arbeitsbuch, the Nazi-mandated workbook that lists the dates and places of her employment—I marvel at her guile, her cleverness, her charm. What part of the family DNA gave her the ability to pull off this subterfuge, and to maintain this deception not just for weeks or months, but for nearly three years?
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