I think, No wonder she didn’t tell you. She chose an entirely different path, and she was probably afraid of you, afraid that you would judge her, and judge her harshly.
“Did Ethel know?” I ask. If she did, that would undermine Natalie’s account.
Ann shakes her head. “I don’t really remember, but I don’t think so. Marilyn told me, because I was her sister-in-law, but I think we decided to keep it to ourselves.”
That makes sense, and also preserves Natalie’s story. I think about those bridge games, and how strange and strained they must have been at times: Ann and Marilyn, at the bridge table, aware of Mom’s secret and yet compelled—by custom, by culture, by circumstance—from saying anything to the other two. Then later, Ethel learns about it, too, but she says nothing to Ann and Marilyn.
Four women, all friends, and all carrying some form of secrecy’s burden.
“Do you know her name?” Ann suddenly asks me.
“Yes,” I say. “It was Annie.”
Ann’s eyes show her surprise. “We never knew her name,” she says.
That sounds entirely plausible. Memory can play its tricks, but I doubt that Ann would forget that this hidden sister had a first name so close to her own.
“So when you moved away,” I say, “there was a reason other than distance that you and Mom fell out of touch. You weren’t all that happy with her, although she didn’t know that.”
Ann’s lips tighten slightly as she nods. She brings up Mom’s obit. “Someone sent it to me, and when I saw that it called her ‘an only child,’ it upset me.”
The obit. The one I sent to the Free Press.
“Why?” I ask, although I had a pretty good idea.
“I don’t think handicapped people should be denied recognition. I just felt bad that she was hidden.”
I protest. “The obit wasn’t Mom’s fault. She wasn’t around to tell us what to write.” I explain the odd situation of having heard that Mom had a sister, but knowing nothing else at that moment—not her name or whether she had lived beyond childhood.
Ann acknowledges the predicament, but says that’s partly her point: If Mom hadn’t kept the secret all those years, if she hadn’t maintained the “only child” pretense, the obit could have given Annie a place in Mom’s world.
So many ifs.
I didn’t come to Radziwillow looking for reinterpretation, but it’s hard for me to miss. The words are set in granite and tile on polished red stone, and we see it as soon as the three of us—Mary Jo and I and Alexander Dunai, our Ukrainian interpreter and guide—walk onto the massacre site, the same killing field where Anna Oliwek lost her family, the same killing field where Bella Kron ran for her life. Up the hill stands the old Soviet memorial, a concrete obelisk with a bouquet of paper flowers resting on top. We climb the eighteen steps to read the chiseled inscription, which Alex translates from the Russian: “On this place in 1942 there was killed about three thousand peaceful citizens.” No mention of how their shared ethnicity had targeted them for death.
Alex had already alerted us to the Soviet habit of describing the Nazi massacres in ideological terms—an assault on the state and its comrades, not on Jews. “The Soviet geniuses managed to write histories of the war without mentioning the Holocaust,” he told us, “and I had to read them in school.”
The second memorial provides the truth. Erected sometime after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the low circular wall of gleaming white stone offers these words in Ukrainian and in Hebrew, inset in a single contoured line that follows the curve of the memorial: “On this place there are buried 4000 Jews, inhabitants of Radzivilov killed in 1942 by the Nazis and their helpers during the second World War.” A lone Jewish star stands at the wall’s central point, reclaimed from the Nazi use of it as a symbol of discrimination and oppression; a burned-out Yahrzeit candle, traditionally lit on the anniversary of a death of a loved one, rests in the tall grass nearby.
I ask Alex about the discrepancy in the number of dead, and tell him that both figures differ from those in the encyclopedias and histories. “The Soviets often manipulated numbers to suit their political agenda, sometimes exaggerating them, sometimes diminishing them,” he says. “Whatever the number, it’s still unimaginable.”
Between the two memorials, an uneven, grassy slope with dozens of slender tree stumps and mounds marks the final resting place of that unimaginable number. There are no names here, no identities. Like Annie’s grave, anonymity defines this burial ground. Mary Jo and I debate whether the tree stumps are meant to evoke a field of tombstones, but Alex doesn’t think so—the rest of the site doesn’t suggest that sort of metaphorical design. No matter, I think; intended or not, the effect is the same.
It had taken us a good hour to find the spot; tall trees make it invisible to the surrounding roads and farms. No signs point the way, and there’s nothing at the opening to indicate what lies beyond. Every person we stopped knew exactly what Alex was talking about when he asked for directions to the Jewish memorial, but describing the precise route involved elaborate sessions of waving arms and pointing fingers and torrents of words. As we drove down one dirt road after another, without success, Alex muttered in English, “go here, go there, you’ll see it. But I bet they’ve never seen it.”
Alex possesses a hearty laugh, which he lets loose frequently, and a roly-poly physique to match. He has the temperament of a journalist and the practiced eye of a historian, and so hiring him has yielded benefits far beyond his interpreting skills. His years of working with American writers has taken him deep into his country’s past, and as we drive the seventy-five miles between Lviv (his home) and Radziwillow on consecutive days, Mary Jo and I exploit our two hours of traveling time on country roads to get ourselves a wide-ranging history lesson.
We spend most of the first afternoon randomly stopping people who look older than seventy, hunting for anyone who lived in Radziwillow before the massacres wiped out the town’s Jews or sent them fleeing. “Do you know the family name Schlein?” Alex asks. “How about Korn?” No one does, not even women the same age as Anna Oliwek—women who in their girlhood might have seen Anna on the streets or in the shops. But it’s not long before we meet two women whose families protected Jews, including Ludmila Korson, who proudly shows us the Certificate of the Righteous from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance organization in Israel, documenting that during a two-year period, her grandparents hid at least seven Jewish families in a brick bunker that her grandfather constructed as a shelter.
“Did you know about the mass killings?” I ask Vira Mykhaylivna Pylypchuk after she invites us inside for tea and to hear her family’s story. She’s eighty-two, and her parents allowed fifteen Jews to conceal themselves in two barns on their property.
“Of course we did,” Vira says in Ukrainian, which Alex translates. “We watched them take the Jews by truck. They were crying. We were crying.” She’s crying now, crying so hard that her words become lost in her sobs.
After reading the accounts of the Volhynian Holocaust, I’m glad to leave Radziwillow having met the descendants of people who resisted the pull of hatred, collaboration, and silent acceptance. That’s why certificates and memorials matter; when this generation is gone, how else will the people of Radziwillow remember what happened to its Jewish community after more than three centuries as a vital part of the town’s life?
Late in the afternoon, we get directions to one of the town’s abandoned flour mills, a local landmark that Anna Oliwek had mentioned. As Mary Jo and I stand outside the wooden building, we notice a lone figure, a young girl no more than ten years old, in shorts and T-shirt, ably and quickly making her way down the street on a pair of purple crutches. She has only one leg. We can’t help staring at her, as if she were Annie’s ghost.
Back in Alex’s car, Mary Jo and I tell him about the young girl. “If Annie had been here in 1919, how would she have been regarded?” I ask Alex. “What sort of attitudes do you think my grandparents
brought with them to America?”
Alex says, with some confidence, that a disabled or mentally impaired child in that era would be considered a shame on the family, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. “The family would have taken care of the child, either out of obligation or because there would be no other choice, but if the disability was severe, the family would probably keep the person in the house, away from prying eyes.”
If the child were female and the parents had other daughters, Alex says, it would have marked them as marriage risks: Are they okay? Is there something wrong with the family that will show up in future generations?
His words remind me of my grandmother’s: The sins of the parents are paid for through the children.
I’m showing photos of present-day Radziwillow to Anna Oliwek, in Chicago, a month after our Ukraine visit. Nothing looks the same as when she lived there; the war left so much destruction and damage that the Soviets tore down much of the city center, erecting a massive concrete square that lost its purpose once May Day celebrations went the way of the communist regime.
As we talk about the dramatic changes that the war brought to her birthplace, it seems like an appropriate moment to ask about the missing piece of her wartime narrative. “I understand you were married before the Nazis invaded,” I ask.
She smiles, enigmatically, and says, “How did you know that?”
“David told me,” I say.
She looks away, retrieving, reflecting, revisiting. “It wasn’t much of a marriage,” she says. “Here’s the story.” Warshawsky was twenty and she was sixteen. They knew each other from Hebrew school, and because he worked in a hardware store where Anna sometimes went to pick up packages for a relative. They spent a lot of time together—“teenage love,” Anna calls it—but had never discussed marriage. “It was his mother’s idea. He got a letter saying he had to go into the Russian army, that he had to leave soon. His mother said, ‘You’re in love, you should get married, who knows what’s going to happen.’ She was afraid I would meet someone else while he was away, but if we got married, she told me, then I would be waiting for him when he got home.”
They went to city hall. “It took half an hour,” Anna says. “I was so young, so stupid. I didn’t know what I was doing.” Later that afternoon, he boarded a train to join the Red Army.
After the war, from Germany, she tried to find him, to learn his fate. She wrote to people back in Radziwillow, and she accumulated bits and pieces of hearsay and information. “I heard he was dead, then I heard, no, he was wounded, shot in the legs. He had survived, but he had a new wife, a Russian girl. I thought, ‘What’s the use of pursuing him? He probably assumes I died along with all the other Jews in Radziwillow.’ I let it go. I decided to let him live his life, and to move on with mine.”
I understand, I tell her. “Why didn’t you tell your children? Why keep it secret?”
“It didn’t seem important,” she says. “All we had was a piece of paper; we had never lived together for one minute. That wasn’t a marriage.”
“One more question,” I say. “Why did you want David to find him after your husband’s death?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Curiosity, mostly. I wanted to know what happened to him, whether he was still alive.”
I understood that, too. Her husband had died, and Anna was reviewing her life, reliving it and the choices she made. This was her version of reinterpretation.
Mom’s last letter, the one she left for us to open after her death, sits on my desk. These are the words that she wanted us to read as we remembered her, and these are the words I’m re-reading now as I reinterpret her recon-toured life. Please do not mourn, she wrote on May 16, 1996, about a year after her stay in the Botsford psych ward. You all have given me much love and pleasure…Fulfill my final wish, stay close and be good to each other.
I read her final words with a deeper knowledge and conviction now. Stay close, she was saying, because I didn’t have that relationship with my sister. Be good to each other, because I couldn’t be good to my sister. Please do not mourn, as I mourned when my family couldn’t cope with my sister’s disabilities and forces beyond her control.
Or does this go too far? Am I imposing emotions on Mom that she did not feel? I can’t know, of course, but this much I do know:
Annie, who arrived in the world with several strikes against her, desired a normal life and was doomed never to have one. Physically deformed, mentally deficient, she met the fate of thousands of people like her, born too soon to know whether the advances in medicine and psychiatry would have given her a better shot at the freedom she so desperately sought. Instead, her world grew smaller, measured by a bed in a psychiatric ward and records that no longer exist.
Mom, desperate to free herself from the depressing world inhabited by her impoverished parents and mentally ill sister, created a secret that turned into a trap. Unlike Annie, she enjoyed the freedom to marry, to raise a family, to achieve a level of comfort and happiness beyond her sister’s most imaginative dreams. But like Annie, she also was a prisoner, a captive of her pretense, from which she never escaped and which she endured alone. Loneliness wasn’t just her fate; it was her punishment.
I’m more fortunate. My search has allowed me to achieve a freedom of my own; free to see my mother as she was, free to embrace her flaws and accept her choices, free to put aside, once and for all, the pain of not being able to help her, to hold her hand and tell her, convincingly, that, yes, I’m here, I’ll always be here, I’m not leaving, I love you, and no, nothing you say, nothing you tell me will make me go away.
{ EPILOGUE }
Eloise cemetery, 2006 (Martine MacDonald photo)
The Eloise Cemetery looks nothing like I thought it would. That’s because it’s not a cemetery at all.
I had seen references to that name, always with a capital E and capital C, so I was expecting gravesites, shade trees, pathways, perhaps flowers here and there. On my first visit to the hospital, I had passed a large cemetery on Michigan Avenue, just west of the old main entrance, and I had thought, there it is, the Eloise Cemetery, the place where the hospital had buried those patients who died alone, with either no family left or no family willing to bury them elsewhere.
I had thought wrong. That’s not the Eloise cemetery. In fact, it’s impossible to see the Eloise burial ground from Michigan Avenue, or from a passing car, or from the site of the main entrance, or from anywhere on the several hundred acres north of Michigan Avenue where more than ten thousand people once lived and worked. To see the potter’s field that everyone calls the Eloise Cemetery, someone needs to tell you how to get there and, once you’re there, what to look for. Otherwise, you could walk right over the graves—all 7,144 of them, the first from 1910, the last from 1948—and never know it.
On a wintry day, Martine MacDonald shows me the way. We had kept in touch after I heard her “Resurrected Voices” presentation at the Friends of Eloise meeting, and now I wanted to take advantage of the knowledge she’s accumulated in overseeing the artistic project on those buried in the hidden field.
She’s the perfect companion for such an adventure, her boundless energy and 150-watt smile warming the inside of her Subaru Outback as we navigate the traffic on this frosty morning. Across from Eloise, we turn off Michigan Avenue onto Henry Ruff Road, heading into history—past the abandoned underground root cellars that once stored up to five thousand bushels of fruits and vegetables from the Eloise farm; past the land where the Eloise cannery once processed sixty-five tons of produce a month; past the place where the Eloise slaughterhouse provided Eloise beef and ham to Eloise’s kitchens; past the sites of the greenhouses, the tobacco drying shed, and the last of Eloise’s four piggeries.
Martine is forty-seven, and her personal palette includes blue eyes and a head of striking white hair that matches the color of the thin blanket of snow underfoot. Her own artistic contribution for the Resurrected Voices project resonates with her childhood journey. Inspir
ed by the story of two indigent six-year-old girls who died of unknown ailments in the Eloise infirmary sometime in 1920, Martine crafted doll-sized clothes out of death certificates, marrying the innocence of paper dolls with the heartbreak of the girls’ early deaths. Martine has first-hand knowledge of abandoned children and institutions: She spent much of her first eleven years in and out of foster homes before adoption gave her a new set of parents and a stable, loving place to grow up.
We park near a chain-link fence, open a gate, and walk along a snowy path that Martine says is a dirt lane in summer. After thirty yards or so, we turn left toward a stand of trees. A picnic table appears in the distance, as if ready to host some ghostly gathering. Martine laughs. “There’s a community garden there, and that’s a table for the gardeners,” she says. “Last summer, when I was on my way to the cemetery, the gardeners asked where I was going. I told them, and they said, ‘There’s a cemetery there? Where?’”
It’s hard to fault the gardeners for their ignorance. No sign marks the spot, either on the chain-link fence or on the gate, and just like the Radziwillow mass gravesite, there’s nothing at the narrow entrance to the clearing that says what lies beyond. To my unknowing eyes, it looks like a field, and then I realize—it is a field, but unlike the burial ground in Radziwillow, there’s no plaque or memorial or stone obelisk, nothing to mark this as final resting place for Eloise’s abandoned and indigent.
Martine stoops and points to a cement marker, embedded in the ground, with a number, “300,” barely visible in the soil and snow. Just beyond, I spot a second one, 299, and then a third, 804. Only two of the 7,441 graves, Martine tells me, have markers with names on them, and those were placed long after the burials; the numbered blocks, fabricated in one of the Eloise shops, identify the rest of the deceased.
Annie's Ghosts Page 36
