Annie's Ghosts

by Steve Luxenberg

  FIFTEEN: The Ghosts of Radziwillow

  execution of “Jews in the employment of the party apparatus”… The full July 2 directive appears in many collections, including Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

  Red Army tank forces did mount one major counterattack… Historian David Glantz has a detailed description of this battle in his paper, “The Initial Period of War on the Eastern Front, 22 June–August 1941,” Proceedings of the Fourth Art of War Symposium, Garmisch, October 1987 (London: Frank Cass, 1997).

  twenty-eight Jews were shot as “dangerous Communists” or “partisans”… This figure appears in several books, but most cite the Radziwillow yizkor book as the source.

  Radziwillow’s turn came… There is no precise number for the Jews murdered in the two Radziwillow massacres. The figures in this chapter come from the Encyclopedia of Jewish Life and the Encyclopedia Judaica, based in part on the Radziwillow yizkor book. The 2004 history of Radziwillow, cited in Chapter 12, gives a total of three thousand Jews for 1942, a count that includes all those killed, not just those at the two massacres.

  needed for the fight against the Soviets… For the Nazi concerns about the supply of men and ammunition, see Bernhard Kroener, “Manpower Resources in the Area of Conflict Between the Wehrmacht, Bureaucracy and War Economy, 1939–1942,” in vol. 5, part 1 of Germany and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  which were of a different gauge… Nazi military records show how much the railway transportation problem complicated the German invasion of the Soviet Union. See Bernd Wegner, “The War Against the Soviet Union, 1942–1943,” in The Global War, vol. 6 of Germany and the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 879. This ongoing multivolume history, prepared by the German military archives (the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt) and translated into English, offers a remarkably detailed view of the Nazi war machine, both in Berlin and in the field.

  made clear in an October 12, 1941 directive… For the full text, see “The Einsatzgruppen or Murder Commandos,” vol. 10 of The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982). The underlined portion appears that way in the original document.

  the documents detailing her deception… These documents provide the specific dates of Anna’s work as a translator for the Nazis, and later in Germany; they verified many of the details she had told me. She was uncertain about some dates; in cases of a discrepancy between her memory and the documents, I have relied on the written record.

  “You could see the blood…” Anna’s account of the scene at the mass gravesite is similar to what others have described in testimony and interviews.

  “The interpreter Anna Prokopowisch…” This is Könitzer’s spelling of Prokopowitsch. Wendy Lower translated the letter of recommendation.

  The Nazis had hired other translators who were Volksdeutschen…Wendy Lower, who has written extensively on the Holocaust in Ukraine, suggested that Könitzer was trying to protect both himself and, perhaps, Anna. “The Volksdeutschen were not granted citizenship automatically,” she wrote me via e-mail. “Only those who were accepted in the Wehrmacht got papers, or so the recruitment posters and decrees claimed.” The Nazis needed the translators desperately and often relaxed their hiring procedure, according to Lower, so many local translators working for the Germans in Ukraine did not have citizenship papers.

  Bella Kron was sixteen when the Nazis came for her… I gratefully acknowledge the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education for allowing me to view and use a portion of Bella Kron’s videotaped testimony, which is filed as interview code 14471.

  on wooden planks across the open pits, seven at a time… Since 2004, a research team head by a French priest, Patrick Desbois, has worked to establish a full documentary record of the Holocaust in Ukraine, interviewing more than six hundred witnesses and collecting previously unknown documents, including photographs. The Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris mounted a remarkable exhibit of the Desbois team’s efforts, called “The Holocaust by Bullets: The Mass Shootings of Jews in Ukraine, 1941–1944.” Part of the exhibit, which I saw in July 2007, includes step-by-step descriptions of what the killing squads did at the mass gravesites.

  SIXTEEN: Abandoned

  she might have said something more about Annie… Mary Bernek, the Botsford social worker assigned to Mom, does not have any memory of talking with Mom about Annie. When I interviewed Bernek in July 2006, she said she wouldn’t have asked Mom directly about her secret, but would have waited for Mom to say something about Annie on her own. Bernek’s daily notes, part of Mom’s Botsford files, don’t show any evidence of a conversation about Annie.

  After several afternoons with articles such as… Leslie C. Barber, “The Age of Schizophrenia,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, December 1937, pp. 70–78, and Farnsworth Crowder, “But Is the World Going Mad?” from The Survey Graphic, reprinted in Reader’s Digest, May 1937, pp. 53–57. Crowder intends his essay as a corrective to grim ones such as Barber’s, but Crowder’s conclusion couldn’t have been of much comfort to someone in my mother’s position. “Modern psychiatry, by shedding light in murky corners of the human soul, has shown us alarming things, but it has not shown us doom,” Crowder writes. “Rather, by giving understanding, by providing humanized, scientific care, by promoting mental hygiene, psychiatry makes us moderns the gainers—not the fated losers—in the immemorial fight for sanity and happiness.”

  the state’s sterilization law… First passed in 1913, the law was later overturned because it targeted mental “defectives” in institutions, and the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that it had to apply to the mentally impaired in general (in other words, more broadly). A 1923 law restored sterilization as state policy; after the 1927 Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, the number of sterilizations began to climb.

  2,339 of the 3,786 confirmed sterilizations… The figure comes from a 1998 lawsuit by Fred Aslin, who was sterilized at Lapeer in 1944 when he was eighteen. Like many such institutions at the time, Lapeer’s population included people who were mistakenly deemed mentally retarded; Aslin was one of them. The state had sent Aslin and his eight siblings to Lapeer during the Depression, deciding that their mother was unable to care for them after their father died, according to Aslin’s lawyer, Lisa McNiff. Aslin lost his suit on statue of limitation grounds, but the state’s director of community health sent him a written apology. “Looking back on it now, it is clear that the treatment you and others received was offensive, inappropriate and wrong,” wrote the director, James K. Haveman, Jr. “Man Fails in Lawsuit Over Forced Sterilization,” Associated Press, March 10, 2000.

  the fourth highest total in the nation… Thirty-two states had sterilization laws at one time or another, resulting in more than 36,000 involuntary sterilizations, according to Paul Lombardo, a professor of law at Georgia State University. Lombardo’s new book, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2008), includes a state-by-state breakdown based on work done in the 1960s by Julius Paul, who assembled the data from state records, institutional reports, and surveys of officials in the thirty-two states. In a note accompanying the chart, Lombardo says that the numbers are likely higher than Paul was able to document.

  SEVENTEEN: Dad’s Secret

  Didn’t the government make it easy… Congress made it so easy that nearly every military applicant received citizenship. The Nationality Act of 1940 exempted non-citizens serving in the armed forces from all but the most minimal requirements in applying for citizenship; proof of lawful entry (Dad’s problem) was one of the few conditions that remained, and the law even offered ways around that. A 1942 amendment to the act went further, creating a procedure for granting American citizenship to applicants on foreign soil, a first in
U.S. history. The military had its own reasons for promoting citizenship; a non-citizen, if captured, could be treated as a deserter or traitor rather than as a prisoner of war. By mid-1943, 37,432 applicants had become citizens. Only sixty were turned down. See “Naturalization of Aliens in Our Armed Forces,” Immigration and Naturalization Review, September 1943, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 6–11.

  he had tried several times during his Army days… Given the tiny number of military applications that failed, it’s remarkable that Dad never managed to get citizenship during the war. When he was based in California for a short time during 1944, his commanding officer suggested a brief trip to Mexico so that Dad could come back across the border and thus establish his “arrival” in the United States, a strategy that Dad writes enthusiastically about in his letters to Mom. For some reason, however, the commanding officer never followed through with enough time off for Dad to make the journey. Toward the end of 1944, as the Army’s manpower needs mounted, the military relaxed its rules and sent more non-citizen soldiers overseas. At that point, according to Dad’s letters, his superiors became less interested in his citizenship problems.

  that disputed sliver of Eastern Europe… Dad really didn’t know anything about his homeland. Since then, I have learned a few basic facts. In 1913, when he was born, Lomza province was part of the greater Russian empire. After the Soviet-Polish war of 1919–1920, it became part of the reconstituted Poland. Bubbe Ida managed to find a way out of the country in the midst of that war.

  “two general hospitals which are exclusively psychiatric…” House Committee on Appropriations hearings on the Labor-Federal Security Agency Appropriation Bill for 1945, 78th Congress, 2d session, April–May 1944, p. 331.

  EIGHTEEN: Uncontoured Ills

  seven months for the 313th to collect, train and transport… My portrait of the 313th comes largely from Records Group 112, Records of the Office of the Surgeon

  General (Army), Box No. 52, 303rd–314th General Hospitals, National Archives II, in College Park, Maryland. The folders contain material that the surgeon general compiled to write the history of the medical component of World War II.

  memo directed draft boards to take time to… War Department Memorandum no. W600-30-43, March 25, 1943, cited in Neuropsychiatry in World War II (Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1966), p. 201.

  they evaluated 5,774 patients… Darnall’s annual report for 1945, which provides a detailed breakdown of what happened to its patients, can be found in RG112, Records of the Surgeon General, World War II Administrative Records, 319.1 Unit Annual Reports, Box 64, “Darnall General Hospital” folder, 1941–1945. The hospital ceased operation on December 15, 1945.

  No patient should be returned to duty unless he can work a full day…. From a May 28, 1945 memo, cited in Neuropsychiatry, p. 227.

  ambivalence about psychiatric discharges…Neuropsychiatry, pp. 217–223.

  the Pacific and European commands eventually adopted different policies… For a good description of this divergence, see Clarence McKittrick Smith, The Medical Department: Hospitalization and Evacuation, Zone of Interior. United States Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1956).

  the name on Bubbe Ida’s passport… Her passport contains no stamp showing her arrival in the United States, suggesting that she might have used it to leave Europe but not to gain entry here. Passports were not required for travelers to the United States until 1920.

  a $3 million budget problem… Missavage says he traveled to Lansing with an Eloise colleague to meet with Gordon Yudashkin about the Eloise transfers. “There was no way to prevent it,” he told me. “It was a done deal.”

  the contraction happened with almost breathtaking speed…The statistics come from government publications, except for the rates per 100,000, which I calculated.

  a panel of three federal judges declared the opposite… In cases involving the constitutionality of a state statue, federal rules allowed the trial judge to convene a three-judge panel. For the panel’s full ruling, see Bell v. Wayne County General Hospital at Eloise, 384 F. Supp. 1085 (Eastern District of Michigan).

  NINETEEN: Always the Bridesmaid

  so many couples wanted to tie the knot… Tuttle, Daddy’s Gone to War, pp. 19–21.

  TWENTY: Reinterpretation

  certain that his anxiety was real… One doctor at the 126th General Hospital disagreed with a colleague’s diagnosis of “reactive depression,” but said he would allow Dad’s case to go forward to the disability board with that diagnosis included.

  if unburdening yourself to your best friend… Mom’s thinking also may have been influenced by a major news event that happened just a week before Annie’s death: the negative reaction to the disclosure that Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton, the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee, had been hospitalized three times for depression and had received electric shock treatment. Eagleton decided to quit the ticket after only eighteen days as George McGovern’s running mate. In political annals, the Eagleton affair seemed to confirm that the American public was not ready for a vice president with a psychiatric past. For Mom, it might have confirmed the risks of revealing her secret.

  an innocuous conversation between new neighbors… Oakland County land records confirm that the Frumkins and the Pierces owned adjoining properties in The Ravines. The Pierces bought their home on December 1, 1958, the Frumkins on November 26, 1963.

  “On this place there are buried 4000 Jews…” Several Holocaust references, as well as the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, state that the second Radziwillow massacre took place near Suchodoly, a small hamlet several miles south of the first massacre site. If those killed at Suchodoly are buried there, as seems likely, then perhaps the creators of the new Radziwillow memorial decided to honor the dead from both massacres with the inscription’s reference to four thousand Jews.

  proudly shows us the Certificate of the Righteous… Yad Vashem confirmed, via e-mail, that on September 29, 1996, the organization had recognized the bravery of Ludmila Korson’s family, the Kubits, for hiding Jews during the years of Nazi occupation in Radziwillow.

  EPILOGUE

  the last from 1948… After 1948, Eloise sent all unclaimed bodies to the Wayne University College of Medicine. Minutes of the Eloise board, Feb. 2, 1948.

  could erect a memorial… In April 2008, Jo Johnson told me that someone had expressed an interest in donating such a marker for the site. The idea is still under discussion.

  { ACKNOWLEDGMENTS }

  A family secret stands at the center of Annie’s Ghosts; a family’s support stands behind it. Mom had asked her children to stay close and look out for each other; my decision to write this book tested that closeness, but my sisters and brothers looked out for me, even when they disagreed with me. I’m lucky to call them my family. Thanks, therefore, to my siblings: Sash, for enthusiasm, guidance, and the insight that we grew up at different times and see our parents differently; Mike, for patience, wise counsel, and giving me that cautious green light to go forward; Jeff, for encouragement, suggestions, and asking, “Who the heck is Annie?” in the first place; Evie, for sharing her memories, saving those wartime letters, and trusting me to do right by them. Thanks, too, to their spouses, their children, and my many relatives; their contributions became cairns on the path to the secret’s origins.

  Any writer would benefit from having an agent such as Gail Ross, who believed in Annie’s Ghosts when it was no more than an idea. She never told me what I wanted to hear, only what I needed to do. I now have a firsthand understanding of why she has such a fine reputation in the publishing world. Thanks, also, to her associate, Howard Yoon, whose contributions began with the title and, fortunately for me, didn’t stop there.

  When Leslie Wells at Hyperion read my proposal for Annie’s Ghosts, she immediately said she wanted the book. I couldn’t ask for a more supportive editor, or a more attentive one. Ellen Archer, now Hyper
ion’s president and publisher, endorsed Leslie’s original judgment, which gave me two reasons to believe in Hyperion as my partner. Two years of collaboration have only strengthened that feeling. My heartfelt thanks to copy editor Anne Newgarden for several sterling catches, and to production editor David Lott and Muriel Tebid of the legal staff for their love of detail.

  My friends at The Washington Post provided more than I could have asked. Their genuine interest in the secret, and the story behind it, fueled me on days when dead ends outnumbered new leads. Former executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., and managing editor Phil Bennett granted me the leave of absence that made the book possible. Len’s response, when I told him in 2004 about my desire to pursue the story someday, was as sustaining as it was spontaneous: “You have to do this.” I regret only that the book took me away from the newsroom at a time of great change, and that I wasn’t around to help out. Thanks, also, to Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Company, whose early interest in the “five thousand” (my shorthand for the many families with relatives once hidden in public mental institutions) gave me confidence in the story’s larger significance. At later stages, I profited from both Len’s and Don’s perceptive reads of the manuscript.

  Other colleagues offered encouraging words, sometimes without realizing their importance to me. They include Rick Atkinson, Bonnie Benwick, David Brown, Kathleen Cahill, Glenn Frankel, Bob Kaiser, Kathy Lally, Jeff Leen, Pat Monahan, Steve Mufson, Wendy Ross, Dale Russakoff, Zofia Smardz, and Jane Touzalin. Bob Woodward, my first mentor at The Post, has given me an invaluable education over the years, part of what we have called our permanent journalism seminar, but I owe him a particular debt for serving as a role model of how to be a generous colleague.