Such Good Girls (2 page)

“Sophie, tell him about the bear. Tell him about the bear.”

“All right,” Sophie said to Alice, then turned to me. “Alice loves the story of the bear. All right. When I was hiding in a small town in Poland with my mother, of course I didn’t have many toys. In fact, I had only two—a doll and a little bear I later named Refugee. He was one of those Steiff bears, but he stayed with me after the war and into adulthood and now he’s in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The copy they made of him to sell in the gift shop is one of their most popular items.”

“Amazing,” I said.

“Tell him about the space shuttle,” Alice said.

“All right, all right,” she said with mock irritation, putting up her hand, as if to prevent her cousin from making any more demands. Sophie explained to me that every American astronaut who goes up in the space shuttle can take a couple of personal items along, and that the commander of Discovery, Mark Polansky, who’s half Jewish and wanted to draw attention to genocide, took a photo of a Darfurian child in a refugee camp and a facsimile of Refugee on a twelve-day mission to the International Space Station in 2006.

“Wow,” I said, wincing at how dumb I must have sounded. “That’s an amazing story. And you said Refugee was a Steiff bear?”

“A little one.” Sophie held her thumb and forefinger three inches apart.

“That’s funny, I had the same one,” I said, probably more excitably than the coincidence called for. “Actually, I still have it in my closet with a bunch of other Steiff animals my parents got me when I was a kid.” What was I doing, inserting my own toys into her narrative? Was I trying to maneuver the conversation onto safer ground? “Unfortunately,” I insisted on adding, “he’s lost an arm. And I think his head came off. You obviously took better care of yours.”

And it was true that the small bear, whom I named Beauregard, had been one of my most beloved toys in a childhood which, unlike Sophie’s, was full of them. That Sophie and I were connected not only by our Judaism and our Polish origins, but also by the very same make of German teddy bear, felt eerily providential.

I left the seder that evening with Sophie’s e-mail address and found myself a couple of months later sitting at the glass-topped dining room table in her Upper West Side high-rise apartment, sipping tea and asking her questions about her childhood hiding from the Nazis with her mother and her bear. I could sense that Sophie was ambivalent about reconstructing a past that had been packed away. When she fished documents and photos out of her file cabinet or boxes in her closet, I felt I was imposing. That my demands on her were in the service of what I hoped would be a charming, inspirational children’s book seemed to make the ordeal more palatable, but even so, Sophie’s occasional protests—“It was so long ago,” “I really can’t remember,” “Does it really matter when my mother gave me the bear?”—made me feel that I was picking at the margins of a thick scab that had formed over an old and grievous wound. Sophie could have put an end to my literary endeavor with just a word, but she didn’t, and I sensed in her, buried beneath her suppression of the past, a faintly beating desire to confront it. (She would tell me much later that she felt a “responsibility” to talk to me.)

I drafted the text of a children’s story called Refugee: The True Story of a Girl, a Bear, and the Holocaust, and kept meeting periodically with Sophie to clarify events and chronology. When we got together, sometimes at a café near her apartment, I tried not to overstay my welcome, since I continued to feel that I had subtly pressured her into sharing the details of a story she otherwise would have been content to relate only sparingly, and in passing.

As time went on, however, the adventures of Sophie’s bear became inseparable from an infinitely more complex and tragic story that could hardly be contained by a few hundred words aimed at six-year-olds. A year and a half after I left my friends’ seder with an idea for a children’s book, I realized that I was actually on a longer and more intense serendipitous journey toward a book for grown-ups, one that would eventually embrace the stories of three other hidden child survivors. Sophie, it turned out, was my portal into the world of the very few and very lucky Jewish children who emerged from World War II, our last living witnesses to the Holocaust. Between 1 and 1.5 million Jewish children were living in Europe before the war, but only 6 to 11 percent survived, compared to a third of Jewish adults. Of these child survivors, who numbered between 60,000 and 165,000 children, some had survived the death and work camps, while the rest survived by hiding or being hidden.

Only later still, well into the writing of this book, did I become conscious of the most obvious reason I felt so strongly drawn to Sophie and her history. At the time of the seder both of my parents, now in their feeble nineties after long, productive, and healthy lives, were suffering through their final months. They weren’t murdered or starved to death, but died at home within a month of each other, surrounded by state-of-the-art end-of-life care. Nonetheless, I was dealing with the loss of my mom and dad, the most important links to my past and my Jewish heritage. The situation—the expensive and hopeful interventions, the shuttling back and forth between Florida and Chicago, the difficulties of coordinating emotional decisions with my siblings—was full of new fears. I was clinging more tightly than ever to the past, lamenting not only unfinished business, but also unasked questions, and trying to take in the vast unexplored landscape of my family and the ultimate unknowableness of those I loved. In the midst of this period of loss and mourning, whom should fate seat across from me at a seder but a combination of surrogate parent and history tutor, someone who could connect me to the very cataclysm that had been at an inescapable remove in my parents’ lives and so conspicuously absent from mine.

Sophie told me what she could remember about her childhood—with the help of some old photos, documents, and an earlier interview she had done with her cousin Alice Herb—and from these elements I could write a credible version of the story from her childlike point of view of events between 1942 and 1948. But how was I going to tell the story from the viewpoint of her late mother, with whom Sophie spent those years and more? Given the peculiarity of their relationship during those years, I longed to capture the discrepancy between their respective realities.

The answer came one day when I was sitting with Sophie in her apartment. As usual Sophie was patiently correcting my mistakes and filling in gaps in my latest draft of her story with new bits of information that, since our last meeting, had been jarred loose from the greater mass of her suppressed memories. Suddenly Sophie pulled a sheaf of typescript pages from a box and said, “I don’t know if this will help, but it’s something my mother wrote for a class she was taking late in life.”

I fanned through the seventeen-page manuscript with a surge of joy. Sophie had just handed me the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone—the means by which I could finally translate Sophie’s speculations about her mother’s state of mind during and after the war into the hard currency of her mother’s own memories. With her mother’s essay, I could at last begin to connect the desperate parallel universes in which the two of them lived.

The story of Sophie’s bear, her generation, and of the momentous event in 1991 that finally broke the hidden child survivors’ adult silence, starts in 1942 in the city of Lvov, Poland, where a girl named Selma Schwarzwald and her mother, Laura, were about to start living side by side in two utterly different lies.

In late August 1942, when the knock came on the door of the Schwarzwalds’ hovel in the Lvov ghetto, it was as if the Messiah himself had arrived. Laura Schwarzwald rose wearily to her feet. With time running out, whoever didn’t have the money to buy Christian documents—forged or real baptismal certificates and marriage documents—would almost certainly receive a death sentence instead. Having deported the bulk of Lvov’s remaining Jews from the ghetto, the Nazis were now hunting down the last of its inhabitants. Every Jew still alive in the ghetto was standing on the precipice of death. All they had to do was look down and see everyone who had gone before them.

Laura’s husband, Daniel, who was at his unpaid job as a security guard for the Third Reich’s military engineering organization, had made the arrangements, and here, at last, were the papers that were the family’s only remaining hope. Laura pressed her hand against her breast to feel the wad of money safely hidden in her brassiere and opened the door.

The gaunt man who pushed his way past her had circles under his eyes as dark as a panda bear’s and a shirt so grimy that its original color could only be inferred. His belt, though pulled tightly around his narrow waist, barely kept his soiled pants up. Was this the paperman? she thought. A scrawny, doomed fellow no better off than the rest of them?

“Where is he?” he demanded, scowling.

Bewildered, she asked, “Who?”

“Don’t play dumb. The paperman. I was told to come here to buy the papers. For my wife and child.”

Laura could barely catch her breath. So the Pole had promised the papers to two separate families? What was he trying to do—get paid twice for the same ones? Weren’t the Poles and Ukrainians already making a killing off the Jews’ desperation for new identities? Laura’s heart sank even more quickly than it had risen at the sound of his knocking.

“They belong to us, the papers!” she screamed at him.

“No need to get excited,” the man said arrogantly, looking around the room with its scraps of furniture and its air of death. “I’ll sit and wait.”

She could hardly bear to look at this withered Jew as he sat in the chair, arms folded, with a pathetic sense of entitlement—entitlement, that is, to go on living too, for another day.

“They aren’t your papers,” she said to him.

“We’ll see about that.”

She begged him to leave, not even trying to hold back her tears, but he ignored her and waited in defiant silence as the afternoon dragged on. What had he been just a few months before—a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman like her husband? Who could tell? Now they were like two hungry animals eyeing each other over a meal that hadn’t arrived yet.

If her husband were at home, he wouldn’t stand for it; he would have thrown this other buyer out, no questions asked. However, something better than her husband intervened: fate. As the ghetto curfew for Jews approached, the paperman still hadn’t arrived. The man in her kitchen kept jiggling his leg and checking his wristwatch with increasing anxiety, knowing that to be seen on the street after curfew was to risk being shot like a rabid dog.

“You’d better go,” she said, “or the dogs will be eating your corpse in the street tomorrow morning.”

He said he’d give the paperman five more minutes.

“Then what?”

“Then I’ll leave and come back for them in the morning.”

“They’re not yours. If they were yours, you’d be in your house waiting for him, not mine.”

He consulted his watch yet again. “Goniff!” he spat. Finally he could stand it no more and stood up. “Anybody tell you what a good-looking woman you are?”

“Go,” Laura said.

He jerked his chin at something over Laura’s shoulder, and she turned to see her daughter, Selma, who had wandered in from the other room. She was blond, not yet five.

“Your little girl is pretty too,” the man said. “Very fair. You’re lucky.”

“Not as long as you’re here. Go. Go before you get a bullet in the head.”

He asked her for a piece of bread.

Thankful that he was leaving, she went to the cupboard and broke off a piece of days-old bread.

Twenty minutes after he left, there was another knock on Laura’s door. She hesitated, wondering if the Jew was not giving up that easily. But a different voice was whispering to her through the door. She opened it and a ruddy Pole stumbled in. If history had made the Jews one of the unluckiest people in the world, and now unluckier than ever, Laura was not above solemn gratitude for the fortunate timing of the man’s appearance. The round-faced man was very drunk, the only explanation needed for his late arrival. He slumped in the chair recently vacated by her rival and demanded to see the money. From her blouse Laura removed the agreed-upon amount and asked to see the documents.

The man slid the precious papers out of his inside jacket pocket and flourished them for a second before putting them back. Then he wagged his index finger in her face, like a metronome.

“Not until I have a drink,” he slurred. “I have to drink in order to stand the sight of all you żyds.” He drew a circle in the air to indicate the ghetto. “Then we will close the deal.”

Every chance to live a little longer had to be bargained for. Laura happened to have half a bottle in the room in the cupboard—how much luck could one woman have!—which she put down before him. He sloshed some into the dirty glass she provided, tossed it back, then poured another and drank that, all the while smacking his lips. Nothing would prevent him from just getting up and stumbling out. Laura’s relief turned to anxiety, but her mazel held; the Pole couldn’t hold his vodka. Laura sat and watched him drink himself into semi-consciousness, then pulled the papers from his pocket and replaced them with the money and waited for him to stir. At that point she was able to maneuver him back into the street. For the rest of her life, she would be as grateful for her good fortune as haunted by it—her family saved at another family’s expense.

That night, Laura read the documents over and over again by candlelight. A real Christian birth certificate for Selma and a marriage license for her, both from the same family, with birth dates enough like their own. From that moment, and for the unforeseeable future, Laura and Selma Schwarzwald ceased to exist. Bronislawa Tymejko and her little daughter Zofia Tymejko had taken their place, just as this life in the ghetto—too precarious, really, to be called “life” at all—had replaced the prosperous, cultured existence she and her family had enjoyed until almost exactly three years before.