A Chosen Few (10 page)

Zionism, the longing for a Jewish state, was first popularized by Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist who had covered the Dreyfus case. He had principally argued for Zionism in London, where the colonial administration of Palestine was controlled. But Zionism had found some of its strongest adherents in Poland. Even in the 1920s, Jewish communities in Poland had already been preparing for the
aliyah
, the historical return to Israel. Both Fania Elbinger and Emmanuel Ewenczyk had been raised in Polish Zionism.

Now, after the Nazi butchery, many Jews felt that surely no one could refuse them their state. The wartime Jewish Resistance was falling apart—at least half of Fania and Emmanuel’s group from Grenoble were going to Palestine. Even before the war ended, some Jews had made it to neutral Spain and from there to the Middle East. At the end of the war the Jewish neighborhoods of Paris were filled with Jewish refugees from throughout Europe looking for contacts to help them get to Palestine.

Fania, too, wanted to go, and she told her mother so. Her mother looked at Fania with moist eyes and said, “So you are going to leave us all alone—just the two of us.”

It was true. Fania’s mother had only her two daughters. Fania’s father had died before the war, and there had been no word from any surviving relative back in Poland. Fania Elbinger’s
aliyah
ended when she looked into her mother’s eyes.

Yankel and Syma Ewenczyk stayed in Grenoble with their oldest son, Sam, who could at last finish his studies, after which he would remain at the university and work in nuclear energy research. Emmanuel’s brother Oscar returned to Paris from Germany, where he had torn up his identity papers, concealed his Jewish identity, and
spent the war in forced labor as a prisoner of war on a farm. At least on a farm he had had enough food to eat.

Oscar and Emmanuel kept the sweater business in Paris, and as Emmanuel had predicted, it was an instant success. As soon as they secured the supplies and their designers came out with a new line, the wholesalers started selling sweaters at top prices, as fast as they could produce them. France was hungry for consumer goods.

Fania and Emmanuel were married on December 30, 1945, in a just-restored synagogue on Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, one of several synagogues the Germans had blown up in October 1941. Two years later, Oscar married Fania’s sister Georgette.

It took a long time to sort out the missing people. Many of them were never found. For some, like Fania’s mother, it took time just to comprehend what had happened. Back in Grenoble during the war, Fania had shown her mother a flyer from the Jewish Resistance saying that hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been taken to camps in Poland were being gassed to death. Her mother had left parents, a brother, a sister, and a niece in Baronovitchi, in eastern Poland. Tossing the flyer down, her mother told Fania, “Don’t believe that. It can’t be true. It’s not possible.” In fact, most of the Jews Fania talked to in the Grenoble area had not believed the flyer. How could you take hundreds of thousands of people and gas them to death? Perhaps some had been gassed, maybe even a few hundred, but more likely they had been shot. Rumors run wild in time of war.

After the Liberation, Fania tried without success to find a trace of her mother’s family in Baronovitchi. She wrote letters. She went to special offices. She discovered that huge extended Jewish families had entirely vanished without a trace. Whole communities were gone, with no precise explanation. Europe was full of individuals who did not have a single friend or relative in the world. Some of them found each other and married quickly. Many went to Israel, at least to be with other Jews.

In early 1945 the elegant turn-of-the-century Hotel Lutetia, located at an expensive Left Bank Parisian intersection, was set up to receive concentration camp survivors. The original idea was to establish a reception center at the train station, the Gare d’Orsay. Liberated prisoners of war and labor camp inmates had already been coming in, a little thinner but happy to be home, and the staff at the center imagined that the liberated concentration camp inmates would be similar. But in April, when the first of them
started returning—skeletal ghosts with glazed, sunken eyes—Parisians could see that something very different had happened to them. Some of the staff who worked in the Hotel Lutetia center openly expressed distaste for their work. The people were frightening to look at and terrible to listen to, with their tales of horror or, as one staff member put it, their “complaining.” This did not fit well with the myth that General De Gaulle was carefully constructing, of a military victory over the Germans, a repeat of 1918. Although survivors marched in their striped uniforms in victory celebrations in 1945, that practice was soon barred.

The hotel functioned as a missing-persons center. A list was established where returning survivors put their names. Most people who went to the hotel searching for survivors did not find the names they were looking for and anxiously canvassed the hotel with photographs and wedding portraits, hoping to find someone who had seen their loved ones alive. Walls became bulletin boards, layered with snapshots and notes. Every day, people came and waited. It was becoming clear that the flyers that the Resistance had circulated during the war had been true. In fact, it was even worse than the flyers had said—not hundreds of thousands, but millions had been murdered. Long after the Hotel Lutetia ran out of survivors to process, relatives still turned up there every day, hoping for news. Since displaced Jews were moving all over the world, they clung to the hope that the ones they were seeking would turn up somewhere. They clung to that hope for years.

When Dwojra Finkelsztajn got back to the Pletzl, she learned that her sister Bella, who had moved to Paris before the war, had been deported to Auschwitz. Bella was not among the few who passed through the Hotel Lutetia. Nor was there any trace of Dwojra’s parents, another sister, or a little brother, Sacha, who had stayed in the village outside Kielce. Unlike Bella, these family members had simply vanished without explanation. They could still be alive. It was only after years of looking for relatives that Dwojra finally located a cousin in Canada. He provided the ending of the Zylbersztajn story. He had seen the Germans march the entire Jewish population of their village down a road. Then they shot them all.

The ninety thousand Jews of France who had been murdered represented a quarter of France’s Jewish population, but the percentage of people missing from the Pletzl was much higher.
The Nazis had started with foreign-born Jews, and the Pletzl had been one of the places to find them.

But although so many familiar faces were missing, the Pletzl was now crowded with gaunt survivors, most of them young, many from Eastern Europe. The neighborhood itself became a transit center. The young people who had lost everyone they knew and who wanted to restart their lives would come for a few months and mill around the neighborhood, until they made the connections to arrange passage to Palestine. A few went to the United States, Canada, and Australia, but most wanted to go to Palestine. Only a few stayed in Paris. The ones who stayed were called “
les griners
,” from the Yiddish word for green—young men and women who had seen the unimaginable depths but were nevertheless considered green, because they didn’t know the neighborhood.

“Y
ou have to laugh at this,” thought Sam Perl as pain tightened his face and forced up the corners of his mouth. Antwerp’s monumental Central Station was still there, with its lacy ironworks. All the little stone turrets were still sticking up from the elevated tracks that ran through the Jewish section of Antwerp, a neighborhood that seemed to cling to rail lines as though it were contemplating a fast exit. The dark tunnels where streets passed under the raised tracks were still there, with the curly ironwork around and even under the bridges. And all the fine high-ceilinged, tall-windowed homes were still there. As he came through the underpass from the broad Belgielei, Perl could see that the Van Den Nestlei Synagogue was still a charred shell, as it had been since that day in 1941. But the other synagogues—though torn up, burned, and vandalized—still stood. In the fall of 1945, when Perl came back to Antwerp, the only thing missing was most of the people he knew. His parents and his brother and wife and two children and a sister and friends were all gone. There were only a few hundred Jews left.

But look who had survived! Sam Perl could not help but be amazed. So many of the strong young people were gone. There seemed to be almost no teenagers at all. But there were old people, even elderly people who had seemed weak even before the war. Great leaders, like the Chief Rabbi, Mordechai Rottenberg, were
gone. And yet people Perl had always thought of as “complete
shlimazels
,” the kind of people to whom everything always happened, had survived. “Who in a million years would have thought it?” he asked himself.

He would always remember this moment when Darwin’s theory of natural selection did not apply, when survival had its own random force. “Life is selfish. It can’t end. It’s not a matter of what is driving you,” he thought. “There have to be some people who survive.” There was also the remarkable fact that he was one of them. A few people he knew had come back, like Rabbi Rottenberg’s sons, Chaim and Jozef, whom he had not seen since the transit camp, when their sister got them South American papers. Sam Perl was put on a train to Auschwitz. He jumped off, but it took the Germans only a few months to find him again. Before they put him on a second train to Auschwitz, the chief of the Gestapo had had him brought to an office where they spent several hours applying the lit end of cigarettes and cigars to the sensitive areas of his body. The second time Sam Perl was deported, he jumped off the train again, and this time he had been able to find a network of Flemish Catholics in the town of Namur, who hid him until the Liberation.

Slowly, more Jews returned. It was not going to be like before the war, but a few hundred were turning up from the safe corners they had found in France and Switzerland and New York, where in the intervening years they had built up the diamond business on Forty-seventh Street.

A
NTWERP BECAME
an important Jewish center in the late nineteenth century, when pogroms had driven Jews out of Eastern Europe. As major diamond deposits were discovered in the Belgian Congo, the diamond trade flourished in Antwerp, predominantly in the hands of Jews from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, and Romania. During the First World War most of the trade had been lost to Amsterdam, since Belgium was at war while Holland was neutral. But in the 1920s and 1930s Antwerp, the Belgian port on the Dutch border, started getting back its diamond trade, fed by a steady Jewish immigration from the east.

Jews were coming to Belgium not only because of its liberal immigration laws, but also because Antwerp had a port with ships
bound for America and Palestine. Mia Lehmann had gone there to leave for Palestine. But once they arrived, many Jews in transit decided to stay, because there was work available in diamonds. You could become a sawer, someone who cut rough diamonds in two. Or you could become a cleaver, who cut the basic facets that determine a diamond’s shape. Or if you were not good with your hands but gifted at commerce, you could become a broker, buying and selling rough stones. None of these jobs required a great deal of knowledge or education. A cleaver, one of the standard entry jobs in the diamond business, apprenticed for one year, then earned more money than many doctors.

By the outbreak of World War II, the great majority of Antwerp’s more than fifty thousand Jews were earning their living in the diamond trade. It was a religious community dominated by devout Orthodox Jews from the east, many of them members of the emotional and flamboyant Hasidic movement. In the early twentieth century the Orthodox community in Antwerp was modifying and modernizing—not drastically, but enough to worry some of the traditionalists from Poland. So to maintain the old ways, they sent for a Hasidic rabbi from Katowice who had a reputation for unerring orthodoxy. The rabbi, Mordechai Rottenberg, arrived in 1912 with his wife, six sons, and three daughters.

Rottenberg was a rabbi of considerable energy and charisma, and he kept the religious community not only together but unusually traditional for a Western community. One of his last official acts was to marry Dwora and Hershl Silberman in 1941. Dwora’s family was also from Łódź, having left for Antwerp in 1927, when she was eight years old. Like many immigrants with no particular knowledge of diamonds, Dwora’s father had become a broker. Dwora’s brother, having the advantage of growing up around diamonds, became a dealer, which required an eye for and a depth of knowledge about gems.

Hershl Silberman’s family had also prospered in Antwerp. They owned a three-story house on Simonsstraat in the heart of the diamond district. This street, which farther up changes its name to Pelikaanstraat, is long and straight and runs along the elevated train tracks to the station.