The Belief in Angels (22 page)

In April of 1944, a few months before the liberation, they line us up and march most of the prisoners away. They tell us they are taking them to another camp. I am told to stay. I think this will be my last day on earth. Someone has discovered I am a Jew and they will shoot me in that moment. Instead, I am given another job for the last three months of my imprisonment.

It feels the same as being dead, this job. It is the job where Pieter and I make our deal.

After the war, the Romanian Rescue Mission offers to send me to Palestine, but while I recover I write to my parents at the last address I kept for them in Brooklyn, New York. Miraculously, it reaches them. They respond with a telegram with instructions to contact a man in Paris who will help me to immigrate to America to join them. They send the man money to be used as payment for my passage to America. They also send me money, the last of their savings, to arrange my travel to France.

I spoke no French, and the man my parents have arranged for me to connect with turns out to be a shyster—he steals my parents’ payment and puts me to work in a Paris sweatshop sewing ladies’ fur coats.

Taking advantage of Jewish refugees has become its own industry. They know we are desperate.

This sewing skill I learned in the Ukranian work camps has become my new trade. As I learned in the camps, to have a trade means life. I work in the sweatshops for two years, and then find a job working in a huge Parisian couture house on the rue Matignon, off the Champs-Élysées, sewing ladies’ gloves for their collections. I save my money and wait to see my family in America.

One day—I’ve only been working a month or so in the couture house—a finely dressed older man approaches my workbench and stands peering over my shoulder, watching me work. He smells like coriander. I am nervous, thinking I will be fired. Everywhere in Paris people point fingers towards those who did not protect the Jews, yet still there is hatred for our people here.

“You have very fine stitching. Where did you learn to sew this way?” he asks me.

I look up into a most startling pair of ice-blue eyes.

“In the work camps in Cyprus, and then …” I pull up my sleeve to show him the numbered marks on my arm. I have no idea why I do this. I had never shown the shameful tattoo to another soul.

“I would be grateful if you would teach this skill to others,” he says. “I am honored to have you here”

“I am honored to work for you,” I respond. “I would be happy to share whatever skill I possess.”

This man turns out to be the great fashion couturier and parfumier Lucien Lelong, who stood up to the Germans when they tried to force the Paris ateliers to move to Berlin. His former wife, a Romanov princess, lost her father and brothers to the Bolshevik murderers.

Only a few years later, M. Lelong closes the doors to his family business and retires. Luckily, having worked and taught for one of the most renowned designers in Paris, I have no trouble securing work with another atelier.

Always there is another goal: to be reunited with my family. But besides the money required for my travel, I have encountered another obstacle. Immigration to America has been tightened. Quotas put in place. Eventually, however, I am granted the right to immigrate because of the enactment of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act. This allows a select number of Jewish immigrants—Nazi death camp survivors, those who have family members who are American citizens, or those who can offer trade services needed in the US.

I fit all the categories.

I am one of 400,000 people who are allowed to immigrate in those last few years. President Truman made sure we are allowed entrance. The day my letter
from immigration arrived, I saw an ad for Air France plane travel to New York. I had never been on a plane and I am terrified by the idea, but it seemed my best option, as it proved more difficult for me to think about boarding a ship again. It is unbelievable to think I could see my family within twenty hours of getting on the plane, although the ticket cost me a fortune. I flew to America from Paris in 1948, nearly four years after gaining my freedom from the camp, at thirty-eight years of age.

The sole detail I remember about my flight is that a button on my coat popped off as I bent to sit in my airplane seat, and one of the hostesses is kind enough to find me a needle and thread so I could sew it back on during the flight. In those days, the airplane hostesses are trained nurses because the idea of taking a flight is dangerous. People worried about altitude sickness and other, more serious disasters. When she returned with a needle, this hostess, this nurse, noticed my skin pallor and asked me questions about my health. She suggested I see a doctor in America. As it turned out, my years in the army and camps had left me sick with anemia and malaria. I had been suffering with these diseases for years without being diagnosed and treated.

When I first arrived, I settled in Brooklyn with my
foter
and
mater.
They had been living in the same Crown Heights apartment since 1924—a miracle that allowed me to find them after all those years.

When they arrived in 1923, there are more than 75,000 Jews living in the Crown Heights neighborhood alone, yet my
foter
found his friend Mendel in the “village” of Brooklyn—another miracle. Mendel helped him find occasional work as a machinist in the factories, and my
mater
washed and sewed clothing in the Brooklyn brownstone they shared with Mendel and his family.

It is inevitable that Oizer should have taken the role of the eldest son in our family after arriving here in America.
Foter
and
Mater
are old when Oizer and Rose arrived, and I, the oldest living son, I am still a soldier and living in Russia at the time. Oizer did the job well, and I possessed no spirit, no will, to displace him from his role when I arrived. He had become a great protector and provider for the family, and I am content for him to continue to fill that role.

Although my
foter
and
mater
seemed overjoyed at my arrival, I felt broken inside. I still mourned our losses and blamed myself for not preventing the tragedies back in the Ukraine.

Soon after I moved in with my family,
Foter
sat talking with me late into the night. We swirled cheap brandy in our glasses and reminisced about our old life on
Bubbe
Chava’s farm. I felt safe. I felt a brief sense of lightness as we sat watching the fire dance with the last embers.

“Those are the best moments in my life. All of us together in the orchards,” I said.

My
foter
had taken up pipe-smoking—a habit I thought made him look like a gangster. He tamped bits of spicy tobacco into his pipe as he spoke.

“The best is coming, Szaja.”

I said nothing as he lit the pipe and drew in slow, rhythmic puffs of smoke.

“Szaja, no one could have prevented what happened. Never mind a young boy.”

I am startled by his comment. Before I could answer, he continued.

“Let’s not talk about the past again. It’s best to let the past go, otherwise it will imprison you. You’re a free man, Szaja. See a future, create a plan, work hard, and you will realize your dream.”

But I had no dreams. Only nightmares.

It is Rose and Mocher who convinced me to move to Brookline to start a tailoring business with them. Rose told me they needed a skilled worker. I had been working in a large sweatshop in Brooklyn with them and I am nearly recovered from my illnesses, thanks to Rose’s ministrations. I knew she felt concerned about leaving me, and this knowledge pressed me into going with them.

I am torn, though. I wanted to stay with the family, this family my eyes are drinking in with thirsty gulps. For years I had dreamt of nothing more than being reunited with them, of seeing my dear
mater
and
foter
again. I thought, in the last days of my work in Paris, that if I could just see them again in America, I would be able to die in peace. This is the thought I lived for.

But then, living there in Crown Heights with them, taking their love and rebuilding my soul, I felt more like a stranger—a ghost, than the son—the brother, I had once been.

I am changed, I knew. And I could feel that it is not a change that would be reversed through love or time. There is some missing faculty; a part of me seems gone forever. I felt as much an imposter in my family as I did in the days I am hiding the fact I am a Jew.

Rose understood this. She is the one person who helps me find myself. She reached into the parts of me that are still intact and drew them closer to the surface. At times this felt healing—I am moving toward a less painful, lighter way of being. I smile and laugh with her teasing and through our laughter my soul breathed air. But at other times, the push toward the surface is a struggle that sent me back into myself, somewhere safer and hidden from even my own conscious thoughts. One day Rose asked me about the camp. I could not answer. That day I realized I could
never answer or I would lose the bits that had survived. And this would break my deal with Pieter.

In the end, after a year living with
Foter
and
Mater,
I decided to move with Rose and Mocher to Brookline, Massachusetts, leaving my parents and the rest of the family behind in New York in Oizer’s capable care. I slept on the couch in a tiny apartment we shared.

“The couch smells like you now,” Rose tells me.

I laugh. “Not a bad smell. Not the smell of your oily latkes on those winter mornings on the farm.”

Rose snaps the dishtowel she uses at the sink at my head.

“Shush. Those oily latkes tasted good enough for you to eat more than your share of helpings, as I remember.”