The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg (16 page)

Letter 43
October 15, 2004

Dear David,

I don't have anyone else to tell.

Do you remember Julia Hilfgott, Julia from Dublin in 1990? You called me an idiot for leaving her. Remember? Well, you were probably right. Julia's here.

You don't know where here is. You were such an ass to me a couple of months ago (you've been such an ass to me forever), so I didn't tell you I left the U.S. for good.

I'm back in Antwerp, where Dad lived (although we didn't know it) and Julia lives here. She saved me from going to jail.

I broke into the apartment building where Dad and Solly grew up. Julia convinced the authorities to put me in a private rest home and to have me psychologically evaluated. Julia apparently had to work hard to keep me out of jail. She was there when I broke in because she lives in the building next door to Dad's old place. She heard the glass crashing and police sirens and ran outside and recognized me.

Two days ago Julia managed to get me out of the home. She told me she knew Dad and she told me he died. Sorry, David.

I wanted answers. That's why I'm here. I wanted to know why Dad left us, where Dad went. There are lots of secrets. It's opened up a new world, this investigation. Julia introduced me to an old woman named Mrs. Fisher who grew up across the hall from our family. I got my answers, and I think I should give them to you.

This isn't an easy decision. When Charlie was born, I called you, and you said, “Good luck with that.” That's all. But I am preparing to tell you what I know. This is your family, too.

T.

Day Nine:
Transcript 8

Has Julia told you any of this?

Okay. Well, Kaatje and Cranberry were confused. They were at the police station, of course, the morning of my break-in. And there was Julia arguing vehemently with a whole crowd of people who wanted my head for causing such a disturbance. And everyone knew who I was, because I look a lot like my dad. Kaatje and Cranberry didn't know what was going on. Why did people know me? Who was this woman? How did she know so much about me? Confusing.

When they asked her, Julia would only tell them she knew me through my dad. They asked her to talk to me. She refused, made them promise not to tell me that she was involved or even in Antwerp. Kaatje and Cranberry were so confused, but they agreed not to tell. They were worried I'd get put in jail if they revealed her identity.

No. Julia had no interest in seeing me. I didn't know the impact I'd had on her when we were so young. She thought she'd found her true love, her soul mate . . . and I disappeared from Antwerp without saying goodbye. She was devastated. You know, she was twenty-two then. Twenty-two is tough. It put her into a deep depression.

Julia and I are a lot alike, except she's always known herself and has managed to keep working to do what she wants to do, instead of falling to pieces and starting over every couple of years like I did.

She believed she'd never forgive me for what I did.

Dramatic, yes. But true, I think.

It was only after Kaatje and Cranberry came to her with the Yiddish newspaper article that Julia agreed to get involved further. Cranberry told her I was searching for Dad. She couldn't believe I didn't know he'd died. It broke her heart . . . she's dramatic. She decided she had a responsibility to get me information. Not because I was me, but because people deserve to know what happened to their parents. European Jews are very big on this recovery of history, I think. Julia knew Mrs. Fisher well.

I had to write David. Who else was there? My kids are too young to understand. I'll tell them someday.

An act of forgiveness? I don't know. I mean, I'm not a great person. David's not a great person. Neither of us deserves anything. I just thought he should know, even if he doesn't have any interest in knowing. At least I gave him the opportunity—or would have had I sent him the letters. And . . . I almost didn't tell him everything.

Letter 44
October 15, 2004

David,

I'm writing you from a balcony overlooking Stads Park. This is Julia Hilfgott's apartment, which is adjacent to the apartment where our father spent the first ten years of his life. Strange?

I've been told it is not so strange. The Jews in Antwerp live in the same neighborhoods they always have since the beginning of time, clustered a bit by sect. Julia knows dozens of families who have lived in all of the buildings along this street, this park. This is what I've been told, though I suppose I still find the coincidence unfathomable. But there aren't that many buildings, and there aren't that many Jews of our family's kind, modern Conservative Jews.

There are people in this neighborhood who knew our family and remember them well. One old lady in particular, Mrs. Fisher. Mrs. Fisher lived across the hall from our family. She still lives in that apartment, across from where I pounded on our father's door. She remembers everything.

She doesn't know everything, though. Mrs. Fisher, for instance, had no idea our father had children, certainly not goyische children. How everything has changed, she said.

But she knows a lot. And now she knows even more—she's even been a first-hand witness to my emergence onto this scene. Mrs. Fisher nearly had a heart attack that night—breaking glass, screaming man. My assistant, Cranberry, screaming in the street. I caused her bad memories. She thought it was the Gestapo waking her up at three a.m.

Can't blame Mrs. Fisher for feeling ambivalent about me. Can't blame her for her anger toward our grandfather, either—she hates him. And that's fair, David. He wasn't a good man.

Luckily Mrs. Fisher is lonely, and her desire to talk to someone, anyone, even the enemy, outweighed her ambivalence about me.

Are we the enemy? Not you and me, David. Not really, except that I woke her up. Grandfather certainly.

Maybe someday I'll tell you about the ancient howling ladies at the rest home. They knew exactly who I was, David. It was in the Yiddish newspaper. It was alive in their graying memories. They knew I was our grandfather's grandson.

Laurence, our father's father, was a powerful man. He became the president of the largest synagogue in the city. He was a very very rich man. Not from diamonds, though, which is what I thought.

What did our grandfather, a poor Polish immigrant, whom we never met, who died before the end of World War II, do to get filthy rich?

He was a steel importer and exporter. He became wealthy by making contracts with the German government after the First World War. In a way, he helped rebuild the Reich (sort of ). He helped rebuild German productive capacity and then purchased iron and steel products from them and exported them all over Europe and to Latin America. Yes, he helped build the Third Reich, but only in a physical sense. And not many in Antwerp believe Grandfather could see into the future, see what devastation was coming from the Nazis he did business with after 1933 (Mrs. Fisher actually believes he could see into the future).

Here's what Mrs. Fisher said (imagine a tiny and bent Gabor sister, her voice like Eva in
The Aristocats
): “Your grandfather knew something. He always knew something before everyone else knew anything. He was magic, because he always understood what would happen before it happened. That's why he was so respected. And feared, too. Sure feared. That's why others accepted his investment in their businesses even when it came at such a price. He knew what would happen before it happened.”

But we're not to the terrible secrets yet, David. Grandfather was not terrible because he could possibly see into the future and was a tough businessman and had business dealings with the Nazis before the war. His perfidy to the Jews was much worse. Our grandfather was a terrible traitor.

We spent the afternoon with Mrs. Fisher. Julia, me, and my two assistants were sitting at a table on Mrs. Fisher's balcony. It was a gray day, as most are here, but the air felt good and we could see bikers and walkers, Hasids and Indians, moving past on the street below. It was an important day.

I took pages and pages of notes. I'll copy them and send them to you, I think.

Mrs. Fisher prepared much food for our meeting. She served tea and scampi and iced water with lemon, and then cake and finger pastries and coffee, and then wine. And then, after hours, some other kind of fish, as it moved toward late afternoon and we all were losing energy. She enjoyed having company, even me, and clearly enjoyed telling her stories, speaking about these ghosts from her past. I haven't ever had a meal prepared like that.

I just thought of something, David. I'll write this when I can. I have something to do first.

T.

Letter 45
October 15, 2004

Dear Julia Child,

I just heard you died a couple of months ago. I'm sorry. When I was a kid, I'd turn on Public Television looking for
Sesame Street
or the
The Electric Company,
and I'd find you, cooking and smiling. You sounded like a Muppet, a chicken caricature of a New Englander. Bok bok bok. You caught my attention. In my own kitchen, there was always one lightbulb out in the ceiling fixture. It was always dim in there as my mother made another box of macaroni. On the television, you laughed and wore colorful blouses and whooped and clucked while preparing some kind of chicken, while discussing the proper wine to drink with it. I couldn't take my eyes off you. Do you know how much we've lost?

T. Rimberg

Day Nine:
Transcript 9

Sitting in that building, on that balcony, eating in that way with people all around . . . it felt like I was part of a family. This is how my dad and his parents spent free time, on these balconies, eating, talking. There was no TV to baby-sit the kids.

It was an odd combination. In some respects, I felt so good sitting out there. I felt something about what was right with my family before I was born. At the same time, this terrible history, which can't entirely be blamed on my grandfather . . . I mean, he didn't create the Nazis . . . was being revealed.

It was a strange thing to do, to write Julia Child. I guess I needed to acknowledge something right in the way they lived.

Letter 46
October 15, 2004

Dear David,

We're ghosts from the past. Here are Mrs. Fisher's thoughts, written from my notes of our conversation. Get ready.

Mrs. Fisher was born in February of 1925. The next month our Uncle Solly was born in the apartment across the hall.

One of Mrs. Fisher's earliest memories was listening to our grandfather verbally bludgeon our grandmother, Aida. “Your grandmother wanted to have a real house. And sure Laurence could afford a house! But he would not pay for a house staff and said there was too much room already—it was a very nice apartment, still very nice, you should look in. I was in the park with my mother and the governess and your grandmother and uncle. Your grandfather happened on us as he walked home from his business, and he screamed at Aida that he would not pay for a house, not ever. I don't know why this memory is so vivid. Perhaps his viciousness?”

Mrs. Fisher remembers her mother calling Grandfather a low-class shtetler who couldn't spend his mountain of money because he might not have enough for his potatoes. I don't understand exactly what that means, David.

Grandfather was not interested in having another child. People talked about Rimberg and his one child and thought, what must be wrong with Aida if there is only one child? Of course, another Rimberg did arrive, eventually. Mrs. Fisher says Grandfather knew before Grandma Aida did. “You're pregnant,” Mrs. Fisher remembers him spitting in the hall, looking at her hips and shaking his head.

“No!” Grandma Aida spat back. “I would know if I am with child!”

Eight months later, in late 1928, our father, Josef, was born.

This child, though, this special child, he softened Laurence up. Dad was so beautiful, light brown curly hair from the beginning (like yours, Mrs. Fisher said to me), these blue eyes like his father's (she pointed at my face, my eyes, and nodded). An angel of a child. “I was not even four years old, but I remember this change in your grandfather. Never did I see him shout at your grandmother again.” Mrs. Fisher nodded.

And then, David, there was more talk: steel, and our grandmother's purchasing of apartments and also constructing them, building her own little empire of real estate. They prospered even through the economic strife of the thirties, with trips to the ocean in summer, Knokke on the North Sea, afternoon tea with the Conservative Association Antwerp families sitting together at luxury hotels. Grandfather rose to be president of the Conservative Association and to the head of many committees at Van den Nestlei, the main synagogue, the most important in Antwerp, amid fraying nerves about what was happening in Germany.

This is when our grandfather began to commit real crimes, I think.

In January 1938 there was a meeting at the synagogue where our grandfather told everyone to calm down. Germany would not make the mistake of coming into Belgium again.

But in April of 1938 our grandfather, seemingly without reason, sent thirteen-year-old Solly to live with distant relatives in New York. Mrs. Fisher was brokenhearted. She'd believed she and Solly would grow up together, would marry, have children, walk them in carriages in the park, own a summer home in Knokke. Mrs. Fisher listened at her door as a Flemish man pulled Solly's trunk from the apartment. Solly and Grandfather stood in the hall. “Go,” Grandfather told Solly. “Don't look back. Never speak of the past. Don't think of us anymore.”

“Why would he say this if he didn't know what was coming?”Mrs. Fisher asked.

In 1939, Mrs. Fisher's father, nervous about moves Grandfather was making, sent her and her mother to Switzerland, where they stayed through the war. Mrs. Fisher's father was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. Even writing that makes me sick.

In February of 1940 our father, Josef, disappeared from Antwerp. He didn't show up in school. He missed his music lessons, which he wouldn't ever do, because he was a very dedicated young pianist. When asked, Grandfather told everyone he'd sent his son to boarding school in Switzerland. In fact, people found out later, Dad was sent only a short distance away to Mechelen, to live with a liberal Catholic family whom Grandfather knew through business ties. Dad lived as a Catholic on a farm, where he survived the war.

Three months later, in May of 1940, the Germans came. Many in the community had escaped days in advance, having heard terrible stories of the treatment of Jews in Germany and in the already conquered Poland and Czechoslovakia. Of the some 50,000 Jews of Antwerp, about 25,000 remained behind, including our grandfather and grandmother.

The Germans set up an organization called the Judenrat to act as an intermediary between the Jewish community and the German leaders. Our grandfather, naturally, having done business in Germany and being fluent in German and a leader in the community, was chosen to lead the organization. Or rather, he volunteered to lead it. “He wanted to protect his business interests. Do you think he would just give away these holdings? All of the apartments your grandmother owned? No! So work with the Germans! They will reward people who cooperate.”

And for a time, the Germans were hands-off. The Judenrat communicated German decrees to the Jews, and complained to the Germans if they felt their rights were being stepped on too much. (Why should we register? Why can't we visit the parks? Why should we wear these stars?) Complaints were actually heard and dealt with in rational conversations, although, of course, the Germans implemented the policies anyway. But with each day of seeming peace, and a continued “correct” attitude on the part of the Germans, Grandfather's reputation as leader grew. “Just obey obey obey. The Germans have no problem with us as long as we obey.”

Then in April of 1941, Belgian anti-Semitic groups attacked the Jewish neighborhoods, burning businesses and homes. And the Germans did nothing to protect the Jews.

“The Germans will work with the Antwerp government to see that we are reimbursed,” Grandfather told everyone. There was no reimbursement.

In early 1942, young people, young women and men, began to be called by the Germans to go to Germany to work. People came running to the Judenrat. “What should we do?”

“Obey,” Grandfather told them. “It will be fine.”

A lucky few, David, didn't obey. A few escaped right then. The ones who obeyed . . . You can imagine the consequences.

And in the summer of 1942, mass deportations began. Grandfather helped organize the movement. He called on groups of Jews to gather their belongings and meet at the train station, telling everyone it would be fine. Soon word came from Mechelen (remember Mechelen?) that a kind of transport depot had been set up there, and Jews from Brussels and Holland were being shoved into cars like cattle and hauled off to the east. It will be fine, our grandfather told everyone. It will be fine. And on August 27, 1942, there was a massive arrest, which took 70 percent of the Jews in Antwerp. Grandfather helped organize that, too, calling out from a megaphone to go peaceably. All the way into early 1943, even with horrible evidence mounting, our grandfather continued to collaborate with the Germans, continued to bring Jews to the square in front of this ornate train station in central Antwerp that has haunted me since I've been here. He stuck them on trains, and they were taken to Mechelen, put in cattle cars and hauled off to die. That's our grandfather, David. That's Laurence Rimberg.

In August of 1943, there were no Jews left, except for a few with Belgian citizenship and the members of the Judenrat. The Germans disbanded the Judenrat at that point, because, of course, there was no more need for an intermediary. The members of the Judenrat were rounded up on September 4, except—guess who? Laurence Rimberg. He had disappeared.

And here history gets hazy. Word on the street was that Grandfather had been working to get forged papers, a forged identity, for the year preceding the termination of the Judenrat. He, like Dad, was sandy-haired and could pass for a gentile easily. Our grandparents became Catholics who lived in Holland. They attended mass, so the story goes. They even became involved in social committees. But then Grandmother found Grandfather hanging from a beam in their tiny house (either hanged by his own hand, or perhaps not—there are plenty of rumors that suggest someone else did this). Shortly thereafter, our lovely grandmother Aida died. By the middle of 1944, although they didn't know it, Solly and Dad were orphans.

I've had dreams, David, of children being dragged by soldiers, dreams of our father laughing while watching the Jews be gathered. I've cowered in the corner in these dreams crying and terrified. It was our grandfather. He did this. We should be cursed.

There. You have the history.

T.