When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Read online

  On Friday, I take my son to a candlelight vigil at the 1913 Firemen’s Memorial on 100th Street and Riverside Drive, just a block away from our rented apartment. It is a marble sarcophagus fronted by a bronze frieze of a horse-drawn fire engine at full tilt, flanked by two statues, representing “duty” and “sacrifice,” erected “by the people of a grateful city” in 1912, “to the men of the fire department of the city of New York who died at the call of duty — soldiers in a war that never ends.” Now the monument has been transformed into a shrine to the hundreds of firefighters who perished in this disaster, men who struggled up those stairs as everyone else struggled down. On the wall, someone has taped a stanza from canto twenty-three of Dante’s “Inferno,” from The Divine Comedy:

  A painted people there below we found

  Who went about with footsteps very slow

  Weeping and in their looks subdued and weary.

  The memorial plaza is laden with flowers — roses and lilies, daisies and sunflowers — and ringed with cards, posters, and flickering votive candles. A teacher from the nearby Booker T. Washington Middle School methodically lays out the cards that her class has prepared. “To all those who risked their lives to save our families, you make all the difference in the world, love from Zoey.” Zoey has drawn a heart and colored it in with stars and stripes, and rent the heart in two.

  Hundreds of our neighbors have gathered silently, overflowing down the slope toward Riverside Park. I hoist my son onto my shoulders.

  “Look at all the candles,” he exclaims, and begins singing “Happy Birthday” in a clear, piping voice. The woman next to us breaks down in racking sobs. Above us, golden in the final rays of the setting sun, an F-16 fighter jet banks steeply over the southern tip of Manhattan, turns and prowls back up the Hudson.

  The week after the attacks, I begin working occasional shifts at St. Paul’s Chapel, which once numbered George Washington among its parishioners. It is right across the street from the downed towers and yet has escaped unscathed; not a pane in its windows has been broken. The main force of the blast was borne by a massive sycamore tree, which now lies uprooted in its small cemetery. The vicar there, Reverend Lyndon Harris, recently served as the chaplain at my son’s school, St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s, on West 114th Street, and has called in dire need of volunteers. Mostly we unpack provisions being trucked in from the Midwest, and then we don surgical masks and trundle coffee and bottled water and sandwiches into Ground Zero to feed the volunteers and construction workers toiling there.

  In those early weeks after the attacks, Armageddon really does seem to stare down at us. Anthrax mailings and rumors of dirty bombs abound; terrorist cells are poised to visit new calamities upon us. Wrenched from its muddling mundanity, life here too, as in Africa, is suddenly rendered exquisitely perishable and precious.

  In October, when city hall reopens after the disaster, Joanna and I join a long line at the heightened security checkpoint to do something we have previously neglected: marry. We joke that it is a trade-off: she will get my forthcoming green card, and in return I will be covered by her health insurance. But in this changed world, an institution that we had both thought unnecessary suddenly seems relevant. In a small, neon-lit room with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, a pleasant Hispanic matron intones a heavily accented Esperanto of vows. She is completely unfazed by the fact that Joanna is eight months pregnant with our second child. We conclude festivities with a brisk brunch at Bubby’s, an upscale diner in TriBeCa, and then Joanna goes back up to Midtown, to her job at New York magazine, and I go on shift at Ground Zero.

  AT THE END of one shift I escape the blackened cinders of the ruins and stroll across to Battery Park and down the Hudson, and I find myself looking up at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. So I go in and sit in their empty cafeteria and order kosher vegetable rissoles and knishes and drink coffee with nondairy creamer and look out over a gray Hudson to the old Ellis Island immigrant station and the Statue of Liberty. I have hardly been thinking about my father’s secret past; it has been crowded out by 9/11. But now I make my way into the museum itself. I skip the floors of Jewish folklore and religious rites, and go right to the Holocaust floor. And there unfolds in front of me an instant history of what happened to the Polish Jews. A chart on the wall lays out the timetable of their torment, the closing of the vise. In the early hours of September 1, 1939, German panzers thundered into Poland. Four weeks later, Warsaw was theirs. On October 26, the new Nazi overlords passed a decree that all Jewish men between fourteen and sixty were to do forced labor; three months later this was extended to women. On November 23, all Jews were made to wear yellow Star of David armbands. Warsaw’s Jews, four hundred thousand of them, were then forced into the ghetto, and within a year it was sealed.

  Before the death camps were set up, I learn, German mobile killing units, the einsatzgruppen, did much of the Jew killing. The firing squads made victims dig their own graves before they were shot. In one grainy thirty-second loop of footage that shows continuously on a TV monitor, Jewish prisoners are unloaded from a truck in front of a large group of spectators, some of whom are smoking and chatting. The Jews, confused and unresisting, are herded into a large shallow pit and gunned down by a firing squad. A pet dog, frightened by the gunfire, runs through the frame and is comforted by its owner. I watch it again and again, the same grainy loop — genocide’s Groundhog Day. The Jews are unloaded from a truck. The audience smokes and chats. The rifles fire. The Jews fall dead in a heap. The little dog bolts. Its owner gathers it into his arms and comforts it.

  I have heard about Auschwitz and Belsen, but here, I learn the names of the rest of the Polish camps: Che?mno, Be?z?ec, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Treblinka.

  On the museum wall dedicated to these death factories are some magnified quotes from the diaries of inmates. One is written from Treblinka:

  We secretly placed in the walls of the graves whole skeletons and we wrote on scraps of paper what the Germans were doing at Treblinka. We put the scraps of paper into bottles which we placed next to the skeletons. Our intention was that if one day someone looked for traces of the Nazis’ crimes, they could indeed be found.

  The writer’s name is Goldfarb, Abraham Goldfarb.

  GOLDFARB’S SECRET MESSAGE in a bottle feels like a personal rebuke. Even as he faced death, he reached out to speak to future generations. I phone my mother and ask her whether we might now discuss my father’s family history.

  “In fact, he’s been working on a letter to you,” she says.

  Soon, a letter does arrive from my father. Only it’s not a letter as such. It’s a family tree, meticulously plotted in his draftsman’s hand on sheets of graph paper taped together. They fold out like an expanding concertina — an intricate origami of our origin. It goes back five generations, and many of the names have footnote numbers by them, fourteen footnotes in all. I notice that he has referred to himself cryptically, by the initials of his assumed name, GG — George Godwin — and has deliberately omitted his birth date. Footnote number eight is marked next to his name. But the footnotes themselves are not enclosed.

  They arrive a few weeks later, mailed only after I have confirmed receipt of the family tree, so that it cannot be deciphered on its own, if intercepted. Footnote eight, after my father, GG, reads simply, “You can work that out yourself.” Even now, in his moment of candor, he cannot bring himself to use his original name. It goes against all that he has struggled to hide for half a century, his self-imposed witness protection program. On the same line as his, he has used his sister’s real name, her only name, Halina Goldfarb. The twelve-year-old girl in the daisy chain headband, suppressing a grin.

  Next to her name he has written: “Born 1926. d. H. X.”

  His footnotes explain the code.

  d = died

  H = Holocaust

  X = extinction of branch of family

  I count the symbols. Of the twenty-four family members in Poland at the time, sixteen were killed in the
Holocaust, including his mother and sister.

  The footnotes are accompanied by some terse instructions. It seems that my father does not really want to discuss his former self with me. What he wants is for me to initiate a Red Cross tracing inquiry for his sister, Halina, and his mother, Janina.

  I write to the American Red Cross, and I get a reply from their Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center. It says that hundreds of thousands of names of victims imprisoned by the Third Reich have recently come to light in newly acquired documents, which has greatly expanded their ability to trace missing relatives. Enclosed are two Tracing Inquiry forms. I fill them out, such as I can from the bare bones my father has sent me.

  Name: Halina Jadwiga Goldfarb

  Occupation: schoolgirl

  Address: No. 5 Kredytowa Street, Warsaw

  Nationality: Polish

  Religion: Jewish

  Under “Last Contact With Sought Person,” I write: “Disappeared from a Warsaw Street in 1942/43.”

  That’s all my father has written.

  I go back and review the form and realize I have missed the first line. At the very top it says: “Sought person is my . . .” and I write: “Aunt.”

  And then I turn to the next form and write: “Grandmother.”

  Only then does it really sink in. This is not just my father’s history; this is my family too; these are my people. Just as Abraham Goldfarb had intended, this Holocaust is reaching forward in time to snag me with its icy claw, to confound me with its counsel of despair. But still I want to resist this inherited burden. My father’s antique associations have nothing to do with my life. These are not my fights. That was there, then. This is here, now.

  I used to think that we white Africans were hard to sympathize with because we were that least defensible of constituencies, the unwronged. Now I am having thrust upon me the poisoned chalice of historic victimhood. But notwithstanding Abraham Goldfarb’s hidden bottle, the hemlock of the Holocaust is not something I wish to drink.

  I know that Jews call the Holocaust the Shoah, which in Hebrew means “catastrophe.” I dimly recall reading Anne Frank’s diary as a child. I once read Primo Levi’s account of Auschwitz; I saw Schindler’s List. I studied the Nuremberg trials in history. But it really wasn’t something I had dwelled on in any detail.

  Holocaust. Holo caustum. From eight years of schoolboy Latin I knew it meant “whole burned.” Burned whole. Even the phoenix of Zionism that rose from those ashes — the muscular sabras trying to reestablish a home in an unforgiving land surrounded by hostile Arabs — resonated too closely with my white African narrative. The parallels with South Africa in particular seemed uncanny. Israelis were building barriers to separate themselves from those who threatened them, just as white Africans had tried to do. Both had created odd-shaped, artificial homelands, isolated dust bowls for those they had displaced, and said to Palestinians or to blacks: live there and rule yourselves, you are no longer a subject people.

  The Red Cross writes back to acknowledge my tracing requests, saying that it will take at least a year for them to be processed. And a few days later, our second son, Hugo, is born. We give him George as a second name. George, after my father. George, which is English for Jerzy. I phone my parents to give them news of their new grandchild. My father comes on the line, and we talk of the baby for a while, and then I tell him that I’ve sent off his tracing inquiry to the Red Cross. It is the first time we have ever referred directly to his real past.

  There is a pause on the line, and then he says gruffly, “Thanks.”

  “Do you think you could tell me more . . . more about, it all?”

  “Well, Pete,” he says, his voice now flat and guarded. “I’ll try. What do you want to know?”

  I struggle to keep the exasperation out of my voice.

  “What do I want to know? Who you are, Dad? I want to know who you are.”

  And so, as an old man now, my father tries to reintroduce himself to his own son, finally acknowledging his real identity, hidden from the world for half a century. Eventually, I receive an e-mail from him. It is headed “My Life History: Part One — Childhood.” My mother says he has been working on it for months, sitting at the computer for hours at a time, staring at the screen between little bursts of two-fingered typing, while she pads in and out with trays of coffee and sandwiches.

  “It is so hard, Pete, after all this time,” he says. “I find it quite amazing how little I remember.”

  It is as if my father has made so few forays into the hidden landscape of his past that the neural pathways leading to these memories are choked with foliage, just as a footpath in Africa disappears soon after the people stop walking there. His e-mails read like reports from an archaeological dig: little random shards of a reconstructed life, the barest facts, shorn of their emotional context.

  He is finally trying to discard a mask, and yet it seems that when he peels it off he cannot easily access what’s underneath. The mask, the superimposed visage that he has shown the world, this concocted exterior, has become his only reality. It is more than just a mask; it is a suit of armor that hasn’t been shed for so long it has fused onto the milky body within, the body it was fabricated to protect.

  He has thought and thought about it, sitting in front of that computer screen in his room in Africa, looking out onto the gaudy tropical garden and bright African birds, but not seeing any of it, trying instead to see into the heart of a Polish boy in Warsaw a lifetime ago. Trying to reimagine who he once had been. And, in time, a few iconic moments emerge from the penumbra like tiny points of light in a wide dome of darkness, beams of a far-off search party coming to rescue him from a cliff face of autobiographical amnesia.

  Eleven

  1924

  KAZIMIERZ JERZY GOLDFARB is born in 1924 in apartment fourteen at 5 Kredytowa Street next to the Hunt Club in central Warsaw. He weighs only three-and-a-half pounds — about half a normal baby’s weight — and is initially kept in cotton wool in a cigar box on the study desk. Everyone calls him Kazio.

  My father has even found two photographs of the address, one as it was in 1939 and one now. He has translated the caption from Polish: “A wonderful building on the corner of Kredytowa Street and Dabrowski Place was lowered after the war, and the majority of interesting architectural details were removed.”

  There are shops underneath, he remembers. On one side, a barbershop, run by Mr. Majewski. Every day, when his father, Maurycy, finishes his breakfast, Mr. Majewski comes up with his little leather case and shaves him with a straight razor at the dining table.

  Maurycy is a shipping agent, and his father before him had been a wine taster. Kazio remembers being beaten by his father only once, when he left a hairbrush — bristles up — on his chair, and Maurycy sat on it.

  His mother, Janina, makes cherry schnapps. Her maiden name is Parnas, and though she no longer practices, she is one of the first women in Poland to qualify as a lawyer. Her father is an optician who has a shop called Iris in which he also sells electrical gadgets; the whole ceiling is hung with glowing chandeliers.

  Around the corner on Jasna (Bright) Street is a nightclub, with a black doorman — the only black person Kazio ever sees in Poland. And, nearby, an open-air café run by Philips, the radio manufacturers, with colored bulbs hanging from the trees, and loudspeakers playing music in the summer. He remembers going to sleep, serenaded by Chopin’s polonaises and mazurkas, waltzes and nocturnes.

  There is a live-in cook, a washerwoman who comes twice a week, and a succession of maids, country girls. He has a steel bed, which, he is assured, is the same model used in army officer training schools. There is a desk, rather like a school desk, with a top hinged in front. All his furniture is painted in royal blue with the edges in red.

  On top of the cupboard stands an 8mm film projector and an 8mm cine camera. Photography is his passion. He is allowed to use his mother’s folding camera, covered in tooled gray leather, and then he graduates to a black ena
mel Kodak Bantam Special with a chrome finish and an F2 lens.

  He plays with his sister in Saski (Saxon) Gardens, near their grandmother’s flat. When they are still small, he sits on a little seat fixed to his sister’s carriage, facing the nanny. Later on he plays in the park with his friends, Jurek Bregman and Wacek Binental.

  Their favorite game at home is Operations. He is always the surgeon. Anne, his cousin, is his assistant, and his sister is the patient’s mother. Her job is to cry. The patient is one of her dolls.

  He remembers a fancy-dress party. He is dressed as a lancer. He wears long slate blue breeches with red stripes down the sides, a tunic with crimson piping and white buttons, a lancer’s czapka and a real saber. The outfit is based on a carefully studied picture of a Polish officer in a book of French military uniforms during the Napoleonic Wars — Poles served in the French army. His sister is dressed as Marie Antoinette in a long white dress. She has long curls and a little white bonnet.

  When Maurycy’s business is in trouble, during the Great Depression, he withdraws all the savings out of Kazio’s savings account and empties his piggy bank. But the economy recovers, and their wealth is soon restored.

  He remembers his nursery school teacher, Miss Bronia Dekler, a large elderly spinster who teaches him to write, and the day that he is finally allowed to graduate from pencil to pen. He remembers going to the collegium by streetcar, and being the teacher’s pet; being given as a present a book by Jan Korczak, about the boy-King Matt, hunting in a forest. He remembers his school uniform, a double-breasted navy blue suit and a soft square cap. And on his sleeve a badge, in the form of a shield, with the number of the school, 89, in blue for the lower years, red for the upper.