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Dear Cz friends, As there has been increased talk here about Avram Kaplan, Mogelov and Transnystria, I am taking the liberty of including below a 4 page chapter from my book-in-progress. It is a true rendition of my trip with my late husband. (Excuse the poor formatting) I don't know if adding these pages is acceptable or if it will show up at all but it's worth a try. If there is a problem, please write to me at
coraschwartz_at_gmail.com Open to all comments as always:
(Cernivtsi 1973)
“Look.” Greg struggled to get something from his inside breast pocket. “My mother wrote about visiting Transnystria with my father.” He placed a packet in front of Marika. “I carry these pages around with me, hoping to find someone who can go with me to the camp, or what’s left of it.”
Marika’s eyes opened wide. “Can I read it?”
“I would love for you to read it. It would be wonderful to hear it in a woman’s voice.”
********************
‘Rudy complained it was a waste of time.
I nodded and didn’t say anything. What could I say to a sixty year old man who spent four childhood years in a Nazi labor camp and didn’t want to go back? Finally he agreed to go.
The next morning, he kissed me on both cheeks as he always did. The glowing tip of his cigarettes faded as he walked silently down the dim corridor of the Hotel Cheramosh. The Gypsy song he whistled echoed while he waited for the elevator. A few minutes later, dressed in his favorite peasant blouse and flowered skirt, I hurried down to meet him for breakfast, and the six hour car trip to Transnystria.
The deep potholes and fallen rocks in the road slowed us down to a thirty-kilometer crawl. Rudy didn’t talk much except to join our Romanian driver who cursed incessantly as he navigated around horse drawn wagons. I sat behind Rudy so I could see his face in the side view mirror. Our guide, and friend Zoya sat next to me. At noon, we stopped in a little village wherewe got our exercise and our lunch in a crowded farmers’ market. Rudy bargained for bright red tomatoes, homemade cheese, honey in a soda bottle, and his favorite, sour milk.
I stood behind him and watched his hand gestures over dark, warm bread. Its aroma filled the air. A weary man was selling the bread and there were four disheveled children sitting on wooden boxes near his wagon. One little girl in a red kerchief stared at us with her mouth open.
“Zoya will it be terrible at the camp? Will I be sorry I talked him into it? Now I’m getting scared.”
“What can I say? I have been there many times, taken many survivors. But nobody is like Rudy. I don’t really know what this will be like for him.”
“He has this thing, this anger. It’s always there. It’s hard for people to understand.”
Zoya nodded. We could say anything to each other. “I know what Rudy is about, remember?” When she smiled her gold tooth caught the sun.
Zoya had made an appointment with an Avram Kaplan who walked us through the weeds behind a Community Center to his ‘museum.’ In the empty room the town had given him, Mr. Kaplan put together a memorial to the ninety thousands prisoners who were murdered there in Transnystria. The walls were covered with photographs of survivors, some with black borders to indicate their death. I sat on a wooden chair next to Rudy. Mr. Kaplan picked up a pointer and lectured, stopping every few sentences to allow Zoya to translate for me. After going through the statistics, the set and plan of the place he proudly switched on tiny red and white Christmas lights that winked at us from the wall map he constructed. He pointed to one camp in the corner and said, “Scazinetz.”
Rudy’s head dropped.
“You know this camp?” Mr. Kaplan asked.
“My camp.” Rudy’s unfamiliar hushed voice made me shudder.
Mr. Kaplan stopped talking for a few moments before moving his pointer across the map to the distribution center. This was where it was decided to which camp each prisoner must go. He told us the people were already hungry and worn from the train that brought them from their homes to this place. They had not been fed, there was no heat in the distribution center, no glass in the windows. It was so crowded, he said, that some people slept in the snow. Many did not get up and many others could no longer make the trek up the mountain to their respective camps. They were shot in front of the distribution center and shoved into a huge pit while the others watched.
I saw the mountain through the window behind Mr. Kaplan. I pictured nine-year-old Rudy dragging his mother’s suitcase up that mountain in the snow.
Zoya brought me back with the next translation. “When the prisoners reached their camps they were told to leave their belongings in the snow. Many found their hands were frozen and they could not let go.” Mr. Kaplan closed his eyes when he recounted how the guards used razors to cut the skin on frozen fingers from suitcase handles. I wondered if hands could get frozen together, like the hands of a mother and child.
Mr. Kaplan asked a question. Rudy gazed out the window for a second and answered yes, he remembered. Then he got up slowly. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He walked to the book of survivors. His head was low over the page where he signed his name. He put the pen down but stayed bent for a few seconds, as though he would never stand straight again.
When he did straighten, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. I turned away. He held his hand out and gave the handkerchief to me. “So now you see. Like I always said, it’s a long story.”
Rudy took out his fat roll of bills and handed all the money to Mr. Kaplan.
We drove on to Scazinetz, which was now a prison. Rudy said, “I’ve had enough. It’s time to go back.”
“This is the last stop. I promise.”
Rudy spoke Russian to a pair of young men sitting at desks overlooking an empty courtyard. Their machine guns rested on a low bench. I understood him when he asked, “What is this, how many prisoners are here?” Rudy hesitated and scratched his head in the way he does when he’s getting ready to say something serious.
“What is he saying now?” I asked Zoya,
“He is asking if they know what this place used to be.”
The guard’s impassive faces didn’t need a translation.
“You see?” Rudy said to me.
“I don’t believe it. How could they not know?”
Rudy rolled a cigarette around in his fingers before he struck a match and lit it. He watched me through the smoke with squinted eyes as though waiting for me to say something. Then he turned and walked away.
The guards turned to Zoya. ‘What is the ‘problema’ they asked. They shrugged when she told them about Scazinetz, and that Rudy was a survivor.
We were back in the car. The driver drove a few hundred feet and stopped at a memorial stone. It was the place of a mass grave. Zoya asked Rudy if we should get out. He said no. A bronze plaque reflected the setting sun.
“Look at that,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“The plaque, it looks like it’s on fire.”
Rudy turned to me. “I don’t see anything.”
It was already dark when we arrived on the main road to start the long trip back to Chernivtsi. Zoya’s eyes were red. Our driver asked Rudy for a cigarette. He tossed him an unopened pack. “Don’t worry about it,” he said when the driver protested. “There is plenty more where that came from.” The driver smoked one after another. Rudy sat next to him, his pale face showed no emotion.
I thought about Avram Kapan, the razors, the wagons rolling through the camp in the morning, collecting bodies thrown one upon the other to form a mountain of corpses.
I expected to be depressed by the visit to Transnystria. Instead I was angry. We passed wagons with families returning from the fields, children bundled in straw and blankets, husbands and wives huddled together on the front seat with woolen ski hats pulled down low and collars up to their ears. Our driver beeped his horn politely now, before passing them. I cleared a circle in the vapor that kept forming on my window from my breath. I tapped lightly on the glass. Suddenly I needed to smash my hand through the window. Maybe that would get their attention, everybody’s attention. I wanted them to hear the sound of glass breaking. I wanted them to see the blood. Instead I put my hand back in my lap.
That night Rudy got drunk at the Hotel Cheramosh but I managed to get him upstairs. He stumbled into the bedroom, miscalculated and missed the chair. His head hit the floor with a loud thud. The blood spread over his shirt and on to the carpet.
“It’s not my fault.” He sobbed as he struggled to get up.
I ran to the bathroom for a towel and held it tight to his head.
“It’s not my fault,” he said again.
I pulled him up on the bed. I was crying too.
“So now you know,” he said.
“Yes, now I know.”
“At least somebody knows.”
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Received on 2018-02-11 23:44:07