7

137 Ave de Suffren,

75724 PARIS

Cedex 15

August 3, 1982

Dearest Radislaw, Radek, Rudi, or whatever they call you there, I hope this letter is not too unwelcome. I was moved to write it after I met Frau Zusters—remember her?—in Berlin this summer. Albert has an interest in a string of supermarkets in West Germany—“Tante Marthe” they’re called. If a housewife spends more than 65 marks she is given a blow-up plastic model of a cozy-looking woman called “Tante Marthe.” Albert got the idea from a chain in California in which he has an investment.

Here we are, brother and sister, and haven’t written to each other in years, since Father died, God help him, and I talk about inflatable damned dolls, as if it were the purpose of the letter. The doll came up though because of its resemblance to my memory of Frau Zusters. I am now older than widow Zusters was when we were sheltered in her house and I still consider myself a desirable woman—you’d say that’s always been my problem. I make the point only as a reflection of the fact widow Zusters then probably still saw herself as a woman in her prime, even though my memory of her bears a close resemblance to a silly Tante Marthe doll.

So during our Berlin visit this summer it played on me: Who was in that house these days? Was it still there? Perhaps the Russians destroyed it in those last few days? It’s age, I think, working on me, and it’s made worse by the fact we had lived through too much fatal history before we were fifteen. I could imagine myself now going back to see the DP camps at Michelstadt or Regensburg the way people go back to an old school. Fortunately those two alma maters—or almae matres—see how well Herr Hirschmann and Miss Tokina taught me before, in their different ways, they both “went east”?—fortunately Regensburg and Michelstadt, with all their camp spivs and operators, no longer exist. All the Displaced Persons have been Placed; Europe is finished with that particular piece of its gardening. I can still however make a fool of myself and go looking for Frau Zusters.

The old house is what passes these days for an easy limousine drive from our hotel near the Europa Center. And you know, I found her without any trouble. The house is divided now, not into two apartments as in our day when half Berlin was bombed out, but into four. Frau Zusters occupies one and rents the other three out to young lawyers and businessmen and their growing families. She has been widowed a second time, so perhaps the dear old thing was a faster mover than she seemed to us to be. Her mind is clear as crystal. She reminded me of the day when we all went and lined up for her 300 grams of meat and that squad of kids turned up and dragged the dentist out of his surgery and beat him up for being defeatist. She told me that I sat on the park fence that day yelling, “I’m going to go and live in Paris.” “And you do,” she said. “You do.”

She took me to the cellar because she said she had something to give me. She had kept in a trunk all Father’s journals. She apologized that the cover of two of them had grown a little mildewed. I didn’t tell her I was ignorant of the fact that Father had been a diarist, but I realized immediately he was exactly the sort of fellow who would write up a journal. He was vain enough—no, I’m not being a bitch, I use the term forgivingly—and really believed that he lived on what he would have called the cutting edge of history. And he thought we’d be all coming back through Berlin pretty soon, when the Allies turned on the Soviets. He’d pick them up on his way through back to Minsk.

I took the dozen or so leather-covered notebooks she gave me. I had to. To refuse would have been an insult to her fidelity. I feel no curiosity about them. I suppose I remembered enough. On the other hand, I didn’t want to burn them. He thought I was a bad daughter, but if he went to so much trouble to make special provision for them it wasn’t my business to turn them to ash. You were the one he considered his heir. I became forever the adolescent whore who went off with the French sergeant in the DP camp. You were his little Belorussian survivor, and it is up to you now what is done with the journals.

As well as this there is the problem, given that the Allies did not turn on the Russians and recapture Minsk and Staroviche, that Europe may not be a safe place for such memoirs. The names of your godfather Ostrowsky and Abramtchik and other Belorussian leaders appear often in histories of that period. There is a book published recently and written by an American intelligence officer of the era which complains that these men were given undue protection by the American Central Intelligence and by the British and French, that Ostrowsky and Abramtchik and Stankievich and all the others are war criminals and should be tried as such. In books of this nature Papa always merits at least a footnote because of a certain massacre carried out by Belorussian police and the SS on the Staroviche-Gomel road in 1941.

Again, we knew very young that events are subtle and that “war criminal” is a relative and shifting term. It was a term used with a straight face by Stalin, whose crimes against the Belorussians and Ukrainians make the SS seem almost indulgent. Nonetheless I consider it my last daughterly duty to send these journals to a far continent where they are not likely to cause comment or serve as evidence. I place them therefore in the care of a loyal son. My advice to you is nonetheless to burn them. There will be too much in them about Onkel Willi, and that awful man Bienecke, and all the rest. I remember you in that six months we spent in Berlin at the end. You were in a daze, which was merciful given the level of bombing. But it was not a happy daze. It terrified Mother. Remembering that child, my advice to you is at least to store them unread and at best to burn them. You and I know how there are vipers nesting in those pages.

I hope you and your children are well. As for me, though childless, I have a loving husband. Father thought him a crook and a child molester, but he has been an honorable man all these years.

The journals are on their way under separate cover.

Your—believe me—affectionate sister, Genia