Epilogue

 

AFTER I LEFT Ania’s, I returned to the DP camp and resumed my quest even though I realized that it was futile. But one day, I had a name. There on a list of Jews living in Palestine was a certain V. Manevich. His country of origin was Poland. It was not the only Manevich from Poland on the list. When my brother had left us, it was before the first German invasion. Our area had still been considered Poland.

I didn’t have the stamina for another wild-goose chase but I had no choice. I wrote a letter to this person and waited. Waiting became my life. I waited for the proper paperwork. I waited for the turmoil in the new state of Israel to quiet. I waited for a place on the boat. There were so many others before me.

 

Soon after coming to Israel in 1949, I headed for the referred kibbutz. In my purse, folded neatly in quarters, was the answer to my letter.

I got a ride in a wooden-fenced well of a truck, and the driver deposited me in the middle of an open field, surrounded by an assortment of tents, outbuildings, and rusted farm equipment. He directed me to a woman holding a clipboard, checking off columns as she inspected goats drinking water from cement troughs.

After finding out my reason for coming, she led me past settlers milking goats and half-dressed children running in a circle. Then, she stopped and pointed to a tall and muscular man who was hammering nails on an enclosure of some sort. His back was to me. In not much more than a whisper, I said, “Velvel.”

The man continued to work.

Again, I said, “Velvel Manevich, is that you?” Could this be my once-skinny brother? He jerked his head around and there he was, a handsome man around thirty, with slate-colored eyes and sun-bleached hair.

“Feygele?” he stammered his pet name, little bird.

His big-toothed smile and streaming tears were all the answers I needed. We rushed into each other’s embrace. My brother had survived.

 

I HAD BEEN alone in the world. Until Ania and Velvel.

After two years at the kibbutz, I met a man, a good man, David, from Grodno. He had his own horrors—concentration camp, the death march. He didn’t seem to notice my dull, stringy hair, the way my clothes hung on my skinny frame, or that my left eye continually twitched and teared. How could he know that even though I was almost twenty-two, I felt like a withered, old woman?

Instead, he called me his beautiful flower. I shook my head and let slip out what I was thinking. “No, my mother was the one who was beautiful.”

“I want you to marry me,” he said.

“I am not a real person,” I responded. “I am a living ghost.”

This time, David’s eyes were the ones tearing and he said, “No, you are a living, breathing woman.”

“There is nothing of me to give,” I said.

He just smiled and said, “You will see, Esfele. Things will change.”

 

Sometimes I allowed myself the fantasy of getting married without my dear ones. There would be Velvel and his family, a wife and three children. Ania, also married now with a child, wrote me that there would be nothing in the world to prevent her from coming to Israel for my wedding. In this pretend wedding, she would be my maid of honor.

I couldn’t afford to live in fantasy. Instead, I busied myself with work: cutting down brush, planting trees, caring for sick children, studying English and literature. I could as well have been in the convent, but here no one saw through me; they saw me as I was—a Jewish woman with only one of her own, like so many here.

With those who experienced the Holocaust, we had a secret, silent bond. At any mention of our pasts, we nodded and shook our heads as if responding to a roll call. There was no need to recount our losses.

With others, it was different. I met an American couple working on the kibbutz for a summer. The wife questioned me about my experiences and I gave her only sketchy details. She said, “Oh I know, it was so hard for us to get food during the war.”

Almost as insensitive, her husband asked me my philosophy as if I had learned a big lesson. I sidestepped the question with a few rehearsed sentences. If he had expected me to get meaning out of these experiences, he had not paid attention to my evasions. There was no meaning.

But, something nagged at me. Maybe there was no rational explanation for what had happened to the murdered Jews, but their lives were meaningful. And then, when the kibbutz held a ten-year anniversary memorial for a Polish woman’s massacred relatives, I felt ready to take a peek at my past. It was time; it was time for me to bring back the dead, my dead. And I could do it in the only way I knew. I bought a new leather-bound book with lined pages and began my final journal, entitled with my announcement to the world, “Esfir Is Alive.”

On the inside first page, I copied this from my favorite poet:

 

I am a wandering girl.

My heart is practiced in longing.

And when the day eats up the dew of the night,

I tuck up the small white curtain from my window pane,

And look upon a new street.

There lies coiled up

In a little corner of my heart

Such a singular, trembling idea:

Maybe no one here will love me.

Maybe no one here will want to know me!

 

                        —Kadya Molodowsky, “Otwock”

 

SCOURING MY OLD journals brought back wonderful memories of Ida and my sisters before the carnage. But, they also triggered a recurring nightmare: I had a disease spreading across my face. It began to bulge under my skin, forming a big lump in the middle. The doctor said this was very dangerous and he had to operate immediately. He removed all the skin from my face. It was completely raw. He said after a while, when the skin grew back, my face would become grotesquely scarred. In the meantime, I walked around like this with my raw face exposed.

I met Ida. She didn’t know it was me. “It’s me, Ida,” I garbled. “Me, Esfir.” I said something personal so she would believe it was me.

She had been horrified and said she couldn’t be friendly with me anymore. I woke up screaming several times and sank back into this dream. I had no control. Each time, I felt that same rawness, that same need to rid myself of whatever poison was affecting me. No matter what I did, I would be scarred for life. 

I spoke to a doctor about these dreams. He told me it was a normal reaction and that they would go away. But I never understood how he could know what was normal since nobody else experienced what I had.

 

As I wrote my story, I remembered. I remembered my darling aunt Perl who bought me a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind doll, my Miriam. I remembered when I went to Volchin to visit Ida and, bubbling from a rehearsal of King Lear, she gave me a tour of her beloved village. I remembered when I once got lost going to my grandparents and my learned grandfather Yankel said to me, “Even a fart in a blizzard has a sound and a smell.” I didn’t remember the Yiddish translation anymore.

And there were other memories. I remembered looking at the disdainful poses of our Polish and Belorussian neighbors who came into our shop; the chest of a girl wearing a red blouse like Rivke had to give away; the faces of all those shunning us like we were vermin or worse as if we were not there. Sometimes, I had begged Rivke or Drora to hold me back. I could have killed each person with my bare hands. I had that much hate inside me—even more than for the Germans who were never my kind.

I remembered my last moments with Rivke at Brona Gora. When she had called my name, when she needed me the most, I was silent. Until I die, I will see Rivke’s once-round, adorable face, her rolling eyes searching for me as she was killed. There will never be a worse moment for me.

The hole inside me is still as deep as that pit that swallowed thousands of Jewish bodies. My sorrow flows through that hole, never-ending.

By happenstance, I had survived. Me, a nothing, a nobody. My grandfather would have said it in Yiddish, a pisher. Had it been a fluke, luck, a miracle—who knows why? Yes, why . . . why me? I kept asking this question. If I allowed myself to believe in a benevolent God who had something more for me to do, I would have an answer.

And so, I have come to the end of my journal. People have questioned me about my life. I have been invited to speak at gatherings. I have been asked to be interviewed. I have refused them all. This is the first and the last time I will reveal my entire story.

 

ONE MORE THING. I would like to record the names of my family and friends, the ones who didn’t survive.

 

My mother Sheyne Cohen Manevich, a woman of grace.

My sister, Drora Manevich, who should have been a lawyer.

My sister, Rivke Manevich, my heart.

My grandmother, Ruth Manevich, a great humanitarian.

My grandfather, Morris Manevich, a gentle man.

My grandmother, Elke Cohen, a pious woman.

My grandfather, Yankel Cohen, philosopher and linguist.

My aunt, Khane Cohen Wornick, a devoted mother.

My aunt, Perl Cohen Epstein, storyteller supreme.

 

Rachel Novick, a lonely girl.

Freyde Finefeld, a courageous fighter.

Yossel Finefeld, a compassionate man.

Liba Levin, who dreamed of love.

Fanny Levin, a kind soul.

Gittel Auerbach, friend extraordinaire.

Jozef Kozak, a prince among men.

Mendel Feigen, activist and orator.

Iser Midler, a man of sensitivity.

Bashke Midler, a woman of surprise.

Sala Midler, who would have been a mayor and/or poet.

Ester Midler, an irrepressible spirit.

Ida Midler, who could have been anything she wanted.

 

Let the world know about Freyde, Rachel, and the twins. Tell them about Mendel Feigen. Share stories about Perl, my grandparents, Gittel, Rivke, Drora. Introduce them to Ida. Explain that once upon a time, in a corner of Belorussia that was sometimes Poland and sometimes Russia, there was once a people whose only crime was being Jewish.

                                —Esfir Manevich, Israel, 1952