BY THE TIME the hearings ended, Lemkin still had no news about his family. Only in the middle of September, during the adjournment, did he learn what had befallen Bella and Josef. The information came from his brother Elias in the course of a reunion that took place in Munich. He learned that his own family was a part of “the files of the Nuremberg trials.”
Elias had survived by a stroke of good fortune, in circumstances described to me by his son Saul Lemkin. Saul was twelve in June 1941, living with his parents in Wołkowysk, when the family decided to take a Soviet holiday. “We were sitting in the dacha when my aunty said something happened with the war, so we turned on the radio.” They learned that Hitler had broken the pact with Stalin, launching Operation Barbarossa, that the Germans occupied Wołkowysk a week later, and that Bella and Josef were trapped along with the rest of the family left at home.
A short vacation became three years in the heartland of the Soviet Union. They knew that “Uncle Rafael” was safe in North Carolina, but the murder of Bella and Josef, and the decision not to bring them on the vacation due to ill health, became a source of acute tension between the brothers Rafael and Elias. “My uncle was quite mad that we left them, but alas we didn’t know what was going to happen.” Saul seemed dejected, seventy years after the events, and apologetic. “We just went for a visit; nobody knew the war would start, not even Stalin.”
Saul and his family remained in Moscow until July 1942. When their visas ran out, they took a train across the Urals to Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan, a small Soviet republic. They returned to Moscow in February 1944. After the war, they returned to Poland, then to a displaced persons camp in Berlin, which was where Lemkin found them. “My uncle called us in Berlin in August 1946. He was at Nuremberg; he spoke to me,” Saul explains. “He told my father not to stay in Berlin too long, the Russians might blockade the city.”
With Lemkin’s help, the Americans arranged for the family to travel from Berlin to Munich, to another camp. Saul was in the hospital recovering from an operation on his appendix when Lemkin joined them in mid-September.
“He came to visit me in the hospital with his secretary Madame Charlet, an American, in the U.S. Army. She spoke a little Russian, a very nice woman. My uncle looked very well, nice clothes; we embraced. He told me, ‘You must come to America.’ ”
They shared what little information they had about events in Wołkowysk. “My father, Elias, found out there were only a few Jews remaining when the Soviets came in the summer of 1944, maybe no more than fifty or sixty.” A repetition of events in Żółkiew and Dubno and tens of thousands of other places small and large across central Europe, reflected in the stones of Treblinka. Saul spoke gently about this subject, but the light in his eyes was dimmed. “The rest, we knew what happened to them. A Jew sent us a letter. My grandparents were taken to an unknown destination. They were dead.”
Did Saul have a photograph of Bella and Josef? No. He learned that the last transport from Wołkowysk was in January 1943 to Auschwitz, but it was an earlier transport that took his grandparents to another place, not far away. “Bella and Josef went to Treblinka, because it wasn’t far away.”
He spoke these words with much sadness, a weary and deep sadness, and then he perked up.
“What’s the name of that famous journalist, the one who wrote Life and Fate?” he asked.
Vasily Grossman.
“That’s it; he’s the one who wrote about Treblinka. I read it and thought of my grandparents.”
Saul believed that Uncle Rafael never knew they went to Treblinka. “That information came only later, long after he was gone.”
Saul’s account offered a frame of sorts for another story. In this way did I learn that my grandmother Malke Flaschner, who lived in Żółkiew on the same street as the Lauterpachts, had died in Treblinka on the same street as the Lemkins.
“There is one thing I must say about that time,” Saul said with a sudden sense of cheer. “The Germans in the clinic were very nice to me, very polite. Compared to life in Poland, Germany was a paradise for the Jews.” If Saul harbored ill feelings, he kept them under wraps.
“Of course, Uncle Rafael had a different view,” he continued. “There were many Germans in the clinic, but my uncle would not look at them.” Saul fixed his eyes on mine. “He hated them. For him, they were poison. He hated them.”