Karolina's Twins (38 page)

Fräu Strauss tilted her head back and stared with one eye. “Why are you wanting to know? Is this legitimate?”

Liam laughed. “Absolutely. I'm an investigator tracking down the story of two little babies that were left behind and lost during the war. I believe they may have been taken to Fräu Schultz. In fact, her son Siegfried may have been the father. I'm working for a friend of their mother who now lives in America.”

“Hmm. Helga never said anything about Siegfried having children. And she would have. She wanted grandchildren. I didn't have any, and Helga would have bragged. Oh my, she would have bragged.” She shook her head. “Siegfried was killed during the war, you know. In Ukraine.”

“Siegfried may not have wanted to tell his mother about the babies until he could see her in person.”

“
Ja,
that would make sense. But he never came back from the front.”

“And the babies? Did anyone bring two babies to Fräu Schultz?”

Fräu Strauss shook her head. “No. No babies. Siegfried was Helga's only child. She would have loved to have two babies. She would have told me for sure. When Siegfried died, Helga had no use for the farm. She sold her farm in 1950 and moved into town. She passed in 1974. She didn't have much when she died, and what she had she left to the church. She had no surviving relatives.”

Liam sighed and stood to leave. “Thank you for your time, Fräu Strauss.”

“Sorry I could not be much help to you in your investigation.”

“Actually, you did help. You crossed a possibility off the list. Thanks again.”

Liam called Catherine from the Munich airport and gave her a report.

“Are you coming home?” Catherine asked.

“Not yet. I'm flying to Kraków in an hour. I'm going to trace the route of the train and make inquiries for a couple of days. Maybe someone will come forward.”

“Liam, we're running out of time. The court date is approaching and if we don't have some proof of Karolina or the twins, I'll have a hard time countering Arthur's argument that they don't exist. Especially now that we know she never mentioned them at Yad Vashem. You've got to find some evidence.”

“That deadline's unreasonable. It's possible someone will have a memory of two babies being found by the railroad tracks, or maybe Muriel Bernstein will surface to confirm Lena's story, but we need more time. I think you should move for a continuance, maybe a couple months.”

“I don't think Peterson will give it to me. I'm not his favorite lawyer, you know.”

“It can't hurt to try. Hell, just sixty days. What's the rush?”

“You heard Peterson. He's protecting the vulnerable elderly who are mercifully brought under his wings in the probate division.”

“Lena didn't look so vulnerable when she was there. She scared the crap out of Arthur.”

“Yes, she did. I'll file the motion. Maybe he'll give us sixty days. Good luck in Poland.”

 

F
ORTY-FIVE

O
N TUESDAY MORNING, CATHERINE
arrived at Lena's home on Pearson Street. She entered the condominium, handed her coat to Lena and strolled to the windows to gaze at Lake Michigan. The wind was churning up the lake and eight-foot whitecaps were crashing against the retaining wall, spraying water onto Lake Shore Drive.

“I wanted you to see something special to me,” Lena said. She walked over to her breakfront and opened the glass door. She pointed to a little pedestal sitting on a shelf all by itself. A treasured centerpiece in her cabinet. “Do you see that? Do you know what it is?”

Catherine nodded. “I do. It's Milosz's shoe.”

“Arthur thinks I'm silly for displaying it like that. A battered child's shoe placed so prominently when I could display my fine china and silver pieces. But it's all I have left of my family in Chrzanów. It's the only thing to show that they ever existed. If something happens to me, Catherine, or when my time is finished, I want you to have it.”

Catherine swallowed hard. “Oh no, I can't. It belongs to your family.”

“Lean smiled and hugged Catherine. “That is how I think of you. To Arthur it will mean nothing.”

“It will mean something to me, Lena. I'd be proud to have it.”

“Good. Then let me finish my story and together we shall try to find the twins.”

“I have to tell you, so far, Liam has had no luck. The twins weren't taken to Siegfried's mother. She died without any surviving family. Liam intends to make inquiries of people along the train route. Yad Vashem has no record of the twins.”

“I know that, but no one at Yad Vashem would have known their names. We didn't pin the names on the children for fear they would be identified as Jewish. I was at Yad Vashem and when I gave my history, I asked whether any Polish citizens reported finding two young babies by a railroad track. They had no record of any such reports from our area. They told me that many orphaned children were saved by the Allies when they overran Germany and Poland, but many of them were in camps or were found in orphanages.”

“But you didn't tell the historians at Yad Vashem about Rachel and Leah, did you?”

Lena shook her head. “I did not. I could not.”

“The twins could certainly have been among those rescued, Lena. That should make you feel a little more at ease. Even if we can't locate them, it's possible that they were rescued.”

“I want to believe that. But unless Liam is successful, I'll never know. I'm so pleased he's making inquiries.”

“I have to be honest with you. Without some proof of Karolina's twins, we'll have a tough time with Arthur's petition. He'll tell the story of how you've become fixated on them—your maps, your research, the train schedules. That's evidence that the quest has taken a prominent place in your life. He'll try to create a presumption.”

“A presumption of what?”

“That you suffer from an all-consuming obsession. And if we have no proof of their birth or their existence, he'll assert it's all a delusion.”

“How does a presumption affect us?”

“It means that the burden of going forward with the evidence would shift. Arthur claims it's all imaginary—Karolina and the babies–and it would become your obligation to produce evidence to prove that they existed. So far, Liam can't find any. A failure to rebut the presumption could result in a conclusion that your compulsive search for the babies is a product of mental deterioration.”

Lena nodded.

“Judge Peterson's not required to reach that conclusion. He can view all the evidence, including your testimony, and decide that you're just fine. I think you make a very good witness. You certainly acquitted yourself nicely when you were last in court.”

“But he could, right? He could find me to be delusional and put me in a home?”

Catherine shrugged. “He could. But we'll fight like hell to prevent that from happening. And don't count out Liam.”

“Thank you.”

“All right, then, let's get back to the story.”

“As I told you, David and I married and settled into the house where I was a squatter. David tried to set up a little tailor shop in the square. He somehow managed to obtain a sewing machine and cleaned out a storefront. He put up signs and we passed out flyers, but he couldn't make a go of it.”

“Strange. He was such a good tailor. He managed the Shop and ran the textile operation at Gross-Rosen. How come he couldn't make it work?”

“I could say because of the postwar economy, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate. Our community, the forty percent of Chrzanów that we grew up with, was gone. Like all the other small towns in Poland, the Jewish community had been eradicated. Deported. Shipped out to the camps. And remember, for years the Nazis ran a huge propaganda campaign telling everyone that Jews were the anti-Christ. People were told not to do business with Jews. Posters depicted Jews as ugly, sneaky, dirty monsters that spread disease.

“The few of us that returned after the war faced a town that had been subjected to and even tolerated Nazi propaganda for over ten years. Many blamed the Jews for the war. After all, they saw the war as Hitler's campaign to rid Europe of the Jewish scourge. Goebbels ran a very effective propaganda machine. I'm not saying everybody harbored these feelings, and there are always exceptions, but generally Polish towns were unfriendly to returning survivors. It was obvious to David and me that we were unwelcome and unable to integrate into the non-Jewish fabric of Chrzanów.

“David had a tailor shop, but he couldn't compete with the tailor shop owned by a Catholic on the other side of the square. Money was very tight and I don't know how he did it, and I guess I didn't want to know, but David began to make money by smuggling cigarettes.”

“Seriously? He was a smuggler?”

Lena laughed and held her hand to her mouth in jocular embarrassment. “He was. My husband the pirate. He'd go off in the middle of the night, meet up with people and come back with cartons of cigarettes. He'd sell them to the Russians and throughout the town. He made enough money for us to live comfortably, but we knew we couldn't make a life in Chrzanów.

“Poland was becoming a Soviet satellite, behind the Iron Curtain, and Stalin was appointing ministers to run the government. They weren't friendly to Jews either. Communism, and the anti-Semitism that lay beneath the surface, was forcing us to consider immigrating to other lands. David's brother had immigrated to New York before the war and he now lived in Chicago. We decided to join him, but we needed a visa, and in 1945 that was impossible.

“For several years, Western countries had established strict quotas on immigration, especially for Jews. After the war, Great Britain, Canada and the U.S. were still enforcing tight immigration quotas for European refugees and they were reluctant to relax them. David figured the best way to get to America was to enter an American Displaced Persons Camp and apply for a visa.”

“I can't believe the two of you wanted to live in another camp.”

“It was how we would get to America. If we stayed in Chrzanów, we would have been stuck behind the Iron Curtain in an unfriendly town. We didn't have any other choice. This was also a conclusion reached by two hundred and fifty thousand other Jews.

“At the end of the war, in May 1945, there were seven to eight million displaced persons wandering around Europe. A million and a half of them were German soldiers. By July, the number of DPs had been reduced to four million. By September, all but a million had been repatriated to their home countries. But of the million that remained, two hundred and fifty thousand were Jews that had no place to go, for the reasons I've just explained. We were the unrepatriables. We called ourselves the
She'erit ha-Pletah,
the surviving remnant.

“To address the refugee problem, the Allied countries set up camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria and Italy. They were little towns, little communities for us to live in until we could find a home. There were British, French and American camps. David researched the camps and decided we would go to Foehrenwald, in the U.S. zone. It was south of Munich in the foothills of the Austrian Alps. We would take a train to Vienna, then to Munich and make our way down to Foehrenwald, but before we left, I had one more thing I had to do.

“I told David to borrow a horse and wagon and take me to Auschwitz. ‘Are you crazy?' he said. ‘Why would you want to return to the gates of hell?'

“‘Take me to Auschwitz. I want to stand there and see it through liberated eyes.'

“It was October, the leaves were turning and we traveled south thirteen miles to Oświęcim. The Silesian hills were bathed in oranges, yellows, reds and browns. Clip-clopping along with no fear of capture or death, it was hard to believe this pastoral setting was a theater of war just nine months earlier. We entered Auschwitz's buffered area along the railroad tracks. The barbed wire fences were still in place and we followed the tracks right up to the main gate. The iron sign,
ARBEIT MACHT FREI,
still arched above the entrance.

“I got out of the wagon and walked into the vacant camp. It was surreal. It held no terror for me any longer. In many ways it was satisfying, knowing the Germans had been defeated, that their vicious reign of evil had been vanquished. It was divine closure. I walked slowly through Auschwitz and then to Birkenau. The grounds of torment and depravity were now empty. Of the vast execution chambers, only four brick chimneys remained, reminding society of the wickedness that once lived here. I showed David the barracks where I slept and where Chaya befriended me. I showed him the kitchen where I worked. I said all my good-byes. I closed the book and I have not been back since.

“We packed our bags and left for Foehrenwald the next day.”

 

F
ORTY-SIX

L
IAM BOARDED THE TRAIN
in Chrzanów for the trip to Rogoznica, the very same route that Karolina took with Lena, Muriel and the two babies. He sat on the right-hand side, by the windows, just as Karolina and Lena had. On his lap was an iPad that would tell him the precise GPS coordinates as the train proceeded north. Agnesa, a twenty-year-old college student with long brown hair, a checkered blouse and blue jeans, sat beside Liam chatting with him and telling him about the towns they passed. Liam had hired Agnesa in Kraków to be his interpreter. He knew he'd be traveling through rural communities where he couldn't depend on everyone to speak English, and he'd quickly come to terms with his limitations—Polish was too tough a language to traverse with a pocket dictionary.

Liam kept a careful lookout for track sidings. Lena had said the babies were thrown soon after they left a siding. In seventy years, one could expect a railroad line to change somewhat, but Liam was confident he could mark the likely spots. Thankfully, the Communists hadn't wanted to spend a lot of money on infrastructure and the railroad lines appeared to be unchanged.