The Sonderberg Case (13 page)

I found out that shortly after the war, Maria took me to a big city where the agents from a Jewish charity were looking for Jewish children who had been hidden by Christians with compassionate hearts, while others tried to find adoptive Jewish parents for them. That’s how I came to America. My “parents” at the time knew only one thing: my name, which was written on a piece of paper by my father and given to Maria. Now that my “American parents” have given it to me, I never part from it: it’s my personal treasure. An unexpected discovery: I thought I was the child of survivors; I’m not. I’m a child survivor. In fact, I ought to mention this to Dr. Feldman. My past might explain my health problems. And then what? I decide to wait.

Both outside and inside, I bear my paternal great-grandfather’s name, Yedidyah Wasserman. I cherish a photo of my real parents.

Understandably, I wanted to track down Maria by every means possible. Not easy. I didn’t know her last name. I had only one desire: to go there. But how could I know if she was still alive? And if she was, how would I identify her? I opened my heart to Alika, hoping to appease the animosity she had been showing me since the Sonderberg trial. To my amazement, she encouraged me to make the trip, even if nothing were to come of it. That way, she said, you won’t be able to blame yourself for not having tried to thank the woman who made it possible for me to meet you. And she smiled faintly. Had we finally reached a truce?

So I returned to my native Carpathian town of Davarovsk. Thanks to the photograph of my parents, I succeeded in finding the street and the house where we had lived, or rather the two-story building that had been built on its ruins. When I saw it I felt something between an immense void and a bottomless, nameless grief. Later, I would try to explain it to Alika: “Imagine a character, onstage, feeling pain, anger, and fear, who wants to cry out and make the walls shake; he opens his mouth but remains frozen and mute for an interminable moment. Tell yourself this was me, as a tiny child, probably frightened, in front of what had been my house with my parents and their plans at the time, the shared hopes my brother and I embodied.”

I spent only a few hours in that small town. Occasionally a passerby came up to me, intrigued; he wanted to know what I was doing in his street. My guide, young, self-confident, and secure in his position, replied with a few
words in Hungarian or Romanian. Satisfied or not, the man would shrug his shoulders and go about his business.

After a sleepless night spent in the only hotel in town, I pursued my pilgrimage to the out-of-the-way village where I was told I might find the woman to whom I owed my survival.

An old peasant woman. Ageless. Silent. Sitting on a bench in the public gardens under a blossoming tree. Motionless. Emaciated face, scored with wrinkles. Gazing into the emptiness.

It is she. The guide made enquiries—at the neighbors’, at the town hall. Maria Petrescu. Once the maid of the Jews in the big town. Heart of gold, soul of a saint.

I tell the guide to ask her if she remembers my family. She doesn’t answer. He repeats the question. Still no answer. The door of a wooden house, right near the gardens, opens and a peasant, about forty years old, emerges. He comes up to us, looking unfriendly.

“What do you want?”

“Nothing bad,” the guide says, reassuring him.

“Then go away. Leave her alone.”

“We’d just like to ask her a few questions.”

“What questions?”

“It’s personal.”

The peasant becomes irritated. “Don’t you see that she can’t answer you?”

“Why?” the guide asks.

“Because she can’t, that’s all. She no longer has all her wits about her. She lives in her own world. We have to force her to eat and drink. What can I say? These things happen. We want to live, grow old, then time goes by. We’re here but not she.”

I feel a pang of anguish. I had arrived too late.

“A shame,” says the guide.

“Why a shame?”

“Because we have gifts for her. And money.”

“Gifts? For her? For Maria Petrescu?”

“Yes. For her.”

The peasant seems lost. He doesn’t understand. Nor do I. Something about this situation, this moment outside time, escapes me. She saved my life and now I should be able to save hers. Except it’s too late.

“I might be able to help you,” says the peasant after hesitating. “I’m her nephew. Vlad. Vlad Petrescu.”

I ask the guide to briefly explain to him the reason for my visit. The nephew doesn’t look surprised. He had heard that a long time ago his aunt had lived far from her family. But he doesn’t know with whom. Did he know that during the war, she had been close to a Jewish family? That she had saved their younger child? No, he’d never heard that. Did she ever marry? No. Never. But …

“But what?”

“People in the village said things about her. Every place has its share of contemptible, nasty people.”

“What did they say about her?”

“Oh, silly things. That she had led a shameless life. That she had had a lot of lovers.”

“Where? In the village?”

“No, of course not. Here everyone knows everyone else. People said that in town she gave in to her instincts. That she was beautiful and a slut. That men ran after her, which wasn’t surprising. They even said …”

A pause. The guide eggs him on.

“What?”

“That she had a child.”

“A child?”

“A little boy.”

He lowers his voice and adds, “A bastard. Obviously, since she had no husband.”

I hold my breath. I glance at Maria from time to time. Can she hear us? Can she understand what her nephew is saying about her, about her life? Here was a courageous, honest, honorable woman, a credit to the human race, and she was treated with contempt! How are we to live in a world where values are so perverted? Where human feelings are so devalued? And yet, fortunately, Maria Petrescu exists: if Christians no longer frighten Jews, it is thanks to her. But how she must have suffered! Moving and magnificent heroine.

“But I’m forgetting,” the peasant says. “You mentioned gifts. For her. Why?”

The guide turns to me, hoping I’ll suggest an answer, but
none comes. A heavy silence sets in. Vlad scratches his head for a moment, then cries out, “Wait. I have things to show you. They come from my aunt.”

He quickly walks away from us and, after quite a long time, returns holding a large envelope.

“This is what remains from her youth,” he says.

My guide seizes the envelope; instinctively at first, I don’t dare touch it, as if it contained a corpse, the corpse of an extinguished memory. But then I examine the contents of the envelope. A faded, yellowed identity photo. A lovely oval face, a modest gaze, a reluctant look before the camera. Yes, she was beautiful, the woman who rescued me. I no longer dare look over at the old, tired, motionless body.

Another photo: a house with a garden. The nephew explains. “This is where she worked during the war.”

Our house. Mine. I’m seeing it for the first time. How was it furnished? How many rooms did it have? How many closets? Beds? Was it joyful inside its walls? Were my parents happy before misfortune struck them?

A last photo: Maria with a curly-headed little boy. He is clinging to her skirt.

“This was her son,” says the nephew. He makes a vague hand gesture. “We don’t know what became of him. They say that his disappearance made her ill. She no longer wanted to see anyone. See that barn there, behind you? That’s where she used to take refuge. To sleep. To shed tears in silence. They say she grew old quickly.”

I go up to her, by myself. I search through my distraught,
worried memory. Where in there is she hiding? How deeply would I have to dig to find a memory of her? What can I do to make her rediscover me, make her react to my presence, to elicit a gesture, a gleam in her eye? I try to catch her gaze. Empty. A wall. I touch her arm. She lets herself be touched. I smile at her. I whisper my name in her ear. Then hers. I tell her I’m pained for her. That I feel close to her. That I’ll remember her. I tell her the secret that I’ve been foolishly hiding from everyone, even from Alika, and my friends, and my children: that I’m sick. I reassure her: I’m alive and I’ll stay alive. Has she heard me? Her lips part, but no sound comes from them. Has the well run dry? A tear appears in her right eye. And in the left one. I kiss her gently on the forehead. She falls back into her lethargy.

The nephew seems puzzled.

“What about the gifts?” he asks, as if to break the silence.

I signal to the guide to give them to him.

“Tell him to swear on everything he considers sacred that he’ll take good care of his aunt.”

Astonished, the nephew vows to take good care of her. Twice.

I leave Maria’s village, and then the town where I was born. My heart is heavy: I am leaving behind a stolen segment of my life. Should I have gone to the cemetery? An old, gray tombstone surely bears the name of a great-grandfather: Yedidyah Wasserman.

Should I have come sooner?

When was sooner?

“YOU WHO EMERGE FROM THE DELUGE
where you were drowned, when you speak, remember your weakness in the dark times from which you escaped,” Brecht writes.

And the journalist wonders: Who escaped? Me?

And what about my big brother, that unknown little boy?

Vanished without leaving a trace. Swept away in the storm of ashes that ravaged History and cast a pall over it forever after. This is something I think about, too, from time to time. Why weren’t my parents able to find a safe place for him? It must not have been easy. The good Maria no doubt tried, but who could give him a home? Not her parents at any rate, on whom she was already imposing a baby they hated. Why would they have taken on the added burden of a ten-year-old Jewish child?

Yedidyah thinks about this “big brother,” just a doomed little boy, and he feels overcome by a violent emotion. He doesn’t even know his name. Was he tall or short? Timid or bold? Cheerful or melancholic? Studious or lazy in school?
Brilliant perhaps? In mathematics or music? Did he have school friends? The only thing his younger brother knows about him is that his life went by like a shooting star. He was ten years old when he died over there, in the kingdom of oblivion. He remained with his parents—their parents—to the end. Should he envy him for that? You can’t envy someone who is faceless.

Who can he blame, who can he hold responsible for his death? A naive question: How could the survival of a Jewish child, who didn’t have the time to experience happiness, threaten the world’s equilibrium? A less naive question that he never asked his grandfather, unfortunately, and that was never raised by the great Rabbi Petahia: What about God? Under what name was this child listed in anticipation of the Day of Judgment by the man who keeps the Book of Life and Death open during the High Holy Days?

Yedidyah wrote to the Davarovsk municipality. They must have kept a birth register. Disappointment: a few months before the liberation, a Russian bomb had destroyed the archive wing.

It is as if this older brother had never existed.

Was this possible? Even for God? Did he sometimes give life in order to immediately erase it? Why? Yedidyah had no idea. But he discovered one thing.

That it was possible.

——

The following thought is attributed to Voltaire late in life: “Happiness? Happiness is living and dying unknown.”

With his whole being, Yedidyah cried out: he is wrong, the great French philosopher is lying.

After returning home, like a man possessed in quest of an elusive truth with multiple masks, Yedidyah set out on a pilgrimage to his family’s origins. He devoted all his free time to it, encouraged by Alika, even though she didn’t fully understand this new obsession.

First he focused on books. After all, this was the easiest path. He consulted the archives at the resource centers, reference libraries, and museums devoted to the memory of the Holocaust in Washington, Paris, and Jerusalem. The records dealing with “hidden children.” Niny Wolf and Judith Hemmendinger in Alsace, the Zionist Sruli Rosenberg in Haifa, and Rabbi Benatar in Bnei Brak. A priest in Toulouse, a physician in Strasbourg. All these utopians with compassionate hearts who scoured Europe as soon as the war ended, with just one goal: to return the Jewish children saved by Christians to their parents if they were still alive, or to the Jewish community if they were not. How and where could he find these exceptional, exemplary men and women? He was advised to consult lists; there must have been some. There were. But Yedidyah didn’t know how they could be useful to him: he was missing too many
clues. He slept badly, worked badly, lived badly. He was often in despair but refused to become resigned. Sometimes he felt close to suicide. Why? For no reason perhaps. Out of boredom. To escape from the inner emptiness that defied him and made him dizzy. In order to accomplish an act that would be his own beginning and his own end.

One night, Alika woke him. He was moaning.

“Why don’t you try hypnosis?” she suggested. “I read an article about it somewhere. A psychiatrist who can revive old, distant, buried memories. It wouldn’t hurt you to try.”