The Sweetness of Forgetting (45 page)

“It seemed a magical land,” he says, looking out the window. “I know that now, in the world today, young people take freedom for granted. All of the things you have, all of the freedoms you enjoy, they are things you were born with. But during the Second World War, we had no rights. Under the German occupation, those of us who were Jewish were considered the lowest of the low, vermin to the Germans and to many French too. Rose
and I dreamed of living in a place where that would never happen, and to us, America was the place. America was the dream. We planned to come here together, to raise a family.

“But then that terrible night happened. Rose’s family would not believe us, would not believe the roundup was taking place. I insisted she must come with me, that she must keep our child safe. She was two and a half months pregnant. The doctor had confirmed it. She knew then, as I did, that the most important thing was to save our child, our future. And so Rose made the most difficult choice of all, but it was, in truth, the only choice she could make. She went into hiding.”

I can feel myself beginning to tremble, for in Jacob’s words, in the French lilt of his voice, and in the emotion of the story, I can almost see it playing out before me like a movie. “At the Grand Mosque of Paris?”

Jacob looks surprised. “You
have
done your research.” He pauses. “It was the idea of my friend Jean Michel, who worked alongside me in the resistance. He had already helped several orphaned children escape through the mosque, after their parents had been deported. He knew that the Muslims were saving Jews, although it was mostly children they were taking in. But Rose was pregnant, and she was still very young herself. So when Jean Michel approached the leaders there and asked them to help her, they agreed.

“The plan was to deliver her to the mosque, where they would conceal her as a Muslim for a time, maybe a few weeks, or a month, until it was safe to move her out of Paris. Then, she would be smuggled, with money I had given to Jean Michel, to Lyon, where l’Amitié Chrétienne, the Christian Fellowship, would provide false papers and send her farther south, possibly to a group called the Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants, the Children’s Relief Effort. They mainly helped Jewish children get to neutral countries, but we knew it was likely they would accept Rose and assist her, because she was only seventeen, and she was
with child. But beyond that, I do not know what happened, or how she escaped, exactly. Do you know how she got out?”

“No,” I tell him. “But I believe she met my grandfather when he was in the army, in Europe. I believe he brought her back to the United States.”

Jacob looks wounded. “She married someone else,” he says softly. He clears his throat. “Well, she would have believed me dead by then. I told her that no matter what, she needed to survive and protect the baby.” He pauses and asks, “He is a nice man? The man she married?”

“He was a very nice man,” I say softly. “He died a long time ago.”

Jacob nods and looks down. “I’m very sorry.”

“And what happened to you?” I ask after a long pause.

Jacob looks out the window for a long time. “I went back for Rose’s family. She had asked me to do it, but in truth, I would have gone anyhow. I dreamed of a day when we could all be together, without the shadow of the Nazis. I believed that I could save them, Hope. I was young and naive.

“When I arrived, it was the middle of the night. The children were all asleep. I knocked softly on the door, and Rose’s father answered. He took one look at me, and he knew. ‘She is gone already, isn’t she?’ he asked me. I said yes, that I had taken her somewhere safe. He looked so disappointed in me. I can still remember his face as he said, ‘Jacob, you are a fool. If you have led her to her death, I will never forgive you.’

“I tried in vain, for the next hour, to tell him what I knew. I told him that the roundup was to begin in just a few hours. I told him that the
l’Université Libre
newspaper had reported that records of some thirty thousand Jewish residents of Paris had been handed over to the Germans a few weeks earlier. I told him about the warnings issued by the Jewish Communists, who spoke of the exterminations, and how we needed to avoid capture at all costs.

“He shook his head and told me again that I was foolish. Even if the rumors were true, he said, it was only men who would be taken away. And likely only immigrant men. Thus, his family was not really in danger, he said. I told him that I had heard it was not just men this time, and not just immigrants. And besides, because Rose’s mother had been born in Poland, some authorities would consider her children non-French too. We could not take that chance. But he would not listen.”

Jacob sighs and pauses in his story. I look at Gavin, and as he glances over at me, his face is pale and sad. I can see tears in his eyes too. Before I can think about what I’m doing, I reach over and take his right hand, which is resting on his thigh. He looks surprised for an instant, but then he smiles, threads his fingers through mine, and squeezes gently. I blink a few times and turn back to Jacob in the backseat.

“You couldn’t have done anything more,” I tell him. “I’m sure my grandmother knew you’d try. And you did.”

“I did,” Jacob agrees. “But I did not do enough. I believed that the roundups would happen, but I was not so confident that I was able to convince Rose’s father. I was only eighteen, you see. I was a boy. And in those times, a boy could not make an older man see his point of view. I often think that if I had tried harder, I could have saved them all. But the truth was, I knew there was a chance that the rumors were wrong, and so I did not speak with the conviction I should have. I will never forgive myself for not trying harder.”

“It’s not your fault,” I murmur.

Jacob shakes his head and looks down. “But it is, dear Hope. I told her I would keep them safe. And I did not.”

He makes a choked sound then, and turns to look out the window again.

“The times were different,” Jacob continues after a long pause. “But I had the responsibility to do more.” He sighs, long and heavy, and continues with his story. “After I left Rose’s home,
I went to my own home. My parents were there, and my baby sister, who was just twelve years old. My father knew, as I did, what was coming, and so he was ready. We went to a friend’s restaurant in the Latin Quarter, where the owner agreed to hide us in his basement. I could have taken Rose there too, but the risks were too great; she would begin showing her pregnancy soon, and I knew that if she was ever captured, she would be sent straight to her death. So I had to get her out of France, get her somewhere safe where the Germans could never find her.

“My father and I agreed, at the same time, that the safest solution for our family was to wait out the roundup in hiding, and then to go on with our lives, always keeping our ears to the ground so that we were aware when the Germans were coming. That night, and long into the next day, and the day after that, we hid in a cramped room in the basement of the restaurant, wondering if we would be found out. At the end of the third day, we emerged, hungry and exhausted, believing the worst was over.

“I wanted so very much to go to the Grand Mosque of Paris, where I knew Rose had been taken. But my father stopped me. He reminded me that I would be putting Rose and everyone there in danger if I went. And so I managed to get word through my friend Jean Michel that she was still safe. I asked him to tell her that I was safe too, that I would join her soon, but I don’t know if word ever reached her. Just two days later, the French police showed up at our door to take my father and me away. They knew we had been part of the resistance, and this was the payment.

“They took my sister and my mother too, and at Drancy, the transit camp outside of Paris, we were separated, taken to different barracks. I never saw them again, although I found out later that they were deported to Auschwitz, just like my father and I.”

We’re all silent for a moment, and I notice that outside, the sun is casting long shadows over the fields on either side of the
interstate. My stomach swims as I think of Jacob and his family being hauled away to a death camp. I swallow hard.

“What happened to your family?” Gavin asks Jacob softly. He squeezes my hand again and glances at me with concern.

Jacob takes a deep breath. “My mother and sister did not survive the initial selection at Auschwitz. My mother was frail and weak, and my sister, she was small for her twelve years and would have been considered unfit for work. They were taken directly to the gas chamber. I pray that they did not understand what was happening. But I fear that my mother, at least, knew enough to be aware. I imagine she must have been very frightened.”

He pauses to collect himself. I can’t seem to formulate words in the interim, and so I wait.

“My father and I were both sent to the barracks,” he continues. “At first, he and I buoyed each other’s spirits as best we could. But soon, he grew very ill. There was an epidemic at Auschwitz. Typhus. For my father, it began with chills in the night, and then weakness and a terrible cough. The guards made him go out to work anyhow, and although I and the other prisoners tried to make work as easy for him as possible, the disease was a death sentence. I sat with him on his last night as fever ravaged his body. He died sometime in the autumn of 1942. It was impossible to tell the day, the week, the month anymore, for in Auschwitz, time ceased to exist in any normal sense. He died before the snowfalls, though, that much I know.”

“I’m so sorry,” I finally manage to say. The words feel woefully inadequate.

Jacob nods slowly and looks out the window for a moment before turning back to us. “In the end, he was at peace. In the camps, when people died, they looked almost like sleeping children, innocent and unworried at last. For my father, it was the same. I was happy to see my father’s face that way, because I knew he was finally free. In Judaism, the idea of heaven is not well defined, as it is in Christianity. But I believed, and still believe,
that in some way, my father found my mother and sister again. And this brings me comfort, even to this day. The idea that they reunited, that they were together again.”

He smiles, a bitter, sad smile. “There is a sign at Auschwitz that says, ‘Work makes you free.’ But the truth was that only death made you free. And at last, my family was free.”

“How did you manage to survive?” Gavin asks. “You must have been in Auschwitz for what, more than two years?”

Jacob nods. “Nearly two and a half. But the fact was, I did not have a choice. I had promised Rose I would come back for her. And I could not, would not, break that promise. After the liberation, I came back to find her. I was so sure that I would be with her again, that we would be reunited, that we would be able to raise our child together, that perhaps we would have more children and somehow escape the shadow of the war.”

Gavin and I listen raptly as Jacob tells us about coming back to Paris, about looking desperately for Rose, about believing in the depth of his soul that she had lived. He tells us of his despair upon not finding her, of the conversations he had with Alain, who was alone and adrift after losing his whole family and who was being cared for by an international refugee organization.

“I finally came to America,” he says, “because this is where Rose and I had promised to reunite. I was trying to fulfill my end of the promise, you understand. And so every day for the last fifty-nine years, I have waited at the tip of Battery Park. It is where we agreed to meet. I always believed she would come.”

“You were there every day?” I ask.

Jacob smiles. “Nearly every day. I had a job, of course, but I would go before and after work. The only days I missed waiting in the park were the day I broke my hip and the days after, as well as the days following September 11, when it was impossible to go to the park. I was standing in the park, in fact, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center.” He’s silent for a moment
and adds softly, “It was the second time in my life I’d watched the world fall down before my eyes.”

I absorb this for a moment. “How were you so sure that my grandmother would come for you? Didn’t you start to believe that maybe she had died?”

He considers this for a moment. “No. I would have felt it. I would have known.”

“How?” I ask softly. I don’t mean any disrespect; it’s just that I can’t imagine hanging on for seventy years because of a feeling.

Jacob stares out the window for a moment and then turns to me with a small, sad smile. “I would have felt it in my soul, Hope,” he says. “Do you understand? It does not happen very often in life, but when two people find that sort of connection, the kind of connection your grandmother and I have, they are forever tied to each other. I would have felt a piece of my soul missing if she was gone. When God joined us together, He made us two halves of the same whole.”

Gavin’s hand suddenly tightens on mine, and he looks over at me with wide eyes.

“What?” I ask him.

Instead of replying, he glances in the rearview mirror. “Jacob?” he asks. “What do you mean by that? By God joining the two of you?”

And in that moment, before Jacob replies, I understand what Gavin’s getting at, and I know what Jacob is about to say.

“The day Rose and I were married,” Jacob says. “We became one in God’s eyes.”

I swallow hard. “You and my grandmother were married?” I repeat.

Jacob looks surprised. “Of course,” he says. “We did so in secret, you understand. Her family did not know, nor did mine. They believed us to be too young. We longed for the day we could have a ceremony in front of them, to celebrate with the people we loved the most. But we never had the chance.”

I’m struggling to understand, and I suddenly realize what this means; if my grandmother was married to Jacob, her marriage to my grandfather had never been real. I feel another pang of sadness for him, for the losses he never knew.

Or had he? Had my grandfather realized in 1949, when he went to Paris, that Jacob Levy had survived, that Jacob’s very existence annulled his own union with my grandmother? Had he, for this reason, told my grandmother that Jacob had perished? The thought makes my stomach swim uneasily, and I realize I may never know the answer.