Trap (9781476793177) (7 page)

Rose paused for a moment. “The Stanislaws saved my life,” she said. “They fed me, gave me a warm place to sleep, and risked their lives to protect me from the Germans, and they later hid me from the Russians. They helped me escape to America. They showed me love, and for that I am forever grateful.” Then her voice grew hard. “But I was stripped of who I was, what I was. My family, my real family, was taken from me and murdered; I was stripped of my culture, my heritage, and my identity. All because we were Jews. In fact, I learned to despise Jews.”

Growing angry, Rose began to pace in front of her audience. “The transformation didn't happen overnight. My memories are hazy, but I had loved our Jewish traditions—my father blowing the shofar, and eating apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah; my mother reading the Book of Ruth for
Shavuot
, lighting the menorah for Chanukah. But the Stanislaws told me that it was for my own protection that I had to forget my family and my culture. They didn't have to say much more than that; I was already deathly afraid of the German soldiers who treated people so cruelly on the streets and whom my parents had obviously feared. But it was more than that. I came to view Christians, like the Stanislaws, as my protectors, while Jews were weak and shameful.”

The Stanislaws carried the makeover of Rose Kuratowski into Krystiana even further. “Perhaps to protect me, or maybe because they believed it, my parents, as I came to think of them, like most of their neighbors, voiced no objections to what they knew was going on in the death camps. The Polish curse
brudny Zid
, ‘dirty Jew' seemed to come too easily from their lips to be wholly a ruse to fit in. But even more shamefully, I used it, too.”

Slowly, the memory of her real family faded. “I know they were transported to Sobibor, and though I have no record of what happened to them, I can surmise their fate was the same as three hundred thousand other people who were sent there. Arriving at the depot, they were relieved of their possessions and separated: men and boys capable of labor in one group; women, children, and the infirm in another. The women were forced to strip naked and had their hair shorn; then they were made to run through an enclosure called The Tube and into a building where, they were told, they would take showers. Once they were inside, the doors were locked while soldiers on the outside started an engine and pumped carbon monoxide fumes into the death chamber. When all were dead, the doors on the opposite end were opened and the
Sonderkommandos
—prisoners forced to do this horrific job—removed the bodies and threw them into a pit for burial.”

Rose's voice faltered. Then she looked over at her husband who nodded to encourage her. “There are those here who know much more than I about the horrors of Sobibor so I won't go into more detail. But I do know that the Germans kept excellent records, so that I was able to learn the day that my mother and siblings arrived in hell and died. My father was a
Sonderkommando,
and most of them were killed, but he escaped Sobibor and survived the war.”

This time when Rose tried to continue, her voice came out as a whisper and she began to cry. However, as Simon began to rise to go to her side, she raised her hand for him to stop. “I'm okay, my dear husband. This is my journey.” She took another deep breath. “The war ended; the camps were liberated, and the horror of the German ‘Final Solution' became known to the world. The Jews who survived began returning to their homes, or at least they tried to, only to run into the antagonism of their former neighbors who didn't want to give up the property they'd stolen in their absence. What's more, the Jews were a reminder that they had done nothing, said nothing, when their fellow citizens were shipped away to be murdered. In some places, such as Poland, nationalists were no more kind to Jews than the Nazis had been. Even Jewish partisans who had fought the Germans, such as my husband and Moishe Sobelman, were hunted by their former comrades. Jews had to flee again, some to Palestine and the hope of a Jewish state, others to America.”

Rose took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. “But what of the children who were given into the safekeeping of others by their parents? Most would never see their families again, if they even remembered them or knew their true identities. The parents, relatives, and communities who could have supplied a link to their past and to their heritage were gone. We were the lost children of the Holocaust.

“We identified with our new families. Those ‘other' people had abandoned us, and worse, they were Jews. We, the children of the lost, had grown up in communities in which Jews were despised, or had deserved what happened to them. The curse ‘
brudny Zid
' did not disappear from Polish lips just because the Nazis were gone.

“I was twelve or thirteen years old and had just finished feeding the chickens in the yard when a strange man appeared on the long drive leading to our home. He looked like a scarecrow. A filthy, skinny, haunted scarecrow with his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks; what little hair remained on his head reminded me of a mangy dog. I stood there watching him approach and suddenly wanted to flee, but I was joined by Piotr Stanislaw and then Anka. He stopped a few feet from me and knelt down. Then he smiled . . . a horrible smile without teeth . . . and called me by a name I had all but forgotten.
‘Rose,'
he said.

“I ran behind Piotr's back and begged him to tell the man to go away. The stranger stood up and I could see the pain on his face, but he tried again, stretching out his hands to me.
‘Rose, I am your father.' ”

As she spoke, Rose held her arms out in memory of a gesture from long ago. “I remember screaming out of fear and because, I think, I knew that what he said was true.”

The child had looked at the man and woman with whom she had lived for the past four years and Piotr nodded. “He said it was true, the dirty scarecrow was my
ojciec
, my father. My reaction was to scream,
‘But he's a brudny Zid, a filthy Jew!'
 ”

Rose shook her head sadly. “I refused to let him near me. At one point he got down on his knees and begged me to let him hold me.
‘You are all I have left,'
he begged. But when Piotr brought me over to him, I spit in his face.”

At last the scarecrow who was her father stopped trying and covered his face with his hands. “He let out a sob that was the saddest and loneliest sound I have ever heard. For a moment, I felt sorry for him, but not enough to go to him. And finally Piotr told him,
‘Maybe you should leave, and you can try again some other day.'
And so my father, Shmuel Kuratowski, the man who made me my first and only dreidel, who saved every last cent he could so that he and my mother could buy my safety, turned and walked away. . . . I would never see him again.”

Rose stopped speaking, too overcome for the moment, and looked out at her audience. Everywhere heads were bowed and tears streamed down cheeks; there were sniffles and coughs and sobs, but no one moved or spoke. However, she was not through with her story.

“If anything after that encounter I became even more anti-Semitic,” she said. “I joined Polish nationalist youth groups where Jews were not welcome and indeed, reviled. I hid my secret ethnicity with such fervor that no one hated Jews as much as I did.”

Rose stopped for a moment and looked up at the ceiling of the synagogue. “I turned my back on the God of Israel and threw myself into Catholicism. But the more I rejected my Jewishness, the more the guilt grew in me like a cancer. I could rail against Jews during the day, but in my sleep I saw the devastated face of my father and heard him say, ‘
You are all I have left.'
Then one day, I was attending a youth rally in the town park when a young Jewish couple and their daughter had the unfortunate luck of wandering into our midst. They were Orthodox and easy to recognize; he in the broad-brimmed black hat and full beard, her in a modest dress with a floral print. The fascists who were in control of our group set upon them, beating the man senseless and tearing the clothes off of his wife and knocking her to the ground.”

Closing her eyes as she remembered the scene, Rose shook her head. “At first I did nothing. After all, these were
brudny Zid
. They deserved whatever they got. They'd killed Christ. They were responsible for Godless communism. They made human sacrifices of Christian infants. Nothing was too outlandish to lay at their feet. But then I saw the little girl. She had been standing off to the side crying until her mother was knocked to the ground. That's when she ran forward and threw herself on that poor woman. I realized that she couldn't have been much older than I was when my parents, my real parents, gave me to the Stanislaws for safekeeping. One of the thugs grabbed her by her hair and pulled her up; I thought he was going to strike her or worse. Then something snapped in me. I ran forward and slapped him as hard as I could. Surprised, he dropped the little girl.

“He yelled at me, ‘
Why did you do that? Are you a Jew lover?
' ”

Rose smiled slightly at the old memory. “To this day I don't know why exactly I responded as I did, though I think that guilt, that psychological cancer that had been growing in me since I spit on my father, finally took over. I screamed in his face, ‘
No. I AM a Jew.
'

“The others in the group stood there stunned. Then one at a time, they turned their backs on me until only the man I had slapped and the terrified family was left. He said, ‘
I should have known. I could smell it in you. If I were you, I'd leave this place. You have lied to us and we won't forget it.
' ”

Rose had gone home to the Stanislaws and told them what she had done. They decided that it was not safe for her to continue living there. “In truth, it wasn't safe for them for me to continue living there,” she told the congregation. “I was a reminder that they had been lying to their neighbors and a reminder of the not-too-distant past when they'd looked the other way when my real family and so many others were murdered. They bribed some government official to let me leave the country on a student visa and sent me to New York.”

Smiling, she added, “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” She'd been living in the city several years after her arrival when she read a notice in the newspaper that there was to be a reunion of Sobibor survivors.

“I was now a young woman and had never forgotten the look on my father's face, or the sound of his voice, when I rejected him and called him a dirty Jew,” she said. “So I went to the reunion hoping against hope that he would turn up there. I imagined a joyous reunion where I would tell him how sorry I was for my words as a child, and how grateful I was for the sacrifices he and my mother made that kept me alive. And he would forgive me and we would be a family.”

Shmuel Kuratowski did not appear that day. “However, I met someone who had known my father at Sobibor. His name was Simon Lubinsky, the kindest, gentlest, wisest man I have ever known.”

Rose said she'd never told anybody about how she'd treated her father out of shame. “But I felt I could confide in Simon,” she said. “So I told him the story I just told all of you and waited for him to pass judgment. It was the longest few seconds of my life, and you know what he said?” She stopped to look lovingly at her husband. “He said, ‘
You were one of God's angels whom he assigned to bear witness to this colossal outrage. God gave you the strength that someday you would remind us all of the tyranny that exists when people lack virtue and absent themselves from God.
' Six months later, he proposed to me and I was thrilled to say yes.”

The couple had returned to Poland in 1980 and located the Stanislaw farm only to find out that Piotr had died. But Anka was still alive and sharp despite her years, filling in some of the gaps of Rose's knowledge about her childhood.

“She said they never heard from my father again after that day but suggested we go to Lublin to see if anyone would remember a man named Shmuel Kuratowski,” Rose said. “We succeeded in finding one man, Stefan, who had been a child when my father returned from the camps and rented a small flat in the attic of his family's home.

“Apparently, my father lived by doing odd jobs but seemed to Stefan to be a sad and lonely man who never remarried. Nor did he talk much about his family from before the war, except to say that he had a beautiful daughter who had survived the Nazis and then moved to America, where she lived like a princess in a fairy tale.

“Stefan said that he asked him once why he did not go to America to live with his beautiful daughter, and my father replied, ‘What? Me? A
brudny Zid?
Whatever would she do with me in America?' They never spoke of me again.”

The Lubinskys learned that her father had died in the early 1960s and had been buried “with no one to read the Kaddish or observe shiva. There was not even a headstone until my generous Simon paid to have one made.”

Rose was drawing to the end of her talk and suddenly sounded tired. “This is the first time I have told my story publicly, or to more than my closest friends, though more people will now know because of my book. I feel that the cancer is shrinking, so I want to thank you tonight for helping me keep a promise I once made as a little girl: that I not forget my family, or who I am.” She lifted her head and stood up straighter. “I am Rose Kuratowski-Lubinsky, the daughter of a simple bookkeeper and of a mother who loved me so much they gave me to others for safekeeping. Because of them, I am alive today. I am proud to be a
brudny Zid
, and blessed to count so many of you as my friends. Thank you.”

As Rose left the front of the synagogue to take her seat next to Goldie and Marlene, who both wept, one at a time members of the audience rose and began clapping. Simon was also standing and took his wife into his arms and held her as her shoulders shook and her tears soaked the tallith he wore around his neck.