The Sweetness of Forgetting (102)

“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?”