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Time must have stood still for a little while as we waited in this apartment, the former owners now ghosts. As we went about the business of living, breathing new life into the chunky prewar furniture—the chairs that others had once sat in, the table they had eaten at, the beds they had slept in. We were a long way from the dirt roads of Kolki and Trochenbrod, but we still had a long way to go.
There’s a photograph of my parents on the street somewhere in Lodz: My mother is wearing a hat, her arm linked through my father’s arm, and another man on the other side. They all look chic in their tall boots, and I like to imagine that this was a happy interregnum, that they were jaunty and carefree, enjoying this more cosmopolitan life, even though I know it was not. Their smiles belie the horrors they have just been through, not to mention that they were surely overwhelmed by such adult concerns as making a living, putting food on the table, getting this family to a better place.
Over the years I pressed my mother for more details about Lodz, but unsurprisingly most of what she remembered had to do with being a new young mother who did not have her own mother to guide her.
Eventually she opened up, and what she told me proved far more colorful than I would have thought. At first she said something about a deli. But then, when pressed, she wasn’t confident it was really a deli. I would later learn that although there was in fact an establishment that served food and drink, it may have been something of a front, that the money came from money itself. My parents changed currency and they bought gold that had been melted down for easy transport. They did this for the largely transient population that was moving from east to west in search of a future.
The deli, such as it was, gave free drinks to local police and other authorities, I discovered from one of my father’s partners, to keep local officials lubricated and on their side. And the business that propped up the business was so successful that my father and his partners had a Jewish cobbler carve out the heels of old shoes as a hiding place for money and valuables. They used old shoes only so as to be less conspicuous—they didn’t want to draw attention with any suggestion of prosperity. I often wonder if this made my mother think of Pesha’s shoes.
I learned most of this from Itzhak Kimelblat, whom I met several times in Rio and whom Frank was able to interview separately on a couple of trips to Brazil. The Kimelblats came from Trochenbrod, or actually from Lozisht, our particular “suburb” of Trochenbrod. The map of the shtetl shows them living across the road from my grandmother Brucha’s house. Itzhak told me that he went to school with Choma, my father’s half sister, and that Choma married Itzhak’s cousin Shai Kimelblat, which made us almost family.
When I first met him in Rio, Itzhak was nearly ninety, fit, stylish, and equipped with a phenomenal memory. I asked him about the business the Kimelblats shared with my father and several other partners, and he said nonchalantly, “Oh, you mean at Seventy-eight Piotrkowska Street?” I searched for the address online—and there it was: the street and the building. I recognized it immediately as the backdrop of pictures of my parents along with their business partners, including Itzhak Kimelblat and his brother, Natan. It’s an elegant old building, with beautiful architecture, located on one of the most magnificent streets in Lodz. Today the street is bustling with cafés and bookstores and shops.
I also learned that this had been the 1887 birthplace of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Today there is a plaque on the building and, outside it, a life-size bronze figure of Rubinstein seated at a grand piano.
Across the street, at 77 Piotrkowska, is a former mansion and bank that once belonged to another successful Lodz Jew, the banker Maksymilian Goldfeder. Now it has been transformed into a club. The street is lined with mansions, banks, and textile factories that were once owned by other murdered Jewish industrialists. At one point, the largest building in the heart of Lodz was the “Great” Synagogue, which was burned down by the Nazis in 1939, along with the rest of the synagogues. There’s another chilling reminder of the city’s history: During World War II, the street was briefly renamed Adolf Hitler Strasse.
The business my father and his partners created required quick thinking; they had to memorize fluctuating exchange rates and be able to convert currencies without the aid of calculators. These guys from Trochenbrod may not have had much education, but they were shrewd. I sometimes thought of this as I watched my mother holding up the line at the CVS register, counting her coupons, running the numbers through her head to make sure there wasn’t a mistake.
Given my mother’s wartime heroics, her cross-continental journey made largely on foot, and her ability to intuit the dangers ahead, it’s not hard to imagine her as a successful associate in the family’s shadow trade. She told me she once traveled to Kiev with gold coins strapped clandestinely around her waist. My father told her where to go, gave her the address and the names of the contacts. I’m not sure if she was trading currency for gold or vice versa. She had one close call on the train, when a man tried to pick her up. She was terrified that his advances might lead to him touching her and finding the secret belt of gold, but she managed to extricate herself somehow. Anyway, mission accomplished. I assume this took place before I was born and that after I arrived she gave up these sorts of gutsy missions, but, knowing her, I can’t say for sure.
From what I now know about our time in Lodz, my parents engaged in their deli–cum–currency franchise for about a year and a half. And even though Itzhak helped fill in many details of this period, he and Natan were in business with my father for only a few months. There were other partners who came and went, as evidenced by the pictures outside the deli where my father poses with a changing cast of characters. In one photograph, Itzhak and Natan wear the war medals they received for fighting as partisans, Itzhak still nursing war injuries that have him leaning on a cane.
Other landsmen came through Lodz, looking for whatever family they could find, including my father’s first cousin Gadia Bisker. When I met Gadia in Israel many years later, he bragged that he had been my first babysitter. My parents helped him get back on his feet, bought him new clothes and shoes, but apparently he was not all that eager to find real work, much to my father’s frustration. It’s not hard to imagine how he might have lost his will. He was the only one of my father’s cousins to survive the massacres in Trochenbrod. Gadia’s sisters and their families, as well as his mother, were all killed, probably alongside my own grandmother and Aunt Choma.
Two of Gadia’s brothers had left before the war. Shmuel and Yehoshua Bisker were among the Zionists from Trochenbrod who went to Palestine in the mid-1930s, and Gadia was focused on getting out of Poland to join them, which he did, eventually. After the war, more than 70,000 Jews arrived illegally in British Palestine on more than one hundred ships that picked up refugees who had moved through Europe by foot or in disguised vehicles to ports along the Mediterranean Sea. Not everyone made it: Many more refugees were stopped by British patrols and sent to internment camps in Cyprus.
My parents may have managed to begin a family, to run a business, to wear fashionable-looking boots, but there were constant reminders that this was not where they were meant to stay. Between 1944 and 1946 there were a series of anti-Semitic incidents in Poland, occurring at a time of general lawlessness and civil war against the Soviet-backed Communists. And, it was increasingly clear that the “iron curtain” was going to make it difficult to leave. Itzhak said that a young girl sent by Brihah (which literally means “to escape” and was the name of an organization that worked to get Jewish refugees across closed borders from Europe to Palestine) came to their store one day and told them it was time to get out of Poland.
Itzhak and Natan, both young and unencumbered, made their way through Europe to Italy and ultimately to Rio, where they had relatives. Once in Brazil, Natan began life as a peddler and went on to build one of the largest jewelry chains in the country, launching a brand of watches bearing his name. My husband, Bert, still proudly wears his Natan watch today. In fact, Natan arrived in the country shortly after two other Jewish immigrant jewelers—Hans Stern and Jules Roger Sauer—who were also fleeing persecution; all three built major international brands.
We stayed in Lodz a little longer. Escaping for us was complicated because I was a baby. But there were constant reminders that we needed to leave, including individual assaults and pogroms, such as the one in Kielce, on July 4, 1946, where forty-two Jews were murdered and many more injured. It was time to get out.
When I was close to six months old, in August or September 1946, we finally left Lodz. We had to employ some spycraft to slip away undetected. My mother traveled light, packing only a few things, and told her neighbors that she and I were going away for a few days. My father went to work as usual. At some point during the day, my father said that he was going out for a break, or maybe he said he was running an errand. He never returned.
They met up at a designated location, where they had arranged transport from the middle of Poland to the middle of Germany and then to a displaced-persons camp in the American zone. My mother remembered a covered truck with a false bottom, which was where we hid for part of the journey. Among the things she packed were some small silver Kiddush cups, called becher in Yiddish, but along the way she started throwing them out, afraid of being caught with them if we were stopped. Knowing what I know now, I’m sure there was money or gold stuffed into the heels of shoes or in the linings of their clothing, and possibly other valuables hidden, as well—all easier to disguise than bulky silver cups.
The biggest challenge, my mother said, was traveling with a baby. She had to stuff cloth into my mouth to keep me quiet as we made our way through dangerous territory. We traveled this way from Lodz to Berlin, which on a direct route was about three hundred miles. Today, on good roads in a modern vehicle, the trip would take about five hours, so I can only imagine how long and harrowing our journey was. My mother recalled few details, apart from how awful she felt having to gag her child. It’s probably just as well that she couldn’t remember more; surely these were not memories to preserve—apart from that we made it.
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