[Wedding photograph. That officer still in uniform, and a plump, fully recovered Leahla in a dark suit, with both her arms around his waist. Caption: “Leahla and Dmitri Abramowitz, 1948.”]
Well, it took a while. I had typhus, of course, and around five other things as it turns out, but Dmitri kept saying, I want that tour of Dresden, you promised to show me Dresden, and what could I do? Of course, we had to go where he was stationed. Here we are, in Rathen. That’s after our two sons were born.
[Photograph of the family on a picnic by the Elbe, sandstone cliffs in the distance. Dmitri Abramowitz frankly stout now, in a porkpie hat and shirtsleeves, holding the hand of a dark-eyed toddler, as Leahla’s head bows over a child in her arms.
Cut to Leahla Abramowitz holding that same photograph.]
That’s the last picture I have of him. He was on duty, and a fascist shot him. A sharpshooter. That was in 1954. I want to show my grandson his stone.
[Leahla Abramowitz stands at a cemetery with a young child, and together they pass black and white markers, each at the head of a rectangle of grass, ivy, or flowers. In the distance is the Elbe, and beyond it, those same white and black and yellow sandstone cliffs.
She pauses at last before a marker with Dmitri Abramowitz’s name engraved in German and Cyrillic, and above it, a red star. Then she whispers something to her grandson, who turns his face towards the camera, fleetingly and with impatience. He picks up a stone. She guides his hand to place that stone on top of his grandfather’s marker.]
I always like our tradition, to put a stone on top. I don’t know why. He doesn’t know we’ve been here. But someone will know.
[She faces the camera.]
Honestly, can I tell you what it means, living here? In this country? It means facing it all over again, every day. It means swallowing my own kishkas. But I can tell you, it always means really, really knowing—
[Off camera: Unidentified woman’s voice:]
Knowing what?
[Abramowitz looks right at the camera.]
That I’m alive.
6
KRAVITZ turned off the projector. He addressed Judit in German. “Well?”
It was clear that Kravitz knew that Judit was familiar with what she had seen. He’d watched her watch it. Through the moss and rust of his beard and tangled side locks, his face was undeniably expressive.
Brusquely, Judit replied in Yiddish, “I’ll pass. Not what I’m looking for.”
Now there was no doubt. It was the same voice Kravitz had heard off-camera at the end of the film. He clearly struggled to find a way to turn this information to his own advantage, and persisted in his awful German. “So maybe you still want to make a business. The man who watched, you want to know a little more about him. A real character. Watch out. He took a special interest, I think, in the lady who made that movie.”
She didn’t say a word.
“Interest in you,” Kravitz said, “and your husband.”
Judit’s hand was in her pocket now. Her fingers closed around the note. She said, “My husband is dead.”
She wanted Kravitz to deny it. She tried to will his mouth into forming the words and telling her that Hans had sat in that same screening room just where she had been sitting, and that for a price, she could know where he’d gone. Instead, Kravitz reverted to Yiddish. “This country is built on a cemetery. When the dead rise, they’ll want their bones back. You need to put that in the film you’re making now. I think you already got some very interesting material. Am I right?”
The screening room was cramped and sticky with the residue of who-knows-what. What had possessed her, to come here? What stupid hope? Nobody sent a messenger. The messenger had sent himself, and fueled with pornographic movies, he had found her alone in the dark.
She finally asked, “Does he have a name—the one who takes a special interest?”
“You think I ask those questions of outsiders? I wouldn’t ask him any more than I’d ask you,” Kravitz said. “But he’s a jailbird. That much I can tell you. I’ve got an eye for it.” He removed the film from the projector and put it back in its case. Then his gaze rose from below those red eyebrows like oil rising through dirty water. “Don’t take chances. Look what they did to your husband. You want protection, I make arrangements.”
Judit said, “You don’t have anything I want.”
Kravitz said, “Suit yourself.”
7
EVEN before she’d reached the bottom of the stairs, Shaindel had asked what film Judit was making and interrogated her to the point where she was forced to admit that she worked for the museum that had been the source of what they’d seen upstairs. To Shaindel, this was as exotic as working for the Stasi.
“Then did you see all those bodies?” Shaindel asked.
“Somebody took those pictures a long time ago,” Judit said. “As evidence.” Then she had to explain about the archive and the photographs and footage that she catalogued and sometimes edited and spliced into the films approved for public distribution. Shaindel had never heard of the National Museum. As the two walked back to the center of Loschwitz, where Judit hoped to catch a bus back to her dormitory, she addressed question after question and described the rooms devoted to the Golden Age of Ashkenaz, the Hall of Bundist Heroes, and the exhibit on Judenstaat’s early history.
Shaindel had heard of Leopold Stein. “Oh, Stein the butcher,” she said, with a throwaway authority that Judit couldn’t counter. Then: “It doesn’t matter where Jews live. When the Messiah comes, there won’t be any countries.”
“This is your country,” Judit said in German, which Shaindel had continued speaking. “You need to know our history.”
“It’s not real history,” said Shaindel.
“What’s not?”
“That movie. All those dead people naked.”
“It know it’s hard to see,” Judit said. “But it’s all true.”
There’d been debate about incorporating those photographs. The National Museum had a strict policy about Churban artifacts: they must originate with the survivors. Purists considered images like the ones they’d used sheer voyeurism. Judit had argued at the time that the Soviets who took the photographs weren’t pornographers. They were documenting genocide. If the pictures made people feel violated, that was the whole point.
Judit thought all this, but what she said to Shaindel was: “My mother survived Auschwitz.”
Shaindel asked, “What’s that?”
Judit stopped walking. They’d come to the center of Loschwitz. Most of the shops were closed, though a few basement enterprises were open for business. What light there was filtered through their grated windows, and turned the dark street gray. How many of those shopkeepers came from Hungary or Poland and had family who died in Auschwitz or Treblinka? Then Judit remembered. The black-hats believed that the slaughter was a consequence of Jews like Judit who had turned their backs on God. Maybe Shaindel’s ignorance was better than what someone might have taught her.
Finally, Judit said, “Auschwitz was a camp.”
“Oh,” Shaindel said. She must have known that Judit had left something out of the story, but she didn’t pursue it. “Like an army camp. Where they train people.”