Indulging in Tuscany, And How Bee Stings Lead to An Epiphany.
After touring emotional sites in Eastern Europe -- memorial-hopping, if you will, for murdered family members -- and then celebrating my birthday surrounded by family and friends in Israel, I thought Tuscany would be a good final stop before returning home to New York. In Tuscany I don't know anyone. Here, alone, I can collect my thoughts, hike, write, and, well, if I must indulge in the local pasta and wine, I must.
And it's all been going according to plan, although what trip would be really worthwhile without a hiccup that leads to an epiphany?
Except it's not really a hiccup, it's a sting.
Hiking from the idyllic farm I'm staying at to Bagno Vignoni I get accosted by a bee (or two? At this point it might as well be a dozen). They get caught in my hair, I run down the trail and scream like a madwoman. It's off-season in Tuscany and no hikers are around to witness me bouncing and flipping my hair as though it were on fire. Finally, the bee(s?) get away with just a couple of bites off my scalp, leaving two knobs on my head. I make it to Bagno Vignoni where tagliatelli with white truffles (now in-season!) and white wine make it all better. I have to wonder what my 16-year old vegetarian hippie-wannabe self would've thought of this 30-something year old woman who is terrified of bees in freaking Tuscany.
But before I can beat myself up too much, I return to the farm and learn that a rogue truck full of beehives had an accident and hundreds of bees are on the loose. The farmers working the field were attacked, forced to jump on their stomachs into the tall grass to hide and then run, leaving their tractors behind. "Queste api sono aggressivi!" says one of the farmers, who got several stings on his face. Aggressive indeed!
So it's this knowledge of bees in the air that encourages me to explore spots further removed from here at least for the next day or two. And that's how I discover La Piccola Gerusalemme -- Little Jerusalem in Tuscany -- in a beautiful little town called Pitigliano, a town carved into tuffs of valleys.
Driving toward Pitigliano I'm thrown by the surreal scenery. A town carved into a mountain! I'd read about it, but to see it! Arriving at the quaint and quiet center I see a map where La Picolla Gerusalemme is shown. It consists of a cultural museum and an old synagogue.
I slip ahead of a German tour group to see the synagogue. It's beautiful but sad, especially after reading the museum pamphlet that tells the story of the Jews of Pitigliano:
"In 1598 the Synagogue of Pitigliano was built. [...] [T]he Medici family instituted the Ghetto here in 1622. In the 19th Century, about 1/4 of Pitigliano's population was of the Jewish faith and this community became known as "The Little Jerusalem," a nickname given to it by the Jews of the city of Livorno. In the 1861 Unification of Italy, all Jews were emancipated and many from Pitigliano's Ghetto left for the larger cities. In 1938 the Jews in Pitigliano numbered approximately 70 people but due to the racial laws, this number gradually decreased. During World War II, the approximate 30 Jews remaining in Pitigliano were helped and eventually saved by Pitigliano's Catholic families who hid and protected their fellow citizens in the surrounding countryside. In the 1960s the Synagogue gradually collapsed, taking with it hopes for a 'rebirth' of the city's Jewish community."
The synagogue was restored in 1995 but it's no longer in use, today it's part of the museum. The museum is beautiful and quite thorough, it shows the remains of the old mikvah (ritual bath), a textile dyeing room, a kosher cellar, bakery and butcher. A side room described as the "Jewish community's original place of worship and study" contains objects "used in Jewish tradition" with explanations of what they are. The objects include kippas (skullcaps), mezuzas, torahs, ketubahs. Each one has a description of what the object is and how it was once part of the Jewish culture in Pitigliano.
It feels like visiting the museum of a lost civilization. And really, it is, since almost none of this civilization is left here -- not enough Jews to make a minyan to use the synagogue, anyway. Although a New York Times piece published last year about this town contains an interview with an impressive Jewish woman who was born here, was saved by Catholic farmers during the war while hiding in a cave for three months and then returned to Pitigliano where she told the New York Times she "has dedicated her life to preserving and restoring her hometown’s Jewish history."
After having visited my grandparents' birthplaces, I can't help thinking that with the exception of Riga, their birth towns might as well have a museum dedicated to that lost civilization, too (and Riga's apparently still working on it with its annual court-approved neo-Nazi march).
Then I realize, it's these little towns I've visited, the ones that purged themselves of Jews that live in tragedy: local citizens wake up among memorials and torn up, lifeless, synagogues. Each day as they walk past ruins they breathe the loss of a culture that once thrived.
And I remember that in Israel, just last week, I celebrated a birthday with great aunts and second cousins, I saw Tel Aviv growing, Jerusalem abuzz; in Brazil, just about three months ago, I saw my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles and cousins, heard old stories, made new memories; in Houston, I celebrated Rosh Hashanah with my parents and sister, missing my brother who was in college. In the past three months I've gotten to enjoy the family thriving in both its ancient home and our "new" homes.
It strikes me, as it has many times in the past few weeks, that my grandparents' stories are far from being just about survival. Survival, especially Holocaust survival, is just a chapter. Their stories are about recreation and their gifts to future generations, me included: inspiration and the guts to thrive.
Love/Life in Munich
It's Oktoberfest in Munich. At night we head to the subway station where metro workers line up by the platform to keep the tipsy from stumbling in the rail. Bavarian costumes rule the street. Girls (grown women) wear tidy braids and dirndl. Boys (grown men) adorn lederhosen and suspenders. German rock, German pop; a man with gray hair dances on top of a table. He falls backwards -- flips in the air -- for a second I think he might be break dancing. Thud. He's on the floor, his feet land behind his head, he's on his neck. For another second I think he may have broken his neck. A small crowd gathers around him and I wonder if someone's called the medics. But he gets up, smiles sheepishly and shakes it off. His friends pat him on the back and start dancing again. The party does not stop.
Coming to Germany after tracing the hardships of my grandparents' early lives we aren't sure about arriving in time for Octoberfest. But when I told my grandmother we were going she was excited. Life, she says, started for her in Berlin, with her freedom.
In Berlin she lived in a DP ("Displaced Persons") camp with her parents and brother, sharing one room in a barrack with ten other families, where they all shared one bathroom. After hiding in a cramped cellar for 630 days this was a luxury. In Berlin she and her friends took classes, went to the opera -- they were free.
In Munich, though, she fell in love. Here, she finished university. She celebrated Oktoberfest with classmates and went to school dances. She met my grandfather, who'd been working for Betar helping refugees make their way to start a new life in Palestine.
In Munich, they married and a little over a year later my father was born. In the hospital, they discovered to their horror that they were only religiously married and not civilly married -- the hospital listed my father as an illegitimate child. My grandparents quickly went to city hall to get the papers they needed for my dad's birth certificate. That night, a quartet came to serenade them, a tradition in Munich after the civil wedding. My grandfather ran out and gave the quartet money to leave, they'd been married for over a year -- what would the neighbors think?! The birth certificate was quickly rectified.
During the day we look up my father's first address and actually find it. I wonder how much it's changed since my grandfather rented two rooms in the building in the 1950s. In this building, my grandfather (the journalist) covered post-war Munich. He wrote about the overwhelming poverty in the city. He wrote about Holocaust survivors living in camps, in ghetto-like conditions. He wrote about Jews bartering for food, unable to get jobs, forced to live on welfare and enduring life as aliens since losing their homes and much, if not all, of their families. Meanwhile, even my father -- the son of stateless refugees -- didn't have any citizenship until his 18th birthday in Brazil.
The DP camps in Munich and Berlin have all been rebuilt into regular neighborhoods so there's nothing to see in that front. We look for the new synagogue and Jewish Community Center (JCC). The synagogue is near the tourist-filled center of the old town, a modern, impressive structure. The JCC is a sleek glass building.
For the first time in our trip a JCC refuses to let us in for a peek into the local contemporary Jewish life. The center is reserved for members only, we are told. We stand our ground until they relent. The JCC is breathtaking. The "small" synagogue seats 400 people and is consistently filled for services, the Israeli security guard tells us. I can't imagine what my grandfather would have thought of Jewish life in Munich today.
Later, we head for the old Jewish cemetery, built in 1816. We discover a beautifully maintained plot of land and meet Johanna, the woman (not Jewish) whose family has been taking care of the cemetery since before the war. Johanna shows us a registry of those buried in the cemetery, a yellowed book her father-in-law managed to hide from the Nazis during World War II. She lives on her own in a small house inside the cemetery walls and spends her days weeding out overgrown plants and planting fresh flowers for the dead.
In Munich we hardly see any monuments for war victims. Life seems to go on. Then we take off for Berlin and it's a different story.
Dubno Remains.
Today I travel to Dubno. We ride a car from Lviv, past the countryside, beetroot and potato plantations and forests. Before taking off, my grandfather gives me names to look for: his old school, his address growing up, the river he swam in during the summer and ice skated on during the winter.
After two hours in the car we arrive. We see the river, Ikva. It’s still there, the Dubno castle tower behind it, intact. It’s a warm day but there are no children playing outside. I imagine what it might’ve looked like as a young boy playing with his friends.
We drive to his old school, where my grandfather would walk to, about 3 or 4 kilometers, each day. He wasn’t a great student, he’d told me, but loved history, physics and geography. Math, not so much. The building, to our surprise, is still there. The outside is almost intact. But it’s an abandoned building. Weeds grow around the edges; windows are cracked. No one uses it anymore.
We find a woman, Ludmila, who studied in the same school as my grandfather. She was a year older, she tells us, and studied with an older class. Ludmila, who’s 89 or 90, has kind eyes and invites us inside her home, where she shows us photographs of her class. Unfortunately, she can’t remember my grandfather since he was a year younger. When we go back outside we see a horse cart on the dirt road carrying supplies, a common sight here. I imagine the old village doctor my grandfather had told me about, the only person in Dubno with a car back in the 1930s: “One time his car stopped and he got his gun and shot the engine,” he told me laughing.
We find my grandfather’s old street and look for the house where his family once had a garden and grew cucumbers, radishes and other vegetables. This street is paved now, but some houses look like they could still have a separate bathroom outside, some look like the walls are barely hanging on.
We go by the large Dubno synagogue, which is still standing in the center of town. Windows are boarded up and we see ruins on the inside through the cracks. A drunk man walks over to us and says something our guide refuses to translate. There are 20 Jews left in Dubno, our guide tells us. But no synagogues remain active today.
When I told my grandfather I was coming to Dubno, his birth town, he first asked me why. There’s nothing to see, he said. Twenty-two members of our family were murdered, including his mother, Zysl, and his younger sister, Mania.
I wanted to see where he was born, how he managed to reinvent himself, recreate a life, thrive from ashes. I’m discovering that everything he left behind stayed more or less frozen in time, deteriorating.
Belarus and Ukraine: Car Rides, Plane Rides, Train Rides and Fuel.
In Belarus we spend hours riding the car. From Minsk to Pinsk (about 4 hours). From Pinsk to Stolin (about an hour). From Stolin to Minsk (another 4 hours). This in the span of three days.
For breakfast, the Pinsk hotel offers us "Broth with a Bird." As adventurous as we like to think we are, we pass. We eat potato latkes with sour cream and black bread for lunch. We have chocolate and vodka for dinner.
In Stolin we see remains of the Great White Synagogue, the place where possibly my grandmother spent days sleeping in transit with groups of refugees before her 630 days under the ground.
At lunch we eat more black bread with beet-sour cream salad and marinated potatoes.
During the drive from Stolin to Minsk, I doze off while watching the scenery of tall trees and marshland. I imagine my grandmother, age 11, walking with her aunt and a group of refugees from David Gorodok after being kicked out of the ghetto, sleeping in the forest, begging for food. I remember how once, she told me, she was so thirsty she could hardly continue walking. She saw a well filled with green moss and bugs, stuck her hand in it, wiped the bugs off, and happily drank the water. Until today, she says, she's grateful for every glass of water.
Before we arrive in Minsk I receive a message from the hotel we're supposed to spend the night in before taking off in a plane to Kiev. The guy says he needs the exact time we're arriving to meet us. He'll be in a car in the parking lot, wearing black. This doesn't make my mother nervous at all. Really.
We arrive in the evening and there's Alex in his car. He takes us on a five-story walk-up to an apartment. Outside the main road the streets are dark and practically empty. We see security cameras on every street corner. Alex leaves us and we opt against leaving the apartment, er, "hotel," for water and dinner. We barricade our door stacking up our two suitcases and hope for the best.
In the early morning we leave for the Minsk airport. After checking-in we try to find some coffee. There's a bar, there are folks drinking whiskey. It's 8:30am. We skip breakfast.
Arriving in Kiev, we see welcome signs outside the airport on the road to the city written in Hebrew. Interesting, I think.
We go see the memorial of Babi Yar, where somewhere between 100-150,000 Jews, gypsies, Ukrainian nationalists, Soviet POWs civilian hostages were slaughtered by Nazis and collaborators on a ravine astonishingly close to the center of town. A day later will mark the horrible event's 72nd birthday. The memorials are covered in flowers, candles and stones. We add our own stones. We look inside the ravine and try to imagine the unimaginable.
Later, we have dinner, probably one of the best meals of the trip. The borscht, finally, is almost as delicious as my grandmothers'. The Chicken Kiev is divine. The cherry strudel is juicy and tangy.
It's been 12 hours since we've arrived in Kiev. After dinner we drag our bags inside a train. In about six hours we'll be in Lviv. We collapse til morning.
** Note: It's about time I send out a huge thank you to my mother, who's taking amazing photos of our trip, being a wonderful blog editor and most of all, an incredible partner in every adventure.
Knocking on Pinsk doors.
We are knocking on doors. Babushkas answer many of them, wearing scarves wrapped around cotton-white heads, thick socks and sandals on feet. We, or actually, our translators, ask them how long they’ve lived here, who they know.
Do they know of a Christian woman living on the street 70 years ago who hid six Jews in her cellar for 630 days and nights?
A couple of women shake their heads like we’re all insane. “Nyet.”
But then one tells us, hidden halfway behind her wooden door, that she was 6 years old during the war and has been in the same house since she was born. She remembers, she says, the police looking for a woman who looked Jewish. Everyone in the street knew that one of the neighbors was hiding Jews, she says, but they told the police that the woman was Russian. They were protecting the neighbor and the Jews. One of the Jews living in the cellar on top of stacks of hay for 630 days and nights was my grandmother. She was 11 when she moved in.
The woman living on the street now says she thinks the house where the Jews were hiding was number 38 or 40. So we look down the road and find the houses, which have been rebuilt. We knock on a neighbor’s door. Zofia Fiodorchenko, who hid my grandmother, lived at number 40, he says. She lived there until the 1980s, had a daughter and two sons. She died a few years ago; she’d already sold her house by then. Nevertheless, we knock on that door. No one answers.
We think we find my grandmother’s house. But when she sees a photo we email her she doesn’t recognize the building.
We drive around Pinsk, a town of 130,000 and it’s much bigger than the villages we saw during our four-hour car ride over from Minsk. Our guide shows us a playground. “This used to be one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries of the 16th century,” he says. I see the swing sets and imagine the children playing there today. The cemetery survived the war, only to be destroyed by the Soviets in the 1960s.
Walking in the quiet old town center, I look around wondering if any of the older women might remember being 10 or 11 years old and having had a Jewish best friend before the war, a neighbor. Would she remember the girl’s mother being forced out of her house with her sick son, to go to Siberia? Does she remember her mother agreeing to store a few of the family’s valuables – perhaps clothing and photographs – so they might come get these things after the war? Might she remember the girl knocking on her door months after the Germans had taken control of the town?
It was nighttime, dark. Maybe she remembers making eye contact with the girl for a second through a window by the door? I wonder if she realized the flurry of excitement my grandmother felt for a split second, thinking that maybe she’d get her coat back, the coat her father had bought her a year ago, and that her friend was now wearing. Does she remember her mother handing the girl a sandwich as she opened the door just a crack, then shooing her friend away? I wonder how long the girl kept that coat.
Our hotel is quite modern. There’s a disco ball enhancing the restaurant’s purple decor and we can watch Russian music videos during breakfast and sing karaoke at night. Unfortunately for us, central heat is only turned on in October and it’s an unusually cold September in Belorussia. We warm up with potatoes, chocolate and vodka. We eat the best potatoes we’ve ever had. I consume more vodka I’ve ever had in one sitting. We are warm.
We go to Pinsk’s historical museum depicting a town where before 1941, 77% of the population was Jewish. There are photos of cathedrals, rooms with prehistoric artifacts and costumes, medieval memorabilia, displays of local animals. There are no photos of synagogues. There are no samples of Jewish artifacts. There is one room devoted to World War II. One small display shows a couple of photos and a map of the Pinsk ghetto. Our guide tells us that her grandfather, not a Jew, fought in the war as a partisan and his hand was mangled. Her grandmother, she told us, was waiting for him after the war, and they married.
At night we walk from our hotel to one of the two surviving synagogues (there used to be 41 in Pinsk before the war). It’s Simchat Torah and the Chassidic synagogue soon fills up. We are surprised to see young people, lots of children. Many speak Hebrew; a few speak English. The kids run around excited, dancing, throwing candy in the air, at each other. Simchat Torah, says the rabbi, “is the happiest day of the year.”
We leave the synagogue. Once we close the gate the singing, clapping and laughter disappears. In the street there’s no sign of a community celebrating, just dark and quiet.
In Riga Reality Hits. Hard.
The night we arrive in Riga is dark and rainy. The following day's weather follows suit. It's fitting for the mood of the day.
We visit the Riga ghetto where my great-grandparents and great-aunts were taken before being murdered. It's eerie: the houses down the streets are now just as they were then. Outside one house we see a wooden structure -- the dilapidated bathroom. When our guide, Victoria, tells us that people live in these houses today we can't believe her. She tells us she's visited people in these houses and felt the ghosts of past atrocities.
We see the art-nouveau apartment building where my grandfather once lived with his parents and sisters (now renovated), the school where he studied (now apartments) the building that once housed his father's hat shop (now being renovated). I imagine him walking to school, just two blocks from his home, his father taking the trolley to work, a few blocks away. We drive by the university where he studied economics, a beautiful building -- I imagine him walking the halls.
We see one of the synagogue that was burned down on July 4, 1941. My grandfather, Eliezer Blankfeld, had already been drafted into the Latvian army by then, which was soon absorbed by the Red Army. Six years later, as a journalist recording the life of Jews in Germany after the war, he would write in an article entitled Why?:
"I remember that day, the 22nd of June 1941, as if it were today. I was a soldier, far away from home without any possibility of contacting my parents or my sisters, and they—not knowing the fate of their only son . . . ."
I wonder when he learned that his family had been taken to the ghetto. Did he hear about the Jews being killed in the middle of the ghetto streets? Or did he hear about the 25,000 Jews who'd walked 6 km in their summer clothes to the Rumbula forest to be frozen to death, shot or burned and buried in mass graves? Could he imagine they might be part of that group?
We visit the only synagogue in Riga that survived the war and see the Sukkah where around 30 Jews celebrated Succot only the night before.
We drive by the Freedom Monument where I have one of my biggest shocks. Every year, Victoria tells us, neo-Nazis hold a parade celebrating Waffen SS divisions in Latvia, created in 1943 on orders of Hitler. This year three members of the Latvian parliament tore up pictures of Nazi concentration camp victims. I cannot believe the Jewish community here still puts up with violent, court-approved hate and anti-semitism. It's devastating.
I have no words.
Today we see a memorial with thousands of victims' names. We light a candle.
