“I don’t know,” she said. “The way he looks at her? The other day he asked me why Jews were being killed. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I should ask him, the blockhead! He said the German officers used to flirt with the Jewish girls during World War I, and now he has to make me cart firewood.”
Several days before, the Germans had finished off the ghetto orphanage. Kube, the generalkommissar for Belarus, had made a special visit. He threw candies to the children as they were tossed alive into a pit and covered with sand. It was hard to argue for staying. In the next several days, I made contact with a partly Jewish partisan unit in Rusakovichi. The reaction was mixed, but the commander ordered us to go ahead. Weidt refused to arrange so many, but Ada was tough. She said twenty-five or no one. Eventually, he gave in. He was going to come, too.
I went to speak to my father, but he refused to leave without Zeyde, and the partisans wouldn’t take an old, ailing man. Zeyde cursed at my father from the cot, but my father didn’t want to discuss it. My father was a ferryman before the war; he delivered safes by horse cart. This was the age before elevators — he carted the safes to the third and fourth floor on his back. The man died without a file at the medical clinic. So you didn’t argue much with him. He said I would go and they would follow soon after. After all, they’d made it this far. It was just a matter of time before Minsk was liberated. By then we had heard about Moscow, Stalingrad — it seemed like a reasonable thing to say. You believed him when he spoke.
The cover for the truck detail was an assignment to load cement at the railway station, on the outskirts of town. The partisans had said they would be waiting in one of three villages not far from the station. The driver was an ordinary German soldier. He had no idea about Weidt’s plans, but I guess we benefited from the German fanaticism about protocol. As we rolled past the railway station, he didn’t say a word.
After hours of driving from village to village, we stumbled onto a forward unit in Rusakovichi, which we had passed twice. The partisans made a mistake; they thought the driver was Weidt and approached off-guard. The soldier had time to fire off several rounds, killing one partisan and wounding another. Weidt had a bullet in the soldier’s skull before any of the partisans had time to shoot back.
We slept the sleep of the free for the first time since July 1941, not really believing it — Ada and I, with Ilse squeezed between us like a child, in a tiny zemlyanka covered with birch leaves. Weidt they took to the commander’s. We woke to shouting, thinking it had all ended so quickly, but it turned out that one of the partisans had lost his temper and was whaling Weidt. It was his brother who had been killed before in the mix-up with the driver. Weidt had his hands bound; the commander waited some time before interfering.
Weidt was gone by the time we awoke. A girl from night watch told us that he had been taken to partisan headquarters for the area; he had begged to say goodbye to Ilse. We never heard from him again. The Minsk ghetto was liquidated a month later. My father had picked such a terrible instance to be wrong for the first time in his life. When the commander made the announcement, I sat down on the grass and could not stand. Then, when no one was looking, I got some rope and walked off until I was out of sight in a clearing with tall trees. I was testing branches for give when Ada appeared. She had followed me. I wept into her shirt until it was soaked. It was a coarse shirt, fashioned from a sack that once held potatoes, and her skin was raw from it. But she managed to stop me.
A month later, I was ordered to join a mobile fighting unit and didn’t see Ada again until after the war, back in the neighborhood. She kept her distance, like old times, and never mentioned the day in the clearing. One night about six months after the war ended, there was a dance in a little club on Shornaya. There was a bomb crater in one of the walls; they hadn’t had time to fix it. Three quarters of Minsk was on the ground. You could feel the cold air through the wall once in a while. I was with my friends, Ada with hers, but at one point she came over. “Lazar, help,” she said. “There’s a captain over there who keeps asking me to dance. Says he wants to escort me home. I’m frightened.”
“Am I just a thug?” I said. She looked away resentfully. “Fine,” I said. “I help you with the captain, you go with me on a date.”
She refused, so I returned to my friends, leaving her to stand there alone.
She came over. “So be it,” she said. “One date.”
The captain and I knew each other from the neighborhood. He lived by Tatar Gardens. You had to take it easy with army captains, but I was something, too. I’m an old camel now, but back then, sparks flew from my feet when I walked — you could light a cigarette if you wanted. I was known in the neighborhood. Anyway, I went over, put my arm around him, and said: “Captain, I just wanted to thank you.”
“What for?” he said. He was nervous, you could see.
“For not letting my girl get lonesome.” I pointed to Ada.
He turned the color of a sugar beet. “I had no idea. Forgive me, Lazar. You’re a lucky fellow.”
I walked Ada home that night. On our first date, she sat about a kilometer away from me. But she agreed to a second. I had a while of persuading ahead of me; we weren’t married for another two years.
Move forward forty years. We were just about to emigrate to America. I was watching television when I heard Ada scream out my name. In the newspaper, there was an advertisement from an Ilse Shusterman, searching for fellow inmates from the Minsk ghetto. Ada flew to Krasnodar to meet with her. Except for a lot of wrinkles, Ilse was the same beautiful girl, married to a scientist, a grandmother already, spoke fluent Russian. Before leaving, Ada asked if she had ever heard anything about Weidt. Ilse said that she had been told by the partisans that he had been assigned to a German POW camp. He had died there, for undisclosed reasons.
Did Ilse ever feel anything for Weidt? Ada didn’t dare ask, and Ilse didn’t volunteer. I doubt it. But it’s to them that Ada and I owe the fifty-seven years that we had together.
Eighty thousand Jews lived in the Minsk ghetto, almost all of them killed. After the war, they got a memorial stone by one of the killing pits; it actually said Jews died here, as opposed to “Soviet patriots,” which is what it said almost everywhere else — if they put up a plaque in the first place. After the war, the government kept saying they were going to tear down the memorial and fill in the pit.
Generalkommissar Kube also did not live to see the end of the war. His maid, who was part of the resistance, placed a bomb under his bed, timed to go off in the middle of the night. (What did that man dream about?) They had to scrape his brains off the ceiling. I regret it was an instant death.
Lazar wanted Slava to fall in love with his granddaughter, so Slava gave him a love story. The rest he invented, following one detail until it gave him the next. He had started far more carefully with the letters — lists of details, outlines, narrative arcs. He had always known what piece of information would come next. However, the stories came out better if he didn’t know everything in advance. In real life, one thing might have happened, but in the letter? It might have, it might not. Was Weidt’s plan a trick to root out ghetto inmates who were causing problems for the administration? Would he slip out of his ropes in the middle of the night, club to death the partisan guarding him, and spirit off Ilse? Was he first a devoted Nazi or a Nazi who had fallen in love? You had to write it down to find out.
In their claim letters, the estranged elders of Midwood, né Minsk, spent time together in a way they refused to in real life. Grandmother and Grandfather fell in love in Lazar’s story; someone else got Lazar’s poor hearing. However, other things were lost, blurred, made false. Mother, Father, and Zeyde killed when the ghetto was liquidated: That is what had happened to Grandmother’s family, he was certain of that, even if the fact crowned Lazar’s story. But was it her father who was a ferrier? And Grandfather hadn’t demanded a date in exchange for helping Grandmother free herself of the leering captain, had he? Why had Slava written it differently, then? That was what the story had asked. The price was, by the end, Slava didn’t remember what about it was true and what was invented.