Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

Gertrud and Abraham: Can we understand the relationship, given its origin? What did that sense of absolute dependency turn into once the danger had passed, was it something like love or beyond love or not at all like love? Or maybe I’m overthinking it, maybe it was exactly love?

Abraham wanted to marry Gertrud; Gertrud wanted to marry Abraham. Rita and Helga each said to me, many times, that they wished Abraham had stayed with their mother; their lives would have been very different, they said. Alexander was more circumspect but seemed to believe this too. When I showed Helga a photograph of Abraham—​the same photograph her mother had had in her house for forty years—​she held it and addressed it directly, lovingly: Why didn’t you stay with us?

The children told me that their mother, who never remarried, thought about Abraham for the rest of her life.

What cleaved them apart? History, you might say. The war ended, Silesia was given to Poland, Dörnhau became Głuszyca, the ethnic Germans were forcibly evacuated, the State of Israel was founded. Gertrud asked Abraham to come to Germany with them, but Abraham wouldn’t go to Germany, that was apparently too much for him; he asked Gertrud to come with him to Israel, but she said no, not with her four children, that was apparently too much for her. And she was still technically married, though her husband was almost certainly dead maybe he wasn’t . . . ?

Opa always said that if they ever forced him to leave his home he’d kill himself; the day before Polish officials were going to force him to leave his home he killed himself. He did it upstairs, he put his head through a noose tied to a rafter. Alexander and Helga said they remember seeing Opa’s body swaying from the ceiling. (Rita said that Opa died from a bad heart, but I don’t know if this is something she actually believes or if she said it for my sake.)

Abraham intervened one last time: he helped get the Fruhlichs’ deportation delayed a week, so that arrangements could be made for Opa’s burial. (This delay had lasting consequences, as decisions in times of chaos and upheaval so often do: the family had been set to be moved to West Germany, but they missed that transport, and were sent instead to East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain.)

And Abraham? My insight is limited; no one in his family, at least that I spoke to, knew about his relationship with Gertrud. Perhaps he would have gone to Israel even if Gertrud had stayed in Dörnhau. Perhaps Abraham’s decision to stay in Poland as long as he did had nothing or at least not everything to do with Gertrud. Perhaps; but it’s not the story I choose. I choose the story that Abraham stayed in Poland only because of Gertrud—​why else would you stay in the country where your wife, son, parents, siblings, and most everyone you knew had been murdered? Once Gertrud was gone, Abraham stuck around only long enough to get his manuscript in order, then moved to Israel. He soon got remarried, to Sophie, also a survivor. Sophie suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, she used to rage at the radio and television, convinced she was being spied on. She and Abraham had no children. Rita and Helga told me their mother never knew that Abraham had gotten remarried. According to Alexander, she did know: the reason Abraham gave Gertrud as to why he could no longer be in touch was, Alexander said, that it bothered his wife.

And Gertrud? Her children told me that she considered the two men, Alexander and Abraham, to be the great loves of her life, and the great tragedies of her life. Her husband, whom the war swallowed up, who was gone but not entirely, who wouldn’t fully release her for forty-seven years. And the prisoner she saved, and then loved, and then could not be with. I cannot help but note the irony—​the sort that history can always be counted on to furnish—​that the German soldier died while his wife was keeping alive the Jewish prisoner who would become her lover.

After meeting Gertrud’s children, after learning the truer story of Abraham and Gertrud, I reread the passages in Abraham’s book that mention Gertrud, or, rather, his unnamed savior; it now felt acutely poignant, even or especially the fact that he kept Gertrud anonymous. It now felt coded, all these buried truths and sentiments, as if Abraham had smuggled into his wartime account of survival his postwar feelings of affection. “I greeted her always with unrestrained joy and my heart sank when she left. A strange joy filled me when I heard her words.” “In those days, my only joy was her visits. Her voice made my heart beat faster.”

I probably should abstain from wondering into their heads and hearts. But how can I not? Their story demands it, you can’t help but try and peer in, fill in the long blank epilogue. Whether what we imagine is historically accurate or not is not the point; stories like this, stories that go so suddenly dark, have momentum, they invite us in, invite us to imagine. . .

Gertrud, in East Berlin, later in Streganz, raising four children who soon enough were raised and gone, and then she was alone. She thinks daily about the war, about her dead child, her dead father, and her husband, maybe dead, probably dead, almost certainly dead. She thinks about Abraham. Does she pine? Yes, or maybe that’s the wrong question, the wrong word: there is too much loss, too much suffering, too much tumult and mourning, and what Gertrud feels in those years and decades after the war toward Abraham cannot be disentangled from that. Yet what she feels toward Abraham is the tip of the spear, what she feels the sharpest, what keeps the wound open, because only regarding Abraham was there ever any choice—​even if in fact