HAD A SECRET
Two years after the reunion with Fabel, I made a discovery on the Internet: a photo of my mother at school, just before leaving for the New World.
I had never seen a photo of her as a child. She looked sad and didn’t show how beautiful she would become, but she was my mother, without a doubt.
There were a dozen other girls and the teacher from Beit Yaacov School. Below the image, there was a cap-tion about three of the recognized girls; among them, Elena Sikora who had died in Costa Rica.
Immediately, I contacted the website that had posted this photo. I sent a message saying that I was Elena’s son and wanted to know who had submitted it. Days later, I received an email with the address of a lawyer in Israel, whose mother was the one who sent the photograph. I wrote to him and asked if his mother was another one of the girls in the class and he replied yes, and that Elena and her mother had been friends in Dlugosiodlo.
I insisted that he asks his mother what she remembered about mine. In another email, he told me that they had been best friends and that she remembered being upset that my mother didn’t say goodbye to her when they left for Costa Rica. Elena had told me that they left secretly because they were afraid of being 195
detained, but the woman told me that it wasn’t true, that everyone knew they were going to America.
She also included some information that she later regretted: they left discreetly because they didn’t want
“the father to know.” It didn’t make sense: my grandfather had been in America since 1929, so why did she place him in Poland?
Something that was being talked about came to mind: the identity of my aunt. I remembered that my mother told me that when they arrived in America, my grandfather didn’t want to meet them or acknowledge that Elena’s younger sister was his daughter. The girl, who arrived in 1934, was too young to be five years old, she couldn’t speak yet, and she was blonde and fair-skinned, different from Elena and my uncle Samuel.
I asked if the man who didn’t want them to leave was my aunt’s father, and he said yes, and that the whole town knew that the girl wasn’t my grandfather’s and that it was a scandal. The man who fathered my aunt was blonde and limped; Moreover, he was married. When I insisted on knowing who he was, he told me that he perished in the Holocaust and didn’t want to say anything else, nor did he write to me again because he surely felt guilty.
Things started to make sense. My grandmother didn’t come to the New World because she was star-ving, as my mother claimed, but because she was flee-ing the scandal and my aunt’s father, who turned out 196
to be Henk Kuropatwa. Secondly, my mother, who told me everything, even what she shouldn’t, felt so ashamed of her mother’s behavior that she hid her sister’s illegitimacy, and my uncle did the same.
Elena had shared that my grandfather didn’t love his youngest daughter and never believed the story of her being five years old, but the suspicions were unfounded. It made sense that Elena wanted to protect her sister and denied having knowledge of her date of birth to her father. But why didn’t she tell me the truth? Why talk about my grandfather’s apprehen-sions and deny while they had any basis?
Then, I remembered my mother’s illicit relationship with Ernesto, her Jewish lover in Costa Rica. Didn’t she do the same? She had a relationship with a married man in a community the same size as Dlugosiodlo. It raised suspicions, people must have doubted, whether it was true or not, just like with her mother, about the youngest son, born in the middle of the trio. Elena had repeated the story and the censure; that’s why she didn’t look for the Schirano family anymore and tried to teach me not to believe this kind of rumors.
Pablo my moréh hated me and my own father who felt the same then also rejected me not because I was a effeminate child, but because I was illegitimate: this explained my father’s request for an abortion. The fact that some boys from the same town hated me could be because they were influenced by Ernesto’s children, who surely suspected the truth.