A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [30]
The hotel functioned as a missing-persons center. A list was established where returning survivors put their names. Most people who went to the hotel searching for survivors did not find the names they were looking for and anxiously canvassed the hotel with photographs and wedding portraits, hoping to find someone who had seen their loved ones alive. Walls became bulletin boards, layered with snapshots and notes. Every day, people came and waited. It was becoming clear that the flyers that the Resistance had circulated during the war had been true. In fact, it was even worse than the flyers had said — not hundreds of thousands, but millions had been murdered. Long after the Hotel Lutetia ran out of survivors to process, relatives still turned up there every day, hoping for news. Since displaced Jews were moving all over the world, they clung to the hope that the ones they were seeking would turn up somewhere. They clung to that hope for years.
When Dwojra Finkelsztajn got back to the Pletzl, she learned that her sister Bella, who had moved to Paris before the war, had been deported to Auschwitz. Bella was not among the few who passed through the Hotel Lutetia. Nor was there any trace of Dwojra's parents, another sister, or a little brother, Sacha, who had stayed in the village outside Kielce. Unlike Bella, these family members had simply vanished without explanation. They could still be alive. It was only after years of looking for relatives that Dwojra finally located a cousin in Canada. He provided the ending of the Zylbersztajn story. He had seen the Germans march the entire Jewish population of their village down a road. Then they shot them all.
The ninety thousand Jews of France who had been murdered represented a quarter of France's Jewish population, but the percentage of people missing from the Pletzl was much higher. The Nazis had started with foreign-born Jews, and the Pletzl had been one of the places to find them.
But although so many familiar faces were missing, the Pletzl was now crowded with gaunt survivors, most of them young, many from Eastern Europe. The neighborhood itself became a transit center. The young people who had lost everyone they knew and who wanted to restart their lives would come for a few months and mill around the neighborhood, until they made the connections to arrange passage to Palestine. A few went to the United States, Canada, and Australia, but most wanted to go to Palestine. Only a few stayed in Paris. The ones who stayed were called “les griners” from the Yiddish word for green—young men and women who had seen the unimaginable depths but were nevertheless considered green, because they didn't know the neighborhood.
3
Liberated
Antwerp
“YOU HAVE TO LAUGH AT THIS,” THOUGHT SAM PERL AS pain tightened his face and forced up the corners of his mouth. Antwerp's monumental Central Station was still there, with its lacy ironworks. All the little stone turrets were still sticking up from the elevated tracks that ran through the Jewish section of Antwerp, a neighborhood that seemed to cling to rail lines as though it were contemplating a fast exit. The dark tunnels where streets passed under the raised tracks were still there, with the curly ironwork around and even under the bridges. And all the fine high-ceilinged, tall-windowed homes were still there. As he came through the underpass from the broad Belgielei, Perl could see that the Van Den Nestlei Synagogue was still a charred shell, as it had been since that day in 1941. But the other synagogues—though torn up, burned, and vandalized—still stood. In the fall of 1945, when Perl came back to Antwerp, the only thing missing was most of the people he knew. His parents and his brother and wife and two children and a sister and friends were all gone. There were only a few hundred